No Cable? No DSL from FairPoint Communications on those phone lines either.

Ossipee (Carroll County), New Hampshire

Some residents of Ossipee, New Hampshire have gotten so desperate for broadband service, they’ve planted lawn signs begging Time Warner Cable to provide it.  Ossipee, population 4,211, is located in the western half of New Hampshire.  Its decidedly rural charm has made it popular for vacationers and those seeking a quiet New England lifestyle.

Unfortunately, for those on Water Village Road, it’s too quiet.  There is no broadband service available.

FairPoint doesn’t offer DSL service in the immediate area and Time Warner Cable, although willing to wire neighbors 1/2 mile away, will not provide service to Water Village Road residents.

Time Warner Cable says it provides service where there are 15 or more homes per mile.  Water Village Road only has 13.95 homes per mile.  The company says it will cost about $100,000 to extend service, and has offered to pay $15,000 towards the cost, with the rest coming from the pockets of residents.

So far, they have refused.

Residents do have one way to get cable and Internet service from Time Warner Cable — commit a crime that lands them at the Carroll County Jail, less than a mile down the road.  It has cable.

As for the signs, Time Warner told WMUR-TV it appreciated the interest, but it still doesn’t make economic sense to provide Water Village Road residents with service.

(See more pictures of the lawn signs below the jump.)

[flv width=”640″ height=”500″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WMUR Manchester Company Says Area Not Dense Enough For Service 7-14-10.flv[/flv]

WMUR-TV reports on the campaign by several Ossipee, N.H., residents to embarrass Time Warner Cable into bringing them cable and broadband service.  (2 minutes)

… Continue Reading

Google today launched a new website which could become a major advocacy center to promote fiber broadband service across America.

Google Fiber for Communities opened with a thank you message for the enormous number of submissions it received for its experimental 1Gbps fiber broadband network.  Google expects to announce the winning application(s) for its experimental  network sometime this year.

But in the meantime, Google also acknowledges what big telecom companies keep trying to downplay and dismiss — “people across the country are hungry for better and faster broadband access.”  That is… better and faster service than their current provider is willing to supply.

The new website provides hints as to its greater purpose:

1. The name itself.  Notice “communities” is plural.
2. The site intends to mobilize for fiber networks across the country, starting with lobbying for pending federal legislation that would require installation of fiber conduit as part of federal transportation projects.
3. The site’s links heavily promotes municipal broadband advocates and organizations, including the National Association of Counties, the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors, the Fiber to the Home Council, the Baller Herbst Community Broadband Page, the Broadband Properties Municipal Fiber Portal, and Muni Networks.  Outside of the Fiber to the Home Council, which has some big telecom company members and isn’t above advocating for their interests, the rest of the list suggests Google advocates that communities do for themselves what their local phone and cable companies won’t do — deliver world class broadband service at non-duopoly prices.

Stop the Cap! shares many of these goals with Google, as we are strong advocates for community fiber-based broadband, and believe additional competition is highly needed in America’s broadband marketplace to break up an anti-consumer duopoly that delivers slow broadband service (or none at all) at the highest prices companies can get away with.  Thanks to Stop the Cap! reader Jerry here in Rochester for sending word.

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Week one of the transition for millions of ex-Verizon landline customers didn’t exactly go off without a hitch.  A few problems with support issues for certain business customers in West Virginia, a major multi-state DSL outage from a fiber cable cut in Virginia, and long hold times of 30 minutes or longer have afflicted the all-new, super-sized Frontier.  Also not inspiring confidence: a plummeting Frontier stock price as Verizon shareholders, which now own 68 percent of Frontier Communications are hurrying to dump their stock and get out.  It has gotten so bad, TradersHuddle declared Frontier Communications the worst performing stock on the S&P 500.

Not much of this comes as a surprise, particularly the fleeing of Verizon shareholders who received 0.24 shares of Frontier, worth about $1.75 on July 1st (but now dropping fast), for every Verizon share they owned on June 7.  They’ve learned from prior experience that holding onto spun-off stock from similar deals with companies like FairPoint Communications and Hawaiian Telcom ended in financial disaster — bankruptcy.  As we predicted last Halloween in our true-to-life telecom horror story, once this deal was completed, Verizon shareholders would rush for the exits, selling their Frontier stock even as the share price plummets.

Shanthi Venkataraman, a reporter for The Street, noted the selloff in progress after the 4th of July holidays.  On Tuesday the stock was down 4.5% to $7.02. More than 30 million shares have changed hands, five times its average trading volume of 6.3 million.  Analysts believe the “turbulence” in Frontier stock is likely to continue for another week as new shareholders from Verizon complete their sell-off.

Zack’s Analyst Blog notes shareholders should be concerned with the future of Frontier’s business model — focusing on a decaying landline business.  Frontier’s revenue is particularly in peril in their biggest service area, Rochester, N.Y., which represents 25 percent of the company’s total access lines.  Customers in the Flower City continue to dump Frontier’s phone and broadband services, preferring Time Warner Cable’s less expensive “digital phone” and far faster Road Runner Internet service.  Time Warner Cable has consistently reported much of their growth in new customers has come from departing landline and DSL broadband customers disconnecting service.

While shareholders have the power to cut ties with Frontier, rural telephone customers in 14 states now confronted with a shotgun wedding to Frontier are not so lucky.  For millions of rural customers, there is no other choice for telephone and broadband service.

Stop the Cap! has reviewed dozens of local news accounts regarding the transition Verizon customers are now confronting as they are introduced to Frontier Communications.  Overall, most of the rural communities are taking a “wait and see” approach, hoping Frontier’s near-universal promises of better broadband and improved customer service will come true.  Verizon effectively slashed spending at least a year or two ago in many of these communities knowing in advance they were not going to be around for much longer.  In states like West Virginia, the results have been devastating for broadband penetration statistics.  While Verizon prepared for a sale, it kept nearly the entire state waiting for better broadband that would never come from the telecom giant.  Now with news Frontier plans to spend millions to improve broadband in the state, residents are hoping that will actually bring a broadband breakthrough in West Virginia.  Time will tell.

Many communities who have long felt ignored as “too small to matter” in Verizon’s larger plans also hope Frontier will manage better customer relationships with residents. After all, Frontier is promoting itself as the phone company with the small-town feel.  But after week one, some customers are feeling Frontier is giving them the big city runaround.  We’ll explore that, and the reactions from community leaders, consumers and businesses to the promises Frontier is making in our multi-part series exploring their transition to Frontier.

When phone companies like Verizon decide to throw their rural customers under the bus by selling them off, shareholders and executives rake in windfall bonuses, sometimes in the millions.  Now a New York assemblyman and a state senator want ratepayers to get a 40 percent cut of the action.

Assemblyman Richard Brodsky (D-Westchester), is the primary sponsor of Assembly Bill A02208 — An Act Requiring the Public Service Commission to Conduct an In-Depth Public Interest Analysis of Proposed Mergers by Telephone Corporations and Other Telecommunications Services Providers.  A companion New York Senate Bill, S7263, was introduced by Sen. Brian X. Foley (D-Blue Point/Long Island).

The legislation would compel phone companies engaged in the practice of mergers, acquisitions, and sales to share 40 percent of the proceeds with New York’s landline phone customers.

The legislation came as a result of watching Verizon systematically sell off parts of its phone empire to third party companies like FairPoint Communications, Hawaiian Telcom, and Frontier Communications.  More than five million customers have been switched away from Verizon to other companies, most of which have gone bankrupt as a direct result of the sales.

Brodsky

Both Brodsky and Foley don’t want to see New York residents face similar consequences.  They are particularly concerned about Verizon’s upstate operations, particularly in rural areas outside of cities like Buffalo, Binghamton, Rochester, Syracuse, Albany, and northern New York.  In the upstate region, Verizon has constructed fiber to the home service under its FiOS brand in urban and suburban regions where it operates, but has made few changes in the countryside.  As Verizon customers from Washington to North Carolina suddenly find themselves served by Frontier, why couldn’t the same thing happen in communities like Sodus in Wayne County, Penn Yan in Yates County, or just about anywhere in northern New York?

Verizon’s business plan has evolved over the last ten years.  Company president Ivan Seidenberg previously declared the landline business dead, and the company has turned its attention to delivering fiber-based video, phone and broadband services to the major population centers within its service areas.  Because rural customers cost too much to serve with similar packages of services, Verizon has begun selling them off to independent phone companies that still see revenue from copper wire landline service.

Verizon claims it has no plans to sell any of its operations in New York, but Brodsky and Foley want insurance that if they change their mind, no ratepayers in New York will face what happened in northern New England or Hawaii when the companies taking control ended up in Bankruptcy Court.

“It’s a ratepayer protection bill for upstate New York,” Brodsky said.

Brodsky said if Verizon were to sell operations, consumers will not be left with inferior service.

Forcing companies to share proceeds of sales to ratepayers who ultimately indirectly bankroll most of these deals is not unprecedented in New York.  Electric and gas utilities are often required to send refunds or issue credits when they sell assets.  Ratepayers of Rochester Gas & Electric received several compensation checks after the sale of the Ginna nuclear power plant in Ontario, New York to Constellation Energy Group in 2004.

Verizon could also be compelled to reinvest proceeds earmarked for consumers in the company’s infrastructure, such as paying for broadband improvements or upgrading lines.

The legislation would only impact companies earning more than $200 million in gross annual revenue from New Yorkers.  Currently, that means the legislation would only impact Verizon and Frontier Communications.

Not surprisingly, Verizon is vehemently against the proposed legislation and is fighting tooth and nail to kill it in Albany.

Foley

Jim Gerace, president of Verizon’s New York region, told the Albany Times-Union the Brodsky legislation was bad for Verizon and anti-business in general.  Gerace predicted companies would not want to do business in New York because they’d fear similar profit-sharing legislation could eventually target them.

“I’m convinced this is going to have a chilling effect on all businesses,” Gerace said. “They’re sending a very dangerous message to all businesses. It just compounds the state’s woes.”

But the Public Service Commission is intrigued by the legislation and is reviewing it.  If enacted, it could make a mass sell-off of rural landlines untenable in New York.

A02208 passed the Assembly by a wide margin — 103-34 and is now awaiting final action in the Senate.  It narrowly passed the Senate Rules Committee June 16th by a 13-10 vote.

If you want to see the bill passed, consider contacting your New York State senator and asking them to support the immediate passage of S7263.  Let them know you do not want phone deals to be cut at your expense, leaving you with a second-class provider.  If Verizon wants to sell off your community, they owe consumers a piece of the action.  It’s time that phone mergers, acquisitions and sell-offs actually benefit the consumers that ultimately pay for them and live with the results.

For more than a year, Stop the Cap! has been covering the issue of broadband mapping, warning against allowing incumbent telecommunications companies from being able to control or influence statewide maps that show who has broadband, and who does not.  A perfect example of why we repeatedly call out telecom-connected groups like Connected Nation being granted a piece of the mapping action can be found this weekend in a guest editorial published in the Fort Worth Star–Telegram written by Todd Baxter, vice president of government affairs and general counsel for the Austin-based Texas Cable Association — the Texas cable lobby:

Newly released maps show that broadband — high-speed Internet — is widely available in Texas. They also underscore that the broadband stimulus program has been ill-conceived and poorly executed by the federal government.

That’s because the federal government put the cart before the horse.

It gave out more than $270 million of your money to a dozen projects in Texas before actually determining where current broadband operators provide service. Common sense would say to find out where broadband is, or isn’t, available before spending the money.

The feds also should better define “underserved,” since the money is intended to help both unserved and underserved areas. It sounds like a riddle — how many broadband providers have to serve a household before it isn’t considered “underserved”? So far that riddle has no answer, and it is costing you, the taxpayer, a lot of money.

Without the data or the definition, how can the federal government make sure it is spending taxpayer money wisely and where it is really needed?

Now that we have the maps, we can see that more than 99 percent of all Texans can access some form of broadband, whether wired, wireless or mobile, from more than 123 providers. Yet — without this information — the federal government awarded hundreds of millions in grants and loans to the Texas projects, with possibly more to come before the broadband stimulus program wraps up in September.

The Texas Cable Association formally objected to seven of the dozen Texas projects when in the application stage, because the areas addressed are already covered by existing broadband providers. We don’t believe the areas are unserved or underserved.

Just a few weeks ago, the Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples, with great fanfare, unveiled the current state of broadband in Texas.  Connected Texas, a subsidiary of Connected Nation joined forces with the state government to perform a broadband census across the state, based on voluntary information provided confidentially by existing service providers.  The result was the stunning “achievement” that 97 percent of Texas already had broadband access, quite a revelation to the scores of consumers who aren’t served by cable companies and cannot get DSL service from the phone company, even if the Broadband Map of Texas says they can.

Texas Broadband Map (click to enlarge)

Kelly from Childress, located in the Texas panhandle, is a perfect example.  She writes Stop the Cap! to tell us how thrilled she was to see the phone company had finally brought DSL service to her street just on the outskirts of town.  She had nagged everyone she could for more than three years about her lack of broadband.  The cable company offered service, if she paid $9,300 for installation of an extended cable line to reach her.  The phone company, despite serving her neighbors less than 1/2 mile away, said she was not “qualified” to receive DSL service.  Today, her husband and two kids do access broadband service, albeit from the equivalent of the broadband black market.  Her nearest neighbor has rigged a souped up Wi-Fi system that allows her family to share the neighbor’s DSL account.  A directional antenna mounted on the roof of each home provides line-of-sight access.  They split the cost of the account and Kelly, an accomplished baker, keeps her neighbors well-supplied with some great pies in gratitude.

Connected Texas collected the information about where broadband service was supposedly available in Texas

Texas has a well-deserved reputation for neighbors helping neighbors to solve problems they’ve long since decided the government can’t, won’t, or shouldn’t solve for them.  Now that neighborly spirit has taken a high-tech approach to share broadband.

With the release of the new broadband map, Kelly thought the days of sharing accounts was over, and she called the phone company to sign up for service.  But, in no surprise to us, broadband availability to her home changed only on paper, not in reality.  No, she was told, she could not sign up for DSL service today or tomorrow for that matter — the company had no plans to extend service her way… indefinitely.

For others, the map is inaccurate because it shows service from dominant cable and phone companies, but ignores the competition.  Regular Stop the Cap! reader Michael Chaney noted, “I know for a fact this map is inaccurate. They show no fiber to the home coverage in Cedar Park, Williamson County, even though I’ve had residential fiber service for almost two years.”

In 2009, Public Knowledge released a report highly critical of Connected Nation, the group responsible for broadband mapping across many states.  Among the findings:

In order to be effective, a national broadband data-collection and mapping exercise should be conducted by a government agency, on behalf of the public, with as granular a degree of information as possible and be totally transparent so that underlying information can be evaluated.

Connected Nation is none of those and represents none of those characteristics. It is an organization sponsored by the telephone and cable companies and represents their interests in deciding what data to collect and how information should be displayed. They are quite up front about their company sponsorship and, in fact, believe it is an asset, if in a way counter to solid public policy.

It would be a setback for our broadband policy if Connected Nation were to take a prominent role in broadband mapping and data collection if it continues on its present policy course because the organization does not represent wise public policy and because it distorts its results.

Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear (D) was correct in April, 2008, when he vetoed a $2.4 million appropriation for Connect Kentucky, which until then had received almost $7 million from the commonwealth. Beshear said that the program was being rejected for state financing because it had asked for funds “without specifically identifying any services to be rendered to the state or providing for any oversight, control or performance measures relative to the services being rendered.”

The group’s close association to incumbent cable and telephone company interests were easily apparent just from the national organization’s board which has 12 outside directors, eight of whom are well known cable and phone company lobbyists or those with direct interests in the industry:

• James W. Cicconi – AT&T senior executive vice president-external and legislative affairs
• Steve Largent – CTIA – The Wireless Association president and CEO
• Joseph W. Waz – Comcast senior vice president, external affairs and public policy counsel
• Larry Cohen – Communications Workers of America president. CWA is in frequent agreement with telecom companies on policy issues.
• Thomas J. Tauke – Verizon executive vice president for public affairs, policy and communication
• Walter B. McCormick – United States Telecom Association president
• Kyle E. McSlarrow – National Cable and Telecommunications Association president
• Grant Seiffert – Telecommunications Industry Association president. (The members are the equipment makers who sell their gear to the telecom industry.)

These individuals, and others, are listed as “national advisors” on the Connected Nation Web site. They are listed as “directors” in their filing with the Kentucky Secretary of State.

The implications of allowing incumbent service providers to influence broadband mapping can be seen in Baxter’s editorial.  If Texas cable and phone companies can declare broadband service available even in areas where it is not, they can then argue against broadband stimulus projects to expand availability as an unnecessary waste of taxpayer money.  The answer to Baxter’s riddle is, unfortunately, too often “none.”  Areas that declare access to wireless broadband, cable and DSL often have access to none of these options.  The cable company doesn’t wire that Texas ranch located too far away from the phone company for DSL and is in an area that just can’t get a good wireless signal.

In smaller communities in rural Texas, efforts by local entrepreneurs to launch needed local broadband services often meet fierce opposition from incumbent interests who declare communities already served, backed up with a map that shows coverage, and therefore should not be allowed to receive stimulus funding.  Often, objections from existing providers effectively disqualifies stimulus applicants and the result is a continued blockade for rural broadband.

The dividend Connected Nation hands to the Texas Cable Association is the political argument that there is no broadband problem in Texas — nearly 100 percent of homes can already access it.  That means broadband stimulus is, in the eyes of the cable lobby, just another federal government giveaway — wasteful spending of tax dollars.  Just look at the Texas Broadband Map and see for yourself.

The Texas Department of Agriculture failed the people of Texas by relying on a group with a vested interest in not finding a broadband availability problem.  And even worse — taxpayers nationwide effectively picked up the $3 million dollars in grant money given to Connected Nation for its map.  That’s a waste of tax dollars that Baxter didn’t bother to bring up.  Somehow I knew he wouldn’t.