Redlined in Duanesburg, NY

Rural areas in NYS are in need of broadband amid the COVID-19 pandemic | WHEC.com: Felton has lived on Creek Road there for nearly 25 years. She never thought all these years later, and all these years of technological advances later, she still wouldn’t have broadband. Amid the pandemic, she and her husband have been working from home. Her daughter has been doing her schoolwork right alongside them. Fortunately, they can afford a hot spot, but it doesn’t always work.

She said for the past six years she has been trying to get broadband to all the town. Duanesburg has a franchise agreement with Charter Communications. “Our town franchise requires them to serve areas with 20 homes per mile, this road that I live on we have about 10 homes per mile,” said Felton. “We're not in the middle of nowhere. I'm two miles from Hannaford and I still don't have a wired connection because there's not sufficient return on investment for Charter to provide it.”

For two decades, the lack of sufficient return on investment has been identified as the cause of America's advanced telecom infrastructure deficiencies. It raises a fundamental question: If universal and affordable access are goals as many public policymakers assert, why do they continue to expect investor owned companies to fill the gaps when the cash flow isn't there? It's the Einsteinian definition of insanity. In this case, pursuing the same public policy and expecting a different result.

Exurban growth has major implications for advanced telecom infrastructure policy, planning

Editorial: California fires’ cruel cycle of natural and human disaster - SFChronicle.com: While the population of California and most of the Bay Area grew little in 2019, and Los Angeles County lost residents for the second year running, according to the state Department of Finance, most of the fastest-growing cities and counties were on the metropolitan edges. San Joaquin and San Benito counties, both in the outer orbit of the Bay Area, were alone in the region in experiencing more than a percentage point of growth, much of it due to housing production. Excluding rebuilding to compensate for earlier wildfire losses, the cities that saw the greatest housing-related population growth were also on the outskirts of the Bay Area — including Lathrop in San Joaquin County and Rio Vista in Solano County — or within an extreme commute of Los Angeles. This continues a long-term trend. Six of the nation’s 25 fastest-growing cities over the past two decades were in California, according to one analysis of census data, and all were on the sprawling boundaries of cities and metropolises.

Big implications here for current advanced telecom infrastructure policy and planning. The reason is these areas on the edges of metro areas while nominally exurban have been regarded by telephone and cable companies as rural and thus suffer from spotty advanced telecom infrastructure.

The return on investment doesn't come fast enough under their business models to justify investment and current federal and state subsidy programs don't offer sufficient incentive to build. Cable companies remain in their confined franchise 1970s "footprints." Telephone companies allow decades old copper lines to rot on the poles instead of modernizing them to fiber to the premise, with only some customers served by limited range and throughput first generation ADSL over copper.

While frustrating to many exurbanites before the public health restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic that has turned homes into workplaces, schools and medical clinics, deficient advanced telecom infrastructure has taken on a new degree of urgency in the exurbs.

Why advanced telecommunications infrastructure subsidies don’t make Internet service available to all Americans – explained in five points

1. For many decades, federal and state governments surcharged phone bills to subsidize infrastructure for voice telephone service in high cost areas. These subsidies paid to telephone companies made sense because the companies had an obligation to honor reasonable requests for service – the universal service mandate for telecommunications services under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. But that requirement does not apply to advanced telecommunications delivered by Internet protocol because the U.S. Federal Communications Commission does not consider advanced telecommunications to be a telecommunications service but rather an optionally provided information service under Title I of the Communications Act akin to America Online and CompuServe in the early years of mass Internet access.
2. Current federal and state subsidy programs don’t directly subsidize the construction of infrastructure in high cost areas. Instead, there exists a mishmash of programs designed to deliver various arbitrary throughput levels, known as “broadband speed.” Instead of determining where to subsidize infrastructure, federal and state governments attempt to map a moving target of advertised broadband speeds in order to determine where to direct subsidies.
3. Without a universal service mandate, investor owned advanced telecommunications providers have little incentive to seek subsidies since they can instead direct capital investments to lower cost and more immediately profitable infrastructure deployments.
4. Since high cost subsidies are available to various actors including non-incumbent investor owned providers, cooperatives and state and local governments, incumbent providers often oppose the award of subsidies within their nominal service territories and “footprints.” They regard these geographical areas as proprietary and other would be providers as interlopers. 
5. The amount of available subsidy funding is too little relative to need and there is inadequate monitoring of how it's spent.
   

The "digital divide" wouldn't exist had copper phone lines been replaced with fiber

Lack of Broadband Handcuffs At-Home Schooling in Ohio: As Columbus, Ohio, students look toward a school year with largely online learning, a new report shows that more than 30% of households in some city neighborhoods don't have broadband access. The gap is not due to lack of infrastructure — internet service providers are available in even the most-impoverished areas — but the result of economic factors, technical literacy and personal choice, researchers said. Internet service is now "the fourth utility," on par with electricity, natural gas and water, said Pat Losinski, president and CEO of the Columbus Metropolitan Library. "I don't know if we've called it out that way as a community and a nation, but it really is," he said.  The Columbus library system handles about 1.6 million reservations for computer use each year, Losinski said. "We have been trying to do the best that we can to serve that need," he said. "But what's happened in the last 120 days is this issue has been laid bare in ways it hadn't been in the past."

Actually, it is due to infrastructure. And what's happened in the last 120 days in Columbus, Ohio isn't necessarily local to that metro or confined to that short time frame. Had the United States as a nation undertaken a comprehensive plan to transition its legacy copper telephone to fiber three decades ago, this problem would be non existent. Households would obtain voice, video and data using Internet protocol technology over fiber connections. 

Consequently, there wouldn't be gaps for data connections commonly referred to as the "digital divide" and blended learning  -- a combination of school and home-based education -- would be in place and able to better weather a pandemic. Moreover, had the U.S. planned this telecommunications infrastructure transition rather than allowing "broadband" to be sold as a luxury option, lower income households would have had time to become more familiar with Internet-delivered services. Particularly considering personal computers have been around for decades and have become more affordable over time.

If U.S. transportation infrastructure emulated telecom policy, nation would be hodgepodge of toll roads with $1, $5, $10 and $20 fare lanes

Broadband Breakfast: Innovation and Contrarianism Define Bob Frankston, Champion of Broadband: In a recent Broadband Breakfast Live Online event, Frankston spoke about the role of municipal versus private broadband networks, arguing that private networks were unnecessary.

“All they do is help packets mosey along,” he said. “…They don’t guarantee that you’re going to get to your destination, they just provide an opportunity.”

Frankston's right. If transportation infrastructure emulated U.S. telecom policy, the nation would be a patchwork quilt of multiple privately owned toll roads with $1, $5, $10 and $20 fare lanes. Everyplace else would be served by unpaved roads and lanes with greedy trolls waiting under creaky wooden bridges for passing megabits. But let's waste time and resources and map this hodgepodge and 20 years later complain about all the shitty roads.

Legislative proposal claims goal of modernizing U.S. telecom infrastructure. But it doesn't have a plan to get there.

GOP Leaders Offer Broadband Framework - Multichannel: Senate Commerce Committee chairman Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and House Energy & Commerce Committee ranking member Greg Walden (R-Ore.) describe it as a foundation for legislative action related to the COVID-19 economic recovery. In the process, they said, the proposals would "modernize the nation’s communications infrastructure, allow all Americans to participate in the digital economy, and enhance U.S. network security, reliability, and resiliency."

According to its backers framework would include 1) authorizing funding for the FCC to complete accurate broadband mapping efforts, something FCC chair Ajit Pai has been calling for; 2) making sure students have access to broadband, 3) making sure those having trouble paying for broadband can still get it, 4) promoting digital equity; and 5) helping carriers "working tirelessly to to keep Americans connected" during the pandemic.

Problem is none of these five items will meet the goal of modernizing the nation's legacy copper telephone connections that reach most every American doorstep with fiber to the prem #FTTP. This has been a fundamental problem in U.S. telecommunications policy for a generation. It is focused on treating the symptoms of its failure to modernize copper to fiber and talking all around that rather than adopting policy and plans to tackle it head on.

Broadband Breakfast: Open Access Network Builders Discuss Ownership Models for Next Generation Broadband Infrastructure

Broadband Breakfast: Open Access Network Builders Discuss Ownership Models for Next Generation Broadband Infrastructure: Panelists agreed in order to fund fiber to the last mile, it is necessary to build into cities first, where network adaption will be high. This will generate the necessary revenue to build into sparser neighborhoods.

This is basically the same model employed by investor owned incumbent telephone and cable companies that brought the United States to the place it is today with big gaps in advanced telecom infrastructure and two thirds of homes not having access to a fiber to the prem #FTTP connection.

It cannot scale up quickly enough to catch up the nation to where it should be in 2020 but for its excessive reliance on investor owned providers that led to these shortcomings. The nation needs a crash build public project to bring #FTTP to nearly every American doorstep. The current viral pandemic control measures that shifted knowledge work out of centralized commute-in offices made its advanced telecom infrastructure deficits painfully apparent.

Rapid rise in work from home #WFH drives demand for enterprise grade connectivity

As states and localities put in place contagion control measures that shut down centralized commute in offices in mid-March of this year, many knowledge workers migrated to working at home. But with only about a third of all U.S. homes having access to fiber to the premise (FTTP) connections, many found their home connections wanting.

They are less secure than enterprise connections. Bandwidth is tight and competes with other users in the household such as students engaged in online learning and video entertainment streaming. Service from legacy telephone and cable companies is optimized for streaming video entertainment with asymmetric circuits allocating much more bandwidth to downloading than uploading. That’s not optimal for virtual knowledge work that often involves the use of two-way videoconferencing and virtual private networking.

The virtual office in the cloud needs fiber connectivity. A co-working space company offering its aptly branded CloudVO (virtual office) recognizes this need. It sells passes for access to these spaces offering what it describes as enterprise-grade connectivity – presumably FTTP.

Meanwhile, AT&T recently rolled out a new business offering aimed at bringing enterprise grade connectivity to home-based knowledge workers. AT&T’s Home Office Connectivity however isn’t FTTP per se. It would also use business class fixed wireless service supported by its mobile 4G LTE infrastructure where there’s no FTTP infrastructure and as a backup network. But that’s where the service becomes decidedly more residential than business class. It’s sold in bandwidth consumption tiers of 8, 12 and 50 Mbps at $80, $130 and $200 monthly, respectively.

The target market for Home Office Connectivity is businesses, not the homes of home-based knowledge workers according to AT&T:

The service enables businesses of any size to extend enterprise broadband connectivity throughout their workforce, whether it is for a single additional line or thousands. It also simplifies onboarding and management with consolidated invoicing directed to the business, single-number enterprise customer care, and professional on-site installation by a certified AT&T technician.

The line between residential and business service in the legacy telephone company business structure is becoming blurred.