Meigs County, Ohio

Connect Ohio, one of the many state chapters working with telecommunications industry-backed Connected Nation, has released its 2011 Technology Assessment about how the state is adopting broadband technology.

Despite celebrating improvements, large parts of rural Ohio still do not receive any kind of broadband service, especially from the state’s dominant provider AT&T, one of the companies that has traditionally backed Connected Nation.

The friendly relations these broadband groups maintain with their sponsors results in reports that strenuously avoid any direct criticism of providers for ignoring rural Ohio, particularly in the southeastern part of the state where broadband is especially difficult to obtain.

Connect Ohio’s findings, mostly provided by voluntary data from Internet Service Providers and respondents to various surveys, downplays rural Ohio’s broadband drought:

Statewide, 5% of Ohio residents report that broadband is not available where they live, 85% say with certainty that broadband is available, and 10% do not know whether broadband service is available.  By comparison, Connect Ohio’s provider-validated Broadband Service Inventory found that 1.7% of households do not have terrestrial fixed broadband service access.

The disparity in Connect Ohio’s numbers is especially apparent in rural Meigs County, located in southeastern Ohio.

“Geographically speaking, nearly two-thirds of Meigs County does not have easy access to affordable broadband,” Meigs County Economic Development Director Perry Varnadoe told The Daily Sentinel. “In terms of infrastructure, access to broadband is just as important as water and sewer service to businesses.”

Varnadoe thinks the few major providers that do offer service in the county are basically done expanding their service areas, and Varnadoe believes broadband adoption has reached a ceiling in Meigs County.

With much of the county bypassed for DSL or cable modem service, the only exception to this is fixed wireless service from New Era Broadband.  Unfortunately, it’s a costly alternative to traditional DSL.

New Era Broadband of Coolville is a Wireless ISP

New Era delivers up to 1.5Mbps service for $60 a month with a $200 installation fee and a two-year service agreement, and provides service in the vicinity of the community of Racine.

The company is still waiting on a $2.9 million grant to expand service to an additional 3,000 residents, mostly in the area of Five Points, which only has access to dial-up Internet.

Only about half the residents of Belmont, Jefferson, Monroe and Harrison counties have broadband connections at home, the study also found.  The Intelligencer/Wheeling News-Register placed most of the blame for that on residents not being particularly interested in the Internet, but service and cost are likely more important factors, as cable and DSL service is also spotty in those counties as well.  If there is a computer in the home, there is a demand for broadband service, especially in households where children find Internet access increasingly important to complete study work.

For most residents, it has become a waiting game to see who will deliver access, if anyone will.  In most of Ohio, customers look to the phone or cable company for access.  Rural Ohio lacks good cable broadband coverage, and DSL from the phone company first requires an interest in providing the service, and AT&T has not proven to be aggressive in rural communities in the state.

In fact, the phone company has been seeking approval to discontinue providing rural landline service at a time and date of its choosing.  If the landline goes, the chance for wired DSL goes with it.

With FairPoint Communications, customers often have to take the good with the bad.  The formerly bankrupt telephone company providing service in northern New England announced last week it had met its obligation to provide at least 90 percent of Vermont residents with a broadband option — typically 1-3Mbps DSL — and has trumpeted results showing 83 percent of Maine and 85 percent of New Hampshire is now served by FairPoint DSL, an improvement over former owner Verizon Communications, which routinely ignored rural areas in all three states.

But while winning the option to buy DSL service, thousands of customers found service lacking last week when a power cable in the Manchester Millyard area brought down both broadband and voicemail service across all three states.

In such circumstances, FairPoint’s backup generators are supposed to maintain service, but not in this case.

“I’m on dialup and went down for 10 (hours),” Wolfgang Milbrandt of Mason wrote in an e-mail to the Nashua Telegraph. “So why does FairPoint have so many eggs in the Manchester basket and is the backup power system that feeble?”

In Milford, Tom Schmidt lost his DSL broadband for about five hours last Monday, with it returning “around 6-ish.”

Company officials admitted they didn’t switch to the generator after the power failed, and customers noticed as voicemail and DSL service began to fail.  Service problems were ongoing even after power was restored after about 90 minutes, with some FairPoint customers reporting problems through the early part of last week.

FairPoint plans to press forward with DSL broadband expansion and has also prioritized build-out of its Ethernet-Over-Fiber service for cell phone towers, delivering fiber-fast connections to more than 800 tower sites to support 4G wireless broadband from major wireless carriers.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WGME Portland FairPoint customers lose service 7-11-11.flv[/flv]
WGME-TV in Portland, Maine covers FairPoint’s substantial broadband outage last week. (1 minute)

If this is a new way to attract customers, it’s sure stumping marketing experts who are questioning Hawaiian Telcom’s launch of its new cable TV service to compete with Time Warner Cable’s Oceanic Cable.  Nobody knows where exactly the service is available for sale, or for how much, and HawTel officials are not saying.

“If you call Hawaiian Telcom and ask them about the service, they essentially say ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you’ and they are the phone company!” says Oahu resident and Stop the Cap! reader Dan Ho, who first discovered HawTel was getting into the cable business from Stop the Cap!  “I realize we’re talking about another form of U-verse here, but that could still be a good thing for Hawaiians who cannot get Oceanic Cable and are stuck with HawTel’s awful DSL service.”

HawTel’s new fiber-copper hybrid network tested successfully for 250 mystery families who participated in a secretive beta-test.  The new service is expected to be sold mostly in a packaged bundle with extra high speed DSL (presumably up to 25Mbps), a central DVR terminal that can record up to four shows off the company’s digital cable TV package concurrently, and unlimited phone service.

Lester Chu, a HawTel spokesman, wouldn’t tell reporters the prices for the new service, instead offering to accept bills from competing providers and allowing HawTel to competitively bid for your business.  The company also wouldn’t say where the service was for sale, “for competitive reasons,” added Chu.

But HawTel has been licensed to provide service on the island of Oahu, and intends to rollout the service in contiguous service areas, so once the first new customers do go public, we’ll be able to ascertain where the service is slated to be delivered next.

HawTel says they will begin targeted advertising to alert residents when the service will be available.  That traditionally means direct mailers, door hanger tags, and door-to-door visits from sales teams hired by HawTel.

“It’s a crazy way to build excitement for the product, by keeping it a secret,” Ho believes. “More important, I suspect their pricing is not going to be very good if they require customers to bring in a current bill from a cable competitor in order to get a quote.”

Ho should know, he’s a marketing professional himself.

“I suspect the company wants face time with a customer to explain away the lack of visible savings by instead talking up the features they will offer that Oceanic Cable does not,” Ho suggests.

Among those features – the four-recordings-at-a-time DVR, the 250-channel all digital lineup, and the presence of NFL Network, a network Time Warner Cable systems have perennially refused to carry on their basic digital tier because of its cost.

[flv width=”480″ height=”290″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KITV Honolulu Hawaiian Telecom Bring Cable Competition To The Islands 7-7-11.mp4[/flv]

KITV-TV in Honolulu opened their newscast with the mysterious launch of Hawaiian Telcom’s new TV service.  (2 minutes)

[flv width=”360″ height=”290″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KHON Honolulu Hawaiian Telcom launches cable TV service in select location 7-7-11.mp4[/flv]

KHON-TV in Honolulu covers HawTel’s introduction of cable competition on the island of Oahu, even though company officials won’t say where it’s available or for how much.  (Loud Volume Warning!) (1 minute)

Discarded copper wire

Fixed line DSL service is at risk of obsolescence in Asia and the Pacific thanks to the widespread deployment of fiber optic cable.

According to a report from the industry analyst firm Ovum, fiber broadband will surpass DSL’s market lead in the Asia-Pacific region by 2014.

Study co-author Julie Kuntsler says Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Taiwan has already achieved more than 25 percent penetration of fiber to the home in those countries, and the People’s Republic of China’s accelerated fiber deployments mean that country is also on track to retire millions of miles of obsolete copper wiring in favor of fiber-delivered broadband.

With China’s enormous population, even today’s small percentage of Chinese citizens with access to fiber, currently 4 percent, still delivers a staggering number of customers now in excess of 74 million.

But fiber broadband growth is not just limited to those countries.  Fiber expansion projects are underway in  Australia, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam — growth that will deliver faster broadband expansion than found in North America, where most phone companies continue to rely on traditional DSL, especially in rural service areas.

Factors that help promote fiber broadband deployment include cohesive national broadband policies from governments that insist on more than incremental broadband expansion, financial incentives for providers who install fiber broadband for consumers, and a population that wants fiber-fast Internet speeds.

The Fiber to the Home Council – Asia-Pacific predicts that 129 million customers in the region will dump copper wire DSL for fiber to the premises by 2014. Cable broadband will also increase its market share.  Combined, the two technologies will shove traditional DSL to second place, as the technology is expected to see no market share growth for the foreseeable future.

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Frontier Communications’ DSL service delivers abysmal results for customers looking for quality time with Netflix.  For the second quarter running, the independent phone company’s ability to keep up with Netflix’s high quality video is about on par with a garden slug in a triathlon — yes, it may eventually reach the finish line, but you’ll be dead before it happens.  Even more embarrassing for Frontier, their service is occasionally beaten by Clearwire, a wireless ISP with a bandwidth throttler that can reduce your online experience to the painful days of dial-up if deemed to be using “too much.”

“Frontier sucks,” writes Stop the Cap! reader Doug in Charleston, W.V. “After they took over where Verizon fled, my ability to watch Netflix online became a source of endless frustration, so now I limit myself to mailing DVD’s back and forth.”

Remarkably, Charter Cable, which does poorly in customer satisfaction surveys, is again the runaway winner, followed by Comcast, the heavily usage-capped Cable One, Time Warner Cable, and Cox.  Verizon and AT&T only deliver middling performance.