Connecticut’s tough Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA) has rejected a settlement between state officials and Frontier Communications to acquire AT&T Connecticut, saying the deal offers very little to Connecticut ratepayers.

The settlement between Frontier, Connecticut’s Consumer Counsel and the Connecticut Attorney General’s office included commitments from Frontier governing contributions to state non-profit groups, phone rates and broadband expansion.

The Authority was told it could either approve or reject the settlement, but not suggest or require changes. It decided late last week to reject the settlement deal.

The regulator cited several reasons for its disapproval:

• A landline rate freeze offers little benefit to Connecticut ratepayers because landline rates have been stable for years and any attempt to increase them will only fuel additional disconnections;
• Frontier’s commitments to improve broadband service in Connecticut are vague, lacking specific speed improvements and rural broadband expansion targets to meet;
• Frontier attempted to insert weakened rules governing pole inspections, which should be part of a separate regulatory proceeding;
• The agreement might limit PURA’s ability to launch cost-recovery proceedings and flexibility to maintain oversight over Frontier’s performance in the state;
• A contractual agreement requiring Frontier to make specific contributions to state non-profit groups is inappropriate and unenforceable;
• A lack of information about how Frontier and AT&T will collaborate after the transaction is complete, particularly with AT&T’s U-verse offering;
• No details about how Frontier U-verse intends to handle Public, Educational, and Government Access channels on its television platform;
• A lack of a detailed disaster preparedness plan from Frontier to handle major service disruptions.

PURA’s Acting Executive Secretary Nicholas Neeley said the goal is to “improve the likelihood of success of Frontier as it assumes the duties, obligations and responsibilities currently held by AT&T in Connecticut.”

“(It seeks to) balance the interests of all parties affected by this transaction, promote competition and preserve the public’s rights to safe and adequate communications services,” Neeley wrote in a public notice. “The Authority hopes that such a session will produce an amended proposal from Frontier that would be deemed acceptable for consideration.”

The rejection also seeks to protect and preserve Connecticut’s regulatory oversight power over Frontier.

Frontier received a better reception from the Communications Workers of America. The phone company has traditionally maintained reasonably good relations with its unionized workforce. CWA approved of Frontier’s purchase of AT&T Connecticut after winning commitments for new union jobs, a job security program, a payout of 100 shares of company stock to each union member, and Frontier’s commitment to prioritize Connecticut-based call centers.

Wall Street is less impressed. This morning, Morgan Stanley downgraded Frontier’s stock to “underweight,” citing complications in the AT&T Connecticut deal and Frontier’s increasing debt load. Frontier is financing $1.55 billion of the $2 billion transaction by selling two groups of senior notes of $775 million each, due in 2021 and 2024. As of June 30, Frontier had amassed $7.9 billion in debt with just $805 million in cash on hand.

Frontier’s proposed northeastern service areas would add almost the entire state of Connecticut to its holdings in mostly rural upstate New York and Pennsylvania and the metropolitan Rochester, N.Y. 585 area code region where the company got its name.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Frontier Communications Connecticut 1-2014.mp4[/flv]

Frontier Communications introduces itself to AT&T Connecticut customers in this company-produced video. (4:03)

Frontier’s “High Speed” Fiber Fantasies

Frontier Communications has jumped on the gigabit broadband promises bandwagon with an announcement to investors the company will make available 1,000Mbps broadband speeds available later this year to a small handful of customers.

“I want to note that nearly 10% of our households are served through a fiber to the home architecture,” said Frontier’s chief operating officer Dan McCarthy. “Over the next several quarters we will introduce expanded speed offerings in select markets including 50-100Mbps services. Some residential areas will also be able to purchase up to 1Gbps broadband service. We are excited to bring these new products to market and look forward to making these choices available to our customers.”

Most of Frontier’s fiber customers are part of the FiOS fiber to the home infrastructure Frontier adopted from Verizon in Fort Wayne, Ind., and in parts of Oregon and Washington. The rest of Frontier customers accessing service over fiber are in a few new housing developments and some multi-dwelling units. The majority of customers continue to be served by copper-based facilities.

Despite the speed challenges imposed by distance-sensitive DSL over copper networks, Frontier customers crave faster speeds and more than one-third of Frontier’s sales in the last quarter have come from speed upgrades. As of this month, 54% of Frontier households can receive 20Mbps or greater speed, 75% can get 12Mbps and 83% can get 6Mbps. Here at Stop the Cap! headquarters, little has changed since 2009, with maximum available Frontier DSL speeds in this Rochester, N.Y. suburban neighborhood still maxing out at a less-impressive 3.1Mbps.

Frontier’s plans for the next three months include a growing number of partnerships with third-party equipment manufacturers and software companies, as well as integrating former AT&T service areas in Connecticut into the Frontier family:

Sale of AT&T Connecticut Assets to Frontier Communications Wins Approval from State Attorney General

Connecticut’s Attorney General has announced a deal with Frontier Communications to approve its acquisition of AT&T’s wired assets in the state. The office asked for and got a three-year rate freeze on basic residential telephone rates and a commitment to keep selling standalone broadband at or below Frontier’s current rates. Low-income military veterans would receive basic broadband service for $19.99 per month, a substantial discount off the regular price of $34.99. The first month of service is free.

Frontier will make $500,000 in donations annually to various Connecticut charities, give $512,500 to the University of Connecticut basketball teams, and commit $75,000 to sponsor the Connecticut Open tennis tournament in New Haven.

The phone company has also committed to invest $64 million on network upgrades between 2015-2017, primarily to expand DSL broadband and U-verse service. The company also must undertake to inspect the wireline network it is buying from AT&T and replace deteriorating infrastructure including lines and telephone poles as needed.

Frontier announced it was buying AT&T’s wired assets in December for $2 billion. AT&T will continue to own and operate its wireless network assets in the state. Connecticut was home to AT&T’s only significant landline presence in the northeast. The Southern New England Telephone Company of Connecticut was originally bought by SBC Communications for $4.4 billion in 1998. After SBC purchased AT&T, the telephone company changed its name to AT&T Connecticut. Its primary competitor is Cablevision Industries, which also serves eastern New York and parts of New Jersey. AT&T has aggressively deployed its U-verse platform in Connecticut. Frontier will continue to run and expand U-verse in the state.

Frontier Services and Partnerships Expand

• Customers may have already received marketing for Frontier’s Emergency Phone, a $4.99/mo landline that can only reach 911. Frontier CEO Maggie Wilderotter told investors that global climate change has made weather patterns more unpredictable, making the reliability and resiliency of traditional landlines a “true life line” in the event of an emergency knocking out Voice over IP lines or cell phone service;
• Frontier Texting, powered by Zipwhip, allows customers send and receive text messages using their existing landline numbers. The service appears most popular with business customers, with more 800 signed up so far;
• Frontier third-party technical and security support offers a large range of computer security, home automation, and support services for both hardware and software. Frontier added the Nest thermostat during this quarter, as well as tech support for Intuit QuickBooks and Dropcam remote video monitoring.

Wilderotter Flip-Flops on Gigabit Broadband: You Don’t Need a Gig

Less than three weeks ago, Wilderotter told the Pacific Northwest readers of The Oregonian they didn’t need gigabit broadband speeds:

“Today it’s about the hype, because Google has hyped the gig,” said Wilderotter, in Portland this week for a meeting of her company’s board. She said Google is pitching something that’s beyond the capacity of many devices, with very few services that could take advantage of such speeds, and confusing customers in the process.

“We have to take the mystery and the technology out of the experience for the user because it’s a bit disrespectful to speak a language our customers don’t understand,” said Wilderotter, in Portland this week for a meeting of her company’s board.

Frontier’s pitch: Better prices for more modest speeds. For most people, Wilderotter said, 10 to 12 megabits per second will be perfectly adequate for at least the next couple years. She said Frontier is upgrading its networks in rural communities where it doesn’t offer FiOS to meet that benchmark.

Now that Frontier proposes to offer those speeds, company officials are excited they will be available. Customers shouldn’t be. Most won’t have access for some time to come, if ever.

When the community of Batavia, Ill., a distant suburb of Chicago, decided they wanted something better than the poor broadband offered by Comcast and what is today AT&T, it decided to hold a public referendum on whether the town should construct and run its own fiber to the home network for the benefit of area residents and businesses. A local community group, Fiber for Our Future, put up $4,325 to promote the initiative back in 2004, if only because the town obviously couldn’t spend tax dollars to advertise or promote the idea itself.

Within weeks of the announced proposal, both Comcast and SBC Communications (which later acquired AT&T) launched an all-out war on the idea of fiber to the home service, mass mailing flyers attacking the proposal to area residents and paying for push polling operations that asked area residents questions like, “should tax money be allowed to provide pornographic movies for residents?” The predictable opposition measured in response to questions like that later appeared in mysterious opinion pieces published in area newspapers submitted by the incumbent companies and their allies.

Comcast spent $89,740 trying to defeat the measure in a community of just 26,000 people. SBC spent $192,324 — almost $3.50 per resident by Comcast and just shy of $7.50 per resident by SBC. Much the same happened in the neighboring communities of St. Charles and Geneva. 

According to Motherboard, the scare tactics worked, cutting support for the fiber network from over 72 percent to its eventual defeat in two separate referendums, leaving most of Batavia with 3Mbps DSL from SBC or an average of 6Mbps from Comcast.

Much of the blizzard of mailers and brochures Comcast and SBC mailed out were part of a coordinated disinformation campaign. Both companies also knew their claims would go largely unchallenged because Fiber for Our Future and other fiber proponents lacked the funding to respond with fact check pieces of their own mailed to residents to expose the distortions.

When it was all over, it was back to business as usual with Comcast and SBC. The latter defended its reputation after complaints soared about its inadequate broadband speeds.

Kirk Brannock, then midwest networking president for SBC, told city council members in the area that “fiber is an unproven technology.”

“What are you going to do with 20Mbps? It’s like having an Indy race car and you don’t have the racetrack to drive it on. We are going to be offering 3Mbps. Most users won’t use that,” he said.

“All the subscribers got these extraordinary fliers. Ghosts, goblins, witches. I mean, this is about a broadband utility. Very scary stuff. This is real. This is comical, but this is very real,” Catharine Rice of the Coalition for Local Internet Choice said of the fliers at an event discussing municipal fiber earlier this year. “They have this amazing picture, and then they lie about what happened. They’re piling in facts that aren’t true.”

In communities that won approval for construction of publicly-owned fiber networks, the battle wasn’t over. Tennessee’s large state cable lobbying group unsuccessfully sued EPB to keep it out of the fiber business. In North Carolina, Time Warner Cable effectively wrote legislation introduced and passed by the Republican-dominated General Assembly that forbade community broadband expansion and made constructing new networks nearly impossible. In Ohio, another cable industry-sponsored piece of legislation destroyed the business plan of Lebanon’s fiber network, forcing the community to eventually sell the network at a loss to Cincinnati Bell.

The larger Comcast grows, the more financial resources it can bring to bare against any would-be competitors. Even in 2004, the company was large enough to force would-be community competitors to steer clear and stay out of its territory.

Another corporate tax cut

Wall Street rallied around big telecommunications company stocks this week as news spread that Windstream has found a way to avoid paying federal income tax by converting its copper and fiber networks and other property assets into a tax-exempt trust.

Windstream says it has already won Internal Revenue Service approval to convert all of its network assets into a publicly traded “real estate investment trust.” REIT’s pay no federal income taxes, and if other large telecom companies follow Windstream’s lead, taxpayers will have to make up the estimated $12 billion in lost tax revenue annually.

Investors are excited by the prospect of a major reduction in tax exposure for some of America’s richest telecommunications companies. Windstream was rewarded the most with a 12 percent boost in its share price – a two-year high for the largely rural phone company. But AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Cablevision also saw stock prices rising over the possibility of major increases in dividend payouts to shareholders from the proceeds of the tax savings.

REIT conversions are just the latest trick in the book corporations have used to cut, if not eliminate most of their tax liabilities. REITs are exempt from federal taxes as long as they distribute 90 percent of taxable earnings back to shareholders. Democrats in Congress have been busy fighting their Republican colleagues offer efforts to drop the practice of inversion — allowing companies to cut taxes by relocating offshore. Robert Williams, an independent corporate tax consultant, told Bloomberg News the Democrats have their hands full with that this year and are unlikely to be able to also devote resources to closing the REIT tax loophole.

“Management teams will surely look closely at emulating Windstream because the tax savings are potentially so significant,” said Craig Moffett, an analyst at MoffettNathanson LLC, in a note. “For a company like AT&T, where free cash flow has been under pressure and management has been willing to push hard to save on taxes, the appeal must surely be great.”

If a high-profile phone or cable company moves to enact an REIT, that might be enough to provoke Congress to act, warned Moffett.

“The biggest hurdle in this process is getting the private letter ruling from the IRS, and we’ve got that,” David Avery, a spokesman for Windstream, told Bloomberg. The deal doesn’t need the consent of the Federal Communications Commission, Avery added.

Windstream’s tax savings will cut company debt by around $3.2 billion and produce about $115 million annually in free cash flow. Although Windstream chief financial officer Tony Thomas vaguely promised to use some of the money to invest in broadband upgrades, he was more specific about the benefits Windstream’s REIT will have on the company’s growth agenda. It can use the savings to “acquire other network assets to grow,” — business jargon meaning more merger and acquisition deals, this time fueled by Windstream’s slashed tax bill.

Wall Street investment banks paid to advise on Windstream’s REIT conversion are promoting the concept to other telecom companies as easy to replicate and profoundly profitable. But who should share in the new found wealth?

“People are asking the question if these tax benefits should be passed on to the end user — you and I when we pay our phone or cable bill — versus going to the corporation,” said Phil Owens, vice president at Green Street Advisors, a real estate research firm in Newport Beach, California, that has counseled companies like Equinix on REIT conversions.

Don’t count on it.

AT&T couldn’t have gotten a better deal for itself if it tried.

Mississippi state officials that awarded AT&T a 10-year State Master Contract, compelling the majority of state government offices to do business only with AT&T, have just given the phone company an early two-year extension without allowing for any public discussion or competitive bidding.

In 2005, when the contract with AT&T was first signed, it was unlikely most government offices, schools, and libraries would be able to find any bidder other than AT&T. The state contract spells out a series of requirements that critics contend were tailor-written with the full knowledge only AT&T could offer the full menu of required services. Nearly 10 years later, and more than a year before the contract was up for renewal, the state suddenly granted AT&T a two-year contract extension, potentially exposing taxpayers to overpriced, taxpayer-funded broadband services.

Interested members of the public who want to examine the state contract for telecommunications with AT&T have run headlong into a roadblock erected by a Hinds County judge who ruled it was off-limits for public inspection and has since been sealed under court order. To this day, only government customers of Mississippi’s Department of Information Technology Services, the agency in charge of the state government’s broadband, are allowed to see the document.

The state contract comes at a significant cost to taxpayers if Marvin Adams’ figures are correct. Adams, who works for the Columbia School District, suspects a lot of money has been frittered away because of the lack of competitive bidding. Only the state’s schools and libraries have the option of either securing a contract with AT&T or requesting bids from competitors like Ridgeland-based C-Spire, which supplies fiber and wireless connectivity.

Adams says AT&T’s contract with the state costs taxpayers $5 per Mbps. But AT&T also charges a “transport circuit charge” of between $10-45 per Mbps. Adams said his colleagues have seen competitive bids averaging $6 per Mbps and the transport circuit charge is included in that price.

The Mississippi Watchdog delivered the understatement of the year when it called AT&T’s contract with Mississippi “lucrative.” Attempts to modify the contract have met with fierce opposition in Jackson, the state capital. Senate Bill 2741, a modest measure that would have compelled school districts to seek competitive bids before signing a multi-year contract with a provider, died in committee earlier this year.

AT&T has close political ties in several southern states. The company co-authored an article with Gov. Phil Bryant and donated at least $42,500 to his various campaigns for political office. In 2012, Bryant signed a bill into law removing most of Mississippi’s remaining regulatory authority over AT&T.

Next door in Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal also maintains close ties with AT&T. The company has funneled more than $250,000 to his wife’s charitable foundation – the Supriya Jindal Foundation for Louisiana’s Children, which also takes substantial contributions from oil and chemical companies, the insurance industry and defense contractors. The New York Times reported back in 2011 that telecom companies like AT&T were increasingly contributing to politically connected charities they could use in campaigns to influence legislation and regulation. Companies can write off their unlimited charitable giving while politicians take credit for the work done by the non-profit groups while also quietly understanding exactly where the money is coming from.