West Liberty, Iowa is home of Liberty Communications

One of the side effects of insatiable telecom industry consolidation is that hard-working, honest, and consumer-friendly providers are swept up by corporate machinery that ends up providing Americans with the least amount of service for the highest possible price.  Remarkably, there are still some top-shelf independent providers out there that actually stand with their customers, fighting to bring better broadband service to everyone in their service areas.

A letter to the editor in the West Liberty Index caught my eye.  It chastised the Federal Communications Commission for its plans to treat rural Americans as second class broadband citizens with speed goals 25 times slower than those enjoyed by their urban cousins.  The FCC, the writer wrote, was simply not going far enough for consumers.  What was so remarkable about the letter?  It was signed by an Internet Service Provider — Jerry Melick, manager of Liberty Communications.

What would happen if the federal government decided that city roads, bridges and infrastructure should be better-constructed and more efficient than the roads in rural America? What about if the policy-makers determined that urban consumers should be able to get where they are going and get what they need faster than rural consumers? A new government plan intends to make that true of our nation’s information superhighway — the Internet. And, while it is not the highway coming into town, as rural consumers, we should still be very concerned.

[…]

The FCC’s plan will make rural Americans second class citizens in the new broadband world, because it establishes a speed goal for rural areas that is 25 times slower than for urban areas. Shouldn’t rural residents have access to the same broadband services as our larger towns and cities? Despite the construction of our state of the art Fusion network, we still face the challenge of how to bring broadband to our rural customers living outside of the communities of West Branch and West Liberty. Without a National Broadband Plan that supports further investment in rural areas, this will be difficult if not impossible to accomplish.

Melick supports broadband reform efforts at the FCC and changing the Universal Service Fund to provide assistance to companies like his, serving rural eastern Iowa, to build out its fiber to the home Fusion network to nearly every resident in its service area.  That’s a refreshing change of pace from the usual rhetoric from AT&T, Frontier, Verizon, and others.

Liberty Communications began service as the independent West Liberty Telephone Company in 1899.  It delivered telephone service for more than 100 years until January 2008, when the company announced it was going to construct its own fiber to the home network to provide television, telephone, and broadband service to its customers.  The Fusion network would expand later that year to start construction in nearby West Branch, the birthplace of Herbert Hoover, the nation’s 31st president.  By April 2009 the fiber network offered a true triple play package of services to customers in both cities. Fusion broadband customers can buy up to 20/2 Mbps service from Liberty.  For the rest of its service area, Liberty still relies on DSL service providing up to 3 Mbps, but believes fiber is the future for all of its customers.

The only question remaining is when forward-thinking policies at the FCC will be enacted to help that goal?

A pro-consumer group has released a new report that refutes claims from the telecommunications industry that broadband reform represents an investment killer and takeover of the Internet by the Obama Administration.

Free Press this week challenging 10 of the wildest claims in its report, “The Truth About the Third Way: Separating Fact from Fiction in the FCC Reclassification Debate.” Aparna Sridhar, Free Press’ Policy Counsel used publicly available evidence to effectively debunk the multi-million dollar lobbying campaign to stop broadband reform.

Unfortunately, more than a handful in Congress have accepted those discredited claims as fact.  Free Press hopes truth will prevail over the enormous money-fueled opposition effort, especially as the FCC begins proceedings next week on its proposed “Third Way” approach to broadband oversight. The agency is expected to issue a Notice of Inquiry and to seek public comment on the issues of broadband reform and reclassification.

A sampling from the report, which we encourage you to read:

Fiction #3: Placing broadband services back under the Commission’s explicit authority will stifle investment in broadband networks.

Fact: The FCC’s proposed policy merely preserves the status quo prior to the recent uncertainty created by the federal appeals court ruling. As a result, it should have little to no effect on company investment decisions.

Many industry representatives and investment analysts have dismissed the notion that the FCC’s Third Way will deter investment. Furthermore, history contradicts the claim that applying some of the rules contained in Title II of the Communications Act to broadband service providers (as the Commission has proposed) will adversely affect investment in the networks. Telecommunications industry investments soared during the period when carriers were subject to the full panoply of rules contained in Title II. Investments only began decreasing once the FCC began dismantling many of the pro-competition rules stemming from this part of the Communications Act.

As we've said at Stop the Cap! for two years now, providers' investments in upgrading and expanding their networks are declining, even as demand (and prices) for those services are increasing.

Fiction #4: Placing broadband services back under the FCC’s explicit authority will lead to job losses in the telecom sector.

Fact: The telecommunications sector accelerated its job-shedding following industry consolidation and FCC deregulation, a trend that continues unabated even as company revenues reach historic highs.

The notion that the FCC’s move to re-establish its authority over broadband networks will harm employment is also nothing more than unsupported rhetoric. The simple reality is this sector accelerated its job-shedding following industry consolidation and FCC deregulation. And this trend continued even as overall revenues in the sector continued to expand. Unfortunately, the underlying market economics and company statements suggest this trend will continue regardless of how the FCC acts on the regulatory authority question.

So much for the argument that regulation will cause job losses. As this plainly illustrates, even as profits fatten at AT&T, Qwest and Verizon, employment numbers are on a steep decline in today's deregulated marketplace.

Fiction # 7: The FCC’s Third Way proposal is an unprecedented power-grab which departs from Congress’s intent to leave the Internet unregulated.

Fact: The FCC’s proposal will bring the Commission’s approach to broadband networks in harmony with longstanding principles in communications policy. The law always has recognized a distinction between communications infrastructure (like broadband networks) and the content that travels over that infrastructure (such as websites on the Internet). In fact, it was the Powell FCC’s decision to abandon oversight over broadband networks that represented a radical and irresponsible shift — by treating basic connectivity services just like content, the Powell FCC undermined the Commission ability to make pro-competitive, pro-consumer policies in the broadband space. This FCC’s proposal would return to the first principles of communications policy that fostered innovation, competition and investment in the first place.

Fiction #8: The FCC’s proposal would amount to a “government takeover of the Internet.”

Fact: The FCC’s proposal would draw a line between basic two-way communications — which have always been regulated by the FCC — and Internet applications and websites, which would remain unregulated by the FCC. None of the parties in the debate before the FCC have suggested that the FCC impose any kind of content regulation on the Internet. Nor has anyone suggested that the government take over the physical infrastructure that forms the Internet. Rather, the FCC is proposing to apply some basic, light-touch rules of the road to the owners of broadband networks.

These rules will attempt to encourage private investment, promote competition, and foster innovation, economic growth, and job creation. Further, restoring its regulatory framework back in harmony with the law will insure the FCC has basic consumer protection authority.

Comcast spent $3.1 million dollars of its subscribers’ money in the first three months of 2010 lobbying elected officials to approve its proposed merger with NBC-Universal and putting a stop to Net Neutrality proposals, according to disclosure statements files in the House clerk’s office.

Comcast has spent over $10 million dollars a year trying to keep broadband reform, ownership limits, and oversight regulators at bay.  Most recently, it is dedicating considerable time and resources lobbying elected officials, with campaign contributions in hand, to get federal approval for its proposed 51 percent ownership stake in NBC-Universal, making the nation’s largest cable operator also the owner of a two major television networks, and a studio that produces movies and television shows.

While your cable and broadband bill increased in 2010, so did the net worth of some of Time Warner Cable’s top executives, compensated in part with shares of company stock.

Chairman, President & CEO Glenn Britt sold 50,000 shares of TWC stock on 02/26/2010 at the average price of $46.44 a share.  While he ponders whether or not to slap limits on your Road Runner broadband service, he can run his fingers through a cool $2,322,000 from this stock sale alone. If you want your child to score big time in investments in the future, then it might wise to look into information such as junior stocks and shares ISA.

Chief Operating Officer Landel C. Hobbs, the man that said Time Warner Cable needed the money earned from Internet Overcharging to afford costly network upgrades, did better than Britt last week when he sold 57,000 shares at an average price of $54.58 a share.  Perhaps chipping in some of that $3,111,160 in extra compensation would help things along.

It doesn’t just stop there:

• Senior EVP & CFO Robert D Marcus sold 28,504 shares of TWC stock on 05/27/2010 at the average price of $54.21 — $1,545,201.84
• TWC Ventures Carl Uj Rossetti sold 13,154 shares of TWC stock on 05/27/2010 at the average price of $54.40 — $715,577.60
• EVP & Chief Technology Officer Michael L Lajoie sold 9,169 shares of TWC stock on 05/03/2010 at the average price of $56.37 — $516,856.53
• EVP & Chief Strategy Officer Peter C Stern sold 3,676 shares of TWC stock on 04/26/2010 at the average price of $55 — $202,180
• EVP & Chief Strategy Officer Peter C Stern sold 1,483 shares of TWC stock on 04/05/2010 at the average price of $53.32 — $79,073.56
• EVP, General Counsel & Secretary Marc Lawrence-Apfelbaum sold 1,394 shares of TWC stock on 04/05/2010 at the average price of $53.32 — $74,328.08

In total, for just the months of April and May and the first week of June, seven executives have extracted more than $8.5 million dollars for themselves.

You got a rate increase to help make all that possible.

Spangler

While the mainstream media and some of AT&T’s apologists tell consumers AT&T’s 2 GB monthly usage limit will impact only a handful of “abusers,” the cable trade press is telling its readers the industry insider’s secret — consumers will blow right through those caps.

Todd Spangler, who is an Internet Overcharging advocate and columnist for Multichannel News, a cable industry trade magazine, writes the implications of AT&T’s usage cap couldn’t be clearer to him.

The new iPhone 4, introduced yesterday to the predictable media crush, provides 10 hours of battery life for playing video, among other features.

But now that AT&T has eliminated its all-you-can-eat plan for smartphones, you will blow through the maximum 3G usage for the entry-level 200 MB plan if you watched just 4 minutes of streaming video per day. That would include commercials.

Even AT&T’s more generous DataPro 2-GB plan would allow just 35 minutes per day of streaming video (assuming you used your iPhone for nothing else), according to the carrier’s online data calculator.

Like a stopped watch, at least he’s right twice a day.

Spangler celebrates the opportunity AT&T’s overcharging scheme provides the cable industry to “grease the skids” for data caps and overpriced consumption billing on cable modem service.

In Spangler’s “Cable companies pay my salary”-world-view, it wasn’t that Time Warner Cable did the wrong thing when it tried to triple broadband pricing — to $150 a month — for the exact same level of service customers previously enjoyed.  It was all about its execution.

Spangler characterizes Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt as a victim, burned over the company’s failed overcharging experiment in 2009.  When one plays with matches, is it any surprise there are consequences?

Consumers will respond to more overcharging schemes the same way they did a year before — with overwhelming condemnation and opposition.  It’s hard to convince consumers to pay a higher price for limits on usage while telling shareholders you’ve invested less to expand your network, charged more to access it, all while the costs to provide the service have dropped dramatically.  Consumers call that out for what it is: greed.

Make no mistake, consumers hate usage caps and overpriced consumption billing and Time Warner Cable has no justification to introduce either.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/CNBC ATT Cuts Unlimited Data 6-2-10.flv[/flv]

Normally business-friendly CNBC covers the introduction of the 2 GB usage cap on AT&T smartphone data usage.  Then the CNBC anchor got skeptical about AT&T’s claims this was good news for consumers, admitting she hates overcharging schemes that deliver a surprise on the bill at the end of the month.  Lance Ulanoff, editor of PC Magazine expressed some doubts himself.  (8 minutes)