Although tens of millions of Americans have pulled the plug on landlines in favor of their mobile phones, there is still a market for affordable landline phone service, especially if you hate talking on cellphones.

Today Google Fiber has announced Fiber Phone, a new $10 phone line with unlimited local/nationwide calling, Google Voice rates for international calls, and package of phone features and voicemail that includes reliable access to 911.

Customers signing up will get a portable Voice Over IP box similar in style to those supplied by cable companies and VoIP providers like Vonage. It is designed to connect to your home’s existing phones and your Google Fiber service, but can also be taken with you on trips.

“We’ll be introducing Fiber Phone in a few areas to start,” Google writes in a blog post. “Over time, we’ll roll out Fiber Phone as an option to residential customers in all of our Fiber cities. Once we bring the service to your area, you can sign up and get the service through a simple installation process. To stay updated on the latest, sign up here.”

Google Fiber has offered TV and broadband service in a “double play” package since its start, but steered clear of phone service due to the complexity of local, state and federal regulations, especially pertaining to 911 service. Google apparently has overcome those challenges.

Frontier Communications CEO Dan McCarthy blames slow Internet connections on your lousy home Wi-Fi network, not on his company’s broadband service.

McCarthy hoped to convince investors attending the J.P. Morgan Global High Yield & Leveraged Finance Conference earlier this month that Frontier’s last-mile network performance isn’t the real problem, it’s his customers’ Wi-Fi, and delivering faster broadband service isn’t going to solve many speed woes.

“I think the biggest issue that we face in having those kind of increments of capacity is the experience in the home can be substandard not only for us and they perceive a speed issue, but it’s really a Wi-Fi issue,” McCarthy said. “If you look at that many of the perceived speed issues in a home are purely due to a neighbor on the same Wi-Fi channel, which can cut your throughput by 50 percent.”

McCarthy claimed at least 40 percent of the complaints Frontier customers lodge about the company’s broadband service relate to the home Wi-Fi experience. Oddly, customers of other broadband providers don’t seem to complain as much about the performance of their Internet access provider. Frontier scores #12 on Netflix’s speed performance ranking, delivering an average of 2.51Mbps video streaming performance. It isn’t great, but it beat Windstream, Verizon DSL and last place CenturyLink.

Frontier Communications has promised to commit additional investment to expand and improve broadband after it completes its purchase of Verizon landlines in Florida, California, and Texas. Copper DSL customers may eventually get 25Mbps service, fiber customers up to 1Gbps. But the speed improvements have not been as forthcoming in Frontier’s original service areas, dubbed “legacy territories.”

McCarthy claimed more customers within its copper service areas will get speeds of 25-30Mbps, with some getting speeds of 100Mbps and above. But legacy customers often report they consider themselves lucky to see 6Mbps from Frontier DSL.

McCarthy

Despite that, McCarthy seemed to signal Frontier will direct much of its investment into its newest acquisition service areas, not the communities which have had Frontier DSL service for a decade or more.

“We’re investing in the copper facilities as we go into these three states,” McCarthy said. “We’ll be putting in the latest generation of bonded VDSL with vectoring capabilities at the DSLAM and that gives us the ability to have those 80-100 Mbps speeds.”

McCarthy does get the benefit of bragging the company has a larger amount of fiber broadband than ever before.

“Before we do the three-state acquisition, about 10 percent of our markets are passed with fiber-to-the-home and with these three markets about 55 percent of those markets are fiber-to-the-home,” McCarthy said. “We’ll have a substantial slug of markets passed with fiber.”

This excludes the fact Frontier did not build this additional fiber infrastructure itself. It acquired it from another company, in this case Verizon.

Rep. Calfee

“The sheer audacity of Charter Communications’ offer of free airtime to legislators following the defeat of a broadband access bill is breathtaking,” wrote the editors of the Knoxville News Sentinel in a heated editorial this week. “The spectacle of lawmakers accepting the offer would be revolting.”

The newspaper was responding to the optics of Charter Communications’ generous offer of free airtime for politicians willing to record “public service announcements” just a day after the Tennessee House Business & Utilities Subcommittee killed a bill that would have allowed public utilities to expand fiber broadband service outside of their current electric service area. If that bill became law, it had the potential of giving Charter the formidable competition AT&T, Frontier Communications, and CenturyLink have failed to deliver in Tennessee.

In an election year, anything that gives politicians exposure to voters is worth its weight in gold, which is why taxpayer-sponsored “newsletters” and “voter updates” fill voters’ mailboxes a few months before Election Day. Charter’s plan to saturate subscribers with dubious “PSAs with Politicians” during ad breaks is harder to ignore than another piece of campaign junk mail destined for the recycle bin.

Rep. Daniel

Charter’s vague explanation it was going to offer the airtime before the Subcommittee vote only makes the scandal worse, because it means lawmakers were given advance notice they could be as well-recognized as Henry “The Fonz” Winkler selling reverse mortgages, circus animals and cheerleaders drumming up business for local car dealerships, and kids night at the local family restaurant — all too common tenants of the “local ad insertion” space cable companies get to make more money (or in this case win/reward influence) on the side.

But Charter’s plan appears to be backfiring, drawing unwanted attention on a cable operator Tennessee loves to hate. But more importantly, it gave the Knoxville press an opportunity to remind voters who the real villains of competition are: Republican Reps. Kent Calfee of Kingston and Martin Daniel of Knoxville — two local lawmakers on the Subcommittee voting with Charter, AT&T, and Comcast against their constituents pleading for more cable competition.

The local hero? Rep. Art Swann (R-Maryville) who voted yes (e-mail him a thank you note). He predicts the bill will be back.

The News Sentinel regards the love affair between Charter and lawmakers as compelling as a lunch date with Limburger cheese:

Actually, the stench emanating from the Capitol would indicate something worse than just bad appearances. Tempting lawmakers with free airtime during an election year — even if the commercial technically would not be a campaign ad — is like waving a treat above the snout of an obedient dog.

Charter has not commented on the matter, but its offer certainly gives at least the appearance of trading airtime for votes; surely legislators know better than to take him up on the offer. Tennesseans must hold lawmakers accountable if they do.

Readers can start by telling Reps. Calfee and Daniel they are watching them very closely on this issue and expect them to support public utility broadband expansion when the issue comes before them next time:

Mediacom, perennially rated America’s dead-last cable company by Consumer Reports’ annual subscriber surveys, will invest $1 billion over the next three years to combat increasing competition from AT&T and other telephone companies by improving its broadband service.

The chief goal of the upgrades is to introduce gigabit broadband speeds for nearly all of Mediacom’s three million customers across 22 states. The initiative, dubbed Project Gigabit, will require Mediacom to push fiber closer to customers and businesses and will depend largely on DOCSIS 3.1 technology.

Mediacom is already providing gigabit service in several communities in Missouri, including Jefferson City, where it sells 1,000/50Mbps service for $149.99 per month, with discounts available to customers bundling it with other services. Mediacom has placed a data cap on its gigabit tier of 6TB a month, with an overlimit fee of $10 per 50GB. The Missouri systems bond 32 downstream channels using DOCSIS 3.0 technology, and customers report speed test results averaging 980/60Mbps. In other areas, many Mediacom systems will be upgraded to DOCSIS 3.1 service as part of the gigabit rollout.

“From the time we acquired our first cable system in March 1996, Mediacom’s focus has always been to offer the smaller communities we serve the same communications and video services that are available in America’s largest cities,” said Mediacom’s founder and CEO, Rocco B. Commisso. “Project Gigabit will allow us to go even further by giving our customers access to one of the fastest broadband networks in the world.”

In addition to speed upgrades, Mediacom also plans:

• Expansion of Mediacom Business’s high-capacity network inside downtown areas and commercial districts to create more “lit buildings” within the company’s footprint and bring tens of thousands of new business customers on-net with immediate access to fiber-based communications services;
• Extension of Mediacom’s deep-fiber residential video, Internet and phone network to pass at least an additional 50,000 homes;
• Deployment of community Wi-Fi access points throughout high-traffic commercial and public areas across Mediacom’s national footprint.

Consumer Reports subscriber survey results for Mediacom

Customers hope the service improvements might finally lift Mediacom out of last place in consumer satisfaction scores, a rating it has maintained for several years.

Mediacom caps its Internet service and penalizes customers with a $10 per 50GB overlimit fee.

The Universal Service Fund is funded by telephone ratepayers. (Image: Free Press)

A $9.25 a month subsidy to allow low income Americans to get basic telephone service would be expanded to include broadband service if a majority of FCC commissioners adopt changes proposed today to the Lifeline program.

A draft plan to expand the 30-year old Lifeline federal subsidy intended originally for landlines to include Internet access was released this morning by FCC chairman Thomas Wheeler and Commissioner Mignon Clyburn. Under the proposal, those eligible for federal aid programs like Medicaid will qualify for a discount, which can be applied to a landline, mobile phone, or broadband service.

“Internet access has become a prerequisite for full participation in our economy and our society, but nearly one in five Americans is still not benefiting from the opportunities made possible by the most powerful and pervasive platform in history,” Wheeler and Clyburn wrote in a joint blog post. “Internet access has become a pre-requisite for full participation in our economy and our society, but nearly one in five Americans is still not benefiting from the opportunities made possible by the most powerful and pervasive platform in history. […]By modernizing the FCC’s Lifeline program, we will do better.”

Republicans immediately pounced on the proposed program, claiming past experiences with waste, fraud, and abuse in FCC programs for the poor have already cost ratepayers a great deal of money subsidizing unqualified consumers with multiple landlines and cell phones. They propose not expanding the program further until more safeguards were put in place to prevent more fraud.

Wheeler

Wheeler and Clyburn appeared ready for that objection, noting the plan would set up an independent clearinghouse to manage customers’ eligibility and approval, removing that responsibility from providers that critics charge have a vested interest in approving as many new customers as possible.

But some still object to the plan, noting Lifeline’s original purpose has been dramatically altered since it was first conceived in 1985 as a program to guarantee low-cost landline service for poor Americans, and efforts to justify its relevance by expanding it to include cell phones allowed fraudsters to game the system.

After the Bush Administration approved a plan to expand Lifeline to include wireless phone subsidies, providers sprung up almost immediately offering free or low-cost cell service using a business plan based entirely around the federal subsidy. Many providers signed up customers later found to be ineligible for service because they already received subsidized landline or mobile service from another provider. Getting rid of duplicate or ineligible accounts took almost four years in some cases.

Today, about 12 million American households receive the $9.25 subsidy. Federal officials estimate up to five million more households will eventually apply for the broadband subsidy, which would boost the Lifeline budget from $1.5 billion to $2.25 billion. The program is funded by telephone ratepayers, as part of the Universal Service Fund surcharge on consumers’ phone bills. For Mr. Wheeler and Ms. Clyburn, the cost is well worth it.

“We can recite statistics all we want, but we must never lose sight of the fact that what we’re really talking about is people – unemployed workers who miss out on jobs that are only listed online, students who go to fast-food restaurants to use the Wi-Fi hotspots to do homework, veterans who are unable to apply for their hard-earned benefits, seniors who can’t look up health information when they get sick,” the two FCC officials wrote.

As a practical matter, the $9.25 subsidy would likely most benefit customers enrolled in voluntary Internet discount programs offered by some cable and telephone companies, often at prices ranging from $9.95-$15 a month. Some skeptics believe the program will prove of limited benefit where Internet service costs $40+ a month. The cost of service is the biggest barrier for low-income Americans. The FCC estimates fewer than half of households with incomes less than $25,000 annually have Internet access at home. Reducing the bill to $30 a month may not be enough.

The proposal is expected to win approval on a future party line vote at the FCC — three Democrats in favor, two Republicans opposed.