Frontier Communications has agreed to bring ADSL broadband service to more of its rural customers, in return for collecting $775 per impacted household from the FCC’s new Connect America Fund, designed to help defray expenses associated with expanding broadband access.

Frontier appears to be the first major phone company in the country to sign on to the new broadband subsidy program funded by telephone ratepayers through a surcharge on their monthly bills.

“Today’s announcement by Frontier Communications represents the beginning of that new deployment: approximately 200,000 unserved rural Americans will get broadband for the first time,” said FCC chairman Julius Genachowski. “I applaud Frontier Communications for stepping up to the plate with its commitment to accelerate broadband build-out by increasing private investment in rural communities, in partnership with the Connect America Fund.”

The FCC will hand Frontier nearly $72 million in subsidies to help the company deploy DSL broadband in areas currently deemed not profitable enough to serve. Frontier says it expects to bring service to 92,876 new households across their national service area that never had broadband service before. The company specifically mentions expansions in Michigan, Oregon, Washington and West Virginia, but says customers in at least half of the states where it provides service will benefit from the broadband expansion funding.

Frontier claims it currently offers 80 percent of its customers broadband service, in part thanks to an investment of more than $1.5 billion by the company over the last two years, according to Kathleen Quinn Abernathy, executive vice president of external affairs.

Genachowski

Frontier is a major provider of traditional ADSL broadband service in its rural service areas, typically offering customers 1-3Mbps service. Customers in larger communities can purchase DSL service at speeds closer to 10Mbps, and the company also sells fiber to the home broadband over its acquired FiOS network in parts of the Pacific Northwest and Fort Wayne, Ind.

Under the terms of the Connect America Fund, participating providers must offer customers at least 4/1Mbps service, which means Frontier will need to make some upgrades in its rural network — most likely reducing the length of copper wiring between its central offices and customers.

Frontier has faced challenges maintaining broadband service in some areas, especially in states where the company acquired aging infrastructure from Verizon Communications. West Virginia, where Frontier is the dominant telephone company after Verizon left the state, is still suffering the after-effects of a derecho windstorm nearly two weeks ago. Frontier has brought in repair crews from as far away as New York to assist in clearing thousands of outage reports.

The company has also gotten some justice after Boone County authorities arrested two men for generator thefts. Frontier has been using generators to keep phone service up and running in areas without electricity, but has been victimized by generator thefts across the state. At least six other generators were stolen in New Martinsville in Wetzel County yesterday.

Frontier has a tip line for anyone with information about stolen equipment or copper theft: 1-800-590-6605.

Other telephone companies expecting to apply for broadband funding from the Connect America Fund include: Alaska Communications Systems, AT&T, CenturyLink, Consolidated Communications, FairPoint Communications, Hawaiian Telcom, Virgin Islands Telephone, Verizon Communications and Windstream.

Copps

Former FCC commissioner Michael Copps thinks usage caps are all about raking in additional profits while cutting back on upgrades while claiming there is a broadband “shortage.” In remarks published on the Benton Foundation website entitled “Hoodwinked,” Copps lets loose on his frustration with the nation’s Internet Service Providers and government regulators who allow them to dictate America’s broadband development:

“Sorry,” the big companies tell us. “You consumers are such data hogs gobbling up the spectrum that we’ve got to ration what you get and charge you more for it.”

While price differentials between those who consume a little data and others who consume a lot may be part of the conversation eventually, we shouldn’t even be considering that at this stage of the game. There is just too much evidence that the big broadband providers operate a scarcity-based plan that works really well for their quarterly reports, but one that would be up-ended if they went out and invested in the increased broadband capacity consumers will need.

Broadband strategist Blair Levin put it well in a recent speech: “When it comes to the wireline access network, instead of talking about upgrades, we are talking about caps and tiers. Instead of talking about investment for growth, we are talking about harvesting for dividends.”

Make no mistake: America is not going to have the telecommunications infrastructure its future so urgently needs without a national commitment, public as well as private, to increase our broadband performance by orders of magnitude. We cannot harvest our future without planting the seeds for our future. It’s something we need to talk about—before the land goes barren.

ToddTool could have been forced into bankruptcy, taking its 14 employees straight to the unemployment line, had AT&T followed through on its threat to collect a million dollar fraudulent phone bill.

Michael Smith and his 14 employees can now sleep again after AT&T dropped a $1.15 million lawsuit against Smith’s small manufacturing company after the story went viral.

The lawsuit was filed over fraudulent long distance calls placed through Smith’s PBX phone system to the war-torn nation of Somalia over a four day period in 2009.

Smith discovered the fraud after getting long distance bills totaling $891,470 the following month.

More than $260,000 of additional charges were billed by Verizon, Smith’s landline phone company, and Verizon forgave those charges a few months after Smith filed a billing dispute. Verizon noticed the unusual calling activity and temporarily suspended Smith’s international long distance service. The phone hackers then simply used a “dial-around” long distance access code for AT&T to keep the calls going through, resulting in a huge bill from AT&T, which charged $22 a minute for the calls.

Unlike Verizon, AT&T wanted its money and despite multiple attempts to get credit for the fraudulent long distance calls, AT&T refused to relent, filing suit against Smith for the full cost of the fraudulent calls, plus interest.

Smith told a Salem, Mass. newspaper if he paid the bill, it would force his company into bankruptcy and put his 14 employees on the unemployment line.

The company claims in its lawsuit Smith should have known better — securing his PBX system more effectively against international long distance fraud and that under Federal Communications Commission regulations, AT&T is entitled to collect from the owner of the phone line, regardless of who actually made the call.

Smith told The Salem News he’s tried to resolve the matter, even reaching out to the CEO of AT&T, but a secretary at the company called and said that once AT&T refers a case to outside counsel, they are done talking.

AT&T later offered to waive the accumulating interest charges on the unpaid balance (now $197,000 and growing) if Smith paid the company $891,470 for the phone calls to Somalia.

Smith filed a countersuit instead, claiming AT&T is abusing the legal process and violating Massachusetts consumer protection laws. A judge was pushing the case to mediation.

Smith’s interview with the Salem newspaper came at additional risk: AT&T’s lawyers threatened they would take action if he “disparaged” the company’s name in the media.

After the story ran nationwide this morning on the Associated Press wire service, the company suddenly dropped the case.

In a statement sent to the media, AT&T writes it is no longer pursuing its claims against Michael Smith, of Ipswich, “though we are entitled by law to collect the amounts owed.”

Easy as counting in the dark.

Suddenlink customers in West Virginia who have been dealing with the aftereffects of a damaging derecho for a week found a nasty little surprise from their cable company when the lights cut back on — gigabytes of usage recorded on the company’s suspect “usage meter,” despite the fact customers were without power for up to a week.

Broadband Reports readers have begun to check back in after extended downtime to report Suddenlink is racking up usage whether customers are using their broadband connection or not:

• “Tylr” reports he was without power for two days but Suddenlink’s usage meter kept the party going, recording 12GB of phantom usage during the two days the customer was without service;
• “Jdmm72” found exactly the same thing, shocked to discover he racked up 10.8GB of usage on a day when he and his fellow neighbors in Nitro, W.V., were completely in the dark.

Suddenlink’s usage meter is not verified by any third-party or government agency to ensure its reliability and the company is under no obligation to change this policy. But customers are expected to cover any overlimit fees Suddenlink imposes for “exceeding your allowance.”

Does the company need the extra money? Not really, according to Suddenlink president and CEO Jerry Kent, who earlier admitted the days of expensive system upgrades were over and it was now time to rake in profits:

“I think one of the things people don’t realize [relates to] the question of capital intensity and having to keep spending to keep up with capacity,” Kent said. “Those days are basically over, and you are seeing significant free cash flow generated from the cable operators as our capital expenditures continue to come down.”

History repeats itself. In 1889, it was railroads, steel, iron, and energy. Today it is telecommunications.

My first introduction to the concept of corporate doublespeak — designed to cushion the blow of bad news behind a wall of barely-comprehensible babble came in October 1987 when I heard one Wall Street analyst refer to the great stock market crash that had just befallen the financial district as a “fourth quarter equity retreat.”

Holy euphemism, Batman!

You weren’t fired — you were “made redundant.”  The bankruptcy of Detroit automakers and the layoffs that followed were not as bad as they looked. It was merely “a career-alternative enhancement program.”

And, no, Verizon and AT&T are not engaged in should-be-illegal marketplace collusion on pricing and services. They are just practicing some harmless “price signaling.”

That’s the awe-struck view of management consultant Rags Srinivasan, who just gushes over the marketing “stroke of genius” that threatens to give customers a stroke when they open their monthly bill.

Srinivasan’s piece, worthy of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, turns up instead on GigaOm, where it gets some pretty harsh treatment from tech-lovers who hate the rising prices of wireless service.

Price signaling has always existed between the number one and number two players in any market. Agreeing to not engage in a price war is truly a win-win for the market leaders. Since outright price fixing is illegal, market leaders resorted to signaling to tell the other company their intentions or send a threat about their cost advantages.

But traditionally, it was more like flirting — ambiguous enough that the underlying intentions could be denied. Why are these two not shy about admitting to flirting now? The simple answer is the iPhone.

Not too long ago we worried about running out of talk minutes and paying overage. Service providers offered us tiered plans that offered more minutes for a higher price and unlimited minutes for an even higher price. With the additional revenue flowing directly to their bottom line, these higher priced plans were real cash cows.

For those who have any doubt about the profits from unlimited plans, I’d point out that the costs of a mobile service provider are sunk with zero marginal cost for additional minutes. And texts don’t even consume traffic channels — they piggyback on control channels.

[…] In another genius pricing move, Verizon Wireless is presenting this $100 mobile service plan to customers in a bundle — talk minutes plus data. In the past, around $70 was allocated to talk because consumers valued it more. Now subscribers pay only $40, but they still pay the same $100 total price. This is nothing short of pricing excellence, protecting customer margin while also using strong price signaling to make sure that the next biggest market share leader follows suit.

What Srinivasan calls “business at its best” and “pricing excellence” we call collusion at its most obvious. The GigaOm author says he does not want the government tinkering with this kind of marketplace “signaling,” and it does not appear likely he has much to worry about. AT&T and Verizon executives have grown increasingly brazen (and obvious) with their near-identical pricing and “me-too” plans which leave little to differentiate the two carriers from a pricing perspective. The likely result will be at least 100 million cell phone customers eventually stuck paying for unlimited voice and texting services they neither want or need.

Wireless Wonder Twins Powers Activate: Shape of anti-competitive marketplace for consumers; form of collusion.

True, AT&T charges Cadillac prices but has the customer service image of a used 1995 Kia… but they did have the original exclusive rights to the Apple iPhone and Apple devotees proved they will endure a lot. Verizon Wireless has a better network and has always charged accordingly.

Unfortunately for consumers, the also-rans Sprint and T-Mobile (and the smaller still) depend on AT&T and Verizon for roaming off the city highway and into the countryside, and they are often stuck with devices that are a step down from what the bigger two can offer.

Srinivasan would have a better argument if the wireless marketplace had not become so consolidated. Had AT&T had its way with T-Mobile, America would have just a single national GSM network — AT&T. Verizon does not consider its CDMA competitor much of a bother either, and Sprint Nextel CEO Dan Hesse has to divide his time between fighting with Wall Street over why the company has not already sold out to the highest bidder (and now wants to spend a fortune upgrading its network) and customers who consider Sprint too much of a trade-off in coverage and its dismal “4G” Clearwire WiMAX network too slow for 2012.

Srinivasan is probably too young to understand AT&T and Verizon never invented “price signaling.” A century ago, the railroad robber barons did much the same, leveraging their anti-competitive networks-of-a-different-kind to maximize prices in places that had few alternatives. Where competitors did arrive, they were typically bought out to “maximize savings and eliminate market inefficiencies.” The same was true in the steel and energy sector of the early 20th century.

The result is that consumers were turned upside down to shake out the last loose change from their pockets. Eventually, government stepped in and called it marketplace collusion and passed antitrust laws that began a new era for true competition.

How soon some forget.