Cleveland’s monument in the downtown district. (Image: City of Cleveland)

AT&T, Comcast, and Charter have surrounded the city of Cleveland, Tenn., (population 42,774) for more than 20 years, yet after all that time, there are still many homes in the area that have no better than dial-up Internet access..

An effort to extend municipal utility EPB’s fiber to the home service into the community just northeast of Chattanooga on Interstate 75, has run into organized political opposition campaign, part-sponsored by two of the three communications companies serving the area.

Tennessee state Reps. Dan Howell and Kevin Brooks, both Cleveland-area Republicans, understand the implications. With AT&T, Comcast, and Charter resolute about not expanding their coverage areas anytime soon, the only chance Cleveland has of winning world-class broadband anytime in the reasonable future is through EPB, which has already offered to extend service to at least 1,000 customers in rural Bradley County in as little as three months. Most of those customers now rely on dial-up Internet services, because no broadband is available. Reps. Howell and Brooks are trying to get the the red tape out of the way so EPB can proceed, but the Tennessee legislature hasn’t budged.

EPB provides municipal power, broadband, television, and telephone service for residents in Chattanooga, Tennessee

There is a substantial difference between 30kbps dial-up and 100Mbps — one of the “budget” Internet tiers available from EPB. But some Tennessee lawmakers and corporate-backed special interest groups don’t care. To them, stopping public broadband expansion is a bigger priority, and they have attempted to stall, block, or prohibit municipal broadband, just to protect the current phone and cable companies that are among their generous contributors.

In 2010, Chattanooga became the first in America to enjoy gigabit residential broadband speed not because of AT&T, Comcast, or Charter, but because of the publicly owned electric company, EPB. So what’s the problem with that? The fact EPB spent $320 million on the fiber optic network — about $100 million of that coming from a federal grant — keeps some conservatives, corporate executives, and telecom shareholders up at night. They object to the public funding of broadband, calling it unfair competition for the two incumbent cable companies and one phone company, which have their own “privately funded” networks.

Republican Rep. Mike Carter, who serves Ooltewah, thinks that’s a lot of nonsense. He notes AT&T and other providers already receive government funding to service outlying areas that no other providers dare to tread for a lack of return on their investment.

“[What] convinces me to back expansion of the EPB of Chattanooga is the fact that they received $111 million in stimulus funds, and in the next five years AT&T alone will receive $156 million of your money [in government funding] assessed every month on your bill to provide 10/4-gigabit service in those areas,” Carter explained to the Chattanooga Times-Free Press. “If the EPB’s $111 million matching grant somehow disqualifies those benefits going to my constituents, how do I explain to them that AT&T is receiving non-matching funds?”

“The issue then became, if it is necessary to create the world’s fastest Internet system, why would EPB not offer that for economic growth in its service area?” Carter continued. ” After I heard the story of the [gig’s] creation and realized that the money had already been spent, I asked myself if I would allow a firmly held principle of no competition with private enterprise by government to deny my constituents and neighbors the incredible benefits.”

Justin Owen, president and CEO of the Beacon Center of Tennessee, is dismissive of Carter’s willingness to bend his principles. In his view, those without Internet access have other options instead of getting EPB Fiber on the public dime.

Owen

“You can get satellite Internet,” said Owen, who added that governments that invest in fiber technology could be “left behind by disruptive innovation,” which in his mind could be satellite Internet. Satellite customers would disagree.

“Horrible, horrible, horrible, and more horrible,” wrote Trey from another Cleveland — this time in Texas. “Speeds are consistently less than 2Mbps and they advertise up to 12. Try a cell phone booster and use that before resorting to satellite Internet.”

Hundreds of customers shared similar stories about their experience with satellite Internet, and they don’t believe it will be disruptive to anything except their bank account.

Owen and his group have not revealed many details about where its funding comes from, but the group is a member of the State Policy Network, which receives financial support from AT&T, Time Warner Cable, Verizon and Comcast. The group’s former leader, Drew Johnson, was also a former opinion page columnist at the Times-Free Press and used column space to criticize EPB and other issues that ran contrary to AT&T’s agenda in Tennessee.

Despite support from the Chattanooga area’s Republican delegation, many legislators from outside the area remain firmly in support of the telecom companies and their wish to limit or destroy community broadband projects like EPB, claiming they are redundant or are based on faulty business plans likely to fail. But while Comcast used to dismiss EPB’s gigabit service as unnecessary and AT&T considered gigabit speeds overkill, both companies are now racing to deploy their own gigabit networks in Chattanooga to compete.

The residents of Cleveland without broadband today probably won’t have it tomorrow or anytime soon. Many are hoping the Tennessee legislature will relent and let EPB solve their broadband issues once and for all. Cleveland resident Aaron Alldaffer is trying to help gin up interest in a renewed legislative push for EPB Fiber expansion with a Change.org petition.

The BBC World Service Global Business program visited Chattanooga in May 2016 to explore EPB Fiber and discuss its implications. (29 minutes)

You must remain on this page to hear the clip, or you can download the clip and listen later.

How much you use the Internet is often a matter of how fast your broadband connection is, according to a new study.

King’s College London researchers found a clear correlation between bad broadband and low usage rates, as customers avoided high bandwidth apps like online video because they were frustrating or impossible to use. One analyst said the findings show rural areas are being “deprived of the full benefits of broadband.”

One of Britain’s most used apps is the BBC iPlayer, which streams live and on-demand programming from multiple BBC radio and television networks. It is a well-known bandwidth consumer, using a significant proportion of a customer’s broadband connection to deliver up to HD-quality video streams. The study found users in South Ayrshire, Ards, the Isle of Wight, the East Riding of Yorkshire, North Down and Midlothian were among the areas where people used iPlayer the least. It wasn’t because they didn’t want to. Those areas were identified by Ofcom, the British telecom regulator, as receiving some of the worst Internet speeds in the UK. Conversely, areas with robust broadband, including London, south Gloucestershire and Bristol, showed above average usage.

Dr. Sastry

“It is clear that high-speed broadband is an important factor in the use of bandwidth-intensive applications such as BBC iPlayer,” said Dr. Nishanth Sastry, a senior lecturer at King’s College London and the lead researcher. “With technological advancements, it is likely that more services important to daily life will move online, yet there is a significant proportion of the population with inadequate broadband connections who won’t be able to access such services.”

Ian Watt, a telecommunications consultant with the analyst Ovum, said broadband speeds must get higher to assure users can watch HD video and simultaneously share their Internet connection with other members of the household.

“Recent Ovum research indicated a speed of 25Mbps was an appropriate target access speed to provide a high quality experience for video services,” Watt said. In the United States, 25Mbps is the current minimum speed to qualify as broadband, according to the most recent FCC definition.

The findings may also explain why U.S. broadband providers only capable of delivering relatively low-speed Internet access report lower average usage than those capable of providing service at or above 25Mbps. Those offering the fastest speeds are also the most likely to attract higher volumes of Internet traffic as customers take advantage of those speeds.

Cox Communications will push broadband speed upgrades as high as a gigabit to customers over an upgraded network heavy on fiber and much lighter on copper coaxial cable.

In an effort to stay competitive and reduce operational and maintenance costs, Cox will begin major upgrades of its cable plant, removing as much copper and as many signal amplifiers as possible to simplify upkeep and make future upgrades simpler.

Cox chief technology officer Kevin Hart told Light Reading he wants to push fiber optics deeper into Cox’s network, bringing optical fiber closer to the neighborhoods where customers live and work. This will allow Cox to reduce the number of customers sharing the same bandwidth. It also eases Cox’s forthcoming upgrade to DOCSIS 3.1 technology.

“We’re […] taking fiber deeper as a part of our multi-year network transformation plan, working towards a node-plus-zero architecture that allows us to take fiber to the home, and allows us to bring gigabit speeds on demand. And of course we’re aligning around DOCSIS 3.1,” Hart said.

Cox is planning its first rollout of DOCSIS 3.1, which gives cable companies to ability to offer gigabit download speeds, in the fourth quarter of this year. It will choose one of the smaller communities it serves as a test market. If all goes well, Cox will push DOCSIS 3.1 across all of its markets between 2017-2020, likely focusing on Phoenix and San Diego first.

Cox is evaluating DOCSIS 3.1 cable modems from a number of vendors, with Arris and Technicolor likely contenders.

Cox continues to support data caps and usage-based billing in some of its markets and has become one of the stingiest with data allowances:

Customers in Cleveland, Ohio are the unluckiest of all, because they also face an overlimit fee when they exceed their allowance: $10 for each additional 50GB block of data. Some customers in Cleveland’s downtown area have found a loophole around the data cap, however. If they access the Internet over Cox WiFi and Cable WiFi hotspots, it does not count against one’s allowance at this time.

Stop the Cap! continues the fight for a better deal for Time Warner Cable customers that could soon end up as Charter Communications customers, if the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) approves the merger.

While the Federal Communications Commission formally approved the deal last week, California has yet to sign off on the transaction, giving consumer advocates like Stop the Cap! an opportunity to recommend the state regulator impose stronger consumer-friendly deal conditions that guarantee customers their share of the anticipated windfall in “deal benefits” that shareholders and executives of the companies involved are likely to receive.

Our California coordinator Matthew Friedman has been educating the CPUC about the true nature of data caps and usage-based billing, and sharing our view that Charter’s promised merger deal benefits are illusory, offering little more than what Time Warner Cable already offers its Maxx-upgraded service areas. In fact, Time Warner’s ongoing commitment to not impose compulsory data caps or usage billing is likely to be canceled by Charter Communications, which has only agreed not to impose such billing schemes on customers for three years.

Even worse, future Charter customers are likely to pay higher broadband bills after Charter imposes its regular prices on Time Warner Cable customers — prices often higher than what Time Warner charges for similar services. Although Time Warner customers have been able to negotiate a better deal for themselves after threatening to cancel, Stop the Cap! anticipates Charter will not be as generous with those customers in the future.

At the minimum, Stop the Cap! is recommending the CPUC either permanently ban compulsory usage caps and usage billing from Charter, or add a competition test that will allow such billing only where consumers can switch to a competitor that offers comparable unlimited broadband service.

Charter’s broadband “deal”

The loss of [Time Warner’s] commitment [to always offer unlimited broadband options to consumers] could result in the following harms, according to Friedman:

1. New Charter’s commitment to provide low cost broadband will become completely voluntary and unenforceable;
2. increased broadband pricing resulting in decreased demand for broadband;
3. New Charter will be able to circumvent Net Neutrality rules;
4. New Charter will be able to engage in a multitude of anticompetitive behaviours, increasing the cost and reducing the attractiveness of competing video content from edge providers, thus lessening the demand for high-speed broadband access to the Internet, and thus running counter to Section 706(a)’s mandate to promote competition in broadband services;
5. innovation and investment will potentially decrease significantly;
6. network security can be adversely affected; and,
7. Californians, especially low-income Californians, may lose access to education opportunities.

We’re not drinking “New Charter’s” Kool-Aid

“Stop the Cap! (and the Office of Ratepayer Advocates as well) has offered a reasonable option of requiring a competition test to sunset the prohibition on data caps and usage based pricing,” wrote Friedman. “This suggestion is based on Charter’s own expert testimony and [the conditions] must be rewritten per these suggestions if it is to fulfill multiple statutory requirements.”

Stop the Cap! also advocates that Time Warner Cable customers that purchased their own cable modems to avoid Time Warner’s modem fees deserve an ongoing bill credit for providing their own equipment, because Charter builds the cost of its modem into the price of broadband service.

“Charter already bakes the price of the modem rental into the monthly cost of the plan,” Friedman noted. “New Charter [should be required] to offer a discount to customers who bring their own modems. Charter currently allows customers to bring their own modems… they just continue to charge those customers for a Charter modem that the customer never uses.”

Although Charter’s pledge to increase broadband speeds for Time Warner customers seems laudatory, in fact Charter’s proposed service offerings also represent a significant rate increase for broadband customers who don’t need or want 60Mbps service. They won’t have much choice after Charter imposes its own plans and pricing, which are now limited to 60 or 100Mbps options for most customers, at prices starting at $60 a month.

“Clearly these TWC customers are materially much worse off under New Charter than TWC,” Friedman told the CPUC. “Equally clear is that Charter’s ‘Simplified Pricing’ (perhaps more accurately described as ‘Fewer Options and Higher Prices’) is far from a public benefit. This massive price increase will affect literally every stand-alone-broadband TWC customer other than the few who qualify for the School Lunch/Senior Assistance plan. While the low-cost School Lunch/Senior Assistance plan is great for the narrowly targeted group of consumers who manage to qualify, roughly doubling the cost of broadband for every other standalone customer more than offsets the combined value of every other ‘benefit’ that the applicants allege will come from this transfer.”

Stop the Cap! also advocates that the CPUC guarantee Charter customers have a choice about the broadband speeds they need and the amount they have to pay for Internet access.

“New Charter should be required to retain TWC’s pricing and plan structure in perpetuity, for both new and existing TWC customers. TWC customers should retain the ability to switch back and forth between TWC’s cheaper, larger variety of plans,” Friedman wrote. “New Charter should be required to continue TWC’s practice of increasing customer speeds as technology advances with no
accompanying price increase.”

Although Charter’s lobbying efforts promote improved service for Time Warner Cable customers, it is our view that once one examines the full scope and impact of Charter’s proposal, customers will be worse off under Charter than they would be staying with Time Warner Cable.

“TWC stands out in its field for its customer-friendly policies such as providing discounts for those who own their own modems, its public commitment to refuse to impose data caps or
usage based pricing even in the face of pressure from Wall Street to do so, and the creation of its TWC Roku App to allow customers to avoid set-top box rental fees,” argued Friedman. “This transfer, as currently conditioned, creates a net public benefit harm, not a benefit, or even a status quo.”

Time Warner Cable Maxx upgrades are on the way for customers in several Wisconsin cities, bringing all-digital cable television service later this year in preparation of boosting broadband speeds up to 300Mbps.

The company has begun notifying customers in the Fox Cities – including Green Bay, Appleton and Oshkosh as well as in southeast Wisconsin, including Milwaukee, Kenosha, Waukesha and Racine that analog television service will be switched off in the next several months.

“Going all-digital brings the benefit of better picture and sound immediately, and will enable us to offer customers faster Internet speeds and additional services in the future,” said Jack Herbert, regional vice president of Time Warner Cable.

The transition to an all-digital network will require video customers without TWC digital equipment (customers who plug their cable line directly into the TV, VCR or similar device) to order a TWC digital adapter.

TWC will offer existing TV customers one or more digital adapters at no charge through at least October 6, 2017. To qualify, customers must order their digital adapters by January 29, 2017. After this free period, each adapter will be billed at the prevailing price, now around $3 a month. Customers can visit www.TWC.com/digitaladapter to place an order or call toll-free 1-844-841-5085 to request equipment. Digital Adapters are also available at most Time Warner Cable stores.

After the free equipment period ends, Stop the Cap! recommends customers return the digital adapters and consider purchasing an online video console such as a Roku device, which supports the Time Warner Cable lineup without recurring equipment rental charges.

Customers can expect free broadband speed upgrades after the digital conversion is complete, with faster Internet access likely available late this year or in early 2017.