Trash bags and electrical tape: The train wreck of a botched transition to fiber

Over the course of the last three decades, legacy incumbent telephone companies totally botched any semblance of an orderly transition to fiber optic connections to customer premises to support modern Internet enabled services. The resulting train wreck of aging, decades old copper cable telecommunications infrastructure designed to provide analog voice telephone service referred to as POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) that cannot support even first generation DSL is painfully on display throughout much the telcos' service territories. It's literally being held together with trash bags and electrical tape.

Steve Blum's blog reports the U.S. Federal Communications Commission is seeking to determine if telcos are neglecting copper to the point where it is no longer reliably usable and what should be done with all the aging copper infrastructure that's been left to rot on the poles.

U.S. Internet needs radical reorientation toward value-based, future edge demand

Legacy incumbent telephone and cable companies are fighting a fiber future for telecommunications infrastructure. People don’t need fast fiber connections, they maintain. Two legacy telcos, AT&T and Verizon, have urged the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to maintain its outdated definition of “broadband” at its current asymmetric 4/1 Mbps. (Not that it matters much anyway since the telcos have largely spurned federal subsidies to help them cover the cost of building out their limited footprints to serve premises lacking even that pokey standard of service.) Their stance reflects the incumbents’ decidedly retrospective philosophy, driven by their highly CAPex risk averse business models that are unlikely to change even though demand for Internet connectivity has grown substantially over the past decade. This retrograde view of Internet demand and infrastructure planning is largely responsible for the current dismal state of American Internet service where many homes and neighborhoods are unserved and those that are pay too much for sub-par service.

Industry expert Michael Elling argues rather than managing the economics of Internet infrastructure with an ex post, cost-based pricing model, instead it should be based on an ex ante, value-based pricing that takes into account the potentially enormous future demand for high bandwidth. The growth of bandwidth demand emulates Moore’s Law for microprocessors, roughly doubling every 2-3 years. It will continue to explode with applications such as 4k video streaming and two-way, HD videoconferencing.

Moreover, Elling astutely observes, contrary to the current market segmentation strategies where providers cherry pick discrete neighborhoods in densely populated metro areas, Elling sees the greatest demand growth for premise Internet service coming from less densely populated areas where residents obtain relatively higher value via its enabling remote work and e-commerce, distance learning and telehealth.

Elling also sees an ex ante perspective that anticipates future demand rather than focusing on past and present demand as mooting the current regulatory policy debate over net neutrality. The net neutrality issue has come about because providers at the core, transport and edge network layers don’t share a unified view of how prices for their services should be set. While those at the core and the transport layers might be inclined to work out a pricing scheme with the edge providers based on ex ante demand at the edge, it’s impossible to do so as long as the edge providers hang onto their ultra risk averse, cost-based ex post demand perspectives. If all the layers agreed to adopt an ex ante perspective, Elling believes, it would bring about a unified pricing scheme based on balanced settlements and price signals that would provide incentives for rapid investment and ubiquitous upgrades at all network layers.

Elling’s concept deserves serious consideration by Internet providers at all network layers as well as public policymakers and regulators. If the United States – the nation that invented the Internet – is to realize the Internet’s full potential and benefit for all Americans, it must first make an attitude adjustment. To an attitude that forsakes a retrospective orientation of bandwidth poverty and embraces a forward thinking outlook based on bandwidth abundance and prosperity.

Title II common carrier regulation would be problematic for Google Fiber

If the U.S. Federal Communications Commission takes President Obama's advice and decides to impose Title II Common Carrier regulation on the Internet (and thereby mandate Internet service providers serve all premises in their service areas), it would throw a monkey wrench not only in the business models of legacy incumbent telephone and cable companies that are based on serving only selected neighborhoods, but that of Google Fiber as well.

Christopher Mitchell of Institute for Local Self-Reliance opines in this piece on Google Fiber in The Kernel suggesting that Google's walled garden strategy is actually reinforcing the digital divide that plagues much of the United States.

“Google is popularizing the idea of building essential infrastructure with a market-driven approach. We don’t build roads like that—if we did, there’d be no roads in rural areas. We don’t build electricity like that—if we did, our economy could be far weaker. We recognize that those things are essential infrastructure.”

Incumbent telcos warn feds: Let us have our way, or the consumer gets it

New Study Projects Investment Declines under Title II | USTelecom

Incumbent telephone companies have warned the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (and indirectly, the Obama administration) that they will tie up in the courts for years any move to regulate Internet services as a Title II common carrier telecommunications service available to all customer premises without discrimination.

Now they are citing a study to back up their threat that they will also significantly pare back construction of new infrastructure. In other words, if you don't let us pick and choose which neighborhoods we want to serve, we'll leave the 19 million premises the FCC estimates are not served by landline Internet service twisting in the wind. Ditto those on increasingly obsolete, legacy DSL service provided over aging copper cables.

That's monopolist speak for if you don't leave us alone, the consumer gets it.

Connecticut consumers squawk over poor Internet service quality from Frontier

More than a decade ago, AT&T was looking to offer TV programming via Internet protocol (IPTV) as part of its U-verse branded triple play service offering. To deliver that bandwidth intensive service, rather than replace its decades old copper plant designed to deliver what's referred to as "plain old telephone service" or POTS with modern fiber to the premise infrastructure, AT&T instead opted to soup up its Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) service to a more robust version, VDSL.

The initiative, dubbed by AT&T as Project Lightspeed, is a hybrid design that brings fiber to field distribution units. Customer premises are connected to those units using the existing POTS copper infrastructure. This is the proverbial weak link in the chain given the often deteriorated condition of the copper pairs in these cables.

That weak link may now be coming home to roost in Connecticut for Frontier Communications, which purchased AT&T's wireline operations in the state earlier this year. Arstechnica reports complaints about Frontier's service have gone through the roof and state regulators and officials are scheduling hearings.

No fiber to the prem in Silicon Valley, but a raft of slow, overpriced options

Wolverton: I’ve got the South Bay broadband shopping blues | SiliconBeat: Willow Glen

Tech Files columnist TroyWolverton goes shopping for Internet service on the California Public Utilities Commission's website but finds the service choices wanting, leaving the legacy incumbent telephone and cable company duopoly as the only viable options.

I did a little shopping of my own on the site a few months ago and like Wolverton, found it identified Megapath Networks as a provider at the same options and prices Wolverton found. But it turned out the company couldn't service my location even after the sales rep insisted it could.

Someday -- hopefully soon -- Wolverton's account will be looked back upon as a description of the primitive and often frustrating state of pre-fiber to the premise Internet service.

How high cost telecom subsidies might work if Title II common carrier regulation was “Obamacare for the Internet”

President Obama’s call this week to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to regulate Internet service providers as common carrier telecommunications providers provoked Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas to disapprovingly dub it “Obamacare for the Internet.”

A political shot to be sure. But what if the high cost of building fiber to the premise infrastructure to all American homes and businesses were subsidized using tax credits such as those used to make individual health insurance more affordable to low and moderate income households under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act?

Instead of directly subsidizing Internet providers to build infrastructure in high cost areas using the FCC’s Connect America Fund – which many providers have spurned or only selectively accessed – customers in high cost areas would receive the subsidies and not providers.

Providers would be able to charge higher rates (not based on bandwidth use or connection speeds) for fiber connections to homes and businesses in high cost areas. Owners of these properties could then use the telecom tax credits to offset the higher cost of getting them connected.

That would create incentive for these premises to get online while also reducing the business risk of the current subscription-based models that are heavily dependent on how many customer premises sign up for service and which act to inhibit infrastructure construction in higher cost areas of the nation.

What do you think? Share your comments.

Western Massachusetts coop creates financial template for regional fiber telecom infrastructure

Steve Nelson: Towns hold the key to broadband - Berkshire Eagle Online: To participate in the last-mile project, a town must take these steps:

1. By Dec. 31, its Select Board must pass a nonbinding resolution expressing the town's intent to participate;

2. As early as next spring at a town meeting, it must authorize the issuance of bonds to cover the town's share of construction costs above the funds contributed by MBI;

3. At the same time, 40 percent of households in a town must sign a conditional contract to take service — Internet, phone and/or TV — when it becomes available.

WiredWest, a Western Massachusetts cooperative formed to construct a regional fiber telecommunications network, has developed the above financing plan for the build out of the network. It's a model that other regions of the United States might wish to study for their own infrastructure development.