[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/ABC Extended interview with Dr John Cioffi – Father of DSL 11-18-13.mp4[/flv]

Dr. John Cioffi, the “Father of DSL” doesn’t think much of fiber to the home service, suggesting it is a waste of money and delivers budget-busting losses to providers. He has the ear of the man in charge of overseeing Australia’s National Broadband Network, Communications Minister John Turnbull. Turnbull’s public statements imply he supports Cioffi’s approach – a hybrid fiber-copper network similar to AT&T U-verse.

By adopting cheaper VDSL technology, Cioffi claims providers can avoid the “$800 unrecoverable loss per customer Verizon FiOS has experienced” bringing fiber to the home. He also claims fiber to the home service isn’t as robust as fiber proponents claim, with flimsy, easy-to-break fiber cables and loads of service calls commonplace among some European providers.

Few media interviews, including this one with ABC Television, bother to fully disclose how Cioffi has a big dog in the broadband technology fight. Cioffi founded ASSIA, Inc., a firm that markets products and services to DSL providers. ASSIA is backed by investments from AT&T, its first customer, and a handful of overseas telephone companies. Cioffi estimates ASSIA software is used to manage 90 percent of existing DSL accounts in the United States and is a fundamental part of AT&T’s efforts to increase U-verse speeds. Dismantling DSL in favor of fiber could have a marked impact on ASSIA’s profits. (8:47)

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Malcolm Turnbull Discussion with Father of DSL John Cioffi Part 1 11-18-13.mp4[/flv]

Australia’s new Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull talks with Dr. John Cioffi about the differences between VDSL and fiber technologies. Cioffi bashes one form of fiber to the home service dubbed “GPON” because it shares infrastructure. Cioffi claims fiber speeds drop to 20Mbps when a few dozen people share a GPON connection. When in Paris, Cioffi claims his shared fiber connection maxed out at 2.5Mbps while ADSL still ran at 6Mbps. (3:52)

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Malcolm Turnbull Discussion with Father of DSL John Cioffi Part 2 11-18-13.mp4[/flv]

Unsurprisingly, Cioffi claims his company’s software is essential for a good vectored VDSL user experience. Cioffi also claims VDSL can easily beat GPON fiber broadband speeds, a very controversial claim. In Cioffi’s view, even Wi-Fi can perform better than fiber. Finally, Cioffi claims Google is spending $8,000 per customer to deploy its fiber to the home network, when VDSL can do the job for much less money. (2:58)

The Australian government’s proposal to launch a nationwide fiber to the home National Broadband Network (NBN) has been scrapped by the more conservative Liberal-National Coalition that replaced the Labor government in a recent election.

As a result, the Coalition has announced initial plans to revise the NBN with a mixture of cheaper technology that can result in faster deployment of lower speed broadband at a lower cost. If implemented, fiber to the home service will only reach a minority of homes. In its place,  cable broadband may be the dominant technology where cable companies already operate. For almost everyone else, technology comparable to AT&T U-verse is the favored choice of the new government, mixing fiber-to-the-neighborhood with existing copper wires into homes..

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/ABC Malcolm Turnbull moves to put Coalitions stamp on NBN Co 9-24-13.mp4[/flv]

Australia’s new Communications Minister moves to put the Coalition government’s stamp on the National Broadband Network, replacing most of the promised fiber-to-the-home technology with a service comparable to AT&T U-verse. From ABC-TV (6:32)

Just a year earlier Telstra, Australia’s largest phone company, was planning to decommission and scrap its copper landline network, considered “five minutes to midnight” back in 2003 by Telstra’s head of government and corporate affairs, Tony Warren. Now the country will effectively embrace copper technology once more with an incremental DSL upgrade, forfeiting speeds of up to 1,000Mbps over fiber in return for a minimum speed guarantee from the government of 24Mbps over VDSL.

The turnabout has massive implications for current providers. Telstra, which expected to see its prominence in Australian broadband diminished under Labor’s NBN is once again a rising star. The Liberal-National Coalition government appointed Telstra’s former CEO Ziggy Switkowski to run a “rebooted” Coalition NBN that critics are now calling Telstra 3.0. Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull also installed three new members of the NBN’s governing board consisting of a Telstra executive, a founder of a commercial Internet Service Provider, and an ex-construction boss who left the NBN in 2011.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/ABC Malcolm Turnbull Outlines NBN Review 9-24-13.mp4[/flv]

ABC reports Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull asked for the resignations of the entire NBN board, one of the first steps to re-envision the NBN under the Liberal-National Coalition’s party platform. Turnbull accused the former government of setting political targets for fiber broadband and was never forthcoming about the true cost and complexity of the ambitious fiber project. (8:50)

Turnbull

Some Australians complain that NBN’s proposed reliance on Telstra copper is a mistake. Telstra has allowed its landline infrastructure to decline over the years and many are skeptical they will ever see faster speeds promised over wiring put in place decades earlier.

The NBN under the Liberal-National Coalition will depend heavily on two copper-based technologies to deliver speed enhancements: VDSL and vectoring. Both require short runs of well-maintained copper wiring to deliver peak performance. The longer the copper line, the worse it will perform. If that line is compromised, VDSL and vectoring are unlikely to make much difference, as AT&T has discovered in its effort to roll out faster U-verse speeds, much to the frustration of customers that cannot upgrade until AT&T invests in cleaning up its troubled copper network.

Coalition critics also warn the new government will foolishly spend less on a fiber-copper network today that will need expensive fiber upgrades tomorrow.

Turnbull isn’t happy with Australia’s mainstream media for lazy reporting on the issues.

ABC Radio reports that the Coalition’s approach to the NBN may be penny-wise, pound foolish. By the time the NBN rolls out fiber to the neighborhood and Telstra is required to invest in upgrades to its copper network to make it work, fiber to the home service could turn out to have been cheaper all along. (5:11)
You must remain on this page to hear the clip, or you can download the clip and listen later.

“I have to say that by and large the standard of reporting of technology and broadband by the mainstream media has been woeful,” Turnbull said. “If the Australian public are misinformed about these issues, it was in large part a consequence of the unwillingness of the mainstream media to pay any attention to what is really going on in the industry.”

The promise of fiber optic broadband may prove elusive under the new government.

With much of the new NBN dependent on Telstra’s copper telephone network, Stuart Lee, Telstra’s managing director of its wholesale division, rushed to defend the suitability of the same copper network Telstra was prepared to scrap under the last government.

Lee said he was especially annoyed with critics that call Telstra’s copper networking “aging.”

“The other thing that makes me cross when I hear it, and I see it a lot in the press is the talk of the aging copper network. It’s not. It’s not an aging copper network. It’s like grandfather’s axe; it’s had five new handles and three new heads. When it breaks, we replace the broken bit. So it’s much the same as it always has been and always will be,” Lee said. “It’s just an older technology, it’s not that the asset itself has deteriorated.”

When questioned about several recent high-profile mass service disruptions Australians experienced on Telstra’s landline copper network, Lee blamed the weather, not the network.

“They correlate to weather events, and the weather events we’ve had in the last [few years] is about five to six times the previous ones, so surprise surprise there is a lot more damage,” said Lee.

The new government has charged the Labor-run NBN with inefficiency, taxpayer-funded waste, and playing politics with broadband by giving high priority to fiber upgrades in constituencies served by threatened Labor MPs. Lee added NBN Co has played loose with the facts, declaring premises “passed” by the new fiber network without allowing customers to order service on the new network. That can become a serious problem, because the NBN plan calls for customers’ existing copper phone and DSL service to be decommissioned soon after the fiber network becomes available.

The Sydney Morning Herald compared the last Labor government’s broadband policy with the new Coalition government policy.

iiNet’s chief technology officer, John Lindsay said that the potential for disconnecting customers from the ADSL network while they still can’t order NBN service was “madness.”

The Labor government’s NBN has also been under fire for a pricing formula that includes a usage component when setting prices. Impenetrably named the “connectivity virtual circuit” charge, or CVC, the NBN charges retail providers a monthly connection fee for each customer and a usage charge that includes a virtual data allowance originally set at 30GB. Retail providers are billed extra when customers exceed the informal allowance. Although the government promised to reduce the charges, they effectively haven’t and likely won’t until 2017.

Lindsay called the CVC an artificial tax comparable to the Labor government’s carbon tax, and represents a digital barrier to limit customer usage.

“It’s a tax on packets,” Lindsay said.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/ABC NBN Copper 11-19-13.mp4[/flv]

Tasmanian residents complain NBN Co’s new fiber network is claimed to be available, but actually isn’t in many neighborhoods now scheduled for disconnection from Telstra’s copper landline and DSL network. (2:17)

A portion of your cable bill pays for much more than programming, with millions diverted to Koch Brothers-backed astroturf groups, tea party candidates, fat paychecks for former public officials taking a trip through D.C.’s revolving door, and generous allowances for travel  expenses racked up by high-flying industry lobbyists.

The Center for Public Integrity took a trip through the 2012 tax return of America’s top cable trade group: the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA), which collected $60 million last year in membership dues from America’s top cable operators, who in turn were reimbursed by you when paying your monthly cable bill. They needed a shower when the journey was over.

NCTA president and CEO Michael K. Powell, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission during President George W. Bush’s first term, was well compensated in his new role representing the same cable industry he used to barely oversee, taking home more than $3 million in pay last year. Eight other employees, including NCTA’s executive vice-president, collectively cleared over a million dollars in salary according to the groups’ Form 990 filed with the Internal Revenue Service.

The revolving door at NCTA headquarters is kept well-greased, with 78 out of 89 federal-level NCTA lobbyists formerly working in government jobs representing the American people. Now they work for the interests of Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and other large operators.

Collectively, the NCTA spent $19 million on lobbying activities last year, much of it bankrolling “dark money” groups that refuse to disclose their donors and consider it their life mission to defeat President Barack Obama and blockade Democrats in Congress — the ones still most likely to demand more oversight and regulation of the free-spending cable industry. Among the groups receiving cable’s cash:

Americans for Prosperity, which received $50,000, spent $33.5 million opposing Obama during the 2012 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks campaign spending. Americans for Prosperity often supports Tea Party causes and candidates and is the main political arm of billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch. As the Center reported Thursday, the group spent a staggering $122 million overall in 2012. Americans for Prosperity is also actively involved in blocking community-owned broadband projects and advocates passing laws forbidding communities getting into the broadband business if a cable company got there first. Now you know why.

Phil Kerpen with Glenn Beck

Americans for Tax Reform, which received $50,000, spent $15.8 million on the 2012 federal election, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The group’s president and founder, Grover Norquist, is famous for his Taxpayer Protection Pledge, by which legislators and candidates promise to oppose all tax increases. The cable industry is also an advocate of tax forgiveness policies that would let cable operators repatriate the cash they stashed overseas, avoiding the same taxman they snuck around opening overseas bank accounts.

American Commitment, which received $10,000, spent $1.9 million on the 2012 federal election to advocate for and against political candidates — mostly to help U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) defeat Democrat Richard Carmona. American Commitment also spent some of its money to oppose Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Obama. American Commitment Founder and President Phil Kerpen is the former policy and legislative strategist at Americans for Prosperity and previously worked at Club for Growth, another group that doesn’t disclose its donors. Kerpen joined Glenn Beck on his program in 2009 to nod agreement when Beck hopped aboard the crazy train suggesting the Obama Administration’s support for Net Neutrality represented a Marxist-Maoist takeover of the Internet. Silly Beck, doesn’t he realize AT&T already called dibs?

The Center for Individual Freedom, which received $20,000, has been actively fighting against proposals for increased disclosure of donors to politically active nonprofits. It spent $1.8 million during the 2012 election cycle mostly opposing Democratic congressmen Steven Horsford, Bill Owens and Dan Maffei, all from New York.

‘Your money is always good here, whether it comes from AT&T or the cable industry.’ — LULAC

The cable industry also bankrolls a number of our “favorite” sock puppet groups that reflexively support cable’s cause even when straying far beyond their alleged core missions and constituencies the groups claim to represent. Among those on cable’s payroll, sharing $5.8 million in “grant” funding, are some very familiar names to any regular Stop the Cap! reader:

• The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation
• The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
• LULAC
• The National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce
• The National Urban League

The largest grant – $2 million, went to the industry mouthpiece Broadband for America, the largest telecom industry astroturf group in the United States, featuring honorary Democratic co-chairman Harold Ford, Jr., who now spends most of his life in MSNBC green rooms after being bounced from office in a failed Senate bid in 2006.

Ford landed on his feet after losing the election, fleeing Tennessee for big money New York, peddling his inside the beltway influence to Merrill Lynch, winning him the position of vice chairman and senior policy adviser, until Merrill Lynch nearly collapsed in the Great Recession and was bailed out by U.S. taxpayers. Ford kept his $2 million annual salary and bonuses, but it wasn’t enough.

He quickly upgraded to a senior managing director at Wall Street firm Morgan Stanley, supplying him with enough cash to buy a $3 million co-op in a tony Manhattan neighborhood.

Broadband for America, brought to you by America’s Big Telecom companies.

From his perch in New York City, Ford pretends to know what is best for the little people across America suffering from no broadband, rationed access, or overpriced service.

His answer: buy it, if you can, from your cable company.

Ford’s co-chair at BfA is former Republican Sen. John Sununu who, by the way, also happens to sit on the board of Time Warner Cable. Need we say more?

There is no reason NCTA lobbyists shouldn’t travel in style when performing their advocacy efforts either. In 2012, they ran up nearly $800,000 in travel expenses.

Unsurprisingly, nobody involved was willing to comment.

Are you getting the mobile broadband speeds your provider advertises for its whiz-bang 4G network? How do you know which carrier really delivers?

The Federal Communications Commission is hoping you can help them find out with a free Android app to be unveiled on Thursday.

The FCC has successfully used volunteer crowdsourcing before to keep wired Internet Service Providers honest through its “TestMyISP” speed measurement project for home broadband connections. When the first results were announced, an embarrassingly bad rating for Cablevision forced the cable company to quickly beef up its broadband infrastructure to match the speeds it promised customers.

Now the FCC’s new chairman Tom Wheeler hopes a similar effort will help the federal agency understand whether the promises wireless carriers make to customers are actually being kept.

With wireless broadband gaining in prominence, the FCC wants to do a better job monitoring a service most Americans use in some form while on-the-go. If providers like AT&T and Verizon Wireless are caught dramatically underperforming in coverage and speed, the agency may take that into account as part of its mission of regulatory oversight.

Consumers will also benefit from having an unbiased source that can offer regular analyses on the speed and performance of each carrier — useful information to have before being locked into a two-year contract.

Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint are among the carriers agreeing to take part in the speed test project.

The FCC Speed Test app will initially be available for Android smartphones. There are no details about the release date of an Apple iOS version of the app, but the FCC’s Mobile Broadband Speed Test home page shows links (not yet active) for both versions of the app.