This co-op provides 25Mbps broadband in rural Minnesota.

Parts of rural Minnesota are teaching the nation a lesson or two about how to deliver rural broadband — form a community co-op and provide it yourself, or wait forever for a commercial provider to deem it sufficiently profitable to deliver a reasonable level of service.

Minnesota’s Broadband Task Force indirectly proved the case for community Internet access with their first official report on the state of broadband in the North Star State.

While the populous Twin Cities are well-provided-for by large cable and phone companies, most of rural Minnesota gets far slower (and spottier) access to telephone company DSL, which is increasingly uncompetitive and inadequate for the 21st century knowledge economy.  Commercial providers have repeatedly told rural Minnesota their 1-3Mbps DSL service is plenty fast enough, at least for those who can purchase the service.  City slickers enjoy speeds of 10Mbps or more in Minneapolis and St. Paul.  But as many more rural residents and small businesses will tell you, DSL just cannot get the job done at current speeds, especially for higher bandwidth applications.

Not all of Minnesota is stuck with second-class Internet access.  Two sections of the state where residents were unwilling to accept the broadband status quo now have speeds that rival anything on offer in Minneapolis or St. Paul, because they decided to provide the service themselves.

Farmers Mutual in Madison, Federated Telephone in Morris, and Paul Bunyan Communications in Bemidji have been running fiber optic cables up and down area streets and delivering next generation broadband to some very happy customers.  All are cooperatives — community-owned providers that put their customers (who also happen to be the owners) ahead of Wall Street shareholder profits.  The result: modern and reliable service, instead of “good enough for you” Internet access at sky-high prices from for-profit phone companies.

Farmers Mutual provides service at speeds up to 20/20Mbps, with faster service forthcoming in the future.  They also believe in an open Internet, free from provider interference.  Just outside of their service area, DSL (where available) often runs at speeds of 1Mbps or less.

Federated Telephone offers a unique Ethernet-based broadband service at 20/20Mbps speeds that advertises unlimited usage — a selling point when larger phone companies like AT&T now place limits on Internet access.  Outside of their service area, many rural Minnesotans are stuck using satellite Internet service or dial-up.

Paul Bunyan Communications goes one step further with a network that already delivers 25Mbps broadband in communities like Bemidji and Grand Rapids (Minn.)  Those speeds are simply unavailable from commercial providers in northern Minnesota.

Minnesota’s broadband story is retold across America.  Urban communities have fast speed, but high prices.  Rural communities have inferior DSL at high prices or nothing at all.  Only about 57 percent of Minnesota households now meet the statewide speed goal of 10/6Mbps service.  Cable operators have no problems achieving 10Mbps download speeds, but 6Mbps upload speeds are very uncommon.  Phone companies cannot reliably achieve either with traditional ADSL service.

The state’s broadband goals are aggressive:

By 2015, the state of Minnesota will:

• a. Be in the top five states of the United States for broadband speed universally accessible to residents and businesses; and,
• b. Be in the top five states for broadband access (availability); and,
• c. Be in the top 15 when compared to countries globally for broadband penetration (adoption).

Community owned co-ops are the most likely to help the state achieve their broadband goals. The state is currently ranked 24th in broadband speed.

If they build it, will Verizon, Time Warner Cable, or Comcast come?

The Massachusetts Broadband Institute (MBI) has just received a major shipment of cable it will use to construct part of its 1,300-mile fiber optic network, designed to provide better-than-dialup service to over 120 communities in western and north central Massachusetts.  That is, if providers show any interest in selling access to it.

The news that the broadband blockade in the western half of the state may finally come to an end is being trumpeted by local newspapers and TV newscasts from Springfield.  WSHM used the occasion to celebrate with current AOL dial-up user Ryan Newhouser, of Worthington:

A high-speed informational highway will be set up with thousands of miles of high-speed fiber optic cables. Those fibers will now be installed on utility polls across Western Mass.

Now residents sitting at their computers in frustration can finally look forward to high-speed internet access.

Perhaps.

As Stop the Cap! first explored earlier this year, the new fiber network is good news for western Massachusetts.  But it alone will not deliver service to the masses who desperately want faster Internet access.

The incumbent phone and cable companies have certainly not shown much interest.  Verizon treats western Massachusetts much the same way it served its landline customers in the rest of northern New England (Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.)  The company’s landline network was allowed to deteriorate along with Verizon’s interest in providing service in the largely rural states.  Eventually, it sold its operations north of Massachusetts to FairPoint Communications.  Comcast and Time Warner Cable are missing in action in many parts of the region as well.  As big phone and cable companies concentrate investments in more urban areas like Boston, many residents in places like Worthington can’t buy broadband service at any price.

MBI optimistically hopes the presence of its new fiber backbone and middle-mile network will change all that.  But outside of AT&T’s apparent interest it to provide service to its cell towers, there has been no publicly-expressed enthusiasm by Verizon or cable operators to begin serious investment in broadband expansion across the region.

The Last Mile Network Challenge

So what is holding western Massachusetts back?  The same thing that keeps broadband out of rural areas everywhere — the “last-mile” problem.  Traditionally, operators target urban and suburban areas for their investments because the construction costs — wiring up your street/home/business — can be recouped more easily when divided between a pool of potential customers.  Every provider has their own “return on investment” formula — how long it will take for a project to pay for itself and begin to return profit.  If your street has 100 homes on it, the chances of recouping costs are much higher than in places where your nearest neighbor needs binoculars to see your house.  Pass the ROI challenge and providers will invest capital to wire your street.  Fail it and you go without (or pay $10,000 or more to subsidize construction costs yourself.)

That is why eastern Massachusetts has plentiful broadband and the comparatively rural western half often does not.

MassBroadband 123 is the state’s solution to the pervasive lack of access across the western half of The Bay State.  It will consist of a fiber backbone and “middle mile” network, solving two parts of a three-part broadband problem.  The project’s commitment to deliver open access to institutions and commercial ISPs across the region is partly thanks to the availability of broadband grant money, particularly from the federal government.

Projects similar to MBI’s MassBroadband 123 typically include the hoped-for-outcome that private companies will step up and invest to ultimately make service available to end users.  Unfortunately, large incumbent providers often remain uncommitted to wiring the last-mile, and communities promised ubiquitous broadband end up with an expensive institutional network that only serves local government, public safety, schools, libraries, and health care facilities.

Thankfully, it does not appear MBI is depending on Verizon, which has shown no interest in spending significant capital on its legacy landline network or cable operators that are unlikely to break ground in new areas.

Communities are increasingly learning if they don’t have service today, the only real guarantee they will get it is by providing it themselves.  That is where WiredWest comes in.  It is a community-powered partnership — a co-op for broadband — pooling resources from 22 independent towns (with 18 more expected to join) to build out that challenging last mile, and deliver future-proof fiber to the home service.  No last generation DSL, slow and expensive fixed wireless, or limited capacity coaxial cable networks are involved.

WiredWest Members

Founding member towns span four counties, including Berkshire County towns of Egremont, Great Barrington, Monterey, New Marlborough, Otis, Peru, Sandisfield, Washington and West Stockbridge; Franklin County towns of Ashfield, Charlemont, Conway, Heath, New Salem, Rowe, Shutesbury, Warwick and Wendell; Hampshire County towns of Cummington, Heath, Middlefield and Plainfield; and the Hampden County town of Chester.

Most of the construction costs for the new network will likely come from municipal bonds, because government grants typically exclude last mile network funding.  Commercial providers often lobby against municipal-funded networks as “unfair competition,” a laughable concept in long-ignored western Massachusetts, where Verizon pitches slow speed DSL, if anything at all.

WiredWest compares rural broadband with rural electrification.  Community-owned co-ops provide service where few private companies bothered to show interest:

Think back to the rural electrification of America. Then, as now, it wasn’t profitable enough for private companies to build out electrical service to rural communities. Imagine where those communities would be today if the government hadn’t stepped in to help fund this essential service – which over time has sustained itself and become a profitable enterprise.

Rural fiber-to-the-home is affordable when you use an appropriate financing and business model that isn’t subject to the same short-term measures of profitability as a private company. A municipal model for example, allows capital investment that can be written off over a longer period of time.

This type of business model isn’t limited to community-owned broadband.  Other countries that treat broadband as an essential utility have, in some cases, boosted broadband beyond a simple cost/benefit “ROI” analysis.

Constructing a broadband network for western Massachusetts still presents some formidable challenges, however:

1. There is a serious imbalance in government grant programs.  A largesse of government funding for institutional broadband has delivered scandalously underused Cadillac-priced networks communities, libraries and schools cannot afford to operate themselves once the grant money ends.  Meanwhile, funding to cushion the cost of wiring individual homes and businesses is extremely scarce.  Isn’t it time to divert some of that money towards the most difficult problem to overcome — wiring the last mile?
2. Government impediments to community broadband must be eliminated.  Repeal laws that restrict public broadband development.  Early experiments in municipal telecom networks have taught valuable lessons on how to operate networks efficiently and effectively.  But the broadband industry engages in scare tactics that highlight failures of older public projects like community Wi-Fi in an effort to keep superior publicly-owned fiber-to-the-home networks out of their markets.
3. The public is not always engaged on the broadband issue and accepts media reports that misunderstand institutional broadband as a solution for those stuck using dial-up.  No matter how good a network is, if the “last mile” problem remains unsolved, the closest consumers like Mr. Newhouser will get to fiber service is looking at the wiring on a nearby telephone pole.  In many communities, fiber broadband paid for by public tax dollars is only accessible at the local public library.  Taxpayers must demand more access to networks they ultimately paid for out of their own pockets, and should support existing public broadband initiatives wherever practical.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WSHM Springfield Broadband internet coming to western Mass 12-8-11.mp4[/flv]

WSHM in Springfield says if you don’t have broadband in western Massachusetts now, it should be coming to your area soon.  But will it?  (3 minutes)

Fiber optic cable spool

For the most populated provinces in Canada, questions about when fiber-to-the-home service will become a reality are easy to answer:  Never, indefinitely.

Some of Canada’s largest telecommunications providers have their minds made up — fiber isn’t for consumers, it’s for their backbone and business networks.  For citizens of Toronto, Calgary, Montreal, and Vancouver coping with bandwidth shortages, providers have a much better answer: pay more, use less Internet.

Fiber broadband projects in Canada are hard to find, because providers refuse to invest in broadband upgrades to deliver the kinds of speeds and capacity Canadians increasingly demand.  Instead, companies like Bell, Shaw, and Rogers continue to hand out pithy upload speeds, throttled downloads, and often stingy usage caps.  Much of the country still relies on basic DSL service from Bell or Telus, and the most-promoted broadband expansion project in the country — Bell’s Fibe, is phoney baloney because it relies on existing copper telephone wires to deliver the last mile of service to customers.

Much like in the United States, the move to replace outdated copper phone lines and coaxial cable in favor of near-limitless capacity fiber remains stalled in most areas.  The reasons are simple: lack of competition to drive providers to invest in upgrades and the unwillingness to spend $1000 per home to install fiber when a 100GB usage cap and slower speeds will suffice.

The Toronto Globe & Mail reports that while 30-50 percent of homes in South Korea and Japan have fiber broadband, only 18 percent of Americans and less than 2 percent of Canadians have access to the networks that routinely deliver 100Mbps affordable broadband without rationed broadband usage plans.

In fact, the biggest fiber projects underway in Canada are being built in unexpected places that run contrary to the conventional wisdom that suggest fiber installs only make sense in large, population-dense, urban areas.

Manitoba’s MTS plans to spend $125-million over the next five years to launch its fiber to the home service, FiON.  By the end of 2015, MTS expects to deploy fiber to about 120,000 homes in close to 20 Manitoba communities.  In Saskatchewan, SaskTel is investing $199 million in its network in 2011 and approximately $670 million in a seven-year Next Generation Broadband Access Program (2011 – 2017). This program will deploy Fiber to the Premises (FTTP) and upgrade the broadband network in the nine largest urban centers in the province – Saskatoon, Regina, Moose Jaw, Weyburn, Estevan, Swift Current, Yorkton, North Battleford and Prince Albert.

“Saskatchewan continues to be a growing and dynamic place,” Minister responsible for SaskTel Bill Boyd said. “The deployment of FTTP will create the bandwidth capacity to allow SaskTel to deploy exciting new next generation technologies to better serve the people of Saskatchewan.”

But the largest fiber project of all will serve the unlikely provinces of Atlantic Canada, among the most economically challenged in the country.  Bell Aliant is targeting its FibreOP fiber to the home network to over 600,000 homes by the end of next year.  On that network, Bell Aliant plans to sell speeds up to 170/30Mbps to start.

In comparison, residents in larger provinces are making due with 3-10Mbps DSL service from Bell or Telus, or expensive usage-limited, speed-throttled cable broadband service from companies like Rogers, Shaw, and Videotron.

Bell Canada is trying to convince its customers it has the fiber optic network they want.  Its Fibe Internet service sure sounds like fiber, but the product fails truth-in-advertising because it isn’t an all-fiber-network at all. It’s similar to AT&T’s U-verse — relying on fiber to the neighborhood, using existing copper phone wires to finish the job.  Technically, that isn’t much different from today’s cable systems, which also use fiber to reach into individual neighborhoods.  Traditional coaxial cable handles the signal for the rest of the journey into subscriber homes.

A half-fiber network can do better than none at all.  In Ontario, Bell sells Fibe Internet packages at speeds up to 25Mbps, but even those speeds cannot compare to what true fiber networks can deliver.

Globe & Mail readers seemed to understand today’s broadband realities in the barely competitive broadband market. One reader’s take:

“The problem in Canada (and elsewhere) preventing wide scale deployment of FTTH isn’t the technology, nor the cost. It’s a lack of political vision and will, coupled with incumbent service providers doing whatever they can to hold on to a dysfunctional model that serves their interests at the expense of consumers.”

Another:

“The problem with incumbents is they only think in 2-3 year terms. If they can’t make their money back in that period of time, they’re not interested. Thinking 20, heck even 10 years ahead is not in their vocabulary.”

While most rural telephone companies are selling customers 1-3Mbps copper-delivered DSL service, Alcatel Lucent has announced the commercial availability of VDSL 2 Vectoring, a new way of delivering up to 100Mbps over the copper wire telephone network most rural North Americans still depend on for telecommunications service.

VDSL2 combines a fiber-copper hybrid network similar to Bell’s Fibe or AT&T’s U-verse, with interference-cancelling technology called “vectoring” to deliver speeds much closer to the 100Mbps theoretical limit of current DSL technology.

“Alcatel-Lucent’s plan to make VDSL2 vectoring commercially available is very timely,” said Rob Gallagher, Principal Analyst, Head of Broadband & TV Research, Informa.  “VDSL2 Vectoring promises to bring speeds of 100Mbps and beyond to advanced copper/fiber hybrid networks and make super fast broadband speeds available to many more people, much faster than many in the industry had thought possible.”

A new way to boost copper speeds even faster.

Different flavors of DSL are currently in use around North America and beyond.  The most basic form, ADSL, also happens to be the most commonplace among phone companies offering basic broadband service.  For customers up to 12,000 feet away from a phone company central office, DSL delivers speeds usually at 1Mbps or faster.  Customers enjoying the fastest speeds must live much closer to the phone company facilities.  The further away you live, the slower your broadband speed.  In rural areas, consumers can live further away than the maximum distance of the central office, which means no DSL service for those subscribers.

A combination of signal loss and interference, called “crosstalk,” from adjacent copper wire pairs are both the enemies of DSL broadband, because they can drastically reduce speeds.

Telephone companies can address this problem by building new satellite central offices located halfway between customers and their primary facilities.  These offices, usually connected by fiber, can successfully reduce the amount of copper wire between the customer and the company, boosting speeds.  Many phone companies also deploy DSL extensions called D-SLAMs, which can be attached to a phone pole or enclosed in a metal box by the roadside.  A fiber cable connects the D-SLAM back to the phone company, while existing copper phone wires go back to individual subscribers.

More modern forms of DSL: ADSL2, ADSL2+, and VDSL, share some of those concepts.  The key is cutting as much copper wire out of the network as possible, replacing it with fiber optic cable which does not suffer signal loss or interference in the same way.

Many European and Pacific broadband networks rely on ADSL2/2+, which can usually deliver reliable speeds in the 20Mbps range.  VDSL networks offer even more bandwidth, and are the basis of U-verse and Fibe, which split up broadband, phone service, and television on the same cable.  When customers demand even faster speeds, phone companies can “bond” several individual DSL connections together to deliver faster speeds.  Some traditional ADSL providers do that today for their customers, especially in areas where low speeds prevail.

An argument the phone company will love.

Alcatel Lucent says VDSL2 with Vectoring is the next best thing to fiber to the home, because it is cheaper to deploy with fewer headaches from local authorities when streets and yards are dug up for fiber cable replacements.  It also meets the growing speed needs of average consumers.  Alcatel Lucent predicts the minimum speed North Americans will need to support the next generation of online video is 50Mbps, more than 10 times the speed phone companies like Verizon, AT&T, Frontier, and CenturyLink provide over their traditional DSL networks, especially in rural and suburban areas.

Vectoring can deliver results for phone companies with aging copper wire infrastructure, more prone to crosstalk and other signal anomalies.  Alcatel Lucent compares vectoring with noise-cancellation headphones.  By sampling the current noise conditions on copper cable networks, vectoring can suppress the impact of the interference, boosting speeds and delivering more reliable results.

With technologies like VDSL2 with Vectoring promising speeds far faster than what rural North Americans currently enjoy, the Federal Communications Commission may want to re-evaluate its national minimum speed standard for broadband — 3-4Mbps — found in its National Broadband Plan.  Alcatel Lucent promises they can do much better.

[flv width=”640″ height=”324″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Alcatel Lucent VDSL2.flv[/flv]

Alcatel Lucent produced this video to promote its new VDSL2 with Vectoring technology.  The video targets cost-conscious phone companies who are being pressured to deliver faster service, but don’t want to spend the money on a fiber to the home network.  (6 minutes)

Frontier Communications customers in North Escambia have spent a very frustrating summer trying to use Frontier’s Internet service.  The phone company has left their Internet customers in Walnut Hill, Bratt, Molino and Atmore (Ala.) offline from at least six major outages since June, often lasting as long as 12 hours at a time.

“This is happening way too often, with no reimbursement for not having the service,” says Frontier customer Susan. “It is crazy to pay as much as we do for dinosaur equipment. I was being charged for High Speed Max for over three years and was actually only getting 756kbps. When we found this out, they only gave me credit for half of what they were overcharging me.”

Frontier Communications blamed AT&T for the latest outage, which lasted nearly eight hours.

Escambia County, Fla.

Karen Miller, spokesperson for Frontier, said the outage occurred when an AT&T fiber line was cut near Bay Minette, interrupting the connection between Atmore and Atlanta.

Miller admitted Frontier has just a single strand of fiber optic cable for their Panhandle customers.  When something happens to that fiber, there is no backup and service goes offline… for everyone.

Without redundancy, Internet customers are at the mercy of AT&T, and any contracting work done between Atlanta and Atmore.  That’s a major problem for some Frontier customers.

“If Atmore and Northwest Florida is managed with only a single cable and the [connection] point of this service is at Bay Minette, Atmore is in bigger trouble than they know,” writes JimD.

Bay Minette is vulnerable to serious Gulf hurricanes.

Customers were also not happy to learn Frontier was largely blaming AT&T, particularly as some customers pay Frontier upwards of $50 a month for less than 1Mbps service that has failed them at least a half-dozen times in the past 90 days.

“Frontier routinely gives high cost deficient service and holds a monopoly on the local market,” writes one local customer. “It is nearly impossible for businesses to find another option. It’s a case of mind over matter: they don’t mind so we don’t matter.”

Miller says Frontier is currently conducting an engineering study to get a backup fiber route from Atmore to Atlanta, but for some customers it is too late.

“We switched to Bright House Networks for both Internet and landline service,” says another customer. “It’s better quality, less expensive and it works. No more Frontier-anything for us.”