Cincinnati Bell is an island in the middle of a sea of AT&T — offering over 258,000 southwestern Ohio residents and businesses access to a fiber to the home network that has kept customer disconnects down and broadband speeds up.

Now the phone company says it is ready for any speed increases on tap from competitor Time Warner Cable and has the capacity to bring gigabit speeds to Cincinnati as soon as enough customers ask. But first it has to expand its footprint.

The company has plans to bring Fioptics to 35 percent of Cincinnati by the end of this year, according to Leigh Fox, chief technology officer for Cincinnati Bell. The company has successfully upgraded its fiber network to offer 53,000 more homes a fiber alternative to Time Warner Cable during the first nine months of this year. At least 29 percent of Cincinnati residents have cut Time Warner Cable’s cord at least once, trying the fiber to the home service.

Cincinnati Bell wants a 50-70 percent penetration rate in the city, defined as the percentage of customers who have subscribed at least once.

“I am pretty confident on returns and we do have to hit a certain metric,” said Fox. “As an example, we just built out my neighborhood over the summer where in the first two weeks we had 23 percent penetration and after a month we had 43 percent penetration.”

Unlike AT&T which confines U-verse to larger population areas, Cincinnati Bell is continuing to invest in traditional ADSL/2+ service for the nearly half million customers throughout its service area that cannot get Fioptics service yet. The company claims the majority of these customers can now buy 10Mbps or faster DSL service, making Cincinnati Bell competitive with Time Warner Cable across the region. Higher, stable speeds are the phone company’s best defense against DSL disconnects. Most cable broadband growth comes at the expense of telephone company DSL customers leave behind.

Currently, the majority of Cincinnati Bell’s “non-techie” fiber customers are satisfied with 20Mbps service. Time Warner Cable is planning to offer up to 100Mbps in the near future, but Fox noted Fioptics has the capability to exceed those speeds ten times over, and said if enough customers want 1Gbps speed, Cincinnati Bell will offer it.

C Spire has announced the nine Mississippi cities that will be finalists for the nation’s first and only statewide 1Gbps broadband fiber to the home Internet service.

The nine communities participating in the first phase of the gigabit fiber broadband initiative include: Batesville, Clinton, Corinth, Hattiesburg, Horn Lake, McComb, Quitman, Ridgeland and Starkville. These cities and towns were among 33 municipalities that submitted formal applications late last month.

Competing cities developed aggressive campaigns featuring rallies and town hall meetings, local celebrations, door-to-door canvassing, mobilization of neighborhood groups and homeowner organizations, dedicated websites, social media campaigns and even stadium and freeway billboard advertisements to get C Spire’s attention.

C Spire also announced pricing for its Internet and related digital television and home phone services. Pricing for 1Gbps Internet access will be $80 a month, $100 a month for combined Internet and home phone, $140 a month for Internet and digital TV and $160 a month for the entire package. C Spire Wireless customers will receive an extra $10 monthly discount on all packages.

The finalist cities were selected by a C Spire review panel that considered factors like proximity to the company’s fiber optic infrastructure, community mobilization capabilities and incentives to speed up the construction process and reduce overall costs.

“We are truly impressed with the overwhelming show of support for C Spire’s Fiber to the Home deployment and the tremendous interest and demand for making this service a reality for the residents in these communities,” said Hu Meena, president and CEO of C Spire. “The positive response we’ve received only strengthens our determination to bring 100-times-faster Internet, and the limitless possibilities that come along with it, to as many people as we can because we know that this service has the power to transform our state into a hub for technology investment and economic growth.”

The nine finalists for C Spire’s gigabit broadband network.

Meena said C Spire plans to continue working with the cities that were not selected in the preliminary round and will share best practices and improvements that promise to make the process easier, faster and better for later challenges.

“We want to ensure that all of our communities remain actively engaged in the process and keep the demand and excitement alive for upcoming phases,” he said.

The finalist communities will next compete to see which can pre-register the most homeowners in designated fiber neighborhoods. Those that reach their targets will get fiber service first.

As soon as neighborhoods reach their percentage goals in an individual city, C Spire plans to begin construction in those areas – so there is a possibility that work could start in more than one community at the same time, said Gregg Logan, senior vice president of C Spire Fiber.

Residents will be asked to make a $10 refundable deposit and provide credit card information when they pre-register. The website also will feature detailed, interactive maps of neighborhoods in cities showing progress each one is making toward turning their fiberhood “green” and qualifying for build out of the service.

Logan said C Spire hopes to start turning up 1 Gig service in the first C Spire Fiber neighborhoods by the middle of next year.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/ABC Extended interview with Dr John Cioffi – Father of DSL 11-18-13.mp4[/flv]

Dr. John Cioffi, the “Father of DSL” doesn’t think much of fiber to the home service, suggesting it is a waste of money and delivers budget-busting losses to providers. He has the ear of the man in charge of overseeing Australia’s National Broadband Network, Communications Minister John Turnbull. Turnbull’s public statements imply he supports Cioffi’s approach – a hybrid fiber-copper network similar to AT&T U-verse.

By adopting cheaper VDSL technology, Cioffi claims providers can avoid the “$800 unrecoverable loss per customer Verizon FiOS has experienced” bringing fiber to the home. He also claims fiber to the home service isn’t as robust as fiber proponents claim, with flimsy, easy-to-break fiber cables and loads of service calls commonplace among some European providers.

Few media interviews, including this one with ABC Television, bother to fully disclose how Cioffi has a big dog in the broadband technology fight. Cioffi founded ASSIA, Inc., a firm that markets products and services to DSL providers. ASSIA is backed by investments from AT&T, its first customer, and a handful of overseas telephone companies. Cioffi estimates ASSIA software is used to manage 90 percent of existing DSL accounts in the United States and is a fundamental part of AT&T’s efforts to increase U-verse speeds. Dismantling DSL in favor of fiber could have a marked impact on ASSIA’s profits. (8:47)

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Malcolm Turnbull Discussion with Father of DSL John Cioffi Part 1 11-18-13.mp4[/flv]

Australia’s new Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull talks with Dr. John Cioffi about the differences between VDSL and fiber technologies. Cioffi bashes one form of fiber to the home service dubbed “GPON” because it shares infrastructure. Cioffi claims fiber speeds drop to 20Mbps when a few dozen people share a GPON connection. When in Paris, Cioffi claims his shared fiber connection maxed out at 2.5Mbps while ADSL still ran at 6Mbps. (3:52)

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Malcolm Turnbull Discussion with Father of DSL John Cioffi Part 2 11-18-13.mp4[/flv]

Unsurprisingly, Cioffi claims his company’s software is essential for a good vectored VDSL user experience. Cioffi also claims VDSL can easily beat GPON fiber broadband speeds, a very controversial claim. In Cioffi’s view, even Wi-Fi can perform better than fiber. Finally, Cioffi claims Google is spending $8,000 per customer to deploy its fiber to the home network, when VDSL can do the job for much less money. (2:58)

The Australian government’s proposal to launch a nationwide fiber to the home National Broadband Network (NBN) has been scrapped by the more conservative Liberal-National Coalition that replaced the Labor government in a recent election.

As a result, the Coalition has announced initial plans to revise the NBN with a mixture of cheaper technology that can result in faster deployment of lower speed broadband at a lower cost. If implemented, fiber to the home service will only reach a minority of homes. In its place,  cable broadband may be the dominant technology where cable companies already operate. For almost everyone else, technology comparable to AT&T U-verse is the favored choice of the new government, mixing fiber-to-the-neighborhood with existing copper wires into homes..

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/ABC Malcolm Turnbull moves to put Coalitions stamp on NBN Co 9-24-13.mp4[/flv]

Australia’s new Communications Minister moves to put the Coalition government’s stamp on the National Broadband Network, replacing most of the promised fiber-to-the-home technology with a service comparable to AT&T U-verse. From ABC-TV (6:32)

Just a year earlier Telstra, Australia’s largest phone company, was planning to decommission and scrap its copper landline network, considered “five minutes to midnight” back in 2003 by Telstra’s head of government and corporate affairs, Tony Warren. Now the country will effectively embrace copper technology once more with an incremental DSL upgrade, forfeiting speeds of up to 1,000Mbps over fiber in return for a minimum speed guarantee from the government of 24Mbps over VDSL.

The turnabout has massive implications for current providers. Telstra, which expected to see its prominence in Australian broadband diminished under Labor’s NBN is once again a rising star. The Liberal-National Coalition government appointed Telstra’s former CEO Ziggy Switkowski to run a “rebooted” Coalition NBN that critics are now calling Telstra 3.0. Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull also installed three new members of the NBN’s governing board consisting of a Telstra executive, a founder of a commercial Internet Service Provider, and an ex-construction boss who left the NBN in 2011.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/ABC Malcolm Turnbull Outlines NBN Review 9-24-13.mp4[/flv]

ABC reports Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull asked for the resignations of the entire NBN board, one of the first steps to re-envision the NBN under the Liberal-National Coalition’s party platform. Turnbull accused the former government of setting political targets for fiber broadband and was never forthcoming about the true cost and complexity of the ambitious fiber project. (8:50)

Turnbull

Some Australians complain that NBN’s proposed reliance on Telstra copper is a mistake. Telstra has allowed its landline infrastructure to decline over the years and many are skeptical they will ever see faster speeds promised over wiring put in place decades earlier.

The NBN under the Liberal-National Coalition will depend heavily on two copper-based technologies to deliver speed enhancements: VDSL and vectoring. Both require short runs of well-maintained copper wiring to deliver peak performance. The longer the copper line, the worse it will perform. If that line is compromised, VDSL and vectoring are unlikely to make much difference, as AT&T has discovered in its effort to roll out faster U-verse speeds, much to the frustration of customers that cannot upgrade until AT&T invests in cleaning up its troubled copper network.

Coalition critics also warn the new government will foolishly spend less on a fiber-copper network today that will need expensive fiber upgrades tomorrow.

Turnbull isn’t happy with Australia’s mainstream media for lazy reporting on the issues.

ABC Radio reports that the Coalition’s approach to the NBN may be penny-wise, pound foolish. By the time the NBN rolls out fiber to the neighborhood and Telstra is required to invest in upgrades to its copper network to make it work, fiber to the home service could turn out to have been cheaper all along. (5:11)
You must remain on this page to hear the clip, or you can download the clip and listen later.

“I have to say that by and large the standard of reporting of technology and broadband by the mainstream media has been woeful,” Turnbull said. “If the Australian public are misinformed about these issues, it was in large part a consequence of the unwillingness of the mainstream media to pay any attention to what is really going on in the industry.”

The promise of fiber optic broadband may prove elusive under the new government.

With much of the new NBN dependent on Telstra’s copper telephone network, Stuart Lee, Telstra’s managing director of its wholesale division, rushed to defend the suitability of the same copper network Telstra was prepared to scrap under the last government.

Lee said he was especially annoyed with critics that call Telstra’s copper networking “aging.”

“The other thing that makes me cross when I hear it, and I see it a lot in the press is the talk of the aging copper network. It’s not. It’s not an aging copper network. It’s like grandfather’s axe; it’s had five new handles and three new heads. When it breaks, we replace the broken bit. So it’s much the same as it always has been and always will be,” Lee said. “It’s just an older technology, it’s not that the asset itself has deteriorated.”

When questioned about several recent high-profile mass service disruptions Australians experienced on Telstra’s landline copper network, Lee blamed the weather, not the network.

“They correlate to weather events, and the weather events we’ve had in the last [few years] is about five to six times the previous ones, so surprise surprise there is a lot more damage,” said Lee.

The new government has charged the Labor-run NBN with inefficiency, taxpayer-funded waste, and playing politics with broadband by giving high priority to fiber upgrades in constituencies served by threatened Labor MPs. Lee added NBN Co has played loose with the facts, declaring premises “passed” by the new fiber network without allowing customers to order service on the new network. That can become a serious problem, because the NBN plan calls for customers’ existing copper phone and DSL service to be decommissioned soon after the fiber network becomes available.

The Sydney Morning Herald compared the last Labor government’s broadband policy with the new Coalition government policy.

iiNet’s chief technology officer, John Lindsay said that the potential for disconnecting customers from the ADSL network while they still can’t order NBN service was “madness.”

The Labor government’s NBN has also been under fire for a pricing formula that includes a usage component when setting prices. Impenetrably named the “connectivity virtual circuit” charge, or CVC, the NBN charges retail providers a monthly connection fee for each customer and a usage charge that includes a virtual data allowance originally set at 30GB. Retail providers are billed extra when customers exceed the informal allowance. Although the government promised to reduce the charges, they effectively haven’t and likely won’t until 2017.

Lindsay called the CVC an artificial tax comparable to the Labor government’s carbon tax, and represents a digital barrier to limit customer usage.

“It’s a tax on packets,” Lindsay said.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/ABC NBN Copper 11-19-13.mp4[/flv]

Tasmanian residents complain NBN Co’s new fiber network is claimed to be available, but actually isn’t in many neighborhoods now scheduled for disconnection from Telstra’s copper landline and DSL network. (2:17)

The WiredWest Cooperative
Towns shown above are official voting members of the WiredWest Cooperative. The town of Montgomery has also recently become a member. Requirements for new towns including being contiguous and directly accessible by road from another WiredWest member town, and less than 50% served by cable broadband.

Although plans to offer publicly owned fiber to the home service in 42 western Massachusetts communities are moving forward, a proposed $10 million taxpayer-funded incentive to encourage Comcast to expand cable service in western Massachusetts could mean the cable giant might get to some of those communities first.

Reps. Stephen Kulik (D-Worthington), Paul Mark (D-Cuba) and Sens. Stanley Rosenberg (D-Amherst) and Benjamin Downing (D-Pittsfield) have filed an amendment to Gov. Deval Patrick’s $40 million community broadband bond bill requesting a $10 million incentive be included to underwrite Comcast’s expenses to expand cable service into areas the company has long declared unprofitable.

“It’s challenging, because you cannot overbuild a new broadband network where there is existing service,” Kulik told The Recorder. “What we’re proposing is to add language to this bill, to provide incentive money to expand cable service.  The partial cable towns aren’t eligible for federal funds. Carving out a way to reach out to these towns and extend cable seems a better way to do this.”

The dozens of communities participating in the WiredWest community broadband consortium have waited years for better broadband service. Rural western Massachusetts has been largely bypassed by Verizon, which only offers limited DSL service to some customers. Dominant cable provider Comcast primarily serves denser neighborhoods in selected towns.

Life is particularly complicated for the handful of communities that have some service from Verizon and/or Comcast, because almost all federal broadband grants are available only to communities that don’t have Internet access. These partially served areas, dubbed “cable towns,” are frustrated by government grants that only direct funding to areas where no service is available and are on the receiving end of endless complaints from local residents suffering broadband envy, knowing a neighbor up the street has had cable service for 30 years while many others are left in limbo.

Kulik

In August, Chris Saner of Huntington told the newspaper Comcast’s cable line ends 1.4 miles down the road from his house. The cable company would be happy to extend service to the roadway in front of his home for $24,000. If Saner had to sell his home, that investment might be mandatory to help find a buyer. Saner should know, as he works in real estate. Prospective buyers tell him, “don’t even show me anything where there’s no cable.”

Broadband access has become so critical, some don’t care whether they get it from WiredWest’s future fiber network or Comcast’s coax.

Fiber broadband “is lobster and filet mignon. Cable is hamburger, but give us hamburger —we’re starving out here,” Saner said.

The $10 million proposal from the four Massachusetts Democrats could bring faster cable Internet service for some residents, but could also potentially undercut fiber access down the road.

Comcast isn’t likely to expand service on its own, citing Return On Investment formulas that make expansion unprofitable. A $10 million incentive could resolve some of those cost concerns, but critics call it corporate welfare.

Robbie Leppzer, a Wendell documentary filmmaker who has been involved in the struggle to improve broadband in western Massachusetts for years, suggests that taxpayer funds would be better spent in the public sector, “where towns and their residents have more say in the process.”

“Personally, I would love to see a nonprofit, community-based solution because it would be a more effective use of money, and it would keep it in the fiber-optic realm,” Leppzer told the newspaper. “While [coaxial cable] may be adequate for now, it will not meet the needs of the 21st century.”

Ironically, western Massachusetts may eventually get the fastest Internet speeds in the state from the Massachusetts Broadband Institute’s $71.5 million middle-mile network, now 95 percent complete. MBI’s priority is to build the regional fiber network and provision it for institutional customers including municipal buildings, schools, hospitals, libraries, fire and police departments. Once complete, the network’s second phase involves expanding access to the public.

The WiredWest consortium will be the public-facing part of the project, responsible for marketing high-bandwidth, affordable Internet, phone, high-definition television services and ancillary services to residents and businesses. WiredWest wants to build a 1,952-mile fiber-to-the-home network off MBI’s regional fiber backbone and institutional network.

One of the most common questions from eager would-be customers is exactly when the fiber network will be finished and open for business to the public. Funding remains the biggest impediment. The cost of wiring residents for fiber service across the 42-town consortium ranges from $70 million to $130 million. It’s a substantial sum for small communities to cover, but the project does enjoy economy of scale that could ultimately save taxpayer dollars.

In Leverett, which has been building a fiber-to-the-home network on its own, the price tag for the 1,900 residents is $3.6 million — the amount of the bond secured to launch the project. Leverett residents will cover the costs of the fiber network through a tax increase that will amount to $295 a year over 20 years for a home assessed at $278,700.

The state can continue to budget about $40 million annually to gradually connect residents to the WiredWest fiber network or find Comcast expansion a better choice at a quarter of the price in some communities. It could even fund both. For some elected officials, getting broadband to communities using any means necessary is the primary goal. Downing thinks the western half of the state has waited long enough for broadband, noting the improvement initiative started in 2008. He wants the project finished before Patrick leaves office.

“We should all recognize that 18 months from now is the end of this administration,” Downing said. “And there is no guarantee that the next governor will share the same commitment for this project.”

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Viodi Broadband – Unique to Each Locale 11-13-13.mp4[/flv]

The western Massachusetts middle-mile/fiber to the home project is being developed in cooperation with Axia Technology Partners, a consulting, engineering, and construction firm. Tim Scott talks to Viodi.tv about Axia’s role as the operator for the Massachusetts community network. (7:45)