Auburn, Alabama

Residents of Auburn, Alabama will one day have a choice for cable television service.  Incumbent cable company, Charter Cable, which has been in bankruptcy, will eventually face competition from Knology, a cable “overbuilder” servicing more than a dozen cities in the southeastern U.S.

The Auburn City Council unanimously agreed Tuesday night to begin a non-exclusive cable franchise agreement with Knology, based in West Point, Georgia.  The cable company already serves several other Alabama communities including Dothan, Huntsville, Lanett, Montgomery, and Valley, and expects approval to construct a system in nearby Opelika shortly.

The decision to bring competition to the city of 56,000 was an easy one because residents demanded more choice:

“Thank goodness this has finally happened.  It is time that people in this area had a choice regarding their cable.  Charter has provided poor customer service as well as poor cable and internet service for years.  I am surprised that my internet has stayed up long enough for me to type this!” — psych1

“This makes my day, now all we need is for satellite to have rights to the local channels and we’ll truly have the competition and choice we deserve…this is a huge step though!” — Matt

“I will dump Charter the second Knology is here.” — lp95

“Now we just need this in Opelika. I hate Charter with all my being.” — jackburnt

“Thank Goodness!  Charter is surely the worst cable company in history. I hope nobody reading this fell for their BS “contract” pricing lately.  They knew this was coming and tried to tie folks down for at least another year. This is truly a victory for the people of Auburn.” — tboone

“I am glad to see competition is coming in,” Ward 1 council member Arthur L. Dowdell told the Opelika-Auburn News. “I wish there was more coming in.”

One question remains on the table — When will Knology commence service in the area?

Chad S. Wachter, general counsel for Knology, said he didn’t know when Knology will be available for city residents.

“We’ll provide those answers with the city when we get them,” he said.

Ward 7 council member Gene Dulaney, the News noted, encouraged Wachter to build as fast as possible.

Charter Cable representatives followed the usual playbook cable operators use when competition is imminent.

Skip James, Charter’s director of government relations, addressed the council during citizens’ communications to express the company’s support for competition.

“We competed with Knology in the past and we will continue to in the future,” he said.

Knology provides customers with cable television, telephone and broadband services.  Most of their systems offer broadband at around 8Mbps and there doesn’t appear to be a limit.  Knology is quietly upgrading their systems to DOCSIS 3 to provide “wideband” service, cable’s designated turn of phrase for next generation broadband speeds.  But the company is also following a familiar pattern of not spending the money to upgrade where competitive pressure doesn’t exist.

Knology chairman and CEO Rodger Johnson told investors during a 1st quarter 2009 earnings call that the company was prepared to upgrade, but isn’t going to jump the gun.

“We are enabling our markets to deliver Docsis 3.0 when we decide the time is right to push the trigger,” Johnson said. “A very expensive piece of that proposition is the transition of the cable modems to 3.0 cable modems. We will make that move at the time that we’re feeling competitive pressures to move to a 3.0 environment, but not until that time.”

Johnson should be careful about waiting too long.  Pinellas County is one of Knology’s service areas in Florida, and it has Verizon FiOS and Bright House Networks fighting for customers in an upgrade war Knology cannot win with slower broadband.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Knology – Choices Ad.mp4[/flv]

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p style=”text-align: center;”>Knology “Choices” Ad (30 seconds)

Sol Trujillo, the former head of Telstra, was routinely depicted in the Aussie cartoon press in a sombrero reflecting his Mexican heritage

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal Opinion page features a piece of nonsense from Holman Jenkins, Jr., one of the editorial writers for the paper, decrying Australia’s “Broadband Blunder” by not allowing Telstra, the dominant provider, free market means to define problems and create solutions in broadband.  The editorial carries a clear subtext for American policymakers — let the free market do it all and keep government out of it (unless they want to cut some checks with taxpayer money or other subsidies, of course).

Australia lacks America’s bottomless think-tank and K Street resources for publicizing policy differences. Its parliamentary government puts all the policy levers, including a ready resort to secrecy, in the ruling party’s hands. Australia is a small nation, with a small elite that tends to place limits on burn-the-bridges debate.

This may sound ideal to Americans, but the results aren’t always good, says Mr. Burgess. Australia, like America, has its “wingnuts,” he says, but they don’t get a hearing. “There’s no sharpening of issues. Policy ideas aren’t fully vetted.”

The [National Broadband Network] NBN, a tremendously awful idea, is a case in point. The government wants to spend $39 billion to deliver 100 megabits to every household in the next decade, without the slightest idea how it might be done commercially or whether customers, who already can get 21 megabits through wireless in most of the country, would be willing to support NBN’s huge costs.

Trujillo was reviled for increasing his own compensation package while presiding over massive cost-cutting layoffs

That’s a remarkable bit of news, for both Americans and Australians.  Jenkins comes right out and tells all of corporate America’s best K Street secrets.  Australia doesn’t have the corporate money-astroturf PR-influence machine that frames debates with a corporate point of view.  ‘Burn-the-bridges debate’ is the way Jenkins might characterize it, but burning actual facts and reality for astroturf fiction is more in keeping with reality.  On just about any issue, from energy deregulation to banking reform to last summer’s often-ridiculous health care debate melodrama filled with death panels, hiring a PR firm that can launder corporate-string-pulling-connections guarantees you can lie, distort, and obfuscate anything into something it’s not, in hopes of dispensing with it.  The Net Neutrality as Marxist Plot nonsense emanating from Americans for Prosperity and Glenn Beck is just the latest example of the broadband policy Distact-O-Matic in use.

American wingnuts not only get a hearing, they often get all of the attention, particularly in the television media.  The more outlandish and dramatic the video, the better.  Policy issues are never vetted at all when you start “sharpening of the issues” with accusations Mao Tse-tung is the founding father of Net Neutrality.

Australia’s NBN is hardly an example of government trying to compete with private industry.  In fact, it was the private industry which built the slow, incrementally upgraded, usage capped, and expensive network that misses large portions of the country which drove the government to consider doing what private industry simply refused to do – provide Australians a state of the art broadband platform.  It’s obvious the government doesn’t need to “do it commercially” with large profits and leveraging higher prices in non-competitive markets — they just need to see it gets done and paid for, recognizing Telstra and other providers will not spend the money to build it themselves because they don’t like the long term wait for that investment to be paid back.

Most Australians will also be surprised to learn they can obtain 21Mbps through wireless “in most of the country.”  In fact, reasonably priced broadband in Australia is much slower, and carries a small usage allowance.

Of course, it takes an unwonted faith in government to believe it will deliver the promised digital nirvana on-time, on-budget or at all. In the meantime, Telstra would have no incentive to invest in its own network, so Australia could end up with the worst of possible outcomes: neither a shiny new functioning government network nor an existing Telstra network that keeps pace with technology and customer demand.

Ah, the elusive “incentive to upgrade” reasoning.  The moving target of what represents appropriate incentive (extra fat profits, no competition, keeping costs low by rationing service) may work very nicely for interested shareholders but do little to advance the broadband platform either in Australia or the United States.  This debate is not new.  Decades earlier, power companies argued that rural areas didn’t need electrification because farmers wouldn’t use it (or afford it), or it was simply too expensive to wire for too few customers.  Citizens in both countries will have to impress on their government whether they consider broadband service a nice luxury to have or an essential utility that must be provided, even if it means bypassing the ‘100% free market’ approach that turns up their noses at rural residents or those deemed too poor to afford it.

Just because Jenkins claims Telstra keeps pace with technology and customer demand doesn’t make that reality.  Australians would argue both points, particularly comparing what they get for their money versus what we get in the United States for ours.

The rest of the piece is a glorification of Sol Trujillo, the controversial former head of Telstra, who has been compared with George W. Bush and Karl Rove for his combination of “I am the decider” confidence and Rove’s “take no prisoners” style of defending those decisions.  Jenkins suggests the source of the active dislike of Trujillo was his willingness to go personal in attacking Australian officials in speeches and press accounts.  But many more Australians would find fault with Trujillo’s very generous compensation package and benefits he and his associates earned even while the stock underperformed under his leadership, and with the sluggish, expensive, and capped state of Telstra’s broadband as he left.

This ad turned up a few days ago in West Virginia newspapers, hammering home the point earlier Verizon deals ended in bankruptcy for the buyers.

Phillip Dampier

The Concord Monitor published an editorial Sunday suggesting that FairPoint Communications’ crash and burn bankruptcy is, in fact, a good thing for New Hampshire.

FairPoint’s bankruptcy was always a distinct possibility. At this point, it’s good that it happened. The massive reduction in debt that will result will either allow the company make good on its promise to provide widespread broadband service or make it attractive to a buyer capable of doing so. Surviving on landlines alone isn’t an option.

FairPoint’s debt would have been hard to repay even in good times by a smoothly operating company. The severe recession, lousy service that caused customers to flee in droves and high interest rates on its debt doomed FairPoint.

This is like saying the GM’s bankruptcy was a great thing for Detroit.  The Concord Monitor would do better to beat the drum for utility commission reform, to make sure such bad deals don’t get approval in the first place.  As it stands, FairPoint’s promises aren’t worth much in good times or bad.  How many broken promises should cust0mers endure before realizing money alone does not resolve bad decisions, bad implementation of those decisions, and now “cost savings” from a company that cannot afford to lose a single technician or customer service employee.

Making FairPoint attractive for a buyout or merger means slashing costs, and we all know where that will happen – among local employees who do the work to keep the company running.  Another merger or buyout with a sweet bonus for management will do little for New Englanders who rely on FairPoint for telephone and broadband service unless the buyer has the resources to provide a more advanced platform for telecommunications in this century.

The editorial is right in calling out the enormous debt FairPoint took on to make the deal happen.  It would be hard to repay in good times by a smoothly operating company, which is precisely why those who live in the next round of cities Verizon is about to cast into the wild Frontier should be so very wary.  The economy, it’s suggested, is getting better, but for those of us in economically challenged states like New York, Ohio, West Virginia, and others where Frontier operates wouldn’t know it from looking around their communities.  If FairPoint thinks it has a challenge now, watch as customers trying to economize continue to pull the plug on their phone lines.  As cell phone plans continue to offer more minutes (or unlimited access), why pay for two phone bills when one is high enough?

Most of FairPoint’s customers have another option: cell phones. Between June 2008 and June 2009 the company lost 11 percent of its landline customers. They’ll lose customers even faster if they raise prices. There are other threats to FairPoint’s future. Small companies and cooperatives are beginning to offer wireless internet service in rural areas. So even if FairPoint succeeds in extending broadband into the boonies, it could face competition.

Considering FairPoint, like Frontier, is relying on rapidly aging ADSL technology for broadband, and has few apparent plans to meet the needs of a wider bandwidth future, old fashioned DSL broadband isn’t far behind copper wire landlines on the endangered species list.  But FairPoint, like Frontier and other independent companies focusing on rural communities may be betting their business plans that for the same reason Verizon said goodbye, would-be competitors will never drop in and say “hello.”  In communities too small for cable companies, the prospect for wireless broadband, or other competition, isn’t exactly rosy.

Not so the investors in FairPoint, who will exchange hundreds of millions of dollars in debt for stock that at week’s end was trading for just over a dime a share. The investors gambled and lost. The free market worked.

The free market worked particularly well for Verizon, who played the system and won an enormous bounty.  Investors taking a beating will write off their losses and move on.  Where do rural FairPoint customers go to write off their loss in the broadband backwater they’ll be stuck in indefinitely?  FairPoint actually represented another failure in the free market, because of the lack of appropriate oversight which should have taken one look at this deal and the debt pile-on it represented, and then rejected it as inappropriate for a utility to gamble with ratepayers’ money.

FairPoint made a number of commitments to win state approval of its purchase. Whether such agreements must be kept is now up to the court.

Utilities are classically required to provide universal service. Urban customers subsidize service for rural ones for the good of society and because they may want to communicate with them. But the game changed when technology allowed other unregulated companies to poach on a utility’s turf by offering cheaper or better service.

FairPoint will keep operating, and its customers are unlikely to see any effect from its decision to declare bankruptcy to reorganize and shed debt.

Don’t pick me up off the floor shocked and surprised when FairPoint and its banker-owners walk into court begging to be freed from the “onerous commitments” they made to get the deal done in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.  Those “hard won” concessions by utility oversight boards may be nothing but memories soon enough.  The game change of telecommunications choice has come to more urban areas, where customers have options.  That isn’t necessarily the case for rural New England consumers without cable and with zero bars on their cell phone from home.

Customers who earlier thought that no changes in the quality of their FairPoint service meant “more crappy” service in their future may find the “crap bar” still has plenty lower to go should the company seek to realize its fiscal conservatism at the expense of its experienced and competent workforce who have coped with bad management decisions since day one.  Somehow the “must keep” employees might just turn out to be the same folks at FairPoint headquarters in North Carolina who made the bad decisions that put the company in its current predicament.

Strong, careful oversight of any restructuring is essential to protect New England ratepayers from being victimized all over again.

Charleston, West Virginia is just one of many cities potentially served by Frontier

Frontier Communications has won approval from state utility commissions in California, South Carolina, and Nevada to take over telephone service currently provided by Verizon Communications.  The decisions were unanimous in all three votes by Commission members, and involve telephone service in several small communities in all three states.

Circles represent Verizon service areas transferred to Frontier in Nevada and California

Verizon’s castoffs serve a small percentage of customers, which made the transaction fly under the media radar in most cases.  In California, Verizon dumps customers in a small section on the northwest border with Oregon.  In Nevada, several small communities south of Reno are involved.  In South Carolina, Verizon drops scattered groups of customers in small clusters across the state.

These state regulatory approvals follow an October 27 announcement by Frontier that its shareholders have approved the transaction, which will result in Frontier owning Verizon’s wireline operations in all or parts of 14 states.

While the approval appeared pro forma in those three states, West Virginia is another matter.  Strong employee union and consumer group protests continue across the state, with many consumers concerned about the implications of Frontier controlling nearly all wired phone lines in the state.  The Communications Workers of America held a conference call with the media Wednesday to outline its opposition to the deal.

The CWA has been a vocal opponent of the deal, claiming it will risk West Virginia’s telecommunications future with a company without the financial capacity to provide the type of advanced services Verizon is providing in other states.  Kenneth Peres, an economist with the Communications Workers of America, said the deal was extremely risky for consumers, workers and the affected communities.

Peres pointed to the perfect record of three out of three failures for earlier Verizon spinoffs.  FairPoint Communications declared bankruptcy early this week after trying to take on the service needs of three New England states.

Peres told the Charleston Daily Mail that if the deal goes through, Frontier “will find it extremely difficult” to meet its $8 billion in debt obligations while simultaneously investing enough capital to maintain its physical plant, improve service quality, set up a new system in West Virginia, lease systems from Verizon in 13 other states, provide video service for the first time (in Indiana), and ensure adequate staffing “while paying out a lot more in dividends than it makes in profits.”

Frontier went on the attack Thursday, accusing the union of interfering just to grab concessions for itself.

Verizon service areas sold off to Frontier in South Carolina

Steve Crosby, Frontier spokesman, said, “They’re just throwing stuff up against the wall. They know this is a good transaction and they’re trying to extract their pound of flesh. They want more concessions. This is their opportunity to ask for more money for their union membership and more benefits. That’s what they want. Union membership across the country is declining. This is how they’re trying to extract as much as they can from either Frontier or Verizon.”

As for Frontier’s debt load, “This is actually a de-leveraging transaction,” Crosby said. “We’re taking on debt but we’re taking on a whole lot more revenue. We’re currently at a 3.8 times revenue-to-debt ratio, going down to 2.6. So we actually get better in terms of revenue to debt. And today we’re fine. We’re able to pay a nice dividend. The day the transaction closes, we are approaching investment-grade borrowings.

“Our board of directors made the decision to lower our dividend by 25 percent when the transaction closes to give us even more cash to invest in infrastructure and to give us even more financial flexibility,” Crosby said.

“Every time we have an argument we win and they bring up other stuff,” Crosby said. “They never bring up the de-leveraging because it undermines their argument. They never bring up the fact that we will reduce our dividend because it undermines their argument.

“We have said we will maintain employment levels for 18 months” after the transaction closes, Crosby said. Because of required regulatory approvals and other factors, the deal can’t close before April 2010.

“So you can figure that’s two years,” Crosby said. “Who nowadays has that kind of job security? I think we’re bending over backwards. I wish I had the pension plan, the job security the CWA has. They’re looking at extracting more from Verizon and Frontier.”

When asked by the newspaper why Frontier shareholders would approve a deal that was destined for failure, Peres told the newspaper:

Frontier’s business model is built on acquisitions. Frontier bought a portion of Global Crossing’s business which increased revenue and access lines “but that began to decline,” he said. “They bought Commonwealth Telephone but that’s flat-lining. What’s the next step? What were they going to do – improve infrastructure or go through the acquisitions route again?” Continuing with acquisitions “postpones the day of reckoning,” he said.

Commentary: Our Take

Crosby’s comments seem more suited for a talk show audience that hates unions.  Obviously the union does not think this is a good deal for West Virginia, and considering the track record of earlier Verizon deals, and the correct predictions from employee unions on their inevitable outcomes, they have every right to oppose the deal on its face.  Crosby apparently has time to address declining union membership, but not the much more relevant decline in the traditional phone company’s bread and butter business – landlines.  Frontier, like other phone companies, continues to see disconnect requests coming from coast to coast as customers dump the phone company for a cable digital phone product, Voice Over IP line, or rely on their cellphone.

West Virginia would be solidly Frontier territory if the state approves the sale

Verizon recognizes their traditional business is a dying one, which is why they are in a hurry to diversify into competitive broadband and video services over their fiber optic FiOS network.  Where it doesn’t make economic sense (under their current business plan) for Verizon to deploy FiOS, decisions are being made about whether to keep those smaller phone operations within the Verizon family, or sell them off to companies like Frontier.  What Frontier acquires today from the standpoint of customers and revenues could represent the high water mark, and without offering robust options for a digital future, Frontier will likely continue to see customer erosion.

FairPoint acquired seemingly healthy Verizon companies serving the entire states of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.  When their efforts to seamlessly combine Verizon’s legacy systems with FairPoint’s own systems failed, that along with an inability to properly service customers, caused a death spiral as customers dropped service, which led FairPoint straight into bankruptcy.

Frontier’s record of investment and service in western New York speaks for itself.  Time Warner Cable eats Frontier for lunch, with less expensive “digital phone” service, much faster and more reliable broadband, and a video package that Frontier doesn’t offer (reselling DISH Network is hardly the same as providing video service that doesn’t come from a third party company’s satellite dish nailed to the roof).  Frontier is ready and willing to stick with DSL service at speeds that are basically maxed out.  Time Warner Cable evidently doesn’t even consider Frontier a significant enough player to deploy upgrades in this area while they are in a hurry to provide them where Verizon FiOS is under construction.

When a company isn’t prepared to keep up with the rest of New York with fiber deployment to the home, the chances of that kind of service reaching West Virginia anytime soon are near zero.

But Frontier’s unique position as a specialist in “rural service” allows it to eke out an existence in areas where cable isn’t a big competitive threat, and where any broadband is better than no broadband at all, at least for now.  But without a plan for keeping up with the fast changing broadband world, customers happy with 3Mbps service today will despise the company for being stuck with those speeds later.  A lot of people in Rochester sure aren’t happy being stuck with Frontier DSL, and that nasty 5GB “reasonable use” language in the Acceptable Use Policy.

Crosby’s comments about CWA member job security, which he evidently envies, says more about the union’s commitment to its members than Frontier has to him.  Perhaps Crosby can quit his spokesman job and switch to a position that gets him CWA membership with a pension and job security.  Perhaps if the people of West Virginia say thanks, but no thanks, Frontier will be in a better economic state than it would be if this mega-deal collapses under the weight of debt and integration challenges.  Then Crosby can keep his job with the evidently lousy benefits.

Peres’ assumption that Frontier lives only through acquisitions isn’t the complete story.  Just like the myth sharks must constantly swim to survive, Frontier doesn’t constantly have to acquire to survive either.  It does have to concern itself with an ever-consolidating telephone line industry, where the smaller independent companies continue to be snapped up by a dwindling number of players.  If a Windstream or CenturyTel comes along with a great offer, Frontier itself may have a new name — Windstream or CenturyTel.

The economies of scale and cost savings are routinely cited by investors promoting consolidation.  It’s no surprise Frontier shareholders voted for the deal.  Bigger is often better for many investors, as long as the quarterly financials play to their interests.  Listening to Frontier investor conference calls, the Wall Street bankers, and the media that support them, are constantly concerned with keeping costs cut to the bone, customer defection limited, risk reasonable, and that dividend being paid.  They are satisfied with Frontier’s rural, less competitive market focus, even if the customers that end up served by them are not.