Bulgaria’s capital city, Sofia, will be blanketed in fiber-to-the-home broadband by the year 2014, according to Bulgarian Internet provider EVO.bg.  The company is investing $860 million to roll out its fiber network, which it says will deliver some of Europe’s fastest broadband speeds.

“Our goal is to improve the individual experience and satisfaction of our subscribers by providing new high-quality services, and increasing network capacity,” said Rosen Velikov, EVO chief executive, in a statement.

A significant number of fiber projects in Europe are underway in the east, as countries like Russia, Romania, and the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia have decided a wholesale upgrade of their communications infrastructure is in order.  Just 20 years ago, some customers waited years for a basic telephone line to be installed.

Today, broadband demand is causing a usage explosion, and companies are upgrading their networks to meet the challenges customers bring.

Nokia Siemens Networks is a major vendor for the project, and is confident Bulgaria’s fiber future will deliver the best possible service for the country’s Internet users.

“Bulgarian citizens demand increased broadband access and new, convergent services – EVO is playing an important role in bridging the broadband gap,” said Nokia Siemens Networks’ head of central-east Europe sales Dietmar Appeltauer.

While Australian officials promote the noble aspects of its new fiber-based National Broadband Network to power commerce, health care, and education, one content and applications developer says the prospect of improved “adult entertainment” options will drive demand for fiber broadband adoption in Australia, just as it has in many other countries.

Jennifer Wilson, project director for The Project Factory, took discussions about the decidedly-adult topic of online content private to be certain it did not overshadow the more virtuous-aspects of the fiber network.

“The single most important factor is the porn factor because pornography has always been at the cutting edge of technology,” Wilson said. “If we cannot get porn on the NBN than we will have trouble getting consumer acceptance and uptake.”

Australia is just starting a debate about the appropriateness of adult entertainment on a publicly-owned network — a debate familiar to community broadband providers who face scrutiny over adult video content often found on municipally-owned cable systems.

Access to adult content and keeping it away from children is now evolving into a secondary debate about the NBN, and some politicians are considering placing adult content controls on the network.

For Wilson, that would be a major mistake.

Speaking at an Australian Computer Society (ACS) forum in Sydney, Wilson said giving parents the tools to control viewing options was perfectly appropriate, but a national policy banning pornography on the NBN would be a disaster.  Wilson believes adult content has always “stimulated” digital growth, and even, in her view, forced a final decision on which high definition DVD format would become the primary standard — Blu-Ray or HD.

“The main reason Blu-Ray took off was because the adult entertainment industry chose the format over HD,” Wilson said. “No one is going to install the NBN on the basis that one day they might need e-health services but they will use that as a justification for getting the service in order to download movies and watch TV.”

Australian technology evangelists of all kinds favor an agnostic approach to content, keeping government out of the viewing rooms of individual NBN subscribers.  Some have gone as far to say adult content will represent an enormous revenue opportunity — one that will help pay off the expense of constructing the network.

That moral dilemma — porn accelerating profit for the NBN, has politicians in a quandary over whether that represents government promotion of adult content for financial reasons.

“Which is exactly why the government needs to stay as far away from this debate as possible,” Jeffrey Maindonald, a Unitarian Universalist tells Stop the Cap! “Give people the tools to make personal decisions for themselves and their families, but stay out of the content and leave that to the authorities when it crosses the legal line.”

Maindonald, a retired minister, accepts adult content has driven everything from home video recording, film cameras, the Internet, and now the possibilities of what can be done with fiber broadband.  For him, it’s an extension of the inevitable debate between “good” and “evil” mankind deals with everywhere else.  Enforcing self-defined moral laws online is a highly subjective business, Maindonald says, one that will simply lead to endless debate and clashes.

“Thankfully, the new network has virtues that extend far beyond a virtual red light district,” Maindonald says, hoping the debate won’t derail the country’s fiber broadband future.

“A colleague of mine, an Anglican archdeacon, told me he was amazed that the most modern technology was being used to still obsess over God’s miracle of the human body,” Maindonald adds. “It won’t stop with the NBN.”

Frontier's Facts - Frontier's new website to counter Comcast's claims about FiOS. (click to enlarge)

Frontier Communications has fired back at Comcast after the Fort Wayne, Indiana cable company erected billboards telling residents Frontier was pulling the plug on its acquired FiOS fiber optic network.

On Wednesday, Frontier purchased a full-page ad in The Journal Gazette headlined, “Comcast Doesn’t Let the Facts Get in the Way of a Good Story! Here’s the Truth: Frontier Isn’t Pulling the Plug on Anything.”  It also launched a new website — Frontier Facts — telling customers it is not “pulling the plug” on any of its services.

Roscoe Spencer, Frontier’s local general manager, tells customers:

Recently, one of our competitors put up billboards, placed inserts in the newspapers and sent mailings to customers indicating we had pulled the plug on FiOS. This statement is simply not true, and we have taken legal action to insist that these false claims be stopped immediately.

Spencer

The spat began when Comcast began trying to recruit disaffected Frontier TV customers who found a massive rate increase notice in bills sent earlier this year.  Frontier blamed the rate increase on the loss of volume discounts former owner Verizon obtained for its FiOS TV service for television programming.  Frontier has sought to negotiate with programmers directly instead of working through a cooperative buying group, so the prices it pays for popular cable networks are much higher than what Comcast pays for a comparable video package.

Frontier watchers suggest the company is well aware its new video pricing is uncompetitive and customers will take their business elsewhere.  Frontier quickly began marketing DirecTV, a satellite provider, as a suitable replacement for those unhappy with the rate increase.  But Comcast also saw an opportunity to pick up new customers at the phone company’s expense, including through the use of billboards Frontier claims are misleading.

Frontier stresses its FiOS platform will continue to provide telephone, television, and broadband service, despite what Comcast’s billboards might suggest.

Despite the involvement of attorneys, Comcast has continued to thumb its nose at Frontier’s legal department.  Frontier spokesman Matt Kelley told the Journal Gazette Comcast was supposed to remove the billboards by Monday of this week, but they remain in place.

The cable company calls it a case of old fashioned competition.

Stop the Cap! reader Kevin calls Frontier’s marketing to get customers to drop FiOS TV for DirecTV a real blast from the past.

“It remains difficult for Frontier to sell people on its advanced fiber network when it is heavily marketing customers to get off of it and switch to DirecTV, a service that looked ultra-modern in the 1990s but today is just a rain-faded, pixellated nuisance,” Kevin says.  “Frontier blew it, Comcast took advantage of their strategic blunders, and now the whining has begun.”

Kevin is a former Verizon FiOS customer who was switched to Frontier when Verizon exited Fort Wayne.

“Verizon knew what they were doing, but eventually decided a few small cities in Indiana were not worth their time or interest, so they sold us off to Frontier, who ended up with a fiber network they’ve shown little interest in running except as an adopted curiosity,” Kevin adds.  “When we got notice of the rate increase, we canceled the TV service and now watch over the air television for free, supplemented with Netflix and Hulu.”

Kevin says Frontier ultimately did him a favor, discovering he was fine without a pay television package.

“Outside of breaking news and sports, you can get most everything else online.  Why pay more?”

San Francisco city officials last night remained in a stalemate with AT&T over the installation of hundreds of utility boxes to aid the company’s U-verse fiber to the neighborhood system.

Since 2008, AT&T has sought to install the metal cabinets — dubbed “lawn refrigerators” by critics — that would house links with AT&T’s fiber network and copper wire connections leading to individual homes.  The plan has been in limbo since the threat of lawsuits and controversy over whether the boxes could reduce the visual appeal of neighborhoods and harm property values.

AT&T’s latest plan, now also on hold, seeks to allow the company to install 726 4-foot-tall cabinets around the city.  That’s completely unacceptable to groups like San Francisco Beautiful, which say the cabinets block public sidewalks and attract graffiti, eventually leading to urban blight.  The group wants AT&T to install the boxes on private property or underground.

[flv width=”600″ height=”358″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KGO San Francisco Showdown Over ATT Boxes 6-23-11.flv[/flv]

KGO-TV in San Francisco covers the fracas over AT&T’s “lawn refrigerators” — cabinets designed to support its U-verse fiber to the neighborhood service.  (2 minutes)

Surprise! A Greensboro, N.C. couple woke up to find AT&T installing these boxes in their front yard. (Courtesy: WFMY-TV)

With the matter generating intense media scrutiny, local politicians have become cautious and a Board of Supervisors vote on the matter has been repeatedly postponed.

AT&T’s U-verse cabinets have been controversial in many areas where they suddenly appear in public rights-of-way, often in front yards.

In Greensboro, N.C., Doris and Dave Robinson learned this the hard way when a tractor, backhoe, and truck appeared in their front yard one morning to install a six foot high metal cabinet with an ominous warning painted on the front telling passersby – “WARNING – AT&T Underground Cable.”

Doris Robinson called and wrote AT&T to no avail, and took their story to a Greensboro television station to warn the neighbors.

“It’s just hard to believe that anyone can come onto our property, put something on the property we disapprove of and leave it on our property,” Dave Robinson told WFMY News. “It’s just not right.”

Doris added, “It struck me as being just terrible to be digging in your front yard and they hadn’t said a word to us.”

In the case of North Carolina, it turns out they don’t have to.  The North Carolina legislature passed laws at the behest of AT&T giving them near carte blanche access to easements established for utilities.  In the past, these have been used for buried and overhead wiring.  Today, they are increasingly used to place enormous metal cabinets, sometimes on the ground, other times attached to a utility pole.  Many have fans that can be heard several yards away.

In California, it will take an affirmative vote by local government officials before AT&T can install similar equipment in San Francisco.

[flv width=”480″ height=”340″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WFMY Greensboro ATT U-Verse Service Means Giant Boxes On Homeowners Front Lawn 6-29-11.flv[/flv]

WFMY-TV in Greensboro shares the story of Doris and Dave Robinson who awoke one morning to find AT&T installing boxes nearly six feet tall on their front lawn.  (5 minutes)

The employees of Sonic.net, a California ISP that threatens to expose the chasm between the cost of providing broadband and the profits reaped from it.

It doesn’t take trillions of dollars to offer world class broadband service in America.  Companies large and small are building gigabit broadband networks to reach customers at prices your local phone or cable company would charge at least $1,000 a month or more to receive, if you consider many charge around $100 a month for 100Mbps.  Now, 700 families in California are going to be offered 1,000Mbps service for just $69.99 per month — including a phone line.

Sonic.net has been in the ISP business for more than 15 years, selling DSL service to California customers at prices that offer value for money.  Most recently, Sonic has been pitching bonded DSL service offering speeds upwards of 40Mbps for the same price it plans to sell its new Fusion gigabit fiber broadband.  For customers who don’t need that much speed, Sonic recently reduced the price for its 20Mbps service to $39.95 per month (including phone line.)

For those in the Sebastopol area lucky enough to qualify for fiber service, Sonic promises unlimited access and an exceptional online experience.

Sonic’s qualifications to run the project are not in question, considering Google selected the company to operate and support the trial fiber-to-the-home network the search giant is building at Stanford University.

Google itself is building an extensive fiber to the home network to serve Kansas City residents and businesses, and promises service at a profitable, but reasonable price.  So has Sonic.net CEO Dane Jasper, whose written views on the state of American broadband explains his personal drive to make Internet access better and faster, without ripping people off with Internet Overcharging schemes or unjustified high monthly prices.

Jasper recognizes much of North America is trapped in a broadband duopoly that delivers all of the benefits to investors, while leaving the continent saddled with slow and overpriced service.  Nine months ago Jasper explained the business model to Benoit Felten, a Yankee Group broadband analyst:

During the construction of this network we have given a lot of thought… to the business model in the US, and how we could do things in a different and more interesting way. The natural model when you have a simple duopoly capturing the majority of the market is segmentation: maximize ARPU [average revenue per user] by artificially limiting service in order to drive additional monthly spending. But fundamentally this is the wrong model for a service provider like us, and we have looked to Europe for inspiration. The model pioneered by Iliad under the Free brand is a better fit, both for us and for our customers.

As the marginal cost of providing more bandwidth or less, and providing [phone service] or not are both minimal, we have adopted a simple flat rate model instead of the more typical US model of “$5 more goes faster”… I believe that removing the artificial limits on speed, and including home phone with the product are both very exciting.

It’s exciting to customers as well, most who give the company nearly five star reviews for excellence, without five-star pricing.  An added bonus: Jasper occasionally responds to customer service inquiries himself.

Reviewing Sonic.net’s blogs and website shows off a company that loves the business it’s in.  If a switch 100 miles away has a problem that interferes with Sonic’s service, you will promptly read about it on the company’s technical blog.

There are houses for sale in Sebastopol, Calif., if you want affordable gigabit broadband.

Jasper’s frustration with the enormous corporate-owned ISPs that dominate the country (and Washington) was on full display in a blog entry in March, answering a question about why American broadband is lagging behind:

[…] In 2003 and 2004, the then Republican led FCC reversed course [on policies guaranteeing a level playing field for broadband], removing shared access to essential fiber infrastructure for competitive carriers and codifying instead a policy of exclusive use and “multi-modal competition”.

This concreted our unique US duopoly: cable versus telco, the two broadband choices that most Americans have today.

In exchange for a truly competitive market, the US received promises of widespread deployment. And, to some degree this has worked. Unfettered by significant competition or price pressure, broadband in at least in its most basic form can now be delivered to most homes in America, albeit at a comparatively high cost to the consumer.

What was given up in exchange for this far-reaching but mediocre pablum was true competition and innovation.

Elsewhere in the world, regulatory bodies followed the lead of the US Congress and separated essential copper and fiber infrastructure from the services and providers who used them, and the result has been amazing. In Asia and Europe, Gigabit services are becoming common, and the price paid by consumers per megabit is a tiny fraction of what we pay here at home.

I won’t deny the innovation that has occurred in the telco/cable duopoly. They’ve got TV, Internet and telephone bundles designed to serve up prime time network shows in over-saturated HD glory, with comparatively middling Internet speeds, all offered with teaser rates and terms that would baffle an economics professor. The clear value of the bundle is to baffle, and pity the consumer who wants to shed a component. At least during the intro periods, it’s often cheaper to take the whole package than just a component or two.

For cable companies, the entrenched interest in the television entertainment portion creates a clear conflict: why should they offer an uncapped broadband connection that can deliver enough video entertainment to allow consumers to cut the TV cord? And if you do drop the TV, up goes the price for even this slow and capped Internet connection, so you pay more either way. And now that telcos have gotten into the television business too, their interest in slowing the pace of increasing broadband speed is aligned as well.

This has yielded a competitive truce in America.

In a slow tide, back and forth, cable delivers a slightly better product, then telco slightly better again, all at the highest possible cost. It is iterative, not innovative, and Americans deserve more. After all, we invented the Internet, right?

Among the giant phone and cable companies providing broadband today are a growing number of innovation outliers — companies challenging the prevailing views that Americans don’t need or want fiber-fast speeds (not at the prices some providers charge), that there is no economic justification for the capital spending required to construct fiber networks when incremental upgrades can suffice (the Wall Street view), or that the best way to drive increased revenue from a maturing broadband market is to throw away today’s flat rate pricing model and establish a guaranteed growth fund collecting tolls on Internet traffic that is sure to rise in the days ahead (Time Warner Cable’s CEO).

Google cannot understand why 1Gbps broadband “doesn’t work” in the United States and intends to construct its own network to prove otherwise.  EPB, a municipal utility in Chattanooga, Tenn. sells gigabit broadband, in their words, because they can.  The concept of a provider offering the fruits of their innovation, even if they aren’t certain how to price or sell the service, is a remarkable and refreshing change from the usual obsession with nickle-and-dime “extras” for add-on features or not selling service that your marketing department does not understand or find useful.

It also exposes the indefensible gap between the cost of providing the service and the price paid to receive it.

Thanks to Stop the Cap! reader Mark for sharing news about Sonic.net’s fiber network.