A handful of broadcasters in California, Michigan, Montana and New Mexico interrupted their regularly scheduled programs earlier this week to warn audiences that zombie attacks were underway and residents should avoid the undead at all costs.

This ‘War of the Worlds‘ scenario did not frighten radio and television audiences, but caught stations off-guard, because the Emergency Alert System messages received over the Internet were programmed to broadcast live over the air with no intervention on the part of the living.

“Local authorities in your area have reported the bodies of the dead are rising from their graves and attacking the living,” said one message, which went out as both a scrolling text message and a voice alert. “Do not attempt to approach or apprehend these bodies as they are considered extremely dangerous.”

The Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday warned the nation’s broadcasters to lock down the equipment that monitors for EAS warnings and rebroadcasts them to the public.

The zombie reports managed to find their way to the airwaves in Los Angeles and Michigan Monday. On Tuesday, the messages were delivered across New Mexico on several of the state’s PBS stations.

How are the hackers getting in?

“Before a year or two ago, the EAS systems were hooked up through phone lines, now they’re hooked up to the Internet,” said Karole White, president-CEO of the Michigan Broadcaster’s Association. “We feel fortunate they were not able to get into the entire Emergency Alert System – that’s the good news. The bad news is they got in at all.”

An equipment vendor suspects affected stations never changed the default password supplied with the equipment that inserts warning messages into broadcasts. The FCC agreed, warning broadcasters:

EAS Participants must change all passwords on their CAP EAS equipment from default factory settings, including administrator and user accounts.
EAS Participants are also urged to ensure that their firewalls and other solutions are properly configured and up-to-date.

The hacker or hackers have not yet been found by federal authorities. If convicted, the person(s) responsible face hefty federal fines.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KRQE Albuquerque Zombie attack announced on local TV 2-13-13.mp4[/flv]

KRQE in Albuquerque reports a hacker attack on the state’s largest public broadcaster delivered fake zombie warnings over the Emergency Alert System earlier this week. (3 minutes)

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.

A big 40oz can of Hype from the Washington Post.

Conservative bloggers are calling it socialized “Obama-Wi-Fi,” broadband advocates claim it represents salvation from high-priced wireless service plans, and the media echo chamber is amplifying reports that the federal government in on the verge of launching a nationwide free Wi-Fi network.

Sorry folks, it is not to be.

An article in Sunday’s Washington Post originally titled, “FCC Proposes Large Public WiFi Networks” got the ball rolling, and almost 3,000 reader comments later, a full-scale debate about the merits of government-supplied Wi-Fi Internet access is underway.

Cecilia Kang and her headline writer mislead readers with statements like these:

The federal government wants to create super WiFi networks across the nation, so powerful and broad in reach that consumers could use them to make calls or surf the Internet without paying a cellphone bill every month.

[…] If all goes as planned, free access to the Web would be available in just about every metropolitan area and in many rural areas.

There is nothing new about the FCC’s effort to set aside unlicensed spectrum for so-called “white space” Wi-Fi. As the spectrum wars continue, wireless companies like Verizon and AT&T are pushing proposals to further shrink the number of channels on the UHF television band and repurpose them for expanded cellular data networks. That newly available spectrum would be secured through an FCC auction. FCC chairman Julius Genachowski wants to set aside some of that available spectrum for unlicensed use, including the next generation of Wi-Fi, which will greatly extend its range and speed.

There is no proposal on the table for the government to fund or create a free, national Wi-Fi network as an alternative to paid commercial services. At issue is simply how 120MHz of newly-available television spectrum would be made available to new users. Republicans and large wireless companies like Verizon and AT&T are demanding the vast majority of that spectrum be auctioned off. AT&T and Verizon would like to expand their spectrum holdings, and a straight “highest bidder wins” auction guarantees the vast majority of it will be divided by those two companies. Many Democrats and broadband advocates want a portion of that spectrum set aside to sell to AT&T and Verizon’s competitors — current and future — to promote competition. They also support set-asides that make frequencies available for unlicensed uses like Wi-Fi.

Genachowski’s proposal could potentially spur private companies or communities to build community-wide Wi-Fi networks operated on unlicensed frequencies. With more robust signals, such high speed wireless networks could be less costly to construct and serve a much wider geographic area.

The potential for competition from the public or private sector is what bothers companies like AT&T and Verizon. Both argue that since they had to pay for their spectrum, allowing other users access to free spectrum would be unfair, both to themselves and to the government’s effort to earn as much as possible from the auction. AT&T has been the more aggressive of the two companies, repeatedly attempting to insert language into legislation curtailing the FCC’s ability to set aside a significant amount of spectrum for unlicensed use. While AT&T’s lobbyists do not go as far as to advocate banning such networks, the technical conditions they demand would make them untenable. AT&T and others also demand the FCC must close down unlicensed networks if they create “harmful interference,” which is open to interpretation.

Helping the wireless companies in the campaign against the next generation of Wi-Fi are hardware manufacturers like Cisco, which has been trying to deep six the proposal for at least two years. Why? Because Cisco’s vision of wireless networking, and the products it has manufactured to date, are not in sync with the kind of longer distance Wi-Fi networks the FCC envisions. Cisco faces overhauling products that were designed under the premise Wi-Fi would remain a limited-range, mostly indoor service for consumers and businesses.

The threat to incumbent Internet Service Providers is clear enough. If a new version of Wi-Fi launched that could blanket entire neighborhoods, communities, non-profits, or even loosely-knit groups of altruistic individuals could launch free Wi-Fi services sharing their Internet connection with others. If the technology allowed users to seamlessly hand off wireless connections from one free Wi-Fi hotspot to another, much like cell sites do today, customers might downgrade their wireless data plans with big telecom companies. Machine-to-machine networking could also rely on Wi-Fi instead of commercial wireless data plans. It could threaten billions in potential revenue.

Stopping these networks is a priority for corporate interests with profits at stake. But one thing they do not have to worry about, at least for now, is the federal government getting into the wireless Internet business.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Washington Post FCC offers path to free Internet access 2-4-13.flv[/flv]

After the original story ran in the Post, Cecilia Kang participated in this interview which clarified what the FCC is actually proposing. This video explains what spectrum allocation and unlicensed spectrum is all about. Kang clarifies her article, explaining private companies and/or communities will have to decide what to do with the unlicensed spectrum. The federal government is only facilitating the space and has no plans to run a national network itself. (5 minutes)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/tech-telecom-giants-take-sides-as-fcc-proposes-large-public-wifi-networks/2013/02/03/eb27d3e0-698b-11e2-ada3-d86a4806d5ee_story.html

Eshoo

Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), the ranking member on the House Energy and Commerce Communications Subcommittee, will shortly reintroduce legislation that will require wireless companies to disclose more information about the anticipated speeds of their 4G wireless networks.

Eshoo announced her legislative intentions Tuesday at the Broadband Breakfast Club, telling attendees it was important for consumers to know what they are getting before signing a two-year contract.

The anticipated legislation is expected to mirror Eshoo’s 2011 bill — the Next Generation Wireless Disclosure Act (HR 2281), which never made it out of the Republican-dominated House committee.

Eshoo said consumers need clear and concise explanations of data limits, caps, or network management policies that can turn a fast 4G connection into a very slow or expensive one.

Many of the former bill’s supporters echoed carriers use “4G” as a marketing tool which can lead to consumer confusion. Networks ranging from Clearwire’s WiMAX service to T-Mobile’s HSPA+ to Verizon Wireless’ LTE network have all been dubbed “4G,” despite offering widely varying maximum speeds.

Consumers have also faced bill shock when they do not understand their monthly data limits.

Like the last bill, Eshoo’s newest effort is expected to face stiff opposition from wireless carriers and House Republicans, but may raise the temperature on data caps at the Federal Communications Commission, which has faced increasing pressure to become more involved in the issue of usage limits and consumption pricing.

How accurate is the map?

The biggest story you know nothing about is taking place at the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, where regulators are trying to figure out what to do with $185 million in leftover broadband expansion funds Internet Service Providers either could not qualify for or did not want. The FCC is on the verge of making a decision, one that will rely on broadband map data that service providers are now calling grossly inaccurate.

During the first phase of the Connect America program to fund broadband expansion in rural areas, the Commission offered up to $300 million to providers willing to wire consumers and businesses deemed too unprofitable to serve.

The rules largely favored phone companies, and although some including Frontier Communications gratefully accepted the funding to expand their DSL service, both of America’s largest phone companies expressed little interest. Many others, including CenturyLink and Windstream, petitioned to change the rules.

In the end, less than half of the available funding — $115 million — was actually spent, none in areas served by AT&T and Verizon.

The initial guidelines for participation were not exactly a high bar to cross. Under the program’s original rules, providers are required to deploy broadband within three years to certain locations that receive less than 768kbps downstream and 200kbps upstream (or no service at all). That “means test” set the bar far below the minimum speed providers can even call “broadband” under the FCC’s own current definition: 4/1Mbps.

Anyone served by 1-3Mbps DSL “broadband” was instantly ineligible because the FCC effectively deemed those speeds ‘good enough for now.’ The FCC argued it wanted to first target funds to those without any service at all, not those who had inadequate service.

Participating carriers receive compensation up to $775 per home to defray connection costs, bringing expenses closer to the Return on Investment-test that decides whether your rural home will have broadband service or not. Large phone companies complained the subsidy was not nearly enough and did not bother applying. Some others said even with the subsidy, it was still too unprofitable to wire rural homes in their service areas.

This not-so-auspicious start of the Connect America project has driven the FCC to propose modifying the rules to increase participation by disinterested providers. In an opaque “Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking,” the Commission proposes new rules that will “further accelerate the deployment of broadband facilities to consumers who lack access to robust broadband.”

Under the new guidelines, providers could be able to apply for funding if the areas they propose to serve are not already getting at least 4/1Mbps service. But in a surprising footnote, the FCC announced they will “use 3Mbps downstream and 768kbps upstream as a proxy for 4/1Mbps service.” In other words, the FCC is ignoring its own standard definition of broadband and settling for something less. That will leave customers waiting for something better than 3Mbps service up the creek, excluded from Connect America funding.

The U.S. Telecom Association is a lobbying group dominated by AT&T, Verizon and other phone companies.

The U.S. Telecom Association (USTA), which represents phone companies, was appalled, suggesting this footnote will block funding from approximately one million rural households that receive what most of us would consider substandard broadband.

“This is particularly true for rural areas served by DSL which in most cases has been engineered to provide an upstream speed of 768 Kbps,” the USTA wrote in comments to the FCC. “In such cases, significant and costly network upgrades would be necessary to provide broadband service meeting the 4/1Mbps  benchmark. Therefore, rather than relying on evidence of 3/768 service to exclude areas from eligibility, the Commission should use the next speed tier—6/1.5Mbps as a proxy for 4/1 service.”

Windstream, in its own comments, was reduced to educating the FCC about the basic technical facts of DSL:

One Mbps upload speeds are not necessarily available to all customers served by standard ADSL 2+ architecture over a 24 AWG copper pair of 12,000 feet. Rather, delivery of reliable upload speeds of 1 Mbps would require an upgrade, such as two-pair bonded ADSL 2+. Two-pair bonded ADSL2+ essentially doubles last mile deployment cost since the end user modem is two to three times the cost of a normal single pair modem, two cable pairs are used instead of one, and two ADSL2+ ports are required at the DSLAM. Moreover, to achieve 1 Mbps of customer payload throughput would require an upload connection speed of more than 1.2 Mbps, while an upload connection speed of 1 Mbps would produce an actual throughput of about 820 Kbps.

Even where the loop length from the DSLAM to the customer is less than 12,000 feet, a service provider can only deliver service meeting the 4/1 requirement—or more precisely, service at speeds of 6/1.5Mbps, the next-fastest standard service tier—if the DSLAM is ADSL2+ capable and fiber-fed.

Windstream provides a primer on DSL to the FCC.

The resource that will determine who qualifies for broadband funding and who does not is the National Broadband Map, which seeks to describe the broadband options available at hundreds of millions of American addresses. If the map shows an area unserved, it qualifies for funding. If the map shows there is no broadband inadequacy, no funding will be offered.

Unsurprisingly, providers of all kinds are hurrying in comments that declare often considerable inaccuracies in the FCC’s map. This is ironic since much of the collected data on which the map is based was voluntarily supplied by those providers.

In various submissions filed with the FCC, several ISPs suggest the national map is not to be trusted. Some complain the updated service areas they earlier submitted have never been incorporated into the map, others are discovering inaccuracies for the first time because they can make the difference between winning or not qualifying for rural broadband funding (either for themselves or a competitor). Among other complaints: providers are overestimating their coverage and fibbing about actual speeds, the map’s census tract granularity ends up declaring an area served if even one household manages to get DSL service while others cannot, and providers only serving business customers are treated as if they serve everyone.

Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant is asking the FCC to clean up the inaccuracies in the Mississippi portion of the National Broadband Map.

The state of Mississippi is the poster child for inaccuracies in the National Broadband Map. All that was required to disqualify most of the state from rural broadband funding was a boastful and inaccurate submission from one cable broadband reseller that claimed they served virtually all of Mississippi. Nobody bothered to question the veracity of their submission or verify it. Now the governor’s office is involved in efforts to scrub the inaccurate broadband map they consider more a fantasy than reality on the ground.

With the FCC preparing to launch the second phase of the Connect America Fund with up to $1.8 billion of available funding per year over five years, the money sharks are in the water circling one another.

Cable operators and wireless ISPs are asking the FCC not to hand out money to their competitors and phone companies are returning fire claiming those providers are lying about their coverage areas and have restrictions on service.

Companies ranging from Comcast to small, independent cable operators working with the American Cable Association are filing objections to the existing map. Wireless ISPs, often family-owned, are even more worried what will happen if phone companies like Windstream get federal dollars to upgrade their DSL service while unsubsidized WISPs are left to compete on their own.

In fact, the Competitive Carriers Association argues wireless providers are best positioned to make use of the unspent funds to deploy rural wireless broadband immediately.

“Wireless carriers offer the best opportunity to bring much needed broadband services to unserved and underserved areas, and it only makes sense for the FCC to consider proposals from wireless carriers,” said CCA president Steven K. Berry. “Many of our members are ready and willing to build out these networks, but depend on [financial] support in order to do so.  Wireless remains underfunded, and this could be an opportunity for the FCC to provide significant support for the services consumers want most.”

Not if the USTA and Windstream have anything to say about it. Both are on the attack in comments filed with the FCC:

WISPs: “Coverage should be independently verified before such areas are considered ineligible for Connect America funding. Like satellite providers, WISPs often have capacity caps and service quality issues, including unpredictable degradation from third-party interference from common devices such as cordless phones, garage door openers and microwave ovens when WISPs use unlicensed spectrum. The sustained speeds WISPs offer, particularly during busy times, also tend to be slower than those offered by [phone company broadband], and certainly slower than the 4Mbps downstream standard required of future recipients of federal funding.” — U.S. Telecom Association

The USTA also attacks WISPs for their usage caps, which they claim should disqualify them from serious consideration because their networks are technically and realistically inadequate to service today’s broadband consumer.

Cable “Competitors”: Windstream claims the bare existence of a cable operator alone should not disqualify the phone company from funding. Windstream suggests cable companies in its service areas may only serve one or two customers in a census tract, not really offer service at all, or provide sub-standard broadband that is so bad, nobody will do business with them.

Windstream proposes its own competition test: “In many areas […] with an alleged presence of an unsubsidized competitor, Windstream has received no requests in the past two years from customers for telephone number ports that are accompanied by cancellation of the customer’s Windstream broadband service. In other words, despite the alleged presence of a competitor providing service at speeds of at least 3/768 in areas where Windstream itself does not provide service exceeding 3/768, Windstream has not received a single request in two years in an entire area to port a phone number to a competitor and cancel the associated Windstream broadband service. Windstream submits that the lack of such porting requests throughout an entire area over a reasonable historical period is strong evidence that there is no competitor providing 3/768 or better service in that area.”

The independent phone company proposes that alleged unsubsidized competitors offer proof they are actually providing service before the FCC excludes an area from funding consideration.

“Here is our view.” — Phillip Dampier

Consumers are free to share their own views with the FCC on these matters by filing their own comments here. The Proceeding Number you will need is 10-90. It is generally easier to create a .PDF, standard .txt file, or Microsoft Word document and attach it to the submission form. Your comments will be publicly visible and posted to the FCC website.

Stop the Cap! feels the FCC should not renege on its commitment to fund rural providers that will guarantee customers will receive at least 4/1Mbps service. This barely adequate minimum will require phone companies to upgrade their facilities to next generation DSL technology that can support future speed upgrades. Compromising on lower speeds gives phone companies the option to deploy outdated early generation DSL that cannot be upgraded easily. In a positive development, many phone companies seem willing to commit to these upgrades with some financial assistance.

Funding should also be available to the provider that can deliver the best broadband service at the lowest cost. As urban and suburban customers have learned, that service often does not come from the phone company. Cable operators willing to commit to rural broadband upgrades should not be disqualified from funding, nor should community-owned providers who want to build their own networks.

We have also repeatedly complained about broadband mapping that lacks a formal mechanism to clearly verify coverage and speeds independent of the ISP supplying the data. Providers have an incentive to artificially boost or reduce coverage, particularly if it means the difference between qualifying for federal broadband expansion funding or disqualifying a competitor because the provider can falsely claim they already offer the service.

Our thanks to Cassandra Heyne, who dubbed the current situation an FCC ‘maptastrophe.’