Google today launched a new website which could become a major advocacy center to promote fiber broadband service across America.
Google Fiber for Communities opened with a thank you message for the enormous number of submissions it received for its experimental 1Gbps fiber broadband network. Google expects to announce the winning application(s) for its experimental network sometime this year.
But in the meantime, Google also acknowledges what big telecom companies keep trying to downplay and dismiss — “people across the country are hungry for better and faster broadband access.” That is… better and faster service than their current provider is willing to supply.
The new website provides hints as to its greater purpose:
The name itself. Notice “communities” is plural.
The site intends to mobilize for fiber networks across the country, starting with lobbying for pending federal legislation that would require installation of fiber conduit as part of federal transportation projects.
The site’s links heavily promotes municipal broadband advocates and organizations, including the National Association of Counties, the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors, the Fiber to the Home Council, the Baller Herbst Community Broadband Page, the Broadband Properties Municipal Fiber Portal, and Muni Networks. Outside of the Fiber to the Home Council, which has some big telecom company members and isn’t above advocating for their interests, the rest of the list suggests Google advocates that communities do for themselves what their local phone and cable companies won’t do — deliver world class broadband service at non-duopoly prices.
Stop the Cap! shares many of these goals with Google, as we are strong advocates for community fiber-based broadband, and believe additional competition is highly needed in America’s broadband marketplace to break up an anti-consumer duopoly that delivers slow broadband service (or none at all) at the highest prices companies can get away with. Thanks to Stop the Cap! reader Jerry here in Rochester for sending word.
A telecom industry front group acknowledged today American broadband in the last decade has not won any awards for speed or price, but if you just give the industry ten more years of deregulation, there will be more competition than ever to change that.
For the Internet Innovation Alliance’s Bruce Mehlman, the cable and phone companies have done a fine job bringing broadband to Americans, especially considering the industry is only ten years old. If you leave things the way they are today, the next decade will bring even more competition from phone and cable companies, he promises.
But consumer groups wonder exactly how a duopoly will ever deliver world class service in the next ten years when it has spent the last ten hiking prices on slow speed broadband and now wants to limit or throttle usage.
This afternoon, National Public Radio’s All Things Considered tried to referee the broadband debate, pondering whether America is a world leader in broadband or has just fallen behind Estonia. Reporter Joel Rose was perplexed to find two widely diverging attitudes about broadband, each with their set of numbers to prove their case.
On one side, consumers and public interest groups like Consumers Union and Free Press who believe deregulation and industry consolidation has created a stagnant broadband duopoly that only innovates how it can get away with charging even higher prices.
On the other, the phone and cable companies, the groups they finance, and their friends on Capitol Hill who believe there isn’t a broadband problem in the United States to begin with and government oversight would ruin a good thing.
Compared with other nations, the United States has continued to see its standing fall in broadband rankings measuring speed, price, adoption rates, and quality. When East European countries and former Soviet Republics now routinely deliver better broadband service than America’s cable and telephone companies, that story writes itself. Embarrassed industry defenders prefer to confine discussion of America’s broadband success story inside the U.S. borders, discounting comparisons with other countries around the world.
For Rep. Joe “I Apologize to BP” Barton (R-Texas), it’s even more simple than that. Even questioning the free market is downright silly.
“As everybody knows, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it,” Barton said at a March congressional hearing to discuss broadband matters. “And y’all are trying to fix something that in most cases isn’t broke. Ninety-five percent of America has broadband.”
Industry-financed astroturf and sock puppet groups readily agree, and dismiss industry critics.
Bruce Mehlman, co-chair of the industry-supported Internet Innovation Alliance, which opposes more regulation, acknowledges that the story of broadband in the U.S. is a classic glass-half-full, glass-half-empty predicament. Still, he says he thinks broadband adoption in the U.S. is going pretty well considering broadband has only been available for 10 years.
“For the optimist, you’d say within a decade we’ve seen greater broadband deployment than you saw for cell phones, than for cable TV, than for personal computers,” Mehlman says. “It’s one of the great technology success stories in history.”
Mehlman says Americans don’t need more government intervention to make broadband faster and cheaper. “We haven’t yet and that’s in the first decade,” he says. “In the second decade, the marketplace is only going to be that much more competitive.”
Kelsey
The problems go further than that, however.
Derek Turner, research director for the public interest group Free Press, told NPR broadband rankings tell an important story. “For the providers to try to say that there’s no problem, it’s merely just a smoke screen,” he says.
Providers would prefer to measure their performance against each other instead of comparing themselves with foreign providers now routinely providing better, faster, and cheaper service than what American consumers can find. They have to, if only because of those pesky international rankings illustrating a wired United States in decline.
Joel Kelsey at Consumers Union tells NPR there is an even bigger question here — what role broadband plays in our lives.
Because 96 percent of Americans can only get broadband from a duopoly — the phone or cable company, the only people truly singing the praises of today’s broadband marketplace are the providers themselves and their shareholders. Consumers see a bigger problem — high prices, and particularly for rural consumers, slow speeds.
“If you talk to [the] industry,” Kelsey says, “they think of broadband as a private commercial service akin to pay TV or cable TV.”
On the other hand, Kelsey says, “There’s a lot of folks who think it is an essential input into this nation’s economy — an essential infrastructure question.”
National Public Radio reporter Joel Rose dived into the battle over broadband numbers between consumer groups and industry representatives. Is America’s broadband glass half-full or half-empty? (June 28, 2010) (4 minutes)
You must remain on this page to hear the clip, or you can download the clip and listen later.
Walt Mossberg (left) discusses the current state of American broadband with FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski (right)
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowki told attendees at the D: All Things Digital conference America scores dead last in a study measuring the rate of change in broadband innovation. American broadband is stuck in neutral while every other ranked nation is moving forward faster in understanding the importance of deploying fast, reliable, and universal broadband. Genachowski directly ties broadband to improving local economies, propelling growth in jobs, and improving education and health care.
Unfortunately the American duopoly most Americans cope with maintains a stranglehold on efforts to bring America literally up to speed with competing nations. Worse, there is no end in sight as long as America relies entirely on incumbent providers to get the job done.
Americans pay some of the highest prices in the world for mediocre broadband, and it’s only getting worse with the introduction of usage limiting schemes like data caps and so-called consumption billing.
Genachowski is attempting to facilitate improved broadband across the United States, but is hampered by private industry undermining the FCC’s authority to help push improvements forward. Recent industry-driven court challenges to the FCC’s authority have led to the agency seeking a different path to regain its regulatory footing.
The FCC chairman sees the biggest challenges coming in wireless broadband, where a spectrum shortage is limiting potential capacity and available bandwidth. Genachowski seeks an accommodation with the nation’s television stations to relinquish UHF spectrum where possible to bolster wireless networks.
Conference host Walt Mossberg challenged Genachowski on why more isn’t getting done and why accepting the current state of the marketplace is acceptable. He also criticized providers for charging high prices for slow service and attacked Comcast for its set top box, claiming if there was an open market for these things, no one would buy it, that it would be the worst thing on the shelf.
[flv width=”512″ height=”308″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/All Things Digital Genachowski 6-2-10.flv[/flv]
Excerpts from FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s visit with Walt Mossberg at the June 2nd D: All Things Digital conference. (6 minutes)
The CTIA is the wireless industry's lobbying group
While the phone and cable companies attempt to fight off broadband reclassification at the FCC, the wireless industry has been pulling its own weight in an effort to convince legislators everything is wonderful in wireless, and no consumer protection regulations are necessary.
The CTIA, the wireless lobbying group, has been blogging on overdrive lately, trying to sell the idea Americans are already soaking in broadband options and competition that keeps prices low and innovation high. Why regulate an industry that isn’t broken?
If only it were true.
While Americans in larger communities do have choices for broadband, for most it’s a matter of picking the phone or cable company for service. That’s called a duopoly. In the wireless marketplace, it’s hardly much better. The nation’s largest wireless phone companies, AT&T and Verizon, have essentially colluded with near-identical pricing and service plan requirements that demand customers add mandatory “options” like data plan add-ons that raise wireless bills higher than ever.
The smaller providers eke out an existence mildly competing over pricing, but with their inherent coverage limitations or history of providing poor customer service, many consumers won’t consider doing business with them. Relying on most wireless providers for broadband threatens the kind of huge bills you see on TV news reports, as carriers limit consumption to 5GB per month, and most charge enormous overlimit fees to customers exceeding the limit.
The Federal Communications Commission recently found one in every six Americans suffer “bill shock” syndrome — that all-too-familiar panicky feeling when you open a cell phone bill and discover an extra zero on the end of the dollar amount due. More than a third of people who experienced bill shock said their bills jumped by at least $50 — around 23 percent said the increase was $100 or more.
Settles
That amounts to more than 30 million Americans, but the CTIA’s “see no evil, hear no evil” blog carries on claiming life is good for wireless consumers. Besides, writes Steve Largent, president of the CTIA, consumers who took their complaints to the Better Business Bureau had them resolved 97.4 percent of the time.
Of course, that begs the question why consumers had to approach the BBB about their poor service experience in the first place.
I’m not the only one asking questions. Craig Settles, an industry analyst, co-administrator of Communities United for Broadband and author of the report “Fighting the Next Good Fight: Bringing True Broadband to Your Community,” is also pondering the industry campaign to block broadband reform.
Settles penned a piece in today’s Roll Call exposing the fallacies from the industry’s PR machine:
The state of broadband — for consumers, businesses and nonprofits — isn’t the rosy picture the industry powerhouses attempt to paint. Ignoring this reality can lead to bad policy decisions and bad legislation.
[…]
Most states may technically have 60 to 80 Internet access providers. However, in practically every state, the combined statewide market share of all but the top five or six providers might total 5 percent, if you’re lucky. In at least half of the states, data show the combined market share of the top two providers ranges from 70 percent up to 95 percent. That represents near or actual duopolies, most often with one wireless and one cable provider as the undynamic duo.
Life at the local level, which is where your true subscriber options exist, further challenges the industry’s claim that people have choices. If you count “having choices” as living in an area where several companies advertise broadband service, or consider dial-up speed as broadband, OK.
But go door to door in rural counties and small towns. The reality you often find is one major carrier providing fair to poor service to some and no service to the rest, plus some small local providers with 2 percent or 3 percent market share struggling to provide decent service in the face of endless efforts to smite them from the planet. If you’re in one of the few states with four or five providers that each have statewide market share of 8 percent to 15 percent, it’s likely each provider is concentrated in a portion of the state, creating a local reality that’s worse than state statistics.
Settles notes that claims of “billions invested” only invites more questions about what carriers are doing with all that money. Settles questions whether its wise to brag about spending $20 billion on infrastructure costs when municipal broadband projects in states like North Carolina, with IT staffs of fewer than 12, have built superior networks delivering 10 times the speed of its competitors.
The CTIA loves to tout the innovation wireless providers bring to customers, but in many cases they are claiming credit (and often getting a cut in the action) for someone else’s innovation, especially from the third-party apps market.
Too often the real innovations in wireless broadband have often come in spite of carriers that have sought to block, control, or “manage” someone else’s vision.
[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Freedom CTIA Ad Spot 5-2010.flv[/flv]
Watch as the CTIA wireless lobby tries to sell Americans on wireless innovation, much of which didn’t come from wireless companies at all. (1 minute)
Rep. Dan Maffei (D-New York) has begun to worry broadband consumers in his western and central New York district.
In April 2009, when Time Warner Cable’s announced Internet Overcharging experiment was upsetting customers in Rochester, Maffei claimed he was concerned about limiting broadband usage for customers in the area. But when former Rep. Eric Massa introduced legislation to ban unjustified usage caps and consumption billing, Maffei told his constituents he wasn’t interested in Massa’s approach:
Thank you for contacting me regarding H.R. 2902, the Broadband Internet Fairness Act. I appreciate hearing from you and welcome the opportunity to respond. The Broadband Internet Fairness Act was introduced by Representative Eric Massa (NY-29) on June 16, 2009, and was referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce. The bill would authorize the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to review volume usage service plans of major broadband internet service providers to ensure that such plans are fairly based on cost.
When Time Warner Cable announced in April that Rochester would be used as a test market for charging Internet users based upon consumption usage, I, along with Representative Massa, opposed this policy. We helped persuade Time Warner to abandon the plan in the area. At that time, Representative Massa also introduced the Broadband Internet Fairness Act.
Other utilities, like water or electricity, charge customers based on usage, but Internet users have traditionally been charged a flat fee for unlimited access to the web. The Broadband Internet Fairness Act would require Internet Service Providers that want to implement usage-based pricing plans to go through several traditional regulatory hurdles. While I share many of the goals of Representative Massa’s legislation, I do not believe passing this stand-alone bill is the right approach at this time.
Of course broadband is nothing like water or electric utilities. In fact, Maffei’s inclusion of that reference is a classic talking point of the telecom industry. Notice they, and Maffei, didn’t mention telephone service — the one utility that provides flat rate calling for most Americans. It also happens to be the utility most comparable to broadband service!
New York's 25th Congressional District
But Maffei made a bad situation worse when he joined 72 other House Democrats co-signing a letter from Rep. Gene Green (D-AT&T), urging FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski not to fight a court decision overturning the agency’s ability to conduct broadband oversight.
The letter represented one giant talking point — the false premise that enforcing a fair, free, and open Internet with Net Neutrality would somehow stifle investment in broadband expansion. Yet AT&T was required to honor the very same principles when it merged with SBC, and managed to remain a multi-billion dollar powerhouse well positioned to expand broadband service to additional customers in its ever-growing service areas.
The fact the broadband industry is a duopoly for most Americans — one that can threaten to pull back on service if it doesn’t get its way in Washington — is just one more reason the industry requires more oversight, not less.
Yet Rep. Maffei stood alone as the only member of the western New York Congressional delegation to sign his name to the agenda of big cable and phone companies.
Perhaps the congressman has forgotten these facts which trouble broadband consumers across western and central New York:
Rochester, NY was the only city in the northeast where Time Warner sought to conduct an Internet Overcharging experiment, made possible because of limited competition in the Rochester market;
Rochester’s other broadband provider, Frontier Communications, insists on a monthly usage allowance of just 5GB per month in its Acceptable Use Policy;
Verizon FiOS has suspended expansion indefinitely and the service will never be available in most of the 585 area code where Frontier operates, and it will take years for most of the rest of his Syracuse district to see the service reach those areas;
Time Warner Cable increased its broadband rates in 2010, as did Verizon;
Green’s letter dances around the real issue — telecommunications companies are spending millions to oppose pro-consumer reforms and stop a return of oversight authority the FCC lost after a recent court decision. Without this authority, the FCC cannot implement the National Broadband Plan’s insistence that American providers not block or impede network traffic. These Net Neutral policies preserve net freedom. The FCC cannot even require that providers tell the truth about broadband speeds and include the company’s terms of service in plain English.
Western New York is a hotbed of consumer activism on broadband issues, particularly because we are actual victims of provider abuse. No one knows more than we how critical 21st century broadband is to the transformation of this region’s perennially challenged economy.
Rep. Maffei needs a reminder this is a hot button issue for consumers from Irondequoit to Manlius. Perhaps he just doesn’t fully understand what’s at stake here. You need to remind him.
We’ve included a suggested letter you can use to help write your own. For maximum effectiveness, include some of your own personal stories, challenges, and frustrations with your local broadband provider. Feel free to share yours in the Comments section.
Dear Rep. Maffei:
I was extremely disappointed to discover you signed your name on a letter written by Rep. Gene Green urging FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski not to restore oversight authority over broadband. While Rep. Green’s letter illustrates he’s mostly concerned about the well being of AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner Cable and Comcast, as a consumer I am more concerned about the broadband duopoly that exists in Rochester & Syracuse.
If the FCC does not regain its ability to oversee broadband by reclassifying it under Title II — as a telecommunications service (which it very clearly is), the FCC can effectively do nothing to stop broadband provider abuses, such as Comcast’s notorious speed throttle on customers using certain Internet websites and services. It took an FCC investigation to finally get the cable company to admit the truth — it was interfering with customers’ broadband speeds. The oversight power the agency had was just what was needed to convince Comcast to stop.
Unfortunately, a DC Circuit Court recently disagreed it had that authority and effectively stripped it away. Chairman Genachowski is simply seeking a return to the status quo before that court decision was handed down. He’s not asking to regulate broadband anything like telephone service. In fact, he’s insisted on a “light touch.” That’s better than today’s court-imposed total-hands-off reality.
By signing Rep. Green’s letter, you effectively tell us you don’t support Net Neutrality protections that guarantee providers cannot censor or impede web traffic. You also do nothing to protect consumers from other provider abuses. Considering what residents of Rochester went through last year fighting a Time Warner Cable scheme that would have tripled broadband prices for the same level of service, I’m shocked you of all people would be a supporter of big telecom’s agenda.
Telecom companies are claiming that if regulations enforcing Net Neutrality are enacted, investment will suffer and broadband expansion will be slowed. Yet AT&T was required, as part of its merger with SBC, to respect Net Neutrality for several years. The company flourished, broadband was offered to more customers than ever, and investors liked what they saw.
The record in western New York is clear — Time Warner Cable was willing to limit its customers access to broadband service, Frontier already does in its terms and conditions, and Verizon FiOS deployment has been suspended indefinitely. For too many of us, there are too few choices. In fact, the only thing we can be assured of is higher pricing and a strengthened duopoly.
I strongly urge you to remove your signature from Rep. Green’s letter and get on board with consumers like myself in your district who believe deregulation and oversight failures have given us nothing but nightmares — from Wall Street to BP’s oil spill. Let’s not make another mistake in handing cable and phone companies unfettered permission to abuse their customers.
Please get back in touch with me as soon as possible on this important matter.
Rep. Dan Maffei told constituents he was concerned about Time Warner Cable’s Internet Overcharging scheme proposed in April 2009. At a town hall meeting in Irondequoit, New York, he admitted Time Warner Cable held near-monopoly power over consumers in Rochester. What changed his tune when he signed on to Rep. Gene Green’s anti-consumer letter to the FCC?(April 9, 2009 — 2 minutes)
Be Sure to Read Part One: Astroturf Overload — Broadband for America = One Giant Industry Front Group for an important introduction to what this super-sized industry front group is all about. Members of Broadband for America Red: A company or group actively engaging in anti-consumer lobbying, opposes Net Neutrality, supports Internet Overcharging, belongs to […]
Astroturf: One of the underhanded tactics increasingly being used by telecom companies is “Astroturf lobbying” – creating front groups that try to mimic true grassroots, but that are all about corporate money, not citizen power. Astroturf lobbying is hardly a new approach. Senator Lloyd Bentsen is credited with coining the term in the 1980s to […]
Hong Kong remains bullish on broadband. Despite the economic downturn, City Telecom continues to invest millions in constructing one of Hong Kong’s largest fiber optic broadband networks, providing fiber to the home connections to residents. City Telecom’s HK Broadband service relies on an all-fiber optic network, and has been dubbed “the Verizon FiOS of Hong […]
BendBroadband, a small provider serving central Oregon, breathlessly announced the imminent launch of new higher speed broadband service for its customers after completing an upgrade to DOCSIS 3. Along with the launch announcement came a new logo of a sprinting dog the company attaches its new tagline to: “We’re the local dog. We better be […]
Stop the Cap! reader Rick has been educating me about some of the new-found aggression by Shaw Communications, one of western Canada’s largest telecommunications companies, in expanding its business reach across Canada. Woe to those who get in the way. Novus Entertainment is already familiar with this story. As Stop the Cap! reported previously, Shaw […]
The Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission, the Canadian equivalent of the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, may be forced to consider American broadband policy before defining Net Neutrality and its role in Canadian broadband, according to an article published today in The Globe & Mail. [FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s] proposal – to codify and enforce some […]
In March 2000, two cable magnates sat down for the cable industry equivalent of My Dinner With Andre. Fine wine, beautiful table linens, an exquisite meal, and a Monopoly board with pieces swapped back and forth representing hundreds of thousands of Canadian consumers. Ted Rogers and Jim Shaw drew a line on the western Ontario […]
Just like FairPoint Communications, the Towering Inferno of phone companies haunting New England, Frontier Communications is making a whole lot of promises to state regulators and consumers, if they’ll only support the deal to transfer ownership of phone service from Verizon to them. This time, Frontier is issuing a self-serving press release touting their investment […]
I see it took all of five minutes for George Ou and his friends at Digital Society to be swayed by the tunnel vision myopia of last week’s latest effort to justify Internet Overcharging schemes. Until recently, I’ve always rationalized my distain for smaller usage caps by ignoring the fact that I’m being subsidized by […]
In 2007, we took our first major trip away from western New York in 20 years and spent two weeks an hour away from Calgary, Alberta. After two weeks in Kananaskis Country, Banff, Calgary, and other spots all over southern Alberta, we came away with the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Good Alberta […]
A federal appeals court in Washington has struck down, for a second time, a rulemaking by the Federal Communications Commission to limit the size of the nation’s largest cable operators to 30% of the nation’s pay television marketplace, calling the rule “arbitrary and capricious.” The 30% rule, designed to keep no single company from controlling […]
Less than half of Americans surveyed by PC Magazine report they are very satisfied with the broadband speed delivered by their Internet service provider. PC Magazine released a comprehensive study this month on speed, provider satisfaction, and consumer opinions about the state of broadband in their community. The publisher sampled more than 17,000 participants, checking […]
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Google today launched a new website which could become a major advocacy center to promote fiber broadband service across America.
