Verizon Communications and AT&T together represent the largest providers of legacy copper wire landline phone service in the United States.  Over the past ten years, the traditional landline business has taken a beating as consumers increasingly turn their backs on the technology Alexander Graham Bell helped invent more than 100 years ago.  No utility service faces more customer defections than the phone company, and providers are increasingly rewriting their business models or lobbying to abandon unprofitable service areas altogether.

For some customers, investments in network improvements have brought advanced fiber optics straight to the home.  But in smaller communities, customers are making due with a deteriorating network phone companies no longer want to maintain.

The Glorious Growth Years

Back in the late 1980s, before most of us realized there was an Internet (or that you might be able to access it from home), the concept of connecting computers together to share information meant buying a 300-1200bps modem and using your home phone line to dial up hobbyist computer bulletin boards, CompuServe, PeopleLink, Delphi, GEnie, and QuantumLink.

Landline service was never perfect, but it worked reliably enough to make and receive phone calls and connect to low speed data networks.  As the 1990s arrived, an explosion in data and wireless services would bring both growth and unprecedented challenges for traditional telephone companies. Businesses demanded access to additional phone lines to power dedicated data lines and fax machines.  Residential customers wanted extra phone lines as well, mostly to keep data traffic off the primary house line. It was the era of frenzied area code splits, cell phones for all, and talk America could even run out of seven digit phone numbers to assign to all of the new lines.

NYNEX is today known as Verizon

As revenue and earnings exploded with the installation of new voice, data, and fax lines, Wall Street investors soon took notice.  Sleepy and safe phone company stocks were suddenly hot, and a deregulation-fueled consolidation frenzy soon resulted as phone companies merged and acquired one another.  Among the Bell System operating companies, familiar names like NYNEX, Bell Atlantic, BellSouth, Southwestern Bell, Pacific Telesis, Ameritech, and US West were gone, replaced by AT&T, Qwest, and Verizon.  Independent phone companies were not immune to the merger and acquisition game.  Today’s largest independent phone companies including Frontier Communications, CenturyLink, FairPoint, and Windstream have all grown mostly through buyouts of other providers.

The Bottom Drops Out

The rapid growth years of the traditional wired phone line came to an end around the same time as the dot.com crash and accompanying recession from 2000-2002.  While cell phone growth would continue, new competitors — especially cable-delivered “digital phone” service and other Voice Over IP providers like Vonage seriously cut into market share and revenue.  The need for additional phone lines to access the Internet subsided with the growth of DSL and cable broadband.  As household income stagnated, choices began to be made about where to cut back, and the traditional landline was a popular favorite.  Why pay for both a landline and a cell phone?  The cell phone stayed, the landline went.  Even dedicated fax machines are increasingly deemed unnecessary in an e-mail world.

The growing realization that the traditional copper wire telephone line was at risk of being the next “horse and buggy business” forced companies to consider a handful of options: ride out the landline declines and lower shareholder expectations, transform their existing networks to sustain new products like faster broadband and television service to give customers reasons to stay, or transition focus on business customers who bring more revenue.

AT&T and Verizon have adopted all three strategies, depending on where customers happen to live.

AT&T: If You are Still Waiting for DSL From Us, Forget It

In October, John J. Stephens, chief financial officer and executive vice-president at AT&T made it clear to investors the company’s interest in growing its legacy wired business had come to an end.  The company had lost landline customers for years, most switching to cell phone alternatives, sometimes sold by AT&T itself.  Spending enormous sums to upgrade AT&T’s copper landline network just didn’t make financial sense in every area.  Instead, AT&T split its operating territories in two: those suitable for upgrades to the company’s U-verse/IP platform, and those in smaller communities who will soon find themselves pushed to switch to AT&T wireless service instead.  That makes the prospects for customers still waiting for wired DSL service from AT&T pretty dim.

“We’ll continue to focus on transforming [existing] DSL lines into high speed [U-verse].” Stephens said. “In those areas where we don’t have U-verse, I think our plans have been fairly clear. We expect to have an LTE [wireless mobile broadband] rollout to 97% of the country. […] We believe that’s going to be able to provide a wireless solution at a high speed, good quality, good cost on a profitable basis for us. That’s the long-term solution to the non-U-verse areas.”

AT&T’s lobbyists have signaled this agenda for years, pressing state and federal lawmakers to get rid of “universal service” requirements that mandate reliable, basic landline telephone service to any customer in their service area who requests it.  AT&T wants the definition of “basic telephone service” expanded to allow the company the option of discontinuing its landline network and selling rural residents cell phone service instead.  The expense associated with maintaining AT&T’s degrading copper wire network is always cause for grumbling on Wall Street, most recently after this year’s repair costs from storms that impacted some of AT&T’s service areas.  Storm damages brought outages in the southern United States, flooded regions along the Mississippi, and rained-out areas of California.

Those problems were exacerbated when AT&T’s repairs don’t always correct the problems.  Repeated outages blamed on inadequate repairs and investment brought negative publicity for the phone company, as well as a number of requests to disconnect service as customers find other providers.

In places where AT&T will never deploy U-verse, AT&T has been content asking lawmakers to ease up on the phone company, urging that minimum service standards and oversight be abolished, along with the power of regulators to fine the company for repeated transgressions.  AT&T argues increased competition makes regulation unnecessary.

AT&T: Wants to eliminate universal service for rural America.

AT&T’s bean counters have calculated investment in U-verse only makes sense in urban-suburban areas.  In more distant suburbs and rural areas, the return on investment isn’t fast enough to justify spending money up-front on service improvements.  Maintaining the decades-old landline network doesn’t make much sense to AT&T either.  Instead, the company sees wireless service as the best prospect to serve its rural customers (and deliver the company higher profits from the more expensive service plans that come with the phones).

“What I see happening with LTE and data is just a huge growth opportunity,” said Ralph de la Vega, CEO and president of AT&T Mobility & Consumer Markets. “We mentioned today that our smartphones now make up 52% of our postpaid base. But I think the way we need to think about smartphones in the future is the smartphone is going to equal the phone in the future. It will be 100% in the next 2 or 3 years. These devices are so good and the costs are coming down so much that I think in the future, you could look at close to 100% penetration.”

Some customers may find AT&T penetrating their wallets, but for the phone company, better days may be ahead:

• Moving customers to the wireless platform exposes them to higher revenue, higher-priced wireless service plans;
• Basic cell phones, which come with lower-priced voice plans are being increasingly replaced with smartphones which come with required, extra-cost data plans;
• Getting rid of the rural landline network slashes AT&T’s upkeep costs and holds customers in place with two-year service contracts common with wireless phones.

Consumers happy with their existing landline service may be less than impressed with AT&T’s cellular network coverage, its dropped call-problem, and the company’s alternative for rural broadband – heavily usage-capped and expensive LTE network access.  AT&T sells wired DSL plans for as little as $14.95 a month with a 150GB usage limit.  AT&T’s wireless LTE network will cost considerably more and is accompanied with usage limits a fraction of that amount.

Verizon: A Tale of Two Networks

Big Red has two wired landline networks: screaming fast FiOS fiber to the home for some, slow speed DSL over a decrepit copper wire network for everyone else.

Verizon is less opaque than AT&T regarding which service areas it treats as valued assets and which aren’t worth the time of day.  The company began selling off its undesirable customers several years ago, starting with Hawaii.  Northern New England was next, followed by several former GTE territories Verizon acquired in 2000.

While Verizon enjoyed the proceeds of the tax-free transactions, most of the impacted customers did not.  Hawaiian Telcom floundered for a few years with bad service and an outrageous debt load before declaring bankruptcy.  Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont suffered through a year-long transition to buyer FairPoint Communications, complete with poor service and notoriously inaccurate billing before that company also declared bankruptcy.  Former Verizon customers in the Pacific Northwest, Indiana, and West Virginia (among others) are coping with Frontier Communications own billing and service problems.

The FairPoint Trust called the $2.3 billion acquisition of Verizon’s New England operations “disastrous.”  It also echoed what Verizon obviously understood itself: its landline operation in New England had been allowed to deteriorate into “inferior assets that had no future.”

Frontier Communications itself judged the network it purchased from Verizon in West Virginia in need of serious upgrades and repairs.  Critics of the deal called Verizon’s West Virginia network “a technical disaster area.”

But while Verizon is capable of landline neglect, it is also the only major phone company delivering true fiber-to-the-home service over its award winning (and expensive to build) FiOS network.

The feast or famine approach Verizon has used for capital investments has resulted in amazing service for some, a loss of reliable service to many others.

FiOS has allowed Verizon to remain a serious player, particularly in the northeast, despite the onslaught of competition from Cablevision, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable.  Average revenues earned from FiOS customers are much higher than what the company earns from customers on its copper wire telephone network.

Some Verizon shareholders have never liked the price for the company’s fiber future.  When the economy tanked in late 2008, an indefinite suspension of FiOS expansion soon followed, leaving Verizon’s network expansion plans in limbo.  The company is still slowly completing the portion of its fiber network promised under existing agreements, but has avoided introducing the service in new cities and towns.  At the same time, Verizon is loathe to maintain investment in its antiquated copper wire landline network, which in some areas was supposed to be retired in favor of FiOS.

Bistro Chat Noir: Reliable Verizon phone service is not on the menu.

As long as Verizon’s older network can be held together, with fingers crossed, customers still have a dial tone.  But when things start to fail, customers are in for serious headaches.  They are popping aspirin almost daily at Bistro Chat Noir, a prestigious French restaurant along Madison Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.  If you plan to dine there, it is best to bring cash.  Even if the management wanted to take your Visa or Mastercard, the restaurant’s phone lines are out so often, they can’t easily process your payment.

These days, the resourceful owners rely on a neighbor’s graciously shared Wi-Fi connection (presumably powered by competitor Time Warner Cable) to process credit card transactions manually.

Waiting for FiOS

The New York Times wrote Verizon’s atrocious level of service isn’t isolated to one bistro:

“Obviously, this is not the way we want to do business,” said Ms. Latapie, who has started giving clients her personal cellphone number to avoid missing reservations when the restaurant’s phone is not performing properly. “When people can’t get through, I tell them it’s Verizon. And if they live in this area, they know — because they have the same problem.”

However irritating, sporadic utility failures are not uncommon. But along a a stretch of Madison Avenue in what is arguably the city’s most expensive shopping and eating district, phone and Internet blackouts have become a nightmarish routine of life for many expensive restaurants, stores and hotels.

For weeks now, mundane tasks — making dinner reservations and paying for purchases by credit card — have become a frustrating challenge.

“We are in the highest rent district in North America and we don’t have communication,” said Jillian Wright, whose spa on East 66th Street is on the second floor of a brownstone building and not ideal for walk-ins. Ms. Wright said she was losing clients daily, and her spa’s phone number goes straight to a voicemail message apologizing to clients for Verizon’s service.

The service failures have affected dozens of businesses, primarily in the East 60s along Madison Avenue. The scope of the problem varies, with some businesses having no phone or Internet service at all for the past several weeks and others experiencing blackouts that last days or a few hours.

Meetings with Verizon officials have deteriorated into spin-and-excuse sessions where company officials promise results but continue to deliver lousy service.  It turns out the problem is Verizon’s ancient copper wiring found underneath the streets in the area.  Just two feet away from Verizon’s cables are steam heating pipes, which warm the tunnels and create major condensation problems.  Couple that with water runoff from the streets above — salt-laden in the winter time — and you have a recipe for corrosion that destroys reliable phone service.

Eventually, Verizon plans to wire FiOS fiber across a large section of Madison Avenue, but with the company’s unwillingness to invest appropriate sums to get the job done, business and residential customers are simply kept waiting.

Or they can switch to Time Warner Cable, and many are.

Your Telephone Is Temporarily Out of Service…

A traditional overhead phone cable is packed with cable pairs for neighborhood phone service

Verizon’s service woes are not just for big city dwellers.  Residents in Virginia are coping with Verizon landline problems in suburban neighborhoods, too.  Verizon employees openly admit they are fighting a losing battle with management to replace defective cables and equipment that should have been replaced years ago.  Management keeps winning and customers keep losing.

“When we come to this area, we dread it,” admits Alex Long, a cable splicer at Verizon for 22 years.

Long just pulled up to a pole off Burksdale Road in Norfolk and found nothing he had not seen many times before  — untrimmed tree branches overgrown into the overhead wires.  The branches had managed to rub the phone cable’s insulation down to bare copper wire.

As a result, whenever it rains, telephone service in the neighborhood becomes sporadic.  If tree branches don’t knock service out, cable-chewing squirrels do.  The lines, the equipment, and the technology is well past its prime, but Verizon management insists repair crews fix what is already there instead of replacing it with something better.  It’s all a matter of money, and Verizon wants to spend as little as possible on its copper landline network.

Long’s experiences were the highlight of a piece published by the Virginian-Pilot, which has heard complaints from readers about dreadful Verizon phone service across the region.

The repairman discloses Verizon technicians have known about the bad cable for at least five years, but requests to replace it have been repeatedly rejected.

“The cable’s totally shot,” Long told the newspaper. “It needs to be replaced, and the company’s budget doesn’t allow for it. That’s what engineering keeps telling us.”

In Hampton Roads, Va., it is a case of the fiber haves and have nots.  The parts of Hampton Roads that have been upgraded to Verizon’s fiber to the home network are virtually trouble-free in comparison to neighborhoods where copper cables still deliver service.  Verizon’s legacy network is of such concern, the Virginia State Corporation Commission has increasingly taken a close look at the level of service Verizon is providing in non-FiOS areas.

William Irby, director of the commission’s Division of Communications, has heard plenty of concerns that Verizon is neglecting their copper network in favor of FiOS fiber.

Verizon’s copper wire neglect might not be such a big problem had the company provided a date certain for upgrade relief.  But with FiOS expansion also stalled, some cities are now wondering if Verizon is abandoning them.

Boston is one of them.

Left Behind: The Cities Without FiOS

Verizon FiOS is well-known in eastern Massachusetts.  There are those who have it and those who want it.  Verizon had been aggressively pursuing franchise agreements with 111 communities across the state until the company announced it was putting on the brakes and ceasing further expansion efforts in new areas.  That leaves Boston and other communities like Quincy behind because they didn’t sign agreements with the company fast enough.

Verizon FiOS customers get the good life: $90 a month for a triple-play package with a $300 Visa debit card reward for signing up.

“If you’ve got FiOS, lucky you,” shares Quincy resident Roger Jones. “If you don’t, good luck.”

Jones says Verizon has left Quincy with a neglected landline network the company doesn’t seem interested in maintaining, much less replacing with fiber optics.

“The company believed in fiber optics because they saw the opportunities fiber could deliver, like additional revenue from selling TV channels,” Jones says. “But then Wall Street caught up to them and said it was all too much.  I might even understand that, except they won’t spend a nickle maintaining what they already have either, unless the regulators twist their arms and threaten fines over the bad service.”

Jones says his Verizon phone line was out three times earlier this year.

“Three strikes and they were out — I switched to Comcast,” Jones says. “A Verizon repair guy that came to my house the third time said all of his relatives switched to Comcast because service got to be so unreliable with Verizon’s old network.”

Back on Burksdale Road in Norfolk, Long was trying to track down another customer’s phone troubles — a loud hum on their line.  Hours later, Long decided it was a futile effort and began looking for an unused replacement pair of good wires he could switch to for the customer.  With the growing number of Verizon customers disconnecting their landline service permanently, that task gets easier every day.

Long told the newspaper it was no surprise Burksdale Road customers were experiencing problems.  Closures which were designed to protect the cable where it splits off individual phone lines were supposed to be water and air-tight.  Instead, he was working with a deteriorating rubber enclosure that showed its age after years of service.  Unfortunately, he explains, Burksdale Road customers will simply have to make due.

Not only won’t Long be able to replace the deteriorating infrastructure he finds, he’ll be forced to improvise with Verizon’s latest cost-cutting solution for wet cables — covering them with sheeting that resembles a plastic garbage bag.  Even that is nothing new for Burksdale Road.  Several houses down, a cable “rain-slicker” was already tightly wrapped around a section of cable where the rubber closure had gone missing altogether.

After getting the dial tone back, Long handed the customer his business card with his direct number and apologized.

“You may have problems again,” he said, advising the customer to call him directly the next time his phone line stops working.

Verizon better hope the customer doesn’t call the local cable company to switch providers or disconnect his landline altogether.

The pushy door-to-door salesman is back, and he’s working for CenturyLink.

Lake Oswego (Ore.) residents have been the unwelcome recipients of repeated doorbell ringing by a small army of young CenturyLink salespeople.  Described by some residents as “rude,” “pushy,” and intrusive, the salespeople pelted would-be customers with questions about how many televisions and computers were found within their homes, and what kind of telecommunications services they had.

Some residents were so alarmed by the aggressive and suspicious sales tactics, they called police.

“They were persistent, they came to my door four times,” Lake Oswego resident Betty Endress, who lives in a private gated community, told KOIN-TV. “We have a ‘no solicitation’ policy.”

Endress refused to open the door because, in her words, it was CenturyLink — a company nobody had heard of.

In fact, CenturyLink acquired Qwest, the former Baby Bell that predominately serves the mountain west states.

CenturyLink admits the aggressive sales force belongs to them.  They are being sent into neighborhoods where the company recently upgraded its broadband service, trying to lure customers away from the cable competition.  But one South Portland resident was so alarmed when three salespeople showed up on his doorstep all at once, he called 911.

Telecommunications providers have been victimized by some criminals who represent themselves as company employees to force their way into residential homes to commit crimes.  CenturyLink says concerned residents should ask to see CenturyLink branded identification badges, uniforms, and a copy of the license permitting them to pursue door-to-door sales.

[flv width=”480″ height=”290″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KOIN Portland Door-to-door sales scare in Lake Oswego 11-7-11.mp4[/flv]

Residents in private, gated communities told KOIN-TV in Portland they’d prefer not to be visited by CenturyLink salespeople on their doorsteps, whether the sales force holds a business license or not.  (3 minutes)

Genachowski

The cable industry is expanding so-called “lifeline Internet service” to more households in an effort to combat what a government agency calls “a persistent digital divide.”

Next spring, Time Warner Cable, Cox, and Charter Communications will launch low-speed Internet service for $9.95 a month for two years.  The offers will echo Comcast’s Internet Essentials, which launched earlier this year as part of a deal with the government to win approval of the cable company’s merger with NBC-Universal.

The Federal Communications Commission calls the effort “Connect to Compete,” and suggests the public-private initiative will help rural Americans and low-income minorities get affordable Internet access. A study by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration found just 55% of black households and 57% of Hispanics currently subscribe to broadband.  More than 72% of Caucasian households and more than 81% of Asian homes use broadband by comparison.  The rural southern states of Mississippi (52%), Arkansas (52%) and Alabama (56%) have the lowest broadband penetration rates in the country.  In contrast, more than 80% of Utah residents have broadband in their homes.

“In this difficult economy, we need everyone to be working together on solutions,” FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said. “Broadband is a key to economic and educational opportunity and these kinds of commitments to close the digital divide are powerful.”

But not every poverty-stricken American will qualify for the discount programs.

Cable operators are following Comcast’s lead, restricting access to families with at least one school age child enrolled in the free school lunch program.  Customers must not have existing broadband service during the last 90 days and customers with past due balances cannot sign up.  Don’t have children or fell behind on your cable bill?  No discount Internet for you.

Pilot programs will be launched by each operator in around a dozen cities total starting next spring, with plans to roll programs out nationally by the start of the 2012 school year.  Broadband speeds, usage limits, and other fees were not disclosed.  Comcast’s Internet Essentials operates at 1.5Mbps with upload speeds up to 384kbps.

Comcast’s program sells a netbook computer loaded with Windows 7 Starter Edition for around $150.  The $250 computers expected to be provided by Microsoft will include Windows 7 Home Premium operating system and Microsoft Office.  An additional vendor will sell refurbished computers to interested program participants for around $150.

The program will primarily reach urban residents who cannot afford current Internet service plans that are sold for $40-45 a month.  Rural residents are unlikely to benefit much because most cable operators do not deliver service in rural areas.

CenturyLink announced its own version of discounted DSL Internet in October to sell for $9.95 a month, but with numerous “gotcha” fees and surcharges.

One group unlikely to take advantage of the program: older householders, particularly those ages 65 and older, where just 45% have broadband at home.  The biggest reason the rest don’t?  They don’t believe they need the Internet at any cost.

This dollar-a-holler astroturf effort failed to impress Longmont voters, who turned back a Comcast-funded opposition campaign to open up the city's fiber network.

Longmont, Col. residents turned their backs on a Comcast-funded campaign to block the opening of the city’s 17-mile fiber loop to competing broadband providers in a strong vote of approval.

As of early this morning, 60.8% of voters approved Ballot Question 2A.  Just 39.2% opposed the measure.

Longmont’s fiber network, built in 1997 and paid for by the Platte River Power Authority, has heretofore been off-limits to the public.  Colorado’s 2005 corporate welfare laws guarantee that taxpayer or ratepayer-funded broadband networks are kept away from the public that paid for them, for the protection of companies like Comcast and CenturyLink.

This results in the construction of showcase institutional fiber optic networks open to government, public safety, hospitals, and libraries… and practically nobody else.  Once built, institutional networks often go underutilized.  In Longmont, at least two-thirds of the city’s fiber optic network still goes unused 15 years after it was built.

The city government hoped to open the fiber network in time to bolster their application to Google to construct a gigabit network for residential and business customers, but after Google selected Kansas City for its fiber project, Longmont wants to keep its options open.  Passing the ballot question does exactly that.

“I’m glad to see 2A won,” Mayor Bryan Baum told the Times-Call. “I think it shows that money isn’t the determinator.”

Longmont voters were subjected to one of the most expensive pushback campaigns they’ve ever seen, thanks to Comcast, who spent $300,000 and counting to get the public to turn against the fiber network ballot question.

George Merritt, a spokesman for the cable-funded group Look Before We Leap, claims the vote results show “the measure’s narrow margin of victory.”  Merritt’s group relied heavily on a highly-suspect 2006 case study by University of Denver professor Ron Rizzuto that claimed 80 percent of community-owned Wi-Fi broadband networks failed to make money.  But the group didn’t make any distinction between Wi-Fi and fiber optics, and more importantly they left out the fact Rizzuto was inducted into the Cable TV Pioneers in 2004 for service to the cable industry.  Rizutto’s “study” was a classic case of dollar-a-holler research on behalf of the New Millennium Research Council, a creature of the telecommunications industry.

New Millennium Research Council -> Issue Dynamics -> Comcast

In fact, the Council is a “project” of Issue Dynamics, Inc., a for-profit, high powered Washington lobbying firm. Issue Dynamics’ client list includes Verizon, Comcast, AT&T and the United States Telecom Association – the trade association for the telecom industry.  The direct relationship between Rizzuto’s findings, and cable companies like Comcast who paid for the research, never made it into the report (or onto the group’s website).

This is the second time Longmont voters have cast ballots on the issue of the city’s fiber optic network.

In 2009, voters faced another cable industry-funded astroturf effort, with $245,000 spent to successfully defeat a similar measure.  This time, thanks in part to public exposure of the companies pulling the strings behind the astroturf campaign, voters rejected the propaganda onslaught and passed the measure.  Cable bills have also increased several times since the 2009 measure, a reminder to the public why competition can make a real difference.

With the passage of 2A, the city can choose to leave the network exactly as it is today or partner with another provider to offer services to the public.  It’s now their choice, not Comcast’s.

You can look all over this astroturf group's website and never find the fact it's bought and paid for on behalf of Colorado's largest cable company -- Comcast.

The next time Comcast or CenturyLink wants to increase your rates because of the “increased costs of doing business,” you might want to ask them why they have collectively spent more than $300,000 on an astroturf campaign to stop the city of Longmont, Col. (pop. 86,000) from using excess fiber capacity to provide competition to the phone and cable company without raising taxes a penny.

Longmont voters are headed to the polls today with a simple question to answer: should the city be allowed to open their fiber network to all-comers to provide competitive video, data, and telephone services to city residents.  Longmont’s fiber network was constructed in the 1990s as part of its electrical infrastructure.  Some utility companies buried enormous amounts of fiber intending to use it to electronically collect usage data from ratepayers so meter readers could become a thing of the past.  Like in other cities, Longmont now has a fiber network that is woefully underused, and the city wants to open up the tremendous excess capacity for telecommunications uses.  They are even open to allowing Comcast and CenturyLink to use the network to help service their own respective customers, but the thought a new competitor (including a community-owned provider) might deliver service over that network has created an absurd $300,000 Hissyfit.

Comcast has been caught funding the majority of the opposition, the so-called “No on 2A” and “Look Before We Leap” projects, sponsored primarily by the Colorado Cable Telecommunications Association, which counts Comcast as a member.

But visitors to the campaign’s cheesy website never realize who is running the show because the effort hides its association with Big Telecom.

It’s a classic example of Astroturf Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.  Scare residents into believing the city will raise taxes or go into financial distress.  Raise uncertainty by claiming important details are being left out.  Encourage doubt by comparing the advanced fiber network with anemic public Wi-Fi failures of the past involving Earthlink (remember them?).

But the No on 2A campaign is also willing to check themselves into a deluxe suite at the Hypocrisy Hotel, accusing city officials of hiding the names of their pro-fiber supporters and backers, including (gasp!) a company based in France!

The No on 2A website breathlessly relates the incriminating documents were unearthed from “previously secret emails just made public thanks to a Colorado Open Records Act.” They suggest a nefarious connection with Alcatel-Lucent because that company, which sells products and services related to fiber networks, communicated with the city in a handful of e-mail messages last summer.  You know those French, always up to something.

When it doubt, blame the French for being in on it.

The rich, buttery irony of a “group” secretly funded by the state’s largest cable company accusing others of keeping secrets is ignored at Kabletown.

But then I’ve received e-mail from Alcatel-Lucent (and Comcast) myself.  And I have a French last name.  Sacrebleu!

The website’s “opponents,” evidently gleaned from the few hundred residents that signed their visitor’s book, includes names like Joanna Crawford, “Garrett County,” and El Cordova, which we think could be the name of a Mexican pro-wrestler, we’re not sure.

City officials are stunned by the sheer amount of money being spent by cable and phone companies to keep competition far, far away.  So apparently is the local media, which has taken to identifying the “grass roots” opposition right down to their job title and name of the lobbying firm they work for.

Take Times-Call, which helpfully discloses “Look Before We Leap” spokesman George Merritt is actually a senior strategist for Onsight Public Affairs of Denver.  That’s a real nice way to say “lobbying firm hired to develop social media strategies to snooker influence public opinion on behalf of corporate clients.”

You know you’re not dealing with a neighborhood group lobbying to reduce road speeds in the neighborhood or sign a petition for improved trash collection when you read Leap’s financial disclosure reports:

• $120,913.64 to mass communications firm SE2 of Denver for a variety of services, including mail pieces, consulting, two television buys and ad production and design.
• $70,500 to Rocky Mountain Voter Outreach of Denver for “canvass, management rent and miscellaneous associates.”
• $37,500 to OnSight Public Affairs for consulting.
• $22,000 to Drake Research and Strategy of Boulder for polling.
• $15,776.84 to Zata3 for phone work.
• $12,260 to Holland and Hart of Denver for legal expenses.
• $8,000 to EIS of Grand Junction for consulting.
• $4,334.65 to Campaign Products of the Rockies, of Denver, for a voter file, mailing lists, stickers and yard signs.
• $2,500 to Mark Stevens of Denver for research.
• $743.75 to Tim Thomas of Boulder for general campaign work.

The whole dog and pony show of Big Telecom money has bemused Longmont mayor Bryan Baum, who supports the 2A measure and believes the distortion campaign has gone way over the top.

“It doesn’t really matter at this stage of the game,” Baum told the newspaper. “It’s going to the electorate. The electorate will vote. And we will know on Tuesday how they voted – if they believe a $300,000 ad campaign, or if they believe the people they’ve entrusted their votes to.”

Some of that $300,000 has also gone into vilifying a real grass-roots effort in support of the Longmont fiber initiative — Longmont’s Future.  Comcast’s front group tried to raise questions about where that pro-fiber group got their backing and money.  The newspaper discovered Longmont’s Future isn’t backed by any French conglomerate or nefarious outside interest.  It’s the work of Jonathan Rice, who operates the website all by himself, spending a grand total of $353 to fight Comcast’s $300,000.

“Every single candidate for office and every incumbent, in every race, supports this measure,” says Rice. “But Comcast and its friends are more interested in profit than progress, and continue to run a smear campaign to spread misinformation and outright lies – they recently posted Mayor Baum’s name as an opponent of 2A when he is actually a vociferous supporter.”

Community Broadband Networks has compiled a series of articles detailing the project and helping to expose the so-called “grassroots” opponents.  We encourage readers to become better acquainted with the underhanded tactics community broadband opponents will use to stop anything that resembles competition.