It’s time for every consumer across the country to help our friends in North Carolina, who are now facing the prospect of a Broadband Dark Age with the passage of a cable-industry-written bill designed to protect their monopoly prices and deliver America’s worst broadband experience.

The grand lie that is the Level Playing Field/Local Government Competition Bill (H.129) claims it will protect broadband competition in the state.  It will, if you are Time Warner Cable facing top-rated, super-fast service from community broadband networks that compete with them in communities like Salisbury and Wilson.

The power to protect North Carolina’s broadband future is now in the hands of Gov. Bev Purdue.

The North Carolina Senate abdicated their responsibility to serve the interests of state residents.  On Tuesday, they voted 39-10 for this consumer atrocity:

Yesterday, the House added insult to injury voting 84-32 for the bill custom written by and for Time Warner Cable:

Not a single Republican in the House stood up for you.

Faison

Several legislators that still remember they represent the interests of voters and not out of state big cable and phone companies were appalled.

Rep. Bill Faison (D-Caswell, Orange), who has been a champion of better broadband across North Carolina, reminded the Assembly the bill should have been named the Time Warner Cable Anti-Competition Bill, written by a New York City-based company that will prevent cities from using their collective buying authority to provide themselves (finally) with the broadband service the private sector has steadfastly refused to deliver.

Faison noted Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt made $27 million in compensation last year — the same as the entire cost of Wilson’s GreenLight fiber-to-the-home cable system.

Faison openly pondered what the cable company has been paying to employ the six full time lobbyists who have been trolling the halls of the state legislature for months, and exactly how much next year’s rate increase will be to pay for their services.

Even the former chairman of the state Republican party called H.129 an enormously arrogant piece of legislation.

Luebke

Another hero for consumers, Rep. Paul Luebke (D-Durham), noted the bill’s immediate impact will be to keep rural North Carolina a broadband desert.  Luebke called H.129 a bad bill that denies service even to communities where no broadband service exists.

But Rep. Marilyn Avila (R-Time Warner Cable) wanted to ensure no one could say there was a broadband problem in North Carolina, so she supported an amendment that allows areas to be declared served if even a single home has broadband service in a particular census block.  That provision delivers beneficial protection to CenturyLink, who can spend their time, money, and attention on a merger with Qwest, the last remaining independent Baby Bell.  While they focus on making themselves bigger through mergers and acquisitions, the phone company faces no competitive pressure to expand service in rural North Carolina, and will face no meaningful competition for the indefinite future.

While Gov. Purdue’s office has made noises about vetoing this bad legislation, it is essential that we let the governor know we need an absolute commitment on her part to veto H.129.  We’ve seen how Big Telecom plays their dirty pool, so we cannot afford to sit back and allow their lobbyists to wear the governor down.

Gov. Purdue

When Time Warner Cable tried to slap an Internet Overcharging scheme on consumers in New York, North Carolina, and Texas in 2009, Stop the Cap! made a commitment to join forces with all of the impacted communities to present a united consumer front against provider abuses.  H.129 qualifies.  That’s why we urge everyone to contact Gov. Purdue and let her know she must veto H.129, an anti-consumer, anti-broadband bill.

Please call -and- e-mail her office:

• E-Mail: [email protected]
• Phone: +1 919 733 2391

Minor Correction Made 5/6 – 5pm ET: We made an error referring to a census tract instead of a census block in the original piece.  One of our readers dropped us a note correcting us, which we are happy to do.  A “tract” actually has many “blocks” in it.

Fast is in the eye of the beholder

Obtaining broadband in rural America can be a real challenge, but few rise to the occasion more than Stop the Cap! reader Paul, who lives in Blaine, Tenn.  Paul so wanted broadband service, he was willing to pay for his own telephone poles and equipment to get Frontier Communications to provide him with DSL service, even though he technically lives in AT&T territory.

Paul’s saga, documented on his blog, began in 2009, when his satellite fraudband provider Optistreams could no longer manage reliable uploading of images and maps for his employer, despite the fact he was paying nearly $150 a month for the service.  Satellite providers are having a tough time providing customers access to an increasingly multimedia rich Internet.  With low usage caps and ridiculously low speeds, most satellite customers we’ve heard from report their experiences to be frustrating, at best.  For Paul, in rural Grainger County, it had become intolerable. Verizon, the best possible wireless option, delivered one bar to the farm country Paul lives in — unsuitable for wireless data service.

Paul called his local phone company, AT&T, and inquired about when the company would extend its DSL service to his part of Blaine.

AT&T answered Paul succinctly:  “[We will] never provide DSL within 20 miles of your location.”

Paul’s property is situated right on the boundary between AT&T and Frontier Communications’ service areas.  AT&T provides service at Paul’s home, but Frontier Communications’ territory starts just 1,400 feet away, on the other end of his property.  In-between is a telecommunications no-man’s land.

Paul pondered emigrating his service from the Republic of AT&T to the Fiefdom of Frontier, which does offer DSL nearby.

Paul lives in Grainger County -- a Frontier Communications territory surrounded by the former BellSouth, today owned by AT&T.

AT&T told Paul he could leave them anytime he liked, taking his broadband business to Frontier.  Besides, nothing precluded him from doing that with or without AT&T’s consent, informed AT&T’s Eastern District Counsel.

Declaring allegiance to Frontier would be no easy matter, however.  Would Frontier allow him to settle down as their broadband customer?

“After a bunch of arguing with Frontier District Manager Mike Bird he sent District Engineer John Simpson out to my home,” Paul says.  “Simpson informed me that I was in AT&T territory and that ended all conversations.  I stated that AT&T had advised they had no problem and further there was no government regulation.  Didn’t matter I was told, that was that.”

Few, if any phone companies will agree to trespass on another provider’s turf, except under the most special circumstances.

Paul contacted Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) to escalate the matter, and followed up with an official complaint to the Federal Communications Commission.

Federal agencies like the FCC become particularly responsive when a United States Senator is involved in monitoring the dispute.  AT&T responded to the complaint telling the Commission Paul had effectively fled their service area and was now a customer of Frontier Communications.  Frontier ignored the FCC initially, and instead sent Paul a letter affirming they would be willing to provide him with DSL, but at a “go away” installation price of $10,000.

When providers confront unprofitable customers difficult to serve, it is often easier to give them a sky high installation price with the hope it will discourage them from pursuing the matter.  Frontier claimed the costs of running infrastructure to reach Paul would amount to $9,977.44 — check or money order, please.

From Gregg Sayre, Frontier’s Eastern Region Associate General Counsel:

“As you know, you are in the service territory of AT&T.  AT&T is correct that we legally can provide service to you outside of our local service territory.  Unfortunately, the cost of serving you… if fully absorbed by Frontier, would overshadow the potential profits.  …In this case it does not make economic sense for us to undertake a line extension at our expense into AT&T’s service territory to reach your location, and the law does not require us to do so.”

“I countered with the fact that we would run the poles along the roadway and they could pay our pole attachment agreement.  They balked,” Paul writes.  “We, in turn, stated we would bring our own infrastructure to them underground and across a friend’s farm and did such for a quarter of the price.  This included running our own network interface at their pole and our house.”

In the end, Paul paid out of pocket for 1,600 feet of direct burial cable running across two farms and a county road.  He assumes responsibility of his cable, Frontier is responsible for the network from their pole back to the central office.

After the robust investment in time, money, and energy, what Paul ended up with wasn’t worth a dollar:

Frontier DSL in East Tennessee: 205kbps/142kbps

That’s worse than most satellite providers.

In fact, Paul has documented much of the time he is without any service at all — offline at least 38 of the last 50 days.

“Our average speed until they installed a new D-SLAM was 92kbps down and 125kbps up,” Paul writes.  It wasn’t just a problem for him.  Among Frontier’s loyal subjects already a part of their service area, customers also reported similar slow speeds.  Paul organized a door-to-door campaign to bring a united front of complaints to company officials.

Paul notes the local Frontier technicians have been responsive and understanding, but Frontier officials higher up are simply dragging their feet on needed upgrades.  Finally, $200 in service credits later, Frontier is promising to install a fiber cable to reduce the distance between the central office and the more distant points in the exchange where Paul and his neighbors live.  While that might help bring Paul’s speeds up, Frontier is notorious for overselling their network, leaving customers in large regions with slow service at peak usage times.  This has particularly been a problem in nearby West Virginia.

Paul says Frontier is largely unresponsive to individual complaints.

“I racked up well over 170 repair tickets in six months,” Paul shares.  “I organized my rural area and we hammered their call center. Did that do anything? Well, I can’t honestly say it did.”

With Frontier, it takes media exposure and embarrassment or the work of individual employees willing to persistently push higher-ups to authorize real solutions to customer problems, not temporary Band-Aids.

Broadband over a telephone network that is decades old requires substantial investments to function well.  In rural areas where customers have few choices, phone companies delivering service on the cheap too often leave paying customers with a quality of service highly lacking.

Creative Redefinition of Today's Problems Into Tomorrow's Solutions

At around 7:00pm ET, Republicans in the North Carolina State Senate are expected to ram through H.129, Rep. Marilyn Avila’s (R-Time Warner Cable) anti-consumer, anti-community broadband bill.

You can listen to the Evening of Infamy right here: North Carolina Senate Audio.

With the cooperation of most of the state’s Republicans, and a handful of Democrats taking cable’s money, North Carolina intends to solve their state’s broadband availability problems in a novel way: by redefining those without broadband service as having broadband after all.

Through an amendment, H.129 will essentially declare the service as widely available if even a single resident in a particular census block has access to something resembling broadband.  That could be 768kbps DSL from CenturyLink.  If one person has the service, the thinking goes, everyone can get it, even if they can’t.

The Senate intends to deal with North Carolina’s broadband crisis by changing the definition of the word ‘crisis‘ into ‘accomplishment.’ Instead of allowing communities to provide service in unserved areas, simply declare all areas as being served, thereby negating the need for community broadband.  Another victory for the free market, and it was dirt cheap not to provide the service, too!

So when broadband-deprived North Carolina consumers call Time Warner, CenturyLink, or AT&T, they can be told:

“No, it’s not that we don’t have any broadband service to sell you, we’re simply providing it in a unique new way — by delivering it to someone else!  (Can’t you move in with them?)”

Problem solved.

As one legislator said earlier, “[TWC and CenturyLink] are calling all the shots.”

Rep. Marilyn Avila (R-Time Warner Cable)

After passing through the Republican-dominated Finance Committee, Rep. Marilyn Avila’s (R-Time Warner Cable) cable company-written, anti-consumer legislation arrived in the North Carolina Senate this afternoon, where it was promptly, if temporarily, derailed over whether residents have the right to watch adult entertainment on community-owned broadband/cable networks.

That’s right… porn has thrown the state legislature into such silliness, the entire bill had to be pulled from consideration until Monday.

Here’s a quick rundown how things played out today:

♥ — H.129, Avila’s anti-broadband bill, has proved to be the first serious piece of legislation that has divided the normally lock-step Republican-controlled legislature this session.  That is entirely because YOU are putting the pressure on with your calls and e-mails to Senate members.  We have it on good authority the overwhelming amount of response to this bill from constituents has been downright hostile to the idea it should ever pass.  Consumers in North Carolina want more choices for broadband, not less.  They want increased competition, lower prices, and most importantly — better service (or at least s0me service from someone).  H.129 does none of those things.  It doesn’t deliver a single new broadband connection anywhere in the state.

♥ — Several amendments helpful to broadband development managed to win a place in the bill.  The communities of Wilson and Salisbury will get to expand their systems to cover larger areas, including the town of Faith Stop the Cap! covered earlier.  We also won a victory changing the terms of the “mandatory referendum” provision to strip away the loaded, misleading ballot question about whether cities should ‘take on more public debt’ to finance the construction of community broadband, replacing it with a fairer alternative — do you favor your community building its own broadband system. 

↓ — But we also lost a few battles. Yesterday, the industry covertly changed the definition of an unserved area from “an area where 50% don’t receive FCC basic broadband service” to a Census block, where 50% of the households don’t receive 768/200Kbps. That change annihilates the unserved area exemption. As confirmed by the highly credible e-NC authority, the industry provides its broadband data by Census block, not by household, and if a census block has just one home that receives Internet service, the entire census block is labelled as having Internet service.

Today, Senator Atwater (D-Chatham) tried to modify that definition with a much better measurement standard: “homes per square mile.”  The federal government has established that the least dense areas of the country are the most costly to serve, which explains why these areas traditionally lack broadband service or receive low speed DSL.  Atwater’s amendment targeted the 38% of the most rural areas in North Carolina to keep the door open for community broadband, but Senator Tom Apodaca (R-Hendersonville) would have none of it, despite the fact his district covers the rural expanse of the western mountains of North Carolina.  Stop the Cap! readers have shared stories with us about hanging out in parking lots using motel Wi-Fi to pay their bills online or complete homework.  In Apodaca’s world-view, that means those areas have broadband.

Now our readers will understand why we have stressed it is so important to have accurate, in-depth broadband map data.  Instead, industry-connected groups like Connected Nation conjure up maps created by unverified, provider-supplied data.  This map data is a critical part of H.129’s tragic terms and conditions.  If the maps say service exists, industry lobbyists use that to browbeat elected officials into believing there is no broadband problem, and there is no reason to allow communities to build their own broadband services.

Of course, the reality is very different.  We’ve received hundreds of messages from Americans who say these maps show broadband as being widely available in their communities, but in reality is not.  Some legislators in North Carolina have confronted this reality personally. For those that haven’t, it’s easy to accept provider arguments, cash those campaign contribution checks, and throw constituents under the bus.

We Saved the Most Ridiculous Part of Today’s Events for Last

Sen. Apodaca's obsession with adult entertainment derailed a scheduled vote on H.129 this afternoon.

When the city of Fayetteville wanted protection for their investment in fiber optics, at risk from H.129, the aforementioned Sen. Apodaca lost his mind.  Instead of protecting city funds already spent on next generation fiber, he substituted his own new amendment — to strip adult programming off community-owned broadband/cable systems instead.

You read that right. In case you didn’t, here it is again:

Sen. Apodaca would rather be the arbiter of what you can watch in the privacy of your own home than protecting community investments in broadband improvements.

So much for the “level playing field” title of Avila’s original bill.  Apodaca’s anti-porn crusade does not apply to Time Warner Cable or other private providers, so he has no problem at all if you want to pop some popcorn and settle down to some movies like “Suck It Sunrise,” “Boning Black Beauty 8” (to answer those lingering questions that went unanswered in part 7), or “Dripping Wet Lesbians,” all currently running on TWC’s adult channels.

No matter that Apodaca’s amendment is completely against federal law, which should signal how clueless some legislators are about these issues.  The Cable Act provides settled law on this subject.  Government cannot engage in cable content regulation — particularly the state and federal government.  The cable industry lobbied hard for that protection in the 1980s in part because of controversy over MTV and other “explicit” programming.  Only the local franchising authority can make decisions about the content they carry — and that means local communities get to make those decisions for themselves (47 USC 544(d)(1)).  That means Sen. Apodaca should worry about his own television viewing habits and stay out other peoples’ lives.

We’re helpers here at Stop the Cap!, so we’d point the senator to 47 USC 544(f)(1):

(f) Limitation on regulatory powers of Federal agencies, States, or franchising authorities

(1) Any Federal agency, State, or franchising authority may not impose requirements regarding the provision or content of cable services, except as expressly provided in this subchapter.

Those exceptions, by the way, have to do with changes in federal law, not the individual whims of one state senator.

Sen. Mansfield, who introduced the original amendment to protect Fayetteville, was naturally disturbed to find Apodaca’s non-germane substitute.  That promoted Apodaca to suggest Mansfield allowed his children to watch pornography, and from there the debate spiraled out of control.  After a brief recess, Apodaca returned to apologize to Mansfield, before killing the amendment to protect Fayetteville’s fiber investment for a second time.

Reviewing today’s events provides us with another edition of Legislators Out of Their League.  Apodaca’s naive amendment was not the only telling example (we know more about telecommunications law than he does.)  Yesterday in the Senate Finance Committee, Ms. Avila was utterly lost at sea as discussion ensued on amendments to the bill with her name on it.  Reduced to muttering at times, confused about the discussions dealing with the definition of underserved, her usual reaction was to oppose what she didn’t understand.  None of this is surprising considering the cable industry wrote the majority of her bill she introduced as her own.  She continues to protect their interests while ignoring yours.

This is why we continue to oppose H.129 and you should too.  We have until Monday to continue to drive the message home to state senators.  If you called or wrote before, it’s time to write and call again.  Tell your state senator H.129 is a bill written by and for the cable and phone companies.  It does not deliver any new broadband service to anyone, risks the investments communities across the state have already made, and allows a handful of big telecom companies to control North Carolina’s broadband destiny.  Considering the state achieves dead last ratings in broadband, that is the kind of control they should never be allowed to have.

Senate Representation By County

2011-2012 Session

(click on your member’s name for contact information)

Stop the Cap! has learned Rep. Marilyn Avila’s (R-Time Warner Cable) anti-consumer, anti-competition, anti-community broadband bill H.129 is on the move again.  Now it’s up for a final vote in the Senate Finance Committee early Wednesday afternoon.  This is our last chance to derail this nasty piece of legislation before it hits the Senate floor and community networks start considering pulling the plugs on their expansion efforts.

North Carolina is YOUR state.  The state legislature is not Time Warner Cable’s personal playground, where they can order up customized corporate protection bills to protect their monopoly profits and stick you with higher bills.  It’s time to let your state senator know H.129 is totally unacceptable.  North Carolina is suffering from America’s worst broadband, and nothing about H.129 will make it any better.  Instead, companies like Time Warner and CenturyLink will continue to charge more for less service than other states enjoy.

North Carolina needs all of the broadband it can get, and with the defeat of H.129, the towns and communities big providers have bypassed for years can finally address their own needs without enduring years of broken promises for broadband service that never seems to materialize.

Our allies at Free Press have made this as convenient as can be.  Check out their legislator look-up page, which will get you the contact information for your state senator.  Then make the call starting tonight (you can even leave a message on their voicemail):

“Hello, I am calling to ask Senator “x” to oppose H.129, Rep. Avila’s anti-broadband bill now before the state Senate.  H.129 is nothing short of a protection bill for Time Warner Cable’s fat profits and does not bring a single new broadband connection to our state.  If communities want to build better broadband for people like me, I say let them.

North Carolina has the worst broadband in the country and large parts of our state cannot get it even if they wanted it.  We have the power today to hold our local leaders responsible if they stray too far — it’s called an election.

We don’t need Ms. Avila and Time Warner Cable, an out of state corporation, telling us what kind of broadband service we can get.

I absolutely expect you to oppose H.129 and I am carefully watching who votes for and against this legislation as it will be a major determining factor how I vote in the next election.  Please feel free to contact me at (provide name, address, and phone number.)  Thank you for hearing me.”

We need your calls to make the difference!