AT&T and Verizon have forced some of their customers to abandon DSL service in favor of fiber upgrades that are sometimes not actually up and running or leave customers with no phone service during power outages.

Wall, N.J. resident James Hallock found his DSL service suddenly stopped working earlier this month, so he called Verizon Communications to get service restored.

“A Verizon tech explained that the service was no longer being offered,” Hallock said.

The termination of his DSL service came with no prior notification, complained Hallock, and Verizon told him his only way back to broadband with the phone company was a forced upgrade to a more costly FiOS package that included phone service that won’t work during power outages.

“In the last outage I saw, people were out of electricity for weeks,” Hallock told the Asbury Park Press in an email. “I don’t believe it’s true that we have to give up traditional phone service, but try spending hours on the phone with Verizon to find out.”

Verizon spokesman Lee J. Gierczynski told the newspaper, “We don’t discontinue a customer’s service without notification, so we’ll have to find out more about what specifically is going on with this customer.”

But Verizon’s CEO says the company is embarked on a plan to rid itself of its copper wire network, especially where FiOS fiber exists.

“Every place we have FiOS, we are going to kill the copper,” Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam told attendees of an investor conference last year. “We are going to just take it out of service. Areas that are more rural and more sparsely populated, we have got LTE built that will handle all of those services and so we are going to cut the copper off there.”

Jackie Patterson, another Verizon customer, found her DSL service suddenly stopped working on Christmas Day.

“Verizon said that they were discontinuing the service and we had to get FIOS Internet (no more DSL) and FiOS phone service,” Patterson said. “I liked the idea that we still had phone service during blackouts — like during Sandy — but now we won’t be able to have that with FIOS.”

AT&T has been doing its part to cut off DSL customers as well. One AT&T customer reported her AT&T DSL service was suddenly terminated without notice in October, 2012 because her neighborhood was scheduled to be upgraded to U-verse, AT&T’s fiber to the neighborhood service. Five months later, AT&T’s U-verse network is still not available, despite the “forcible upgrade,” and nobody at AT&T can tell when it ultimately will be.

“It’ll be resolved on February 22nd,” AT&T promised back in December — two months after Brie’s service initially went dead, she tells The Consumerist.

“A representative showed up today to complete our installation,” complained Brie. “Guess what he found? The lines outside aren’t working. And guess what he told me? He’d talk to his manager. He’d escalate it. He’d get engineering out. He didn’t know how to fix it. He couldn’t tell me when or how or what needed to be done and no timetable as to when the work would be complete.”

Unfortunately for Brie, switching to the local cable company isn’t an option – it doesn’t offer service to her home.

Atlantic Canada provider Eastlink still offer unlimited access for speeds of 20Mbps or slower, but the fastest speeds now come with usage caps and overlimit fees, as depicted on this sample invoice.

While broadband pricing in the United States depends primarily on whether one lives in a rural or urban area, in Canada, which province you live in makes all the difference.

Canadian broadband pricing varies wildly across different provinces. If you live in northern Canada, particularly in Nunavut or the Yukon, Internet access is slow and prohibitively expensive, assuming you can buy it at any price. Customers in Atlantic provinces including Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Labrador and Newfoundland pay the next highest prices in the country, often exceeding $60 a month. But Atlantic Canadians often find unlimited use, fiber optic-based plans are often part of the deal. In the west, fervent competition between dominant cable operator Shaw and telephone company Telus has given residents in British Columbia and Alberta more generous usage allowances, faster speeds, and lower pricing.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports the most significant gouging takes place in the Canada’s two largest provinces: Ontario and Québec, where Bell (BCE) competes with three dominant cable operators: Rogers and Cogeco (Ontario) and Vidéotron and Cogeco (Québec). Critics contend that “competition” has been more in name-only over the last several years, as prices have risen and usage allowances have not kept up.

“These disparities are influenced by the competition,” Catherine Middleton, a professor at the University of Ryerson’s Ted Rogers School of Management told CBC News. “For example, Bell competes against Rogers in Ontario, but against Vidéotron in Quebec, with different plans for different markets.”

(Coincidentally, in 2007 the University of Ryerson accepted a gift of $15 million from the late Ted Rogers, founder of Rogers Communications, which won him naming rights for the Ted Rogers School of Management.)

Rogers and Cogeco charge Ontario residents more money for less access. Vidéotron treats their customers in Québec somewhat better, so Bell has plans to match.

“Ontario gets the worst when it comes to competitiveness,” Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa and Canada Research Chair in Internet and e-commerce law told CBC News. “It tends to be the least competitive when it comes to getting bang for your buck.”

Prices start to moderate in the prairie regions. SaskTel and MTS Allstream are the largest providers in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Both offer customers unlimited service plans, something of a shock to those further east. But unless you live in a larger city where the two companies are upgrading to faster fiber-based networks, DSL at speeds averaging 5Mbps is the most widely available service.

Nearing the Canadian Rockies, usage-restricted plans are a reality once again. In Alberta and British Columbia, Telus and Shaw competition means more generous usage allowances, and Telus does not currently enforce their usage limits. Shaw raised its own usage limits significantly beyond what a customer would find from Rogers back east. Prices are often lower as well.

The CBC notes unlimited broadband from cable operators has become a rarity. Eastlink, which provides service in Atlantic Canada, has phased out unlimited access on plans above 20Mbps. Rogers has a temporary “unlimited use” offer for customers paying for its premium-priced 150Mbps plan, and only until March 31.

The most significant recent change for eastern Canada was Bell’s decision to offer an unlimited-use “add-on” for $10 extra a month for Bell customers in Québec and Ontario who choose at least three Bell services (broadband, television, phone, satellite, or wireless service). Rogers has matched that offer for its own triple-play customers. Those who only want broadband service from either provider will pay three times more for unlimited access — an extra $30 a month.

The mainstream Canadian press often ignores third party alternative providers that offer an escape from usage-capped Internet access.

But there are other alternatives, often ignored by the mainstream media.

A growing number of third-party independent providers buy wholesale access from large Canadian networks and sell their own Internet plans, often with no usage limits. TekSavvy, Distributel, Acanac, among many others, provide Canadians with DSL and cable broadband at prices typically lower than one would find dealing with Bell, Rogers, Shaw, or other providers directly. Some discount plans still include usage caps, but those limits are often far more generous than what the phone or cable company provides, and unlimited access is also available in most cases.

One website allows consumers to comparison-shop 350 different providers across Canada. Despite the growing number of options, the majority of Canadians still buy Internet access from their phone or cable company and live under a regime of usage caps and high prices, if only because they do not realize there are alternatives.

Usage caps have cost Canadian broadband consumers both time watching usage meters and money paying overlimit penalties. But the cost to innovation is now only being measured. While online video has become so popular in the United States it now constitutes the largest percentage of traffic on broadband networks during prime time, usage limits have kept the online video revolution from fully taking hold in Canada. That is a useful competition-busting fringe benefit for large telecom companies in Canada, which own cable networks, cable systems, broadcast networks, and even satellite providers.

Netflix’s chief content officer called Canadian broadband pricing “almost a human rights violation.” The online video provider was forced to introduce tools to let Canadians degrade the quality of their online video experience to avoid blowing past monthly usage allowances.

Windstream is reportedly behind the latest effort to ban community broadband networks in Georgia.

Rural communities across Georgia are upset about a new piece of legislation ghost-written by Windstream Communications that would keep broadband a strictly private affair in the Peach State.

House Bill 282, introduced by Rep. Mark Hamilton (R-Cumming) would prohibit publicly owned broadband networks from being built anywhere an incumbent provider delivers at least 1.5Mbps “broadband” in the state.

Sources familiar with the legislation say Windstream, a phone company primarily serving smaller communities, is the primary force behind the bill now before a legislative committee. When news of the bill came to light earlier this week, consumers and local communities began to push back with state legislators. A planned hearing on the bill has been temporarily pushed back until next week.

The legislation would effectively tie the hands of municipalities that have waited more than a decade for AT&T, Windstream, CenturyLink and other phone companies to bring DSL broadband to rural Georgia.

While not proposing a total ban on public broadband, the bill’s requirement that service be denied to a customer in a “census block” where at least one home can receive slow speed DSL makes building such networks nearly impossible.

The Georgia Municipal Association notes local governments in small towns and cities, already strapped for resources, would have to prove to the Georgia Public Service Commission that each census block a community wants to serve has no existing broadband service (census blocks are the smallest geographic area the Census Bureau uses for data collection.)

There are 291,086 census blocks in Georgia, making such a review difficult at best.

For communities that have already built public broadband networks, the bill brings more bad news. Under its terms, existing networks would not be allowed to expand anywhere any other provider delivers even a modicum of “high speed” 1.5Mbps Internet access. With many community networks built out in stages to minimize initial financial outlays, H.B. 282 could ruin the economic cost recovery models under which existing networks were financed and built, potentially risking bondholders.

Rep. Hamilton does not seem to care about them or whether rural Georgia gets Internet access or not. He answers to a higher calling: Windstream’s lobbyists.

The final report of Gov. Nathan Deal’s Competitive Initiative found rural Georgia at a disadvantage simply because many communities cannot get broadband service. Several regions in Georgia called on Deal’s office to help improve inadequate broadband infrastructure.

Instead, Hamilton’s bill would turn over Georgia’s broadband needs to phone company “Return on Investment” formulas that guarantee large sections of rural Georgia will remain unserved, with other areas left underserved. The bill itself defines suitable broadband at just 1.5Mbps, deemed inadequate by the Federal Communications Commission for today’s broadband user.

The bill’s defenders told The Telegraph the bill was designed to “close off an opportunity for government waste.” The bill also closes off an opportunity for better broadband and competition in Georgia.

“The fundamental question is rather simple: does Georgia want local leaders to determine the economic and investment strategies for their communities or do we want those decisions to be made solely on the business plans of companies based outside of the state,” asked the Georgia Municipal Association.

Georgia residents can contact the House Energy, Utilities & Telecommunications Subcommittee members and tell them to reject H.B. 282. Local municipalities seeking further information about this legislation should contact the Institute for Local Self-Reliance for additional information and guidance.

The mouthpiece of Big Telecom.

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation has looked and looked, and just does not see America’s broadband problems aptly described by industry critics including Susan Crawford, David Cay Johnston and Tim Wu. As far as the ITIF is concerned Americans have little to complain about with respect to broadband availability, speeds or pricing.

That finding is part of a new research paper, “The Whole Picture: Where America’s Broadband Networks Really Stand,” authored by Richard Bennett, Luke Stewart, and Robert Atkinson.

The report sniffs at critics complaining about uncompetitive, high-priced service, dismissing them as misguided “holders of a particular ideology or economic doctrine, which is Neo-Keynesian, populist economic thinking in this instance.”

Bennett, Stewart, and Atkinson, who have all penned pro-industry reports for years, prove another economic doctrine: the free market for industry bought-and-paid-for-“research” is alive and well.

The summary finding of the report:

Taking the whole picture into account, this report finds that the United States has made rapid progress in broadband deployment, performance, and price, as well as adoption when measured as computer-owning households who subscribe to broadband. Considering the high cost of operating and upgrading broadband networks in a largely suburban nation, the prices Americans pay for broadband services are reasonable and the performance of our networks is better than in all but a handful of nations that have densely populated urban areas and have used government subsidies to leap-frog several generations of technology ahead of where the market would go on its own in response to changing consumer demands.

Although the report is extensively footnoted to bestow credibility, once a reader begins to check out those footnotes, trouble looms:

1. Some footnotes lead the reader to business or Wall Street media reports, which can favor an industry point of view or extensively quote from executives and insiders;
2. Several certain critical assertions include footnotes that link only to the home page of the source, making it impossible to find the exact source material used;
3. Many footnotes come from earlier articles, position papers, and statements from the authors or others affiliated with the ITIF — hardly independent sources of information.

Bought and paid for research.

ITIF’s report is riddled with customized benchmarks the ITIF appears to have invented itself. Ars Technica caught one in the executive summary and questioned the relevance of measuring broadband adoption among “computer-owning households” at a time when an increasing number of Americans use broadband for video streaming on televisions, use smartphones, or rely on tablets for access.

We also noted the authors making several assertions without facts in evidence to support them. Among them is the unsupported notion that “the high cost of operating and upgrading broadband networks in a largely suburban nation” makes today’s broadband pricing understandable and fair.

In fact, the most significant costs borne by cable operators came during the early years of their initial construction — one, even two decades before broadband over cable was envisioned. When cable Internet service was introduced, it was praised for its relatively inexpensive start-up costs and its ability to deliver ancillary, unregulated revenue for cable operators. Those cable networks over which broadband is delivered have been paid off for years.

The authors avoid the actual financial reports of the largest phone and cable companies in their study, because as public shareholder-owned companies, they are obligated to disclose reality. Those financial reports show a consistent drop in capital expenses and infrastructure investment and a major increase in revenue and profits from broadband service. Cable industry executives have repeatedly asserted the reason they raise broadband prices is not because the costs to run their networks are very high, but rather because “they can.”

From there, Bennett, Stewart, and Atkinson play endless rounds of Statistics Scrabble.

Claim: America enjoys robust competition for broadband.

Phone Company

Fact: The cable industry has declared itself the victor for delivering high-speed broadband in the United States. DSL has long since given up competing on speed, and even AT&T’s hybrid fiber-copper U-verse platform is rapidly losing ground in the broadband speed race. Wireless and satellite plans are almost all slower and routinely cap usage, often to levels of just a few gigabytes per month.

The cable industry also won the right to keep its network to itself, not allowing third-party wholesalers on-demand access to resell broadband over those networks. Phone companies have been able to charge discriminatory wholesale pricing to access their networks, and only for certain types of connections.

Abroad, most networks are open to third parties on non-discriminatory terms. In places like the United Kingdom, customers have their choice of ISPs available over a traditional BT DSL line. In Asia, public subsidies and incentives helped push providers to construct fiber to the premises networks, but those networks are open access, helping spur competition and lower prices.

Domestically Time Warner Cable permits competitors like Earthlink on its network on a voluntary basis, but unsurprisingly Earthlink charges the same or higher prices for service that Time Warner charges once a six month promotion ends. That represents “competition” in name-only.

Claim: Most speed-test-based research rankings on broadband speeds around the world are wrong.

Cable Company

Fact: ITIF at one point makes the unfounded assertion that since many people only test their broadband speed when something seems wrong with their connection, most speed-test-sourced “actual speed” data is not very useful because there often is something wrong with a broadband connection when testing it, resulting in flawed data. This ‘picked out of the sky’ claim is one of the primary arguments ITIF makes about why broadband rankings (produced by those other than themselves) are irrelevant.

ITIF’s press release about its report makes the completely unsubstantiated assertion that “the average network rate of all broadband connections in the United States was 29.6Mbps in the third quarter of 2012; in the same period, we ranked seventh in the world and sixth in the OECD in the percentage of users with performance faster than 10Mbps.”

DSL customers may find a statistic rating America’s broadband speeds as better than one might expect to be less than useful when it only counts broadband connections faster than the average DSL user can buy themselves.

This cherry-picking may help the ITIF’s arguments look more credible, but it does nothing to improve your broadband speeds at home or at work.

Claim: Broadband provider profits average less than 2% annually.

Fact: Another clever statistic (poorly sourced as ‘from the home page of Bloomberg.com’ — check back with us when you find the original article yourself) that fails to tell the whole story.

We aren’t THAT profitable, really.

First, ITIF defines net profits specifically as “simply the difference between revenue and expenses.” But that definition may not account for a range of corporate accounting activities which can diminish net profits but still let the company walk away with high fives from Wall Street. Share buybacks or dividend payouts, acquisitions, costs and expenses from other divisions not related to broadband, etc., can all affect the bottom line and mask the enormous earnings and profit potential of American broadband.

Take Time Warner Cable, which has a 95 percent gross margin selling broadband. Broadband service is just one of three primary services sold by the cable operator. Broadband does not suffer from landline losses in the phone business or from escalating TV programming expenses. Broadband is clearly the most profitable service in Time Warner’s product arsenal because it occupies only a small part of the company’s wired infrastructure. Supplying broadband service also costs Time Warner relatively little money as a percentage of their earnings and has helped offset revenue loss from the television side of the business. Bandwidth costs have also declined year after year. Infrastructure upgrades are more than covered by pricing that has begun to creep up over the last few years. In effect, broadband earnings are covering for other products that are not selling as well.

ITIF’s claim that supplying broadband is costly and that current rates are justified just isn’t true.

Claim: Europe is behind the United States in broadband.

Fact: The one legacy network that both Europeans and Americans share in common is the copper wire basic telephone service. From there, telecommunications service diverged.

North Americans embraced cable television while much of western Europe (especially the UK) preferred direct-to-home satellite service. That difference set the stage for some significant broadband disparity. Cable broadband technology has proved more robust and reliable than DSL service. Phone companies that rely on basic DSL are falling behind in broadband speeds. Investment to bring fiber online is the only way these phone companies can stay competitive with cable broadband. Some countries with particularly decrepit telephone networks, especially those left over from the Communist era in eastern Europe, are being scrapped in favor of fiber to the home service. Many western European countries are incrementally introducing fiber to the cabinet or neighborhood service, which leaves the last mile copper phone wire connection in place.

This is why speeds in many eastern European countries and the Baltic states with full fiber networks are so high. Advanced forms of DSL are more common further west, using technologies like VDSL2+. But DOCSIS 3 cable upgrades (and those to follow) continue to leapfrog over telephone company DSL advancements. Speed disparity is often the result of fewer cable systems in Europe as well as the amount of fiber optics replacing basic telephone service infrastructure.

Despite that, many Europeans pay less, particularly for faster service, than we do. Plus, fiber optic upgrades are within the foreseeable future in many European countries. In the United States, fiber deployments are now crawling or stalled in areas served by AT&T and Verizon. Neither company shows much interest in spending money on further wired upgrades and no competitive pressure is forcing them to, especially as both phone companies increasingly turn attention to their wireless divisions for most of their earnings.

The kind of research produced by the ITIF is tainted as long as they don’t reveal who is paying for these research reports. As Stop the Cap! readers have learned well, following corporate money usually helps expose the real agenda of these so-called “think tanks,” which are created to distort reality and quietly echo the agenda of their paymasters with a veneer of independence and credibility.

Residents in mountainous western North Carolina have been frustrated by broadband availability maps from the Federal Communications Commission that suggest broadband service is plentiful and fast. But on the ground, customers trying to sign up for Internet access the FCC says is readily available is anything but.

The FCC’s National Broadband Map has been repeatedly criticized by broadband advocates for relying on voluntary data supplied by Internet Service Providers — data that has often proved incomplete, exaggerated, or just plain inaccurate.

Wally Bowen, executive director of Asheville’s Mountain Area Information Network (MAIN), wants to show the FCC its broadband map is out of touch with the real world. MAIN has announced a new website that will let western North Carolina residents test and report the real broadband speeds they are getting from providers to the FCC. If no broadband service is available at all, residents can report that as well.

“Based on our experience, we believe the FCC is underestimating the scope of this problem,” said Bowen, an advocate for Internet access in rural areas. “The FCC’s estimate is based primarily on data provided by the cable and telephone companies.”

With a growing amount of federal money available to wire unserved areas, phone and cable companies may have a vested interest exaggerating their coverage areas and Internet speeds to stop would-be competitors from entering their territories and building new networks. New providers could find a very enthusiastic customer base of more than 48,000 aggravated residents in 16 counties in western North Carolina that have no broadband options at all.

“This new website empowers citizens to compare their real-life experience with the FCC data, but more importantly, it dissects the broadband problem, provides ideas for solving it, and shows citizens how to add their voices to the policy debate,” said Bowen.

Bowen believes profit-minded private companies are unlikely to ever be enthusiastic about wiring rural communities when larger profits can be earned in larger cities.

“Solving this problem isn’t rocket science,” said Bowen. “We’ve seen this movie before. Seventy-five years ago, for-profit electric utilities left rural America in the dark, so Congress passed the Rural Electrification Act and allowed local communities to solve the problem themselves by creating nonprofit electric cooperatives.”

But federal funds are off-limits if another provider already claims to offer service in an area, no matter how poorly they deliver it. Many large cable and phone companies have also worked to ban community-owned broadband networks from ever getting off the ground with the passage of corporate-sponsored bills passed by state legislatures. That leaves rural residents waiting endlessly for the telephone company to get around to providing some level of broadband service.

Problems with Frontier Communications’ DSL in the region tells the story:

Paul Manogue lives in an area considered “served” by Frontier Communications. The phone company sold him 3Mbps service, but after installation, Manogue found Frontier locked down his DSL modem to 1.5Mbps, the fastest speed his telephone line could comfortably handle. Today, Manogue pays $60.98 for 1.5Mbps service that has since further degraded. Today his top speed is 1Mbps or less, even though his monthly bill remains the same. His broadband connection does not come close to the 4/1Mbps minimum speed the FCC expects from today’s rural broadband networks.

“We have been bluntly told [by Frontier] that the level of service we receive is what we pay for,” Manogue told MAIN. Manogue has no other options.

Bill Duffell of Burningtown thinks Frontier broke its promise to deliver broadband where Verizon, his old provider, refused. He is still waiting, along with a number of other residents, for even basic DSL.

“Frontier promised to bring high-speed Internet access to remote areas of western North Carolina within three years,” he said. “They have not done this and now tell me there are no plans to bring high-speed Internet to the area. Internet access via satellite costs me $129.99 per month with Exede/WildBlue and is weather dependent.”

Allen in Madison County says Frontier delivered tolerable service until six months ago, when his speeds began to drop.

“The breaking point was when I was going to upload a 30 minutes video and found out it was going to take over 13 hours to upload.” Allen says. “I called Frontier and they [told me I was] ‘in a high volume area.'”

Anyone considering launching a competitive broadband service to improve the online experience of Manogue, Duffell, Allen and others will not qualify for any federal assistance because Frontier, the incumbent provider, already provides DSL broadband. Frontier also receives significant aid from the Connect America Fund — up to $775 to extend broadband to each individual home or business it earlier deemed unprofitable to serve. Each additional connection risks slowing down every other connection in the immediate area if Frontier does not maintain regular upgrades.

Two of the largest phone companies in the country — AT&T and Verizon — have both refused CAF money altogether. AT&T sees a bigger financial opportunity disbanding their wired telecommunications networks in rural America and forcing customers to switch to more costly (and much more profitable) wireless data services.

“The refusal of Connect America funding by the big carriers, plus their plans to abandon their wired networks in rural areas, is a policy earthquake that’s been ignored by corporate media,” Bowen said.