The community of Pinetops, N.C. has finally got 21st century gigabit broadband, but no thanks to a state legislature so beholden to Time Warner Cable, it let the cable giant write its own law to keep potential competitors away.

The passage of H129 was almost a given after Republicans regained control of both chambers of the state legislature in 2011 for the first time since 1870. The bill made it almost impossible for any of the state’s existing community-owned broadband networks to expand out of their immediate service areas. It also discouraged any other rural towns from even considering starting a public broadband network to solve pervasive broadband problems in their communities.

It was not the finest moment for many of H.129’s supporters, who had to explain to the media and constituents why the state’s largest cable operator needed protection from potential competition and more importantly, why public officials were catering to the corporate giant’s interests over that of the public.

“I wish you’d turn the camera off now because I am going to get up and leave if you don’t,” said Rep. Julia Howard

Rep. Julia Howard (R-Davie, Iredell) found herself losing her cool when WNCN reporters in Raleigh caught up with her and confronted her with the fact her campaign coffers had been filled by the state’s largest telecom companies. She didn’t have an answer for that. Moments later, she appeared ready to flee the interview.

“I wish you’d turn the camera off now because I am going to get up and leave if you don’t,” Howard told the reporter.

Rep. Marilyn Avila was so close to Marc Trathen, then Time Warner Cable’s top-lobbyist in the state, we decided five years ago it would be more accurate to list Time Warner Cable as her sole constituent. Avila’s name appeared on the bill, but it was readily apparent Time Warner Cable drafted most of its provisions. The nearest city in Avila’s own district wanted no part of H129, and neither did many of her constituents.

The bill managed to pass the legislature and after becoming law effectively jammed up community broadband expansion in many parts of the state.

It would take the Federal Communications Commission to pre-empt the legislation on the grounds it was nakedly anti-competitive and prevented broadband improvements in communities major telecom companies have ignored for years.

As a result of the FCC’s actions, the community of Pinetops now has access to gigabit broadband, five years late, thanks in part to Rep. Avila who got a $290 dinner for her efforts and was honored as a guest speaker at a cable industry function in recognition of her service… to Time Warner Cable.

Rep. Avila with Marc Trathen, Time Warner Cable’s top lobbyist (right) Photo by: Bob Sepe of Action Audits

Greenlight, Wilson’s community-owned fiber to the home provider, switched on service in the community this spring to any of the 600 Pinetops homes that wanted it, and many did.

“We just love it!” said Brenda Harrell, the former acting town manager.

In fact, Greenlight is now delivering the best broadband in Edgecombe County, and deploying fiber to the home service was hardly a stretch for Greenlight, which was already installing fiber optics to manage an automated meter infrastructure project. The only thing keeping better broadband out of the hands of Pinetops residents was a law written by an industry that loathes competition and will stop it at all costs. Time Warner Cable didn’t bother to offer service in the community even after its bill became law and residents endured years of unreliable DSL or dialup access instead. Talk about a win-lose scenario. Time Warner Cable got to keep its comfortable cable monopoly while many families had to drive their children to businesses miles away just to borrow their Wi-Fi signal to finish homework assignments.

Faster broadband is likely to be transformative for the quiet rural community. Current town manager Lorenzo Carmon sees more than nearby fields of sweet potatoes and soybeans. With gigabit fiber and cheap local housing, Pinetops could become a bedroom community for upper income professionals now living in Greenville, a university town heavily populated by doctors, students, and high-tech knowledge economy workers. If and when they arrive, they’ll find a tech-ready community, right down to the local Piggly-Wiggly supermarket, which now has fiber fast internet service too.

Pinetops offers proof of the obscenity of bought-and-paid-for-politicians supporting corporate protectionism that harms people, harms education, harms jobs, and leaves rural communities with no clear path to the digital economy of the 21st century. Legislation like H129, which continues to be enforced in more than a few U.S. states, needs to be pre-empted nationwide or even better repealed by state legislators.

But North Carolina’s legislature still isn’t getting the message. They are outraged the FCC outsmarted Time Warner Cable and them, and are now wasting time and resources to have the FCC’s pre-emption overturned in court, evidently so that rural North Carolina can continue to tough it out with DSL indefinitely. That’s political malpractice and North Carolina voters need to show the door to any elected representative that cares more about the interests of a giant cable company than what is good for you and your community. Reps. Avila and Howard don’t have to live with 3Mbps DSL, so why should you?

“If the private sector is not providing the services, the government has to step in,” said Carmon. “The internet is just like electricity. You can’t live without it.”

We couldn’t agree more.

(Editor’s Note: In keeping with the changes introduced by the latest “AP Stylebook 2016,” as much as it pains us, starting today we will refer to the “internet” in lowercase.) 

The internet.

“I have a plan for that.”

High tech jobs.

“I have a plan for that.”

Facilitate Citizen Engagement in Government Innovation.

Yes, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has a plan for that, too. Whatever “that” is, there is essentially a four-year plan.

“Hillary Clinton’s Initiative on Technology & Innovation” runs 15 pages and immediately reminds readers of the menu at Cheesecake Factory. There is literally something for everyone. It’s surprisingly robust for someone who professed she didn’t understand much of the email controversy she entangled herself in while serving as Secretary of State and admittedly doesn’t know how to work a fax machine. The question is, if voters choose Mrs. Clinton as the next president of the United States, how can they be sure her administration will achieve those promises, starting with a commitment to bring internet service to 100 percent of the country.

Believe it or not, there are organizations out there that track just how many of these pledges are actually kept during each administration, and surprisingly the track record is better than you might think. Politifact’s Obameter shows the Obama Administration achieved the majority of its tech policy objectives, compromised on a few others, and broke its promise on just one: Requiring companies to disclose personal information data breaches.

After almost two decades of telecommunications deregulation, President Obama turned plenty of attention to internet issues in the last two years of his second term. His de-facto enforcer turned out to be FCC Chairman Thomas Wheeler, who has been tenaciously dismantling years of an industry-fueled “trust us, we know best” regulatory policy framework partly established during the (Bill) Clinton Administration. An exception to the usual revolving door of regulators taking well paid jobs in the private sector after leaving government, Wheeler has gone the other way — leaving the private sector as a former telecom lobbyist and venture capitalist to serve as FCC chairman during Obama’s second term. He’s a huge improvement over former chairman Julius Genachowski, who was typically resolute on telecom issues until he wasn’t.

Politifact’s Obameter gives high marks to President Obama for delivering on much of his tech issues platform.

Many progressives looking to keep or even build on Wheeler’s willingness to check telecom industry power are unsure whether Hillary Clinton will be tenacious like Sen. Elizabeth Warren or get up close and personal with big telecom companies, like former Tennessee congressman Harold Ford, Jr., who still serves as honorary chairman of the industry front group Broadband for America.

Progressives with long memories do not fondly recall the first Clinton Administration’s willingness to compromise away or abandon major policy positions it seemed steadfast on during two campaigns. After the 1992 election, Knight-Ridder Newspapers compiled a list of 160 specific commitments made by Bill Clinton. As he approached the end of his first term, the newspaper chain found Clinton managed to achieve 106 of them — a surprising 66% success rate. The reason for the perception-reality gap? Many of those commitments involved low-key, barely noticed policy changes or were originally so broadly defined as to make them achievable based on even the thinnest evidence of change.

The George W. Bush administration managed worse under a perpetual cloud of post Bush v. Gore partisanship and a change in priorities after 9/11, leading to a failure to deliver on most of his policy positions and pledges, according to CBS News. But the Bush Administration’s love of deregulation was well-apparent at the FCC during his two terms in office under FCC chairmen Michael Powell (now a top cable industry lobbyist) and Kevin Martin. Some of those deregulation policies have been reconsidered during the Obama Administration, and some voters are wondering if that will stay true should Mrs. Clinton be our next president.

Many of Clinton’s pledges on tech issues are bureaucratic crowdpleasers that have little immediate relevance or understanding outside of Washington. There are expansions in various federal programs, appointments of new federal overseers to keep a lookout for burdensome regulations on the state and local levels, and a variety of programs to expand broadband at a growing number of “anchor institutions” (not your home or business) through the use of public-private partnerships. It is worth noting many similar projects have already been up and running for at least a decade. Some of these anchor institutions cannot afford to pay the ongoing cost of getting service from these projects, and many are already served more than adequately, with capacity to spare. As we reviewed Mrs. Clinton’s tech policy positions, it also became clear the greater the scope and likely cost of any single pledge, the more vague it seemed to be, especially regarding the money required to pay for it and how its success will be measured.

America’s rural broadband problem.

In particular, Mrs. Clinton is promising to “finish the job of connecting America’s households to the internet, committing that by 2020, 100 percent of households in America will have the option of affordable broadband that delivers speeds sufficient to meet families’ needs.”

Left undefined: what is “affordable,” what speeds are “sufficient” to meet families’ needs, and what technologies will be used to deliver it. Mrs. Clinton is satisfied with “directing federal agencies to consider the full range of technologies as potential recipients—i.e., fiber, fixed wireless, and satellite—while focusing on areas that lack any fixed broadband networks currently.” In other words, doing exactly the same thing they already do today.

Satellite internet access, as it now exists, often performs much slower than the FCC’s definition of broadband – consistent download speed of 25Mbps. Most Americans subscribed to traditional DSL service don’t receive true broadband speeds either. Since satellite internet technically reaches the continental United States already, there will be plenty of ways for Mrs. Clinton to “declare victory” on this pledge without allocating the billions needed to provide quality wired or high-speed wireless broadband to still-unserved rural America.

Mrs. Clinton also proposes a new “model digital communities” grant program that will “leverage the $25 billion Infrastructure bank she plans to establish” to facilitate access to high-speed internet. Again, much of this proposal is left woefully undefined. Structured properly, this could be used to develop high-tech cities with high-speed service such as in Kansas City (Google) or Chattanooga (EPB Fiber). These could offer a road map for other communities. The problem is finding the money to build such networks. Private providers will argue they already have advanced networks that don’t require public tax dollars, so these projects are unnecessary. Local governments might admit if they don’t secure similar federal funding that “model cities” get to help cover some of the costs, they won’t proceed. Others may philosophically object to having the federal government meddling in overseeing local projects. Some others might prefer the money be simply spent to wire up rural communities that don’t have any access at all and call it a day.

Put it (almost) anywhere.

The Clinton campaign is also sure to attract fans among the country’s wireless carriers because her campaign promises to review regulatory barriers the phone and cable companies deal with, particularly pole access, zoning and cell tower issues, streamlining small cell placement, and continued promotion of “climb/dig once” policies which encourage placing fiber and/or conduit in trenches whenever/wherever a utility performs upgrades or outdoor maintenance. Oh, and she’s for 5G spectrum allocations as well. None of this, pardon the pun, is groundbreaking either.

Clinton is more specific supporting the Obama Administration’s Net Neutrality policy, backed by Title II authority, allowing the FCC latitude to manage abusive ISP behavior in a barely competitive marketplace. But she stops well short of criticizing companies about some of their current abusive, anti-consumer policies. She has nothing to say about data caps or zero rating, pricing or poor service, and doesn’t lament the sorry state of competition in the American broadband marketplace.

Clinton’s policy positions seem to suggest the federal government will have to help multi-billion dollar phone and cable companies get over their Return On Investment anxieties by subsidizing them to encourage rural broadband or enhancing outdated infrastructure. We’d prefer a position that moves this country towards universal broadband service, even if it comes at the price of short-term profits at the nation’s top ISPs. It would be useful to see some politicians stand up and suggest Comcast and AT&T, among others, are not entirely paragons of virtue, and they need to do more to solve this pervasive problem. That is something their customers already understand. In return for the billions in profits they earn annually in a de facto duopoly, they should be willing to devote more energy towards network expansion and less on cooking up schemes like data caps/zero rating and the usual share buybacks, dividend payouts, acquisitions and executive compensation. Asking nicely doesn’t seem to work, so now it’s time to tell them.

Although we’ve been a bit tough on Mrs. Clinton, we have not forgotten her likely opponent, Donald Trump, so far lacks any coherent summary of his tech policies. We do know he opposes Net Neutrality because he believes it is an Obama-inspired “attack on the internet” in a “top-down power grab.” Trump believes Net Neutrality will somehow be used to “target conservative media.” That makes about as much sense as saying pistachio is a liberal ice cream flavor. Trump’s team has a lot of work to do before November.

A condition imposed by the Federal Communications Commission requiring newly merged Charter-Time Warner Cable-Bright House to expand service into at least two million new homes already served by another cable or phone company already offering High Speed Internet is causing heartburn for smaller cable and phone companies that fear government-mandated competition in their service areas.

FCC chairman Thomas Wheeler has long believed that cable operators could compete against one another for customers, driving down prices for consumers while forcing service improvements. One of the conditions approving the Charter deal could have put Wheeler’s theory to the test, but not if Charter can help it.

Charter CEO Thomas Rutledge implied that he will continue to shield fellow cable operators from unwanted competition.

“When I talked to the FCC, I said I can’t overbuild another cable company, because then I could never buy it, because you always block those,” Rutledge said at last month’s MoffettNathanson Media & Communications Summit. “It’s really about overbuilding telephone companies.”

It seems unlikely Charter will ever directly overbuild one of its friends in the cable industry, especially important ones like Comcast, Cox, and Cablevision. Smaller independent cable companies don’t feel as secure, which is why the trade group that represents many of them, the American Cable Association, has tried to get the FCC to back off.

“The overbuild condition imposed by the FCC on Charter is stunningly bad and inexplicable government policy,” ACA president Matthew Polka said in a statement. “On the one hand, the FCC found that Charter will be too big and therefore it imposed a series of conditions to ensure it does not exercise any additional market power. At the same time, the FCC, out of the blue, is forcing Charter to get even bigger.”

The FCC probably crafted the deal conditions to force Charter to compete with other cable operators, because one million of those new customer locations must be where at least 25Mbps broadband service is already available. That protects many phone companies still offering DSL as an afterthought, because most don’t offer speeds anywhere close to 25Mbps. But the FCC left several counter-intuitive loopholes in the language that Republican FCC commissioner Ajit Pai says lends credibility to the ACA’s argument.

“Unless Charter chooses to exclusively overbuild areas served by Comcast, which I find highly unlikely, Charter’s increased broadband market share will come at the expense of smaller competitors,” Pai wrote in comments about the proposal.

Notably, Charter is allowed to buy up other small telecom companies and count up to 250,000 of their customers towards the one million new homes served requirement. If those are small rural cable companies, that means the FCC is allowing Charter to grow even larger instead of providing more competition. Charter could also choose to overbuild municipal broadband providers and co-ops, especially in areas next to existing Charter/TWC/Bright House systems. That would harm the FCC’s current interest in removing roadblocks to publicly owned broadband networks. Enthusiasm for such networks could be dampened if Charter is willing to wire the area at their own expense.

Rutledge’s announcement is sure to make life uncomfortable for a number of rural phone companies that have invested in fiber network upgrades and now face the potential of Charter taking away customers that are helping to pay off those upgrades.

An unintended consequence of the FCC’s various loopholes could place a heavy burden on independent telephone companies that invested in network upgrades for faster broadband even as wealthier and larger phone companies are protected from that competition by delivering frustratingly slow DSL.

One potential target for a Charter overbuild could be UniTel, headquartered in Unity, Maine. UniTel offers residential customers in Albion, Dixmont, Newburgh, Thorndike, Troy, and Unity broadband speeds up to 1 gigabit. Unity is located between Bangor and Portland — both served by Time Warner Cable (now Charter).

Phone companies like UniTel call the FCC’s mandate “artificial competition” that could put it and other rural independent phone companies into financial distress. UniTel has a speed edge over anything Charter plans to offer customers in the immediate future as it deploys fiber to the home service, but television is another matter. One of the benefits of being a large cable company is volume-discounted pricing for cable television networks. Smaller independent operators cannot compete when wholesale television programming discounts are calculated in, allowing larger companies to undercut smaller ones with lower pricing.

UniTel officials criticized the FCC for creating deal conditions that Charter will exploit to the detriment of improving rural broadband service.

“Rather than allow New Charter to unilaterally narrow the scope of the buildout condition to meet its own business objectives, UniTel respectfully urges that the Commission should act to narrow the scope of any buildout condition, not to meet the private business objectives of New Charter, but rather to meet the public policy objectives of universal service in rural areas,” the company argued in its filing with the FCC.

A handful of rural telecom associations generally agree with UniTel and want the FCC to retarget Charter’s buildout requirements to fixing the rural broadband problem by expanding into unserved service areas instead.

Comzilla

Comcast just felt for itself what can happen if their customers don’t pay their bills. They threaten to cut them off.

With just one day remaining before Duck River Electric Membership Corporation claimed it would rip Comcast’s equipment and wiring off its utility poles for non-payment of pole attachment fees, Comcast showed up with a check.

“To avoid an interruption of service, Comcast has once again agreed to pay Duck River significantly more than what is owed under our current contract, despite Duck River’s refusal to negotiate reasonable terms,” Alex Horwitz, vice president of public relations at Comcast, told Times-Free Press reporters.

Duck River officials dispute that and say Comcast was behind (again) on its pole attachment fee payments and is the only utility company complaining about the price.

“Size-wise, they’re the Godzilla of telecommunications,” said Steve Oden, director of member services at the tiny electric co-op. “And we’re just a lowly electric co-op here in Middle Tennessee.”

Oden claimed he is treating Comcast exactly the same way they would treat their own customers.

“If you don’t pay your Comcast cable TV or internet bill, they’re going to do what?” The answer, Oden said, is they “cut you off.”

Comcast claimed in turn Duck River is using their position as a monopoly to gouge customers with high rates.

“Unfortunately, the utility has been unwilling to compromise and has billed Comcast for arbitrary pole rates that are nearly three times the national average,” said Horwitz.

Had Comcast not come up with a payment, Duck River was prepared to start removing Comcast’s wiring and equipment from its poles, and cut power to Comcast’s equipment, which would have killed service for about 7,000 Comcast customers.

The two are now talking (again) about securing a long-term contract that will stabilize pole attachment rates and keep Duck River’s local power co-op from having to make collection calls in the future.

Cleveland’s monument in the downtown district. (Image: City of Cleveland)

AT&T, Comcast, and Charter have surrounded the city of Cleveland, Tenn., (population 42,774) for more than 20 years, yet after all that time, there are still many homes in the area that have no better than dial-up Internet access..

An effort to extend municipal utility EPB’s fiber to the home service into the community just northeast of Chattanooga on Interstate 75, has run into organized political opposition campaign, part-sponsored by two of the three communications companies serving the area.

Tennessee state Reps. Dan Howell and Kevin Brooks, both Cleveland-area Republicans, understand the implications. With AT&T, Comcast, and Charter resolute about not expanding their coverage areas anytime soon, the only chance Cleveland has of winning world-class broadband anytime in the reasonable future is through EPB, which has already offered to extend service to at least 1,000 customers in rural Bradley County in as little as three months. Most of those customers now rely on dial-up Internet services, because no broadband is available. Reps. Howell and Brooks are trying to get the the red tape out of the way so EPB can proceed, but the Tennessee legislature hasn’t budged.

EPB provides municipal power, broadband, television, and telephone service for residents in Chattanooga, Tennessee

There is a substantial difference between 30kbps dial-up and 100Mbps — one of the “budget” Internet tiers available from EPB. But some Tennessee lawmakers and corporate-backed special interest groups don’t care. To them, stopping public broadband expansion is a bigger priority, and they have attempted to stall, block, or prohibit municipal broadband, just to protect the current phone and cable companies that are among their generous contributors.

In 2010, Chattanooga became the first in America to enjoy gigabit residential broadband speed not because of AT&T, Comcast, or Charter, but because of the publicly owned electric company, EPB. So what’s the problem with that? The fact EPB spent $320 million on the fiber optic network — about $100 million of that coming from a federal grant — keeps some conservatives, corporate executives, and telecom shareholders up at night. They object to the public funding of broadband, calling it unfair competition for the two incumbent cable companies and one phone company, which have their own “privately funded” networks.

Republican Rep. Mike Carter, who serves Ooltewah, thinks that’s a lot of nonsense. He notes AT&T and other providers already receive government funding to service outlying areas that no other providers dare to tread for a lack of return on their investment.

“[What] convinces me to back expansion of the EPB of Chattanooga is the fact that they received $111 million in stimulus funds, and in the next five years AT&T alone will receive $156 million of your money [in government funding] assessed every month on your bill to provide 10/4-gigabit service in those areas,” Carter explained to the Chattanooga Times-Free Press. “If the EPB’s $111 million matching grant somehow disqualifies those benefits going to my constituents, how do I explain to them that AT&T is receiving non-matching funds?”

“The issue then became, if it is necessary to create the world’s fastest Internet system, why would EPB not offer that for economic growth in its service area?” Carter continued. ” After I heard the story of the [gig’s] creation and realized that the money had already been spent, I asked myself if I would allow a firmly held principle of no competition with private enterprise by government to deny my constituents and neighbors the incredible benefits.”

Justin Owen, president and CEO of the Beacon Center of Tennessee, is dismissive of Carter’s willingness to bend his principles. In his view, those without Internet access have other options instead of getting EPB Fiber on the public dime.

Owen

“You can get satellite Internet,” said Owen, who added that governments that invest in fiber technology could be “left behind by disruptive innovation,” which in his mind could be satellite Internet. Satellite customers would disagree.

“Horrible, horrible, horrible, and more horrible,” wrote Trey from another Cleveland — this time in Texas. “Speeds are consistently less than 2Mbps and they advertise up to 12. Try a cell phone booster and use that before resorting to satellite Internet.”

Hundreds of customers shared similar stories about their experience with satellite Internet, and they don’t believe it will be disruptive to anything except their bank account.

Owen and his group have not revealed many details about where its funding comes from, but the group is a member of the State Policy Network, which receives financial support from AT&T, Time Warner Cable, Verizon and Comcast. The group’s former leader, Drew Johnson, was also a former opinion page columnist at the Times-Free Press and used column space to criticize EPB and other issues that ran contrary to AT&T’s agenda in Tennessee.

Despite support from the Chattanooga area’s Republican delegation, many legislators from outside the area remain firmly in support of the telecom companies and their wish to limit or destroy community broadband projects like EPB, claiming they are redundant or are based on faulty business plans likely to fail. But while Comcast used to dismiss EPB’s gigabit service as unnecessary and AT&T considered gigabit speeds overkill, both companies are now racing to deploy their own gigabit networks in Chattanooga to compete.

The residents of Cleveland without broadband today probably won’t have it tomorrow or anytime soon. Many are hoping the Tennessee legislature will relent and let EPB solve their broadband issues once and for all. Cleveland resident Aaron Alldaffer is trying to help gin up interest in a renewed legislative push for EPB Fiber expansion with a Change.org petition.

The BBC World Service Global Business program visited Chattanooga in May 2016 to explore EPB Fiber and discuss its implications. (29 minutes)

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