Can Verizon be enticed to puts its FiOS trucks back on the road to expansion?

Despite the fact further expansion of Verizon FiOS has been stalled for more than two years as a result of a company directive, local officials in one Massachusetts community won a commitment from Verizon to extend its fiber to the home service to every home and business in return for a lengthy contract renewal.

Just nine months after local officials in Medford, north of Boston, first signed an agreement with Verizon, The Medford Transcript reports the two were back at the negotiating table with an amended agreement to extend Verizon FiOS beyond the 71 percent already served in return for a franchise that will not expire until 2025.

Verizon originally left large sections of West Medford and several neighborhoods scattered around the area without a fiber upgrade.

Verizon regional president Donna Cupelo acknowledged Medford is the only community in the state that has won a second round of FiOS expansion.

Like many cable franchise agreements, Verizon has agreed to contribute towards the operation of the community’s Public, Educational, and Government access channels available to subscribers of both Comcast and Verizon FiOS.

The amended agreement will expire at the same time Comcast’s current franchise agreement ends, giving both providers parity.

Verizon’s agreement to expand its FiOS network under certain conditions may provide the first visible path for other communities with incomplete fiber service to entice Verizon to keep building its fiber network.

Halloween scare stories are back!

It is amazing the length some incumbent broadband providers will go to stop publicly-owned networks from getting off the ground and competing with the “good enough for you” service on offer from the local phone or cable company.

This morning, Stop the Cap! received word from a Minnesota reader who reports their dinner hour was interrupted by an unsolicited phone call from a group called “Americans for Sensible Broadband,” which as far as we can tell does not exist as a formal group. The caller used ridiculous scare tactics worthy of a bad Halloween movie:

• Did you know that fiber broadband networks are expensive to run and will increase your electric bill to pay for the high powered lasers needed to send the signal to your home?

Fiber broadband projects now expanding in Minnesota have no relation to your electric bill because most are run by independent community-owned co-ops, not electric utilities. Even if they were run by an electric provider, the cost to power a fiber network is far smaller than the network of signal amplifiers and other transmission equipment needed by traditional cable and phone companies. The only electrical expense to the homeowner is powering any set top boxes or other related equipment to make use of the service. These costs are comparable to what one would pay with cable or phone services.

• Most fiber networks are not actually fiber at all. The largest companies in America actually let you keep your current wiring, but that is not fiber, so why spend tax money on a risky fiber network?

While AT&T U-verse has chosen the route of “fiber to the neighborhood,” which still relies on existing copper wiring from nearby poles to your home, many fiber to the home projects take fiber… straight to the home. Some community networks do make use of very short lengths of pre-existing copper wiring inside your home, but this has more to do with your convenience. You don’t need a fiber connection to your landline phone, for instance. Compare the broadband speeds and services on offer from the community provider vs. incumbent cable and phone companies. Choose the one that delivers the best services for the price.

• America’s cable and phone companies are working hard for pro-growth, pro-expansion policies in Washington that will allow your community to get the benefit of billions of private investment, at no risk to you.

An in-home threat to your children or incumbent provider profits?

Incumbent phone and cable companies already enjoy a higher level of deregulation than ever before. If they have not spent money to improve broadband in your area before, there is nothing that will open their wallets to provide the service now, unless someone else subsidizes part of the cost. Guess who “someone” is? That’s right. You the taxpayer or ratepayer. Whether in the form of broadband subsidies paid for by taxpayer dollars or ratepayer subsidies from the Universal Service Fund, only subsidies or competition prod incumbents to deliver better broadband to rural Minnesota (or anywhere else). If you fail a “Return On Investment” test, you will not get broadband no matter how much deregulation gets approved in Washington.

The question for rural consumers is whether AT&T, Frontier, CenturyLink, Comcast, or Charter Cable has your best interests at heart or whether a community co-op you partly own will.

• In socialistic countries, the government runs the broadband service and can monitor your web browsing. Do you want your local community checking up on your online activities?

“Socialistic” is in the eye of the beholder. Most broadband networks are run by private telecommunications companies, some with state subsidies, others entirely on their own. The federal government’s security agencies already have access to monitor Internet traffic under warrantless wiretapping laws, and that extends to every provider in the country, private or public. That said, there is no evidence local government officials would monitor your web browsing habits, much less have the budget or technical expertise to do so.

• Fiber cables create more hazards on utility poles designed for phone, cable and electric service. Is it worth risking those services for an unnecessary and expensive fiber network?

Electric and phone companies used the same scare stories to try and keep cable television lines off utility poles more than 30 years ago. Cable operators fought for and won the right to use utility poles to no ill effect, and at fair prices. It is ironic some cable companies want to use the same argument against municipal fiber that phone and electric companies used against them.

• In these difficult economic times, do you realize your local taxes could triple to pay for unnecessary fiber Internet?

Most public broadband projects are financed by municipal bonds obtained in the private free market. Investors can decide for themselves if they represent a safe investment, and many do. If the networks fail, private investors typically take the hit.

But the most ridiculous claim of all was that “recent news reports warn that lasers could blind your children if they happen to play with the fiber cables in your home.”

The only “news report” we could find on this subject was an Engadget news story from 2011 about an S3 Krypton laser that could blind astronauts without proper safety equipment. But those lasers are not powering broadband networks.

In reality, fiber to the home networks are safer than traditional copper phone wiring, which can send a significant electric shock to anyone playing with the wiring when a telephone rings. Many fiber networks rely on Class 1, low power lasers — the lowest risk level. Even if a customer stared at the lit end of an optical fiber connector, the visible light would be diffused into a cone pattern that would be completely harmless by the time it reached the retina. Many networks also include a secondary safety mechanism that quickly shuts down the laser light once the connection has been broken. Certain higher-powered laser communications networks can have some safety risks, but almost entirely for workers working on primary cables that deliver service to dozens of homes. Those workers are well-trained to avoid those risks.

Minnesota seems to be one of the latest hotbeds of incumbent wrath over expanding community-owned broadband networks. Despite efforts to label them insidious creeping socialism, they are actually no more threatening than a traditional co-op, except perhaps to incumbent cable and phone companies that have been running to the bank cashing checks from customers enduring low broadband speeds at high prices.

Cable companies are starting to lay the groundwork to support the next generation of HD video — first with 4K, an improvement over today’s HD standard, and eventually 8K Ultra High Definition TV — delivering pictures 16 times better than the current 1080p HD standard and coming close to the level of detail supported by IMAX.

The 8K evolving standard, proposed by Japan’s public broadcaster NHK and dubbed Super Hi-Vision, remains years away, but cable operators are preparing their systems to support 4K UHDTV (3840 x 2160 – 8.3 megapixels)  much sooner.

By the time 8K comes into use, most cable operators will rely entirely on a single broadband pipe to deliver video, Internet access and telephone service. To handle that traffic, and the bandwidth UHDTV demands, providers will have to upgrade their systems to support much faster speeds. A single video channel transmitted in 8K UHDTV requires around 360Mbps.

That makes Google’s decision to construct a gigabit broadband network in Kansas City seem less revolutionary and almost evolutionary, considering how quickly bandwidth demand will increase in the next eight years.

The cable industry is now moving fast to finalize the next version of the DOCSIS standard which supports cable broadband. DOCSIS 3.1 is expected to be introduced Thursday at the Cable-Tec Expo. An initial preview seems to suggest the standard will be backwards-compatible with prior DOCSIS versions — good news for those buying their own cable modems — and will support multi-gigabit speeds, if the cable operator decides to dedicate more of its available bandwidth to broadband.

An essential goal of the cable industry is to match or beat 1Gbps, currently on offer from several fiber to the home service providers and Google. Some operators want even more — up to 10/2Gbps capacity, as they consider future speed needs.

But engineering advancements and innovation fly in the face of bean counters attempting to monetize broadband usage with usage caps and usage-based billing. The industry’s justification for usage caps becomes even more tenuous as it moves to a single pipeline for all of its services and treats its cable TV package differently from Internet traffic. AT&T and Bell are already doing that today with their U-verse and Fibe platforms. Both claim their TV channels move over a different network than traditional Internet, but as costs for both continue to decline, that is becoming a distinction with little difference.

Google and a handful of independent or community-owned broadband networks are largely the only ones calling out the cable industry’s bogus claims that consumers don’t need super fast broadband, usage caps are necessary, and broadband speed upgrades are difficult and too expensive. These new competitors have correctly predicted the exponential growth in bandwidth demand and are prepared for it, even as the industry continues to dismiss their competitors’ networks as unnecessary overkill.

But cable’s hurry to DOCSIS 3.1 tells a different story.

Jeff Baumgartner from Light Reading Cable observed cable executives at Tuesday’s annual Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM) conference, where those attending beat the drum for faster and better networks:

[DOCSIS 3.1] will also focus on the quality of cable’s pipe, reduced latency and other smarts designed to help enable a new set of broadband-based services. Cable’s interest in offering 4K HD services, which offer four times the resolution of today’s HD, was an example that was brought up several times during the session.

The cable industry also hopes to shorten the process of creating the specs and having them turn into deployable products. An average generation of DOCSIS has typically taken three to four years.

“We can no longer do that,” said Phil McKinney, the new president and CEO of CableLabs, but didn’t offer a guess on the anticipated cycle for 3.1. “We have to deliver higher and higher performance.”

[…] And 3.1 is also about the almighty dollar as broadband usage continues to climb. Getting costs down “is a key part of Docsis 3.1,” said Cox Communications Inc. EVP and CTO Kevin Hart.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Light Reading NBCU Ultra-HD Demo 10-12.flv[/flv]

Jeff Baumgartner from Light Reading Cable was invited to a demonstration of 8K UHDTV, which will require much faster broadband networks to handle the super high quality video. (3 minutes)

PC Magazine has declared fiber to the home service America’s fastest broadband technology, and among larger providers, Verizon’s FiOS once again took top honors for delivering the fastest and most consistent broadband speeds.

Over the past nine months, the magazine’s readers have been conducting regular speed tests using their personal broadband connections. The magazine found fiber optics remains the best current technology for delivering cutting-edge broadband service, with an average speed rating for FiOS reaching 29.4/16.7Mbps. Since PC Magazine readers were subscribed to various speed tiers while conducting the tests, the magazine’s ratings do not measure the fastest possible speeds on offer from different providers. Verizon’s most-popular service bundle includes 15/5Mbps service, heavily weighting Verizon’s speed rating which is capable of even faster speeds with their 50-300Mbps premium service tiers. But on average, consistently fast speeds kept them in the top spot.

Cable broadband technology was the second-best choice, depending on how cable operators implement it. Cable companies depend on a singl, shared broadband pipeline in each neighborhood. DOCSIS 3 upgrades allow a cable operator to vastly expand that pipeline by “bonding” several channels together to increase the maximum bandwidth. Cable operators that combine the latest technology with the smallest number of customers sharing a connection do the best.

Midcontinent Communications (better known by customers as Midco), achieved first place nationwide. The company, which serves customers in Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Wisconsin, took top honors with an average speed of 24.7/4.4Mbps — the best of any cable operator.

Ratings sometimes show the level of investment made by cable operators in their network. A sudden boost in average speeds is a sure sign a cable operator is rolling out network upgrades. A speed decline can expose a cable company trying to oversell an already constrained network. Charter Cable, which has routinely gotten poor ratings in Consumer Reports’ rankings, showed dramatic improvement in PC Magazine’s ratings, achieving third place with an average speed increase from 15Mbps to 18.5Mbps. But while the added speed is nice, the company’s usage caps are not. Conversely, WOW!, which achieved top scores in Consumer Reports’ ratings, scored towards the bottom of PC Magazine’s tests.

Comcast, which last year trumpeted its high rankings in controversial ads claiming to deliver the fastest broadband in the nation has now been overrun by both Midco and Charter. Comcast Xfinity is now in sixth place, hardly the fodder for any future ad campaign.

Cox Cable actually lost ground since last year, with average speed now down to 14.8Mbps. The bottom four: Time Warner Cable, Mediacom, WOW!, and Suddenlink — are all hampered by slow upload speeds and more anemic “take-rates” on higher speed broadband plans with the speeds on offer. With fewer premium speed customers, average speed ratings take a hit from the larger proportion of customers sticking with standard service.

Phone companies barely appeared in the magazine’s top ratings. AT&T’s U-verse could not even make the top-15. While 25Mbps was adequate when U-verse was first deployed, the broadband speed race has quickly overshadowed the company’s fiber to the neighborhood service, which still relies on home phone lines and antiquated copper infrastructure in the immediate neighborhood.

Phone companies still offering traditional ADSL on almost all-copper networks turned in even more dismal results — most too low to rate. Only Frontier’s adopted FiOS network kept them in the rankings in the overall broadband “slow zone” in the Pacific Northwest, along with CenturyLink’s acquired ADSL2+ and bonded DSL networks built by Qwest.

ISPs that perform poorly typically criticize the methodology of voluntary speed tests as the basis for speed and performance ranking. Most criticize the apparent lack of consistency, random sampling, the possibility rankings may be weighted in certain geographic areas, and may mix a disproportionate number of customers with standard or premium level speeds to unfairly boost or diminish average speed rankings. But overall, PC Magazine’s rankings show some technologies superior to others. If a customer has a choice, finding a fiber to the home provider is likely to provide an improvement over what the cable company offers, but the differences between phone company DSL and cable broadband are even starker.

The FCC speed test program, conducted by SamKnows, takes more regular snapshots of broadband quality from volunteer panelists. Your editor’s home broadband connection from Time Warner Cable is profiled above, showing results from January-September 2012

Lafayette, Louisiana has never sit still for private companies bypassing the heart of Cajun country. When electric companies refused to wire the city, the community elected to do it themselves. When Cox Cable and AT&T said no to providing the kind of cutting-edge broadband that would allow Lafayette to protect its reputation as an entrepreneur-driven community, publicly owned utility LUS constructed a fiber to the home broadband network for every resident and business. Today, LUS Fiber has helped transform the parish, with half the unemployment rate of the rest of the country and an attractive place for digital economy jobs. It has even helped curtail well-educated recent graduates moving away in search of high-tech employment.

“There really is no infrastructure more important in the 21st century economy than fiber,” said Geoff Daily, executive director of Fibercorps, a non-profit group promoting digital economic development in Lafayette.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/FTTH Council – LUS Profile 9-24-12.flv[/flv]

Watch how LUS Fiber has transformed the lives of students, attracted new high-tech business, and promoted job growth with broadband infrastructure most cable and phone companies simply won’t provide.  (9 minutes)