A growing scandal over alleged diversion of British taxpayer funds intended for fiber broadband rollouts has now cost one whistleblower his job, terminated after suggesting British Telecom (BT) is artificially inflating infrastructure expenses.

The Conservative government’s Department for Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) oversees £1 billion in public subsidies to improve broadband in Britain. Much of that is earmarked to construct fiber to the neighborhood facilities in smaller towns and villages — the rural subsidy providing the only chance most of these residents have for better broadband service. But a whistleblower inside the DCMS has said the primary government-approved contractor, BT, is artificially inflating its prices — pocketing a growing amount of taxpayer funds instead of enhancing its broadband buildout.

Courtesy: Br0kenTeleph0n3 (click to enlarge)

The whistleblower, identified as Michael Kiely, a DCMS broadband project consultant, was fired after he detailed BT’s ever-growing (and highly confidential) cost estimates to several village and town councils fighting for a better deal from the phone company. The issue has been closely watched by the Br0kenTeleph0n3 blog, which reports on how Britain’s broadband stimulus funding is being spent. The blog reported the DCMS sacked Kiely, apparently for exposing BT’s secret pricing schemes.

“I am getting increasingly concerned at the way in which whistleblowers are being bullied,” Margaret Hodge, chair of the Public Accounts Committee, told the Guardian newspaper while demanding an investigation. “All too often people hide behind commercial confidentiality. This culture denies us the right to know how our money is being spent.”

Many local governments are matching broadband subsidies with local funds to increase the number of homes reached by fiber-enhanced Internet access. The demand for fast broadband is so great in the UK, the initial plan to spend £530 million has now been effectively doubled, with even more money coming from the European Commission and other sources. Britain’s broadband expansion plan envisions reaching as many rural homes as feasible with the available funds. The more funds diverted away from broadband expansion into the pockets of others, the fewer number of homes can be reached.

The enormous amount of available government funding  appears to have caught BT by surprise, and Kiely suspects the company is inventing new fees, while inflating others, to ‘soak up’ the additional money without having to deliver any improvements in service.

Kiely noted BT appeared to be setting  new wholesale rates for fiber cabinets, despite the fact costs vary widely in different regions. Kiely notes that even as BT enjoys economies of scale, the price it charges for rural cabinets appears to be rising, even though costs are declining.

In rural areas, BT is seeking up to £30,000 for each fiber cabinet, despite the fact the average price in Northern Ireland’s recent broadband roll-out was just over £13,000 each.

BT’s estimate for two fiber cabinets in Great Asby, which will service hundreds of residents, was estimated at £60,000, a price Kiely also suggests is inflated.

The phone company has made cost verification nearly impossible with strict, mandatory confidentiality agreements that prohibit local councils from learning BT’s true costs. BT’s non-disclosure agreement also prohibits local governments from comparing notes about what the company charges in nearby communities. The government has approved only two vendors for the government-funded broadband expansion — BT and Fujitsu, with BT winning the overwhelming majority of contracts.

The giant, former state-owned phone company, comparable to AT&T or Bell Canada, can also hide cost reductions achieved from experience rolling out service, economies of scale like volume discounts, and other labor savings. BT’s attempt to create standardized pricing also leaves plenty of room to inflate prices by rolling in unexplained charges like “planning costs,” “availability charges,” and “take up bonuses.”

Despite this, BT says claims it is misspending public funds are completely baseless, and points to its own independent investment in British broadband.

“It is ludicrous that some people are suggesting that we are trying to pass on the full cost of deployment to our public sector partners,” BT said in a statement. “In fact, we are looking at a low double digit year payback in these areas even when the public funds are taken into account.”

Courtesy: Br0kenTeleph0n3 (Click to enlarge)

Conservative party loyalist Maria Miller, recently appointed as the government’s new culture secretary during a cabinet reshuffle, has not commented on the BT controversy. Instead, she has prioritized reducing government “red tape” for providers like BT while also tamping down expectations for the broadband expansion program.

Among her deregulation priorities: scrap the right for local governments to object to the placement of often unsightly broadband street cabinets, force “reasonable” terms on private landowners where necessary infrastructure must be placed or routed across, and sweeping permission to allow virtually anyone to put overhead lines up anywhere they please. All of these objectives heavily favor BT’s interests, according to industry observers.

Miller also recently took pressure off BT to deliver game-changing speeds by redefining “superfast broadband” as “potential headline download access speeds greater than 24Mbps.” That falls far short of the 100Mbps service most expected in return for more than £1 billion in taxpayer subsidies, often directed to BT.

Even more telling, Miller considers 2Mbps broadband speeds adequate: “Our investment will help provide 90% of homes and businesses with access to superfast broadband and for everyone in the UK to have access to at least 2Mbps,” she said.

The European continent, in comparison, is targeting 30Mbps as the bare minimum speed, with at least 50% of Europeans getting 100Mbps service by 2020.

Great Britain’s broadband expansion plan is highly dependent on fiber to the neighborhood (FTTN) technology, with traditional copper phone lines carrying the service the rest of the way into a home or office. Both AT&T’s U-verse and Bell’s Fibe are examples of FTTN technology.

As elsewhere, BT considers 24Mbps a suitable maximum speed for FTTN technology, but most customers will not even achieve that. Just like traditional DSL, distance matters, as does line quality. BT has quietly told most councils the average speed most local residents will actually receive is 15Mbps on average.

[flv width=”640″ height=”372″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Jeremy Hunt Announces Superfast broadband 2010.flv[/flv]

Former Secretary of State for Olympics, Culture, Media and Sport Jeremy Hunt outlining Britain’s superfast broadband initiative in 2010. (4 minutes)

Let the gouging begin. Here was the price being charged by an eBay vendor this past Tuesday for the SB6141 cable modem.

A few days ago, Stop the Cap! notified readers Time Warner Cable was planning to charge a $3.95/mo modem rental fee for current High Speed Internet customers planning to keep using company-supplied equipment.

With over $300 million in potential new revenue, this new surcharge from the folks living high on 1% Mountain is guaranteed to make the cable company a tidy sum for doing… absolutely nothing. Time Warner is not improving your broadband service — they are just charging you separately for a piece of equipment needed to use the service you already paid for. It would be like selling you a lamp and then start charging an extra monthly fee to keep the power cord.

We’ve had our own illuminating experience here at Stop the Cap! headquarters finding our way around this newest surcharge — by purchasing our own DOCSIS 3 cable modem and sending the soon-to-be $47.40 a year (until the end of time) Ubee modem packing back to Time Warner. Only we can’t.

I am unsure what bothers me more: Time Warner’s scanty “approved modems for purchase list” — mostly Cadillac-priced models that would fit in at Barney’s New York or Nordstrom, the bottom feeder eBay and Amazon Marketplace sellers who are capitalizing on the modem fee by increasing their prices for customer-owned equipment to gouging levels, or Time Warner’s failure to activate customer-purchased modems because it “changed its billing system this week” in preparation for the new modem fees “and can’t activate customer owned modems at the moment.”

As Time Warner Cable customers began ordering the SB6141 online, the price doubled. This is the same vendor that charged $99.95 two days earlier.

Out of the five “approved” models, the obvious best choice for those who do not require a modem-router combination is the Motorola SurfBoard SB6141 DOCSIS 3.0 Cable Modem. It features support for 8×4 DOCSIS 3 channels, which in non-technical terms means it will handle the best speeds Time Warner is likely to offer in the foreseeable future. We do not recommend customers invest in DOCSIS 2 modems, because that technology is closer to the end of its useful life and simply will not support broadband speeds customers will crave in the next few years.

Once Time Warner Cable made the announcement, the race was on… for the handful of online retailers carrying the SB6141 to jack up the price as quickly as possible. I predicted this was likely in the comment section of our earlier piece. When the nation’s second largest cable operator plans to subject millions of broadband customers to unnecessary modem rental fees and smart customers are clever enough to avoid them, demand is going to rise. Prices would rise much faster.

In the last 48 hours, the cost of the SB6141 has literally doubled from $99 to $200 thanks to some eBay sellers looking for quick profits. This unit is now barely available from Amazon.com Marketplace vendors, typically with a waiting list, for around $130. It was selling for as little as $89 just a few weeks earlier. We even found some refurbished units on eBay that formerly sold for less than $100 now selling for $199, just after Time Warner’s new fee hit the media.

Buying a refurbished unit won’t save you much. Two days ago, this eBay vendor was charging $100 for the same used cable modem.

Finding retailers for this particular model has proven difficult and because of the relentless price gouging, we are now recommending customers hold off on buying their cable modems, at least until Time Warner expands their list of approved models or a broader number of retailers start selling the model to help force prices back down to earth. Don’t pay an eBay gouger twice the usual price!

For customers who mistakenly ended up buying our earlier recommended model we quickly crossed off the list (the SB6121), we’ve found Amazon.com especially accommodating, even supplying a prepaid return shipping label, after explaining the modem model mess to Amazon’s customer service and requesting a free return. So yes, we got stuck with the wrong model too. Sending the 6121 back is our best recommendation as Time Warner Cable customer service explained as late as this evening they cannot activate customer-owned equipment not on their approved-for-purchase list (or anything else at the moment).

Our second order, for the SB6141 at the pre-gouge price of $99 arrived this afternoon, and that led to more frustration with Time Warner Cable, who ultimately failed to activate the modem.

After a very lengthy hold time, a Time Warner representative took my modem’s MAC address to activate the device, and it failed to register. A supervisor eventually explained Time Warner Cable updated their billing system to accommodate the forthcoming modem rental charge and in the process brought down the customer-owned equipment activation system (the one that will let Time Warner know who will not have to pay the fee) earlier this week. In other words, while adjusting their billing system to charge you more, a “glitch” made it impossible for customers across the eastern United States to prevent that from happening.

The problem, it was explained, was temporary and they expected to fix it by the end of the week. After explaining today is Thursday (the end of the week is already near), I was told to “call back this weekend or Monday” and “hopefully” the problem would be fixed. Hopefully before October 15th, when the fee kicks in for the Big Apple anyway. That was 40 minutes of my life I will never get back.

One would think if Time Warner was planning to throw a Money Party for themselves, they would at least take some of the forthcoming $300 million to invest in a better way to keep customers from long hold times and inconvenience to avoid the latest unnecessary fee, only to be told everything was broken and to call back some other time. This is why cable companies regularly earn the disdain of their customers.

Phillip “You Guys Need a Timeout” Dampier

AT&T and Time Warner Cable are complaining they have gotten a raw deal from Kansas City, Mo. and Kansas City, Ks., in comparison to the incentives Google was granted to wire both cities with gigabit fiber broadband.

“It’s time to modernize our industry’s rules and regulations…so all consumers benefit from fair and equal competition,” read a statement from AT&T.

“There are certain portions of the agreement between Google and Kansas City, Kan., that put them at a competitive advantage compared with not just us but also the other competitors in the field,” said Alex Dudley, a Time Warner Cable spokesman. “We’re happy to compete with Google, but we’d just like an even playing field.”

The Wall Street Journal seemed to suggest Google was getting the keys to both cities, with grants of free office space and free power for Google’s equipment, according to the agreement on file with the cities. The company also gets the use of all the cities’ “assets and infrastructure”—including fiber, buildings, land and computer tools, for no charge. Both cities are even providing Google a team of government employees “dedicated to the project,” says the Journal.

The Google Fiber project was so desired that the local governments rolled out the red carpet. In Kansas City, Mo., for instance, the city is allowing Google to construct “fiberhuts,” small buildings that house equipment on city land at no cost, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The cities are discounting other services, as well. For the right to attach its cables to city utility poles, Google is paying Kansas City, Kan., only $10 per pole per year—compared with the $18.95 Time Warner Cable pays. Both cities have also waived permit and inspection fees for Google.

The cities are even helping Google market its fiber build-out. And both are implementing city-managed marketing and education programs about the gigabit network that will, among other things, include direct mailings and community meetings.

Several cable executives complain that the cities also gave Google the unusual right to start its fiber project only in neighborhoods guaranteeing high demand for the service through pre-registrations. Most cable and phone companies were required by franchise agreements with regional governments to build out most of the markets they entered, regardless of demand.

But the Journal missed two key points:

1. Time Warner Cable has been granted the same concessions given to Google on the Missouri side, and AT&T presumably will also get them when it completes negotiations with city officials on the matter.
2. Both cable and phone companies have the benefit of incumbency, and the article ignores concessions each had secured when their operations first got started.

The Bell System enjoyed a monopoly on phone service for decades, with concessions on rights-of-way, telephone poles and placement. AT&T was a major beneficiary, and although the AT&T of today is not the same corporation that older Americans once knew, the company continues a century-long tradition of winning the benefit of the doubt in both the state and federal legislature. AT&T has won statewide video franchise agreements that give the company the power to determine where it will roll out its more advanced U-verse platform, and enjoys carefully crafted federal tax policies that helped them not only avoid paying any federal tax in 2011 — the company actually secured a $420 million “refund” subsidized by taxpayers.

Cable operators also won major concessions from local governments under pressure from citizens eager to buy cable television. At the time, cable companies were granted exclusive franchises — a cable monopoly — to operate, an important distinction for investors concerned about the value of their early investments. Local zoning and pole attachment matters were either negotiated or dealt with legislatively to allow cable companies the right to hang their wires on existing utility poles. Franchise agreements permitted the gradual roll-out of cable service in each franchise area, often allowing two, three, or more years to introduce service. It was not uncommon for neighborhoods on one side of town to have cable two years before the other side could sign up. That sounds awfully familiar to AT&T U-verse today.

Google’s proposal to build a revolutionary broadband network delivering 1Gbps deserved and got the same type of treatment then-revolutionary phone and cable service won back in the day.

Time Warner Cable also won much the same treatment Google is now getting, and the cable operator has gotten $27,000 in fees refunded and will avoid another $100,000 in permit fees going forward. Time Warner Cable and Google will both receive free traffic control services during network construction — not that Time Warner Cable plans much of a change for customers in either Missouri or Kansas.

AT&T will likely also receive the same treatment, although it would be hypocritical of them to complain that Google gets to pick and choose where it provides service. Large swaths of Kansas City and suburbs are still waiting for U-verse to arrive, and many areas will never get the service. Cable operators had to wire a little further, but also benefited from years of monopoly status and network construction expenses paid off years ago when there literally was no competition.

Those paragons of virtue at Goldman Sachs are appalled Google has such a good relationship with Kansas City officials more than happy to have the gigabit speeds neither AT&T or Time Warner Cable would even consider providing.

Google’s rights “appear to be significantly more favorable than those cable, Verizon or any other fiber overbuilders achieved when striking deals with local governments in the past,” Goldman Sachs analyst Jason Armstrong told the Journal. “We’re surprised Time Warner Cable hasn’t been more vocal in its opposition.”

But then the cable company has secured most of the same benefits Google has, so why complain at all?

In fact, city officials had to browbeat Time Warner to modernize its network in ways it would have not done otherwise without the new agreement.

Both AT&T and Time Warner have every right to be concerned. Their substandard networks and high prices (along with a lousy history of customer service, according to national surveys) put them at a competitive disadvantage if Google does not make any major mistakes. Neither cable or phone company has made any noise about upgrading service to compete, and should customers begin to leave in droves, then both companies may actually have something to cry about.

The Wall Street Journal’s report on the concessions granted to Google wanders off into the Net Neutrality debate for some reason, and misses several important facts reviewed above.  (3 minutes)

Copps

Americans need to stand up and say “no” to more telecom mergers and lobbying efforts that push for additional deregulation and corporate protectionism in the telecommunications sector. Unfortunately, we are in for a fight, thanks to Washington’s problem disappointing a multi-billion industry that lavishly finances political campaigns, conventions, and vacation outings.

Michael Copps, former commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission from 2001-2011 and acting chairman for the first six months of the Obama Administration ought to know.

“The consolidated world of telecom broadband did not evolve from the hand of God, the mysterious workings of natural law, or the inevitability of market-based dynamics,” Copps wrote in his essay, “Why Give Up on Competition?” “It was enabled by conscious decision-making at the federal level, largely through the abdication of its oversight responsibilities by the Federal Communications Commission over the better part of 30 years.”

In short, it did not have to turn out this way, no matter what the telecom industry and their astroturf friends have to say.

“Go to just about any telecom conference these days, and some industry maven will make the case that restoring competition to the telecom world is so 1990s,” Copps writes. “Why don’t we all just recognize the inevitable, they ask: telecom is a natural monopoly, competition is a chimera, and the sooner we flash a steady green light for more industry consolidation and less government oversight, the better off we’ll all be.”

Provider-backed ALEC advocates for the corporate interests that fund its operations.

Too many in Washington are already true believers, according to Copps, and the result is two companies controlling over 2/3rds of the wireless marketplace and a broadband duopoly for most Americans. This did not happen overnight. Enormous and expensive lobbying campaigns run for over a decade have convinced lawmakers that less is more when it comes to telecom regulation and oversight. Regulators ringing alarm bells about deregulation without sufficient competition have been picked off, says Copps, by the telecom industry-backed American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has convinced at least 19 state legislatures to wipe away authority from state public service commissions that for years have been trying to protect consumers and preserve competition.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was originally designed to open the telecommunications marketplace to increased competition, but also ensure a level playing field for competitors by charging the FCC to implement and enforce strong rules to keep incumbent telecommunications companies from steamrolling new competitors.

No surprises here: Michael Powell was FCC chairman during the deregulation frenzy of the first term of George W. Bush. Today, he’s the president of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, the largest cable industry lobbying group in the country.

With the arrival of President George W. Bush, the new Republican majority at the FCC promptly began obliterating checks and balances at the behest of some of the nation’s largest phone and cable companies. The results:

• Reselling rights and wholesale leasing of facilities to competitors were wiped away, guaranteeing monopoly control of already-established networks;
• Opening up the long distance and local market to Baby Bell competition with their promise they would compete nationwide failed. Like Big Cable, the Baby Bells sold local and long distance only to their own customers, not to those located in another Baby Bell’s service area;
• Instead of competing, phone companies simply bought each other. “As soon as one transaction was approved, another one came through the door,” Copps reported. “Sometimes it seemed like the merger approval business was our only business.”;
• ” The FCC voted, over the strenuous objections of Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein and me, to remove advanced telecommunications (broadband) from the purview of Title II of the Telecommunications Act—where consumer protections, competition, privacy, and public safety are clearly mandated—and placed them instead in the nebulous and uncharted land of Title I, where regulatory authority is uncertain, consumer protections are virtually non-existent, and where the huge companies are better positioned to wreak havoc on the promise of competition,” Copps said.

To right the wrongs, Copps wants some major changes to reignite competition and return to telecom innovation, eliminating the stagnation we have from today’s cozy, barely competitive marketplace:

1. Learn to say “no” to more industry mergers. Consolidation has not brought communications nirvana for consumers, just higher prices and fewer choices, often from a monopoly provider;
2. Encourage innovative approaches like municipal broadband. Copps: “‘My way or nothing’ may be the mantra of the big guys, but that means no broadband in places they don’t wish to serve.” Copps wants to see the federal government pre-empt state bans on public broadband laws provider-backed ALEC has gotten through legislatures across the country;
3. Smarter stewardship of wireless spectrum, including unlicensed spectrum use, shared spectrum, smarter technology, and a “use it or lose it” policy that pulls back unused/warehoused spectrum held by some of the nation’s largest wireless carriers.

Even as DOCSIS 3 cable technology continues to roll-out across cable systems now offering faster Internet speeds, the next generation of cable broadband is on the way, reportedly capable of delivering up to 10/2Gbps service.

CableLabs’ DOCSIS 3.1 project will be the subject of a special panel at an upcoming cable engineer conference later this month.

“DOCSIS 3.1 specification development is a significant milestone on the industry’s road map to next-generation services,” said CableLabs chief technology officer Ralph Brown. “Our SCTE Cable-Tec Expo panel will identify the motivations, requirements and key technology building blocks under development with the collaboration of the vendor community.  DOCSIS 3.1 solutions will provide both residential and commercial cable customers with faster data rates — both upstream and downstream — that support increasingly compelling broadband services.”

The DOCSIS 3 standard allows cable operators to bond multiple channels to support faster speeds.

The new standard will incorporate changes in how cable spectrum is utilized for broadband, vastly expanding potential bandwidth. Although the standard can support gigabit broadband speeds, nobody expects cable companies to offer those speeds in the near term.

Instead, providers are more interested in addressing their upstream speed limitations. From the earliest days of cable broadband, the assumption was that customers would care far more about downstream speeds and consider uploading an afterthought. The result was a network that prioritized download speed. But as users continue to upload more multimedia content and embrace cloud storage, slow upload speeds are starting to aggravate customers.

DOCSIS 3.1 is rumored to de-emphasize the current QAM modulation cable operators use for broadband in favor of more robust technologies such as orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), already used by the wireless industry. Unlike interference/noise-prone QAM, OFDM uses much smaller subcarriers that work better in noisy signal conditions. Although coaxial cable is capable of delivering a large amount of spectrum to cable operators, all of it cannot be practically used because of external interference from electrical equipment, broadcast radio and television signals, and other sources. Error-correcting technologies can let operators use more of their available spectrum without reducing the quality of service to customers.

The study group working on DOCSIS 3.1 is also reviewing the incorporation of “low density parity-check” (LDPC) error correction that would efficiently improve noise rejection over today’s Reed-Solomon approach. Combining OFDM and LDPC could improve spectral efficiency up to 25 percent.

The cable industry is pressuring the study group to preserve backwards compatibility with the older DOCSIS 3.0 standard just now coming into widespread use. Some industry insiders predict cable operators will keep today’s QAM modulation for downstream speeds while boosting upstream speeds using OFDM.

Cable operators across the country are gradually moving away from analog service in favor of digital with the ultimate goal of an entirely IP-based network for television, phone, and broadband. The pressure is on for DOCSIS 3.1 to help accelerate that transformation, but most industry experts don’t believe the new standard will be finalized until at least the middle of 2013, with at least 6-12 months before equipment shows up supporting the finalized standard.