Provo, Utah will be the third city in the country to get Google’s gigabit fiber network, in part because fiber infrastructure installed by a defunct provider that ran into money problems is now likely available for Google’s use.

The announcement came from Provo Mayor John Curtis this afternoon.

The choice of Provo was a surprise even to area residents, who speculated the “epic announcement” promised by Provo’s deputy mayor Corey Norman involved the opening of a new Popeye’s Chicken location or a second Red Lobster headed to town. Instead, it is only 1,000/1,000Mbps broadband for a likely price of $70 a month.

Provo’s existing fiber infrastructure, now owned by the local government, was likely a major reason in selecting the city of 115,000 for a Google-style upgrade.

The announcement came a little over a week after Google announced Austin, Tex. as the second stop for Google’s fiber upgrade. The surprise announcement may create waves in the telecom industry that earlier assumed Google was only interested in developing a demonstration project in Kansas City. It is now likely Google has bigger plans than that.

Communities that own, control, or manage their own fiber networks — institutional or available to the public — may be the next to be courted by Google.

Google will face off against Comcast Cable and CenturyLink (formerly Qwest) in the city.

[flv width=”480″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KTVX Salt Lake City Provo Getting Ready for Epic Announcement 4-16-13.mp4[/flv]

KTVX in Salt Lake City reports Provo is getting ready for “an epic announcement.” It turns out Google’s gigabit fiber network is coming to the city of 115,000.  (2 minutes)

Sarah Palin and her Big Gulp were seen on every Comcast channel in mid-Tennessee until technicians could force her off subscribers’ screens.

“If this had been an actual emergency, you would not be seeing Sarah Palin holding a Big Gulp while addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference convention….”

The former vice-presidential candidate got free extra publicity from Comcast cable systems serving middle Tennessee on Saturday night when a test of the emergency alert system went haywire and switched every Comcast channel to Gov. Palin’s speech given to a conservative political group.

Subscribers may have been amused until they discovered she was on every channel, and there was no way to get rid of her and back to regular programming until a Comcast technician could be called on to reset the system.

“The Comcast cable system serving middle Tennessee has experienced a problem with its emergency alert system,” Comcast spokeswoman Sara Joe Houghland said in an e-mailed statement. “Impacted customers had their equipment locked onto C-SPAN until Comcast personnel were able to resolve the problem shortly thereafter. The company is working diligently to find the root cause of the matter.”

Not diligently enough for irritated subscribers, some who missed post-season basketball games or network shows.

The Tennessean reports this is not the first time Comcast has had this problem:

• It happened again on Monday morning when a line of powerful storms moved through the area;
• A similar incident happened when a string of tornadoes hit the Nashville area in late January.

The problem seems to be the “end of warning/test”-signal not being processed properly by Comcast, which then keeps the warning active until the equipment is reset. In January, the newspaper reports the “end of message” disengage signal was missing altogether.

The Tennessee Association of Broadcasters have lost their patience and have asked the FCC to exclude local stations from being overridden by the EAS warning system.

Their argument is that any real emergency will likely be covered by local newsrooms well in advance of any weather or news messages dispatched through the EAS system.

A Comcast customer in Albany, Calif. got the cable company to pay her $290 towards the purchase of a new television after her cable box went out with a bang.

Kay Corlett’s television, plugged into the back of the box, was an unintended casualty.

Corlett had no trouble getting Comcast to replace her defunct cable box at no charge, but her television was another matter.

“I was very distressed because I had the feeling that they caused the problem so they should be taking care of it very quickly,” Corlett told KGO-TV News.

Corlett played phone tag with a supervisor assigned to investigate her claim and other Comcast employees proved unable to help.

Attitudes changed when KGO’s “7 On Your Side” consumer team intervened. With Comcast’s ongoing intransigence threatening to end up on the evening news, Comcast quickly asked their insurance company to cover the loss.

Corlett received a check for $290 which she put towards the purchase of a new and improved television.

Comcast called the incident extremely rare and recommended customers use surge protectors on their electronic equipment. It was unclear whether the cable box spontaneously failed or if a surge in a nearby power line caused the problem.

[flv width=”600″ height=”358″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KGO San Francisco Comcast buys woman TV after cable box exploded 11-26-12.flv[/flv]

KGO-TV in San Francisco helped Kay Corlett get compensation for the damaged television she says failed after her Comcast cable box exploded.  (3 minutes)

Comcast cable subscribers in Mattapoisett want less bundling and fewer fees.

They and everyone else.

This month, the 6,000 local residents of the small coastal town in southeastern Massachusetts got the opportunity to voice their concerns about Comcast Cable’s performance before the Board of Selectmen at an open town meeting contemplating the renewal of the cable operator’s five year franchise agreement.

The Sippican Week covered the proceedings:

Subscription plans and fees were the main concerns voiced by residents at the meeting.

“I’m just here to see if there is any way we can unbundle or offer some of the channels a la carte, rather than have to pay an exorbitant fee for the channels that are bundled at the different levels,” said Herb Webb.

“Instead of these large packages you have to buy, they could break them up into smaller sub-packages,” said Selectman Tyler Macallister. “Get some feedback from the town and develop packages specially for Mattapoisett.”

Resident Bob Spooner also questioned the $2 fee subscribers are charged for each cable box in addition to their main TV.

“What about the people who have four or five TVs,” said Spooner. “That’s another six or eight dollars a month.”

Macallister agreed, “I’m already paying for those channels, but now I have to pay $2 to get it.”

Selectmen chair Jordan Collyer tried to answer residents’ concerns, much like any local town or city official facing similar complaints would — with understanding and little else. After all, Comcast operates in a largely deregulated marketplace and need not fear threats from elected officials.

Local governments have no say over a cable company’s pricing for its most popular tiers of service, cannot dictate matters of channel bundling or equipment fees, and have little recourse beyond taking bids from other operators willing to serve when an incumbent company’s franchise goes unrenewed.

But that almost never happens. No major cable operator will offer to replace another major operator, meaning the chances that Time Warner Cable, Cox, Cablevision, or Bright House Networks would respond favorably to a request are effectively zero.

But parts of Mattapoisett are lucky enough to at least have a competitive option — Verizon FiOS, although that company also charges for set top equipment and bundles channels together. The local government has little control over Verizon’s service either.

One alternative open to residents and the local government is to support the construction of a community-owned provider that could, as much as programming contracts allow, respond more effectively to these kinds of concerns. Under current regulatory policies, that is about the only way Mattapoisett, and towns like it, can guarantee the presence of a responsive provider ready to meet the collective needs of the community.

Despite industry propaganda touting an “unlimited broadband future” (possibilities, that is, not an end to usage caps) and good sounding headlines about robust competition in the broadband market, the reality on the ground isn’t as rosy.

Americans looking for a better deal for broadband are largely stuck negotiating with the local cable company or putting up with less speed from the phone company to get a cheaper rate.

That is hardly the “success story” being pushed by the Mother of All Broadband Astroturf Front Groups, Broadband for America. BfA, backed by money from some of America’s largest telecom companies calls today’s marketplace “dynamic” and “rapidly changing.” For them, competition is not the problem, the way we define competition is.

Tell that to San Jose Mercury News columnist Troy Wolverton, whose dynamic and rapidly changing Comcast cable bill has now reached $144 a month, and threatens to go higher still when his two-year contract expires.

Wolverton is a case study of what an average American consumer goes through shopping around for broadband service. Despite assertions of a vibrant, competitive Internet access paradise from groups like Broadband for America, Wolverton found very little real competition on the menu, despite being in the high tech heart of Silicon Valley.

Valley residents can typically choose between AT&T and Comcast, if they have any choice at all. Neither company offers a great deal for consumers.

Comcast offers faster speeds at considerably higher prices that can be reduced somewhat by signing up for a costly triple-play service. AT&T’s prices are lower, but its service is slower and is based on a technology that in my experience is less reliable.

So it goes for millions of Americans who face the same dilemma: take a higher-priced package from the cable company or settle for less from the phone company. With the exception of Verizon FiOS, most large telephone companies still rely on basic DSL service to deliver broadband. AT&T’s U-verse and CenturyLink’s Prism are both fiber to the neighborhood services that deliver somewhat faster speeds than traditional DSL, but also have to share bandwidth with television and traditional phone service, leaving them topped out at around 25Mbps.

Wolverton could not believe his only choices were Comcast and AT&T, so he visited the California Broadband Availability Map, one of the state projects earnestly trying to identify the available choices consumers have for broadband access. Despite California’s vast size, it quickly became apparent that even companies like AT&T and Comcast largely don’t deliver broadband outside of cities and suburbs. Several smaller, lesser-known providers emerged from the map that were open to Wolverton, which he explored with less-than-satisfying results:

In addition to Comcast and AT&T, it listed Etheric Networks, which offers a wireless Internet service directed at home users that’s based on Wi-Fi technology, and MegaPath, which offers Internet access through a variety of wired technologies, including DSL.

After further research I found that neither of those companies was a legitimate option. MegaPath can’t deliver residential service to my house that’s faster than 1.5 megabits per second. Etheric, which focuses on business customers, offers a service level with speeds of up to 22 megabits per second, but it costs a cool $400 a month.

Other non-options for Wolverton included the highly-rated Sonic.net, which in his neighborhood is entirely dependent on AT&T’s landlines for its DSL service. That was a no-go, after Wolverton discovered he would be stuck with 3-6Mbps service. Clearwire also offers service in greater San Jose, but not at his home in Willow Glen.

That left him back with AT&T and Comcast.

But that is not really a problem in the eyes of industry defenders like Jeffrey Eisenach, managing director and principal at Navigant Economics and an adjunct professor at George Mason University Law School. Navigant is a “research group” that counts AT&T as one of its most important clients. The firm provides economic and financial analysis of legal and business issues cover for clients trying to sell their agenda. Navigant’s “experts have provided testimony in proceedings before District Courts, the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and numerous state Public Utilities Commissions.”

Eisenach goes all out for the broadband industry in his paper, “Theories of Broadband Competition,” which throws in everything but the kitchen sink to defend the status quo:

• The cost of broadband service is declining;
• The duopoly of cable and phone companies are still competing for customers and introducing new services;
• Competition can take the form of provider innovation (ie. providers compete by offering a better services, not lower prices);
• Wireless competition is accelerating, citing LightSquared and Clearwire as two conclusive examples of competition at work;
• The cost of service on a per-megabit basis has declined.
• Competition in today’s broadband market delivers ancillary benefits not immediately evident when only considering the customer’s point of view;

Eisenach’s pricing proof stopped in 2009, just as cable providers like Time Warner Cable began raising broadband prices. TWC’s Landel Hobbs to investors: “We have the ability to increase pricing around high-speed data.” (February, 2010)

Eisenach has appeared at various industry-sponsored evidence touting his views of broadband economics and competition that later turns up as headline news on Broadband for America’s website. But just as Wolverton’s initial optimism finding other choices for broadband faded with reality, so do Eisenach’s conclusions:

1. Eisenach’s evidence of broadband price declines stops in 2009, coincidentally just prior to the recent phenomena of cable broadband rate increases, which have accelerated in the past three years;
2. Competition still exists in urban and suburban markets, as long as phone companies attempt to stem the tide of landline losses, but it’s largely absent in rural markets and in decline in others where companies “reset” prices to match their cable competition. AT&T’s U-verse and Verizon’s FiOS both effectively ended their expansion, leaving large swaths of the country with “good enough for you” service. Cable operators have even teamed up with Verizon Wireless to cross-market their products — hardly evidence of a robustly competitive marketplace;
3. Innovation can take the form of services customers don’t actually want but are compelled to take because of bundled pricing or, worse, the decline in a-la-carte add-ons in favor of “one price for everything” models. Verizon Wireless set the stage for providers of all kinds to consider mandatory bundling for any product or service that can no longer deliver a suitable return on its own. For customers already taking every possible service or fastest speed, this pricing  may deliver lower prices at the outset, but for budget-focused consumers, compulsory packages or high prices on a-la-carte services assures them of a higher bill;
4. Eisenach’s examples of competition are a real mess. LightSquared is bankrupt and Clearwire has shown it cannot deliver an equivalent broadband experience for customers and throttles the speeds of those perceived to be using the service too much. Other wireless providers typically limit customer usage or cannot deliver speeds comparable to wired broadband;
5. While the cost per megabit may have declined in the past, cable providers are still raising prices, and as Google and community-owned providers have illustrated, delivering fast speeds should not cost customers nearly as much as providers continue to charge, with no incentive to cut prices in the absence of equally fast, competitive networks;
6. While broadband may open the door for additional economic benefits not immediately apparent, competitive broadband would further drive innovation and reduce pricing, delivering an even bigger bang for the buck.

Wolverton recognized taking a promotional offer from AT&T will temporarily deliver savings over what Comcast charges, but he would have to set his expectations lower if he switched:

I’m reluctant to switch to AT&T. [U-verse] Max Plus is the fastest level of service it offers at our house, but with a top speed of 18 megabits a second, it’s significantly slower than Comcast’s Blast. Speed matters to us, because my wife and I often share our Internet connection, and we frequently use it to transfer large files such as apps, videos, photos or songs to or from the Net.

[…] What’s more, as the FCC outlined in another recent report, Comcast does a better job of delivering the speeds it advertises than does AT&T.

What’s worse in my book is that AT&T’s U-verse’s Internet service is a version of DSL. It’s faster than regular DSL, because the copper wires in your house and neighborhood are connected to nearby high-speed fiber-optic cables. Even with that speed boost, though, I’m hesitant to go back to any kind of DSL service, because my wife and I suffered through years of unreliable DSL service from AT&T predecessor PacBell and then EarthLink, which piggybacked on AT&T’s lines.

Wolverton also objected to Comcast’s bundled pricing scheme, which delivers the best value to customers who sign up for broadband, television and phone service. Wolverton does not need a landline from AT&T or Comcast, and would like to drop the service. He’s not especially impressed with Comcast’s TV lineup (or pricing) either. But he noted if he switched to broadband-only service, Comcast would effectively penalize him with a broadband-only rate of $72 a month, exactly half the current cost of Comcast’s triple-play package.

In a later blog post, Wolverton confessed he liked Comcast’s broadband service and speeds, and with the carefully-crafted pricing the cable and phone companies have developed, he expected to remain a Comcast customer given his choices and pricing options, which are simply not enough.