Wildfires pose potential crisis -- and opportunity -- for PG&E

Wildfires create worst crisis for PG&E since San Bruno gas disaster | The Sacramento Bee: California’s wildfires have left Pacific Gas and Electric Co. confronting its most serious financial crisis since the 2010 San Bruno gas explosion, a disaster that threatened the company with bankruptcy and ultimately cost the utility $1.6 billion in fines and other costs. Two state agencies, Cal Fire and the California Public Utilities Commission, have launched investigations into whether Northern California’s largest utility could be at least partly responsible for the fires that ignited Oct. 8, killing at least 41 people and destroying roughly 5,700 homes and businesses. So far, neither Cal Fire nor the CPUC has cited evidence that PG&E contributed to any the ignitions. But the stock price of parent company PG&E Corp. has plunged over the last week amid investor jitters that the utility could be held responsible. PG&E shares closed Monday at $53.43, a drop of $4.34. Since Friday the company’s stock market value has fallen by more than $5 billion.

The threat of wildfires sparked by electric power transmission lines in PG&E's Northern California service territory will continue into the future after the recent deadly wildfires that ravaged California’s wine country, killing more than 40 people and destroying several thousand homes and businesses. Some predict the hazard will worsen due to climate change and continued residential development near fire prone wildland areas.

Out of crisis, goes the adage, opportunity often follows. For PG&E, that opportunity is to vastly reduce the chance of its power lines starting destructive wildfires and subjecting the company and its shareholders to significant legal liability. How so? By placing its last mile distribution lines serving customer premises in buried underground conduit instead of suspended overhead on wooden poles close to combustible flora and other materials. 

There’s an additional bonus on top of the reduced maintenance and storm outage costs associated with above ground transmission poles and infrastructure. PG&E recently filed an application with California utility regulators to serve as a wholesale telecommunications provider using its fiber optic infrastructure. Conduit for underground electrical power cables could also house fiber for telecommunications and bring it close to residential, business and institutional PG&E customers. PG&E could lease that fiber to internet service providers, providing an additional revenue stream to help offset the cost of undergrounding its premise electrical service lines.

And that's not all. In placing electric power lines in underground conduit, electric utilities can apply shielding to protect the grid from damaging electromagnetic flux from X-class solar flares or EMP weapons detonating at high altitude. 

Stop the Cap! The End of Google Fiber Expansion: Where Did It All Go Wrong?

Stop the Cap! The End of Google Fiber Expansion: Where Did It All Go Wrong? : The bean counters also arrived at Google Access — the division responsible for Google Fiber — and by October 2016, Google simultaneously announced it was putting a hold on further expansion of Google Fiber and its CEO, Craig Barratt, was leaving the company. About 10% of employees in the division involuntarily left with him. Insufficiently satisfied with those cutbacks, additional measures were announced in April 2017 including the departure of Milo Medin, a vice president at Google Access and Dennis Kish, a wireless infrastructure veteran who was president of Google Fiber. Nearly 600 Google Access employees were also reassigned to other divisions. Medin was a Google Fiber evangelist in Washington, and often spoke about the impact Google’s fiber project would have on broadband competition and the digital economy. Porat’s philosophy had a sweeping impact on Alphabet and its various divisions. The most visionary/experimental projects that were originally green-lit with no expectation of making money for a decade or more now required a plan to prove profitability in five years or less. (Emphasis added).

In adopting that five year ROI cutoff, Google Fiber effectively placed itself under the same financial constraints governing slow moving legacy telephone and cable companies it hoped to overbuild with fiber to the premise (FTTP). Having ventured into FTTP nearly a decade ago with no overwhelming technological or marketing advantage and using the same recurring monthly subscription business model -- including TV programming -- as the incumbents, it should surprise no one it's retreating.

As a former advisor to Google co-founder Larry Page was quoted as saying in Phil Dampier's post mortem excerpted above, "There’s no flying-saucer shit in laying fiber." Indeed. So unless Google Fiber figures out how to teleport fiber conduit into the ground or develops fiber cables that hang in mid air defying gravity -- thus avoiding the need for pole access -- it's pointless for Google Fiber to remain in FTTP.

Google Fiber's parent company, Alphabet, has a unit simply dubbed "X" to develop "moonshot" inventions profiled in the November 2017 issue of The Atlantic. Perhaps X will be able to obsolete FTTP and the Internet itself by coming up with a way to store quantum bits of information in the substrate of space time and encrypted by a form of blockchain technology to ensure data integrity.

A Better Deal falls short of urgent need to fully modernize America’s telecommunications infrastructure

Democrats this week unveiled a plank of the party’s A Better Deal platform declaring Internet protocol-based advanced telecommunications an essential modern utility equivalent to electric power service. It proposes a $40 billion Universal Grant Program to subsidize for profits, cooperatives and local governments to ensure it is available to every U.S. home, school and small business.

The proposal falls short relative to the urgent need to modernize America’s legacy metallic telecommunications infrastructure designed for analog telephone and cable TV of decades past to fiber optic infrastructure. Its main flaw is it isn’t framed an infrastructure initiative.

Rather, the proposal calls for a service standard couched in outdated terminology, calling for “universal high speed Internet.” That term describes a level of service and not infrastructure. It and “broadband” distinguish from narrowband, low speed dialup connections over phone lines commonly used in the 1990s (and unfortunately still the case in 2017 for too many American homes). In so doing, the Democratic proposal falls into the trap of the current debate over what constitutes “high speed Internet.” That can only add further delay to solving the deepening crisis of deficient telecommunications infrastructure in much of the United States that now requires an expedited effort.

In addition to its origins in the past, “high speed Internet” is also too present focused since that term means what’s sufficient to support today’s needs relative to high quality voice, video and data. It doesn’t take into account tomorrow’s needs which will undoubtedly require more bandwidth -- and the growth capacity only fiber optic premise connections can efficiently provide. That’s why instead of “high speed Internet,” the federal government should instead launch a cleanly defined telecom infrastructure modernization initiative to bring fiber connections to every American doorstep. And provide sufficient funding to achieve it. That will take at least five times the $40 billion the Democrats propose.

Google Fiber's Kansas City experiment demonstrates need for publicly owned advanced telecom infrastructure

Google Fiber made Kansas City better but didn't transform it | The Kansas City Star: There may be a lesson here. Digital technology has undoubtedly transformed our world, disrupting media, entertainment, politics, retail, money management and more. But the miracle is at the end of the pipeline — the miracle isn’t the pipeline itself. Most Americans now see internet service as a utility, and price remains an important consideration. That could explain why Google Fiber is rethinking its role in getting digital service to the home.

Internet protocol-based advanced telecommunications is indeed a modern utility for residential, commercial and institutional premises just as electricity and telephone service before it. However, what remains unclear is the appropriate business and pricing model. Electricity is correctly billed on a consumption basis. Use more megawatts, pay more. That makes sense because the generation of those megawatts incurs costs directly attributable to their production. But the same cannot be said for the gigabits and terabits that power advanced telecommunications carrying voice, video and data.

The Kansas City Star correctly observes price of this most new utility is a consideration. It's because ISPs bill using a monthly recurring charge as do other utilities. Every household budgets based on its monthly recurring costs such as mortgage or rent payments and utilities. But is that the right pricing model for advanced telecommunications, particularly when the monthly recurring charge is based on bandwidth? While large businesses and data and call centers might be in the market to buy bandwidth, most consumers are not. They merely want reliable telecommunications service that doesn’t distort, slow down or stall and don’t care about the bandwidth that ensures that level of service.

 

The only way to ensure that service standard going forward as the bandwidth requirements of advanced telecommunications services evolve and grow is fiber to the premise telecom infrastructure. It’s the only technology that provides sufficient headroom for whatever services may be coming in the foreseeable future as well as adequately supporting today’s. In that regard, Google Fiber got the technology side of the equation right. But as the Star suggests, the business model essentially copied that used by legacy telephone and cable companies needs rethinking.

A better model would be to treat most telecommunications infrastructure as a public asset like roads and highways, funded by taxpayers at all levels of government – federal, state and local. Google Fiber and other ISPs would have a role to build and maintain those fiber thoroughfares and sell services over them on an open access basis. But they shouldn’t own them. Since they would be selling services, it would be in the economic interests of the ISPs to ensure the reliability of the network.

The current private ownership model of advanced telecommunications service is clearly broken and crippled by market failure in much of the United States lacking infrastructure capable of reliably delivering high quality voice, video and data. As the Google Fiber experiment shows, simply adding another investor-owned ISP isn’t going to solve that national problem. A new path forward is needed.

Insanity defined: The continuing call for more competition in telecom infrastructure

FCC doesn't know enough about competition, or lack thereof, says GAO: The Federal Communications Commission needs better information about broadband competition, according to a report by the federal government accountability office. Existing data shows that 51% of U.S. residents only have access to one provider that offers at least a minimum level of broadband service, which the GAO defines using the FCC’s own advanced services standard of 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload speeds.

That the majority of Americans have only a single advanced telecom services landline provider shouldn’t surprise anyone. If the Government Accountability Office conducted a similar study of other utilities – which is how the Federal Communications Commission classifies this service – it would find most Americans have only one water, electric power or natural gas utility serving them.

What makes advanced telecom service any different? Is it reasonable to expect multiple advanced telecom providers to make connections to customer premises when the economics of the dominant investor-owned business model leave many consumers with no options whatsoever let alone multiple choices? For inexplicable reasons, analysts ignore the microeconomics of telecom infrastructure where high cost barriers to entry make market competition – defined as many sellers competing for many buyers-- impossible. 

Americans hold the large investor owned telephone and cable companies that dominate a market that tends toward monopoly or duopoly in low regard. The misguided belief is more competition will up their game and force them to provide better value and customer service. Problem is that solution is only viable in a competitive market. Telecom infrastructure isn’t one and calling for more competition won’t make it so.

Riverside County, California: A microcosm of telecom infrastructure modernization challenge facing nation

$4 billion gigabit-for-all project in California makes its case with data: As one of the nation's largest counties plans a gigabit fiber network that could cost as much as $4 billion, project organizers are publishing data-rich stories they hope will catch the attention of companies that can build it. Riverside County, California, the 10th-most-populous county in the nation, recently extended its deadline for companies to submit proposals for its RivCoConnect initiative, a plan to bring gigabit internet to all of its 2.4 million residents. Now open to responses until Sept. 28, the county published three new web pages last week to showcase its vision and illustrate the character and demographic makeup of the people whom the new connectivity would serve.

This county is a microcosm of the challenge facing the entire nation when it comes to modernizing its legacy metallic telecommunications infrastructure built for the 20th century to fiber to the premise for the 21st. Extrapolate that single digit billion dollar project cost for Riverside County to the more than 3,000 counties in the county and it's easy to see why the United States needs a major federal initiative to fiber the nation, funded to the tune of $200 billion or more.

Investor owned players like legacy telephone and cable companies as well as new entrants like Google Fiber aren't going to take on this monumental task for the foreseeable because the numbers don't pencil out for their shareholders. State and local governments don't have money to bring to the table, already strapped with other aging infrastructure obligations as well as enormous and growing costs for health services and public pensions. Only the federal government is in a position to step up and fund this vital infrastructure.

Verizon’s FiOS Deployment In Boston Is Fiber-To-The-B.S. | HuffPost

Verizon’s FiOS Deployment In Boston Is Fiber-To-The-B.S. | HuffPost

This development shows it's far easier to talk about and even promise to deploy fiber to the premise (FTTP) telecommunications infrastructure than it is to fund and construct it. It also shows even large very well capitalized companies like Verizon, AT&T and more recently Alphabet's Google Fiber unit aren't up to the task. They lack the will (investment incentive driven by strong capital returns) and the means (patient capital than can wait many years for a return on capital investment) to do the job.

As Bruce Kushnick and other observers have shown, the talk typically falls far short of real world results. It's time to face the reality that the urgency needed large scale FTTP deployment the United States should have completed a decade ago requires a well funded federal initiative to accomplish the job. As the saying goes, money talks and bullshit walks.