Martin

While thousands of West Virginians continue to struggle without any broadband service, the state government is having trouble finding a way to spend up to $40 million in broadband stimulus money on institutional broadband projects that often already have cutting edge fiber networks.

State officials won $126 million in federal stimulus grant money last year, from which the state announced it would lay more than 2,400 miles of fiber optic cable to wire government offices, schools, and libraries.  Now, a vocal critic says a combination of government waste, preferential treatment for the state’s largest phone company — Frontier Communications, and bad planning could leave up to $40 million of the grant money on the table, unspent for better broadband.

Jim Martin, president of business broadband provider Citynet, says the state overestimated the number of public facilities that need broadband improvements.  Many of the facilities involved already have high speed service, and do not require additional infrastructure.  As the grant expires, Martin says he would not be surprised if the state only managed to fund the installation of 300 miles of fiber.

Martin believes funds should be redirected to bolstering the state’s “middle mile” network — fiber infrastructure that would serve as an open network backbone to ensure capacity exists to support growing broadband demands in the state.  Instead, Martin told the Charleston Gazette, the state has been spending money providing fiber broadband to small libraries with fewer than a dozen computers that are unlikely to have the resources to pay the monthly fees Frontier Communications will charge for the service.

“There’s no value to any of this to anyone but Frontier,” Martin said.

In fact, Martin believes many of the current projects funded by taxpayer dollars deliver enormous benefits to Frontier’s bottom line, but only incremental improvement to some institutional users.

Martin claims Frontier has, in some cases, only spent enough money to install fiber from the pole to the building. That assures Frontier of being the only provider that can deliver ongoing service to institutional users.  Martin has a dog in this fight — his company competes with Frontier for business service contracts.

West Virginia's current broadband map shows large areas of the state have access to no broadband at all. (Olive color = No broadband.) (Click to enlarge)

Before the grant expires in February 2013, the state is hurrying to bolster its list of would-be recipients.

Jimmy Gianato, the state’s homeland security chief, said his office recently identified 330 additional “replacement locations” — higher education facilities, schools, health departments and state-owned hospitals — that could be eligible for the project, according to the newspaper.

Not on the list are individual consumers and small businesses who currently do not have access to any broadband service.  One of the ongoing problems of broadband stimulus funding is that public funds are often available to bolster broadband for state and locally-owned institutions, such as government offices, health care facilities, schools and libraries, but no funding to improve infrastructure for individual broadband service for “last mile” users.  This can result in Cadillac-style installations for small schools and libraries who win superb quality networks they ultimately cannot afford to operate on an ongoing basis.  For most, that service would come from Frontier Communications.

Martin already accused the state of investing in more than 1,000 routers without being certain if they were needed or where they would be installed.  At $20,000 each, Martin called the routers “Lamborghinis” and suggested they were largely unnecessary.

A repair shortcut made by Time Warner Cable in Cleveland got some unwelcome media attention last week, when the company was caught repairing one customers’ cable and broadband service with a hastily-spliced replacement line strung across the ground from a neighbor’s house — a “repair” that left both Bainbridge customers with pixelated pictures and disrupted broadband service.

“We’ve called them 10 times, at least,” Dr. Roger Classen told consumer troubleshooters at WEWS-TV. “Nothing has happened, they say we need a new line.”

The Classen’s neighbors were surprised to find Time Warner Cable had spliced their cable line and ran at least 50 feet of cable across the ground to the neighbor’s house, leaving a tripping hazard and a hassle whenever either homeowner mows the lawn.

After one phone call from the Cleveland television station, two Time Warner Cable crews appeared almost immediately to properly bury the offending cable and restore service for both customers.  It’s another example of high profile media getting results for customers who cannot get satisfaction themselves.

WEWS-TV recommends that customers running into a brick wall with Time Warner Cable demand to speak to a supervisor, write down the names of everyone you speak with, visit a local cable office to raise your complaint, or file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau.

[flv width=”480″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WEWS Cleveland Dealing with your cable 7-14-11.mp4[/flv]

A Cleveland television station called out Time Warner Cable for some shoddy repair work that left bad service and a cable strung across the ground across two yards.  The station says these kinds of complaints are among the most common the newsroom receives from Cleveland-area customers.  (2 minutes)

With FairPoint Communications, customers often have to take the good with the bad.  The formerly bankrupt telephone company providing service in northern New England announced last week it had met its obligation to provide at least 90 percent of Vermont residents with a broadband option — typically 1-3Mbps DSL — and has trumpeted results showing 83 percent of Maine and 85 percent of New Hampshire is now served by FairPoint DSL, an improvement over former owner Verizon Communications, which routinely ignored rural areas in all three states.

But while winning the option to buy DSL service, thousands of customers found service lacking last week when a power cable in the Manchester Millyard area brought down both broadband and voicemail service across all three states.

In such circumstances, FairPoint’s backup generators are supposed to maintain service, but not in this case.

“I’m on dialup and went down for 10 (hours),” Wolfgang Milbrandt of Mason wrote in an e-mail to the Nashua Telegraph. “So why does FairPoint have so many eggs in the Manchester basket and is the backup power system that feeble?”

In Milford, Tom Schmidt lost his DSL broadband for about five hours last Monday, with it returning “around 6-ish.”

Company officials admitted they didn’t switch to the generator after the power failed, and customers noticed as voicemail and DSL service began to fail.  Service problems were ongoing even after power was restored after about 90 minutes, with some FairPoint customers reporting problems through the early part of last week.

FairPoint plans to press forward with DSL broadband expansion and has also prioritized build-out of its Ethernet-Over-Fiber service for cell phone towers, delivering fiber-fast connections to more than 800 tower sites to support 4G wireless broadband from major wireless carriers.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WGME Portland FairPoint customers lose service 7-11-11.flv[/flv]
WGME-TV in Portland, Maine covers FairPoint’s substantial broadband outage last week. (1 minute)

Wayne King: Living high off Time Warner Cable's Hog

The vice-chairman of North Carolina’s Republican Party, Wayne King, Tuesday penned a guest editorial in the Fayetteville Observer telling readers recent legislation passed in the state legislature provides a level playing field for telecommunications companies and protects “scarce public dollars” from being spent to compete against private providers like Time Warner Cable.

This legislation will also greatly benefit North Carolina taxpayers. At a time when local governments are cutting education and law-enforcement funding, taxpayers simply do not need to be spending scarce public dollars on communications systems that directly compete with the private sector. It makes no fiscal sense to build public infrastructure right alongside lines that have already been built by private firms.

Let’s imagine the government wanted to get into some other generally private industry. Would taxpayers be willing to foot the bill for a publicly subsidized cafeteria right next to a favorite local restaurant? Keeping in mind that you’d have to pay for services at both facilities (public communications networks still charge subscribers), I think the answer would be no.

Too bad Mr. King prefers to dine at Time Warner Cable Café.  He’s evidently having trouble seeing over the cable company’s talking points-menu to recognize that while he rails against public broadband expansion and community-owned competition to providers like AT&T, CenturyLink, and Time Warner Cable, he completely forgot the state of North Carolina and the city of Charlotte are handing Time Warner $5 million in combined, “scare public dollars” to create just over 200 new jobs and promise not to lay anyone off in the city of Charlotte.  That’s $5 million this year, and doesn’t count the sums the cable company has won from taxpayers over the past several years.

Mr. King has absolutely nothing to say about that kind of corporate welfare — the kind that takes $5 million away from education and law enforcement and hands it to a provider that will be raising its prices on North Carolina consumers once again by the end of this year.  And why not?  Where will those consumers go for a better deal?  FCC commissioner Mignon Clyburn called out the legislation for what it is: “a broadband barrier.”

While Mr. King remains firmly seated at Time Warner Cable’s table as it funnels money to his party’s legislators, it’s easy to stare out of their window and complain about a new café being built across the street.  If that happens, diners just might end up paying a lot less for their meal, and get a much better dining experience to boot.

The only folks with indigestion will be executives at the cable and phone companies, and people like Mr. King, who will probably have less campaign money to show for it.

Virgin Mobile, which last year excited a number of our readers with the introduction of its Broadband2Go unlimited mobile broadband plan, has continued to evolve the meaning of “unlimited,” to now mean just 2.5GB of usage per month before speeds are reduced to the very un-broadband level of 256kbps.

It’s just another in a series of limits Virgin Mobile has placed on its 3G “unlimited” pay-as-you-go service since last August.

Last summer, customers paid up to $100 to purchase the mobile broadband device used with the service, and promptly discovered a lot of people were doing the same thing, which promptly overloaded the network and drove speeds downward.  Within months, our readers reported Virgin had quietly implemented a “fair access policy” that began reducing customers’ speeds after as little as 200MB of use daily, usually to 256kbps or less.  By February 2011, Virgin announced a 5GB usage cap, after which speeds would be permanently throttled until customers either paid an additional $40 or waited out the end of their billing cycle.

Apparently, even 5GB of usage per month is considered too much, so now Virgin Mobile is slashing that in half to 2.5GB.  Despite the ongoing decreases, company officials insist whatever level they are, they are still generous.  The company said less than 3 percent of its customer base will be impacted by a 2.5GB limit on their supposedly “unlimited” plan.  Virgin Mobile, now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sprint, gets around that pesky contradiction by calling their plan “unlimited access,” which means you can access it day or night at speeds that either might be fast, or heavily throttled.

What used to cost $40 a month for truly unlimited service today costs $50 for 2.5GB.

Virgin Mobile's Broadband2Go "Before" Pricing from August, 2010

Virgin Mobile's Broadband2Go "New and 'Improved'" Pricing

The days of "Sugar Mama" are long gone.

Virgin Mobile is also hiking rates for two budget handset plans that include data:

• 300 minutes, including unlimited texting and data up $10 to $35 a month
• 1,200 minutes, including unlimited texting and data up $5 to $45 a month

But competition does occasionally deliver some benefits to consumers as Virgin recognizes it is being killed by cheaper unlimited smartphone plans from MetroPCS and Cricket, so it has cut the price on its own unlimited calling, texting, and data smartphone plan by $5 to match its competitors’ $55 monthly price.

Virgin Mobile is in the process or repositioning itself away from being a prepaid budget-priced carrier towards a smartphone-oriented provider for customers who do not want to sign lengthy service contracts with Verizon, AT&T, or even parent company Sprint.

This certainly means the days of Virgin Mobile’s Sugar Mama are long gone. 

Thanks to Bones and several other Stop the Cap! readers for sharing this news with us.