Greenlight announces gigabit service for Wilson, N.C.

Claims from critics that government-owned Internet Service Providers would bring ineptly managed, behind-the-times broadband are belied by the reality on the ground.

Network World highlighted several cities offering consumers and/or businesses gigabit broadband service from publicly owned Internet providers. All of them stand alone with no commercial competitor willing or able to compete on speed. In fact, most of the communities offering their own Internet service do so because incumbent cable and phone companies showed no interest in upgrading or expanding their services or offer them at prohibitive prices. For many of the towns involved, the only way to get 21st century broadband was to build it themselves.

Cable companies like Time Warner Cable scoff at the need for superfast broadband speeds, claiming customers are not interested in gigabit Internet. After the Federal Communications Commission issued a challenge for every state in the U.S. to reach 1Gbps Internet speeds in at least one community by 2015, then chief financial officer Irene Esteves said 1,000Mbps service was unnecessary and the cable company wouldn’t offer it because there was little demand for it.

While Esteves was telling reporters gigabit speeds were irrelevant, Time Warner Cable’s lobbyists were working behind the scenes to make sure none of their community-owned competitors offered it either, cajoling state officials to pass legislation that would effectively ban publicly owned broadband competition. Time Warner, along with other cable and phone companies evidently feel so threatened, they have successfully helped enact such bans into law in 20 states.

The record is clear. The best chance your community has of getting gigabit speeds is to rally your local government or municipal utility to offer the service you are not getting from the local cable/phone duopoly anytime soon.

Chanute, Kansas

The city of Chanute, Kan. is fighting back against incumbent phone and cable companies trying to ban municipal-owned ISPs in the state.

With just 9,000 residents barely served by AT&T and the routinely awful Cable ONE, Chanute knew if it wanted 21st century broadband, it was unlikely to get it from the local phone and cable company. Chanute has owned a municipal fiber network since 1984 and has been in the Internet provider business since 2005. Now the city is working towards a fiber to the home network for residents while AT&T is lobbying Washington regulators to let the company scrap rural landline and DSL service across Kansas and other states.

The city is taking a stand against the latest effort to ban community broadband networks in Kansas. It’s a rough fight because Kansas lobbyists get to write and introduce corporate-written telecom bills in the legislature without even the pretext of the proposed legislation originating from someone actually elected to office. SB 304, temporarily withdrawn for “tweaking,” shreds the concept of home rule — allowing local communities to decide what works best for them. Instead, AT&T, Cable ONE, Comcast, Cox, and other telecom companies will get to make that decision on your behalf if the bill re-emerges in the legislature and passes later this year.

“We’re taking a leadership position to do something about it. I’d hate to sit here and keep bashing AT&T and Cable One. They don’t care. All they care about is paying dividends back to their stockholders,” Chanute’s utility director Larry Gates told Network World. “My feeling – this is mine, it’s probably not the city’s, but it’s mine – is I wouldn’t care if we ever made a dime on this network, as long as it would pay for itself. If it could increase and do the things with education, health, safety, and economic development – man, that’s a win. That’s a huge win.”

Chattanooga, Tennessee

The “headquarters” of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance is in the basement of this building in suburban Washington.

EPB Broadband is the best argument community broadband advocates have to counter Big Telecom propaganda that community-owned broadband is a failure waiting to happen. EPB has received national acclaim by delivering gigabit broadband to consumers and businesses that Chattanoogans can’t get from AT&T and Comcast. EPB is Chattanooga’s municipally owned electric utility and originally laid fiber to power its Smart Meter project to better manage its electric system. With near infinite capacity, why not share that network with the community?

EPB routinely embarrasses its competition by offering highly rated local customer service and support instead of forcing customers to deal with offshore call centers rife with language barriers. Customer ratings of AT&T and Comcast are dismal — rock bottom in fact — but that isn’t the case for EPB, embraced by the local community and now helping to foster the region’s high-tech economic development.

Santa Monica, California

Santa Monica City Net does not serve residential customers, but a lot of locals probably wish it did. Greater Los Angeles has been carved up between bottom-rated Charter Communications and never-loved Time Warner Cable. Time Warner customers in LA will soon get access to 100Mbps broadband. Businesses in downtown Santa Monica can already get broadband from City Net at speeds up to 10Gbps.

Lafayette, Louisiana

LUS Fiber has had a very tough battle just getting service off the ground. Its two competitors are AT&T and Cox, and the fiber to the home provider had to work its way through legal disputes and a special election to launch service. Even to this day, corporate front groups like the Taxpayers Protection Alliance are still taking potshots at LUS and other municipal providers. TPA president David Williams refuses to identify where the money comes from to fund TPA’s operations. It’s a safe bet some of it comes from telecom companies based on the TPA’s preoccupation with broadband issues. The group always aligns itself with the interests of phone and cable companies.

Cable and phone companies that fund sock puppet groups like TPA could have spent that money to upgrade broadband service in communities like Lafayette. Instead, they cut checks to groups like the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, headquartered in a basement rental unit in suburban Washington, D.C.

Burlington, Vermont

Burlington Telecom’s troubled past is a poster child for anti-municipal broadband groups. The provider’s financial problems are often mentioned by groups fighting public broadband. To be sure, there are successes and failures in any industry and inept marketing by BT several years ago hurt its chances for success. Its competition is Comcast and FairPoint Communications, which means usage-capped cable broadband or slow speed DSL. BT sells a gigabit broadband alternative for $149.99 a month for those signing a 12-month contract. Comcast charges $115 a month for 105Mbps service — about ten times slower than BT’s offering.

Tullahoma, Tennessee

The Tennessee Telecommunications Association is appealing to the state government to keep publicly owned broadband competitors out of their territories.

LighTUBe, the telecommunications branch of the Tullahoma Utilities Board (TUB), announced its gigabit Internet offering in May 2013, says Network World. The magazine suspects the provider is interested in commercial, not residential customers.

That no doubt comes as a relief to the Tennessee Telecommunications Association, which represents the state’s independent phone companies. Last month, more than a dozen executives from those companies invaded the state capital to complain that municipal providers were threatening to invade their territories and offer unwanted competition.

“We are particularly concerned about four bills that have been introduced this session,” says Levoy Knowles, TTA’s executive director. “These bills would allow municipalities to expand beyond their current footprint and offer broadband in our service areas. If this were to happen, municipalities could cherry-pick our more populated areas, leaving the more remote, rural consumers to bear the high cost of delivering broadband to these less populated regions.”

Among the companies that want to keep uncomfortable public broadband competition out of their territories: North Central Telephone Cooperative, Loretto Telecom, Twin Lakes Telephone Cooperative, Highland Telephone Cooperative, TDS Telecom, United Communications, Ben Lomand Connect, WK&T Telecommunications, Ritter Communications, Ardmore Telephone Company, and RepCom.

Bristol, Tennessee

Bristol is unique because its city limits are effectively in Tennessee and Virginia. Neither state has gotten much respect from incumbent telephone and cable companies, so BTES — the electric and telecom utility in Bristol — decided to deliver broadband service itself. The network is now being upgraded to expand 1Gbps service, and it represents an island in the broadband backwater of far eastern Tennessee and western Virginia and North Carolina.

Cedar Falls, Iowa

Iowa has never been a hotbed for fast broadband and is the home to the largest number of independent telephone companies in the country. Cedar Falls Utilities is one of them and is trying to change the “behind the rest” image Iowa telecommunications has been stuck with for years. The municipal telecom provider has boosted broadband speeds and announced gigabit broadband last year.

Wilson, N.C.

Greenlight has been providing fiber to the home service for several years, and its presence in the middle of Time Warner Cable territory was apparently the last straw for the cable company, which began fiercely lobbying for a municipal broadband ban in North Carolina. Thanks to a massive cash dump by Koch Brothers’ ally Art Pope, the Republicans took control of the state government between 2010-2012. Many of the new legislators have an ongoing love affair with ALEC — the corporate front group — and treat its database of business-ghostwritten bills like the Library of Congress. What AT&T, CenturyLink, and Time Warner Cable want, they now get.

With a broadband ban in place, Greenlight can’t expand its territory, but it can increase its broadband speeds. Time Warner Cable tops out at 50Mbps for almost $100 a month. For $49.95 more you can get 1,000Mbps from Greenlight. Instead if competing, TWC prefers Greenlight to simply go away, and the North Carolina legislature has shown it is always ready to help.

Richard Miller from the Capitol Fax blog spent the weekend at the Illinois State Fair and might as well have left his AT&T cell phone at home, because the wireless giant’s network collapsed with an overload of traffic.

“Both days, after 5 o’clock in the afternoon, AT&T’s mobile phone service wouldn’t work,” Miller writes. “Calls in or out were sporadic at best, and texts took numerous attempts to work, if ever. Internet? Fugetaboutit. And when the nightly concert started, everything completely shut down. No calls, no texts, no nothing.”

How to improve AT&T service? Remove the rules that require them to provide it.

Miller reported friends attending the fair with him had no difficulties using Verizon Wireless, Sprint, or T-Mobile, so Miller concludes the problems were AT&T’s to own.

“There’s no excuse for the giant corporation’s lousy service,” said Miller.

Attendees with missing children or needing to make emergency calls were plain out of luck. Pay phones are long gone. The only alternative was finding someone with a phone not served by AT&T.

“[People] pay good money for the service and they have a right to expect that they can use their expensive communications devices at large annual events, where people get separated all the time,” said Miller.

Ironically, the Illinois Farm Bureau (IFB) received at least $20,000 from AT&T in 2012 and is for wholesale deregulation of AT&T. The Illinois Partnership for the New Economy & Jobs, a front group for AT&T Illinois, noted that the farm bureau is all for “updating” Illinois state laws that take the hook off AT&T’s responsibility to serve every resident in the state. A preview of what that looks like was experienced by Miller and others at the state fairgrounds.

Cable operators and publicly owned utilities in Tennessee are battling for control over the prices companies pay to use utility poles, with facts among the early casualties.

The subject of “pole attachment fees” has been of interest to cable companies for decades. In return for permission to hang cable wires on existing electric or telephone poles owned by utility companies, cable operators are asked to contribute towards their upkeep and eventual replacement. Cable operators want the fees to be as low as possible, while utility companies have sought leeway to defray rising utility pole costs and deal with ongoing wear and tear.

Little progress has been made in efforts to compromise, so this year two competing bills have been introduced by Republicans in the state legislature to define “fairness.” One is promoted by a group of municipal utilities and the other by the cable industry and several corporate-backed, conservative front groups claiming to represent the interests of state taxpayers and consumers.

Some background: Tennessee is unique in the pole attachment fee fight, because privately owned power companies bypassed a lot of the state (and much of the rest of the Tennessee Valley and Appalachian region) during the electrification movement of the early 20th century. Much of Tennessee is served by publicly owned power companies, which also own and maintain a large percentage of utility poles in the state.

Some of Tennessee’s largest telecom companies believe they can guarantee themselves low rates by pitching a case of private companies vs. big government utilities, with local municipalities accused of profiteering from artificially high pole attachment rates. Hoping to capitalize on anti-government sentiment, “small government” conservatives and telecom companies want to tie the hands of the pole owners indefinitely by taking away their right to set pole attachment rates.

The battle includes fact-warped editorials that distort the issues, misleading video ads, and an effort to conflate a utility fee with a tax. With millions at stake from pole attachment fees on tens of thousands of power poles throughout the state, the companies involved have launched a full-scale astroturf assault.

Grover Norquist’s Incendiary “Pole Tax”

Conservative Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform wrote that the pole attachment fee legislation promoted by public utilities would represent a $20 million dollar “tax increase” from higher cable and phone bills. Even worse, Norquist says, the new tax will delay telecom companies from rushing new investments on rural broadband.

Norquist

In reality, Americans for Tax Reform should be rebranded Special Interests for Tax Reform, because the group is funded by a variety of large tobacco corporations, former clients of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and several wealthy conservative activists with their own foundations.

Norquist’s pole “tax increase” does not exist.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) provides guidelines and a formula for determining pole attachment rates for privately owned utilities, but permits states to adopt their own regulations. Municipal utilities are exempted for an important reason — their rates and operations are often already well-regulated.

Stop the Cap! found that pole attachment revenue ends up in the hands of the utility companies that own and keep up the poles, not the government. Municipal utilities stand on their own — revenue earned by a utility stays with the utility. Should a municipal utility attempt to gouge other companies that hang wires on those poles, mechanisms kick in that guarantee it cannot profit from doing so.

A 2007 study by the state government in Tennessee effectively undercut the cable industry’s argument that publicly owned utilities are overcharging cable and phone companies that share space on their poles. The report found that “pole attachment revenues do not increase pole owners’ revenue in the long run.”¹

The Tennessee Valley Authority, which supplies electricity across Tennessee, regularly audits the revenues and costs of its municipal utility distributors and sets end-user rates accordingly. The goal is to guarantee that municipal distributors “break even.” Any new revenue sources, like pole attachment fees, are considered when setting wholesale electric rates. If a municipal utility overcharged for access to its poles, it will ultimately gain nothing because the TVA will set prices that take that revenue into account.

Freedom to Distort: The Cable Lobby’s Astroturf Efforts

Freedom to distort

Another “citizens group” jumping into the battle is called “Freedom to Connect,” actually run by the Tennessee Cable Telecommunications Association (TCTA). Most consumers won’t recognize TCTA as the state cable lobby. Almost all will have forgotten TCTA was the same group that filed a lawsuit to shut down EPB’s Fiber division, which today delivers 1,000Mbps broadband service across the city and competes against cable operators like Comcast and Charter Cable.

One TCTA advertisement claims that some utilities are planning “to double the fees broadband providers pay to the state’s government utilities.”

In reality, cable companies have gone incognito, hiding their identity by rebranding themselves as “broadband providers.” No utility has announced it plans to “double” pole attachment fees either.

TCTA members came under fire at a recent hearing attended by state lawmakers when Rep. Charles Curtiss (D-Sparta) spoke up about irritating robocalls directed at his constituents making similar claims.

“What was said was false,” Curtiss told the cable representatives at the hearing. “You’ve lost your integrity with me. Whoever made up your mind to do that, you’re in the wrong line of work.”

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/TCTA Pole Attachment Fees Ad 3-13.flv[/flv]

TCTA — Tennessee’s cable industry lobbying group, released this distorted advertisement opposing pole attachment fee increases.  (1 minute)

The Chattanooga Free-Press’ Drew Johnson: Independent Opinion Page Editor or Well-connected Activist with a Conflict of Interest?

Johnson (Times Free Press)

In its ad campaign, the TCTA gave prominent mention to an article in Chattanooga’s Times-Free Press from Feb. 27: “Bill Harms Consumers, Kills Competition.”

What the advertisement did not say is it originated in an editorial published by Drew Johnson, who serves as the paper’s conservative opinion editor. Johnson has had a bone to pick with Chattanooga’s public utility EPB since it got into the cable television and broadband business.

That may not be surprising, since Johnson is still listed as a “senior fellow” at the “Taxpayers Protection Alliance,” yet another corporate and conservative-backed astroturf group founded by former Texas congressman Dick Armey of FreedomWorks fame.

Johnson’s journalism credentials? He wrote a weekly column for the conservative online screed NewsMax, founded and funded by super-wealthy Richard Mellon Scaife and Christopher Ruddy, both frequent donors to conservative, pro-business causes.

TPA has plenty to hide — particularly the sources of their funding. When asked if private industry backs TPA’s efforts, president David Williams refused to come clean.

“It comes from private sources, and I don’t reveal who my donors are,” he told Environmental Building News in January.

Ironically, Johnson is best known for aggressively using Tennessee’s open records “Sunshine” law to get state employee e-mails and other records looking for conflicts of interest or scandal.

Newspaper readers may want to ask whether Johnson represents the newspaper, an industry-funded sock puppet group, or both.  They also deserve full disclosure if the TPA receives any funding from companies that directly compete with EPB.

The Institute from ALEC: The Institute for Policy Innovation’s Innovative Way to Funnel AT&T and Comcast Money Into the Fight

Provider-backed ALEC advocates for the corporate interests that fund its operations.

Another group fighting on the side of the cable and phone companies against municipal utilities is the Institute for Policy Innovation. Policy counsel Bartlett D. Cleland claimed the government is out to get private companies that want space on utility poles.

“The proposed new system in HB1111 and SB1222 is fervently supported by the electric cooperatives and the government-owned utilities for good reason – they are merely seeking a way to use the force of government against their private sector competitors,” Cleland said. “The proposal would allow them to radically raise their rates for pole attachments to multiples of the national average.”

The facts don’t match Cleland’s rhetoric.

In reality, the state of Tennessee found in their report on the matter in 2007 that Tennessee’s pole attachment fees are “not necessarily out of line with those in other states.”²

In fact, some of the state’s telecom companies seemed to agree:

• EMBARQ (now CenturyLink) provided data on fees received from other service providers in Tennessee, Virginia, South and North Carolina. In these data, Tennessee’s rates ($36.02 – $47.41) are similar to those in North Carolina ($23.12-$52.85) and Virginia ($28.94 – $35.77). Rates were lower in South Carolina.
• Cable operators, who have less infrastructure on poles than telephone and electric utilities, paid even less. Time Warner Cable provided mean rates per state showing Tennessee ($7.70) in the middle of the pack compared to Florida ($9.83) and North Carolina ($4.86 – $13.64).

In addition to his role as policy counsel, Cleland also happens to be co-chair of the Telecommunications and Information Technology Task Force of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Members of that committee include Comcast and AT&T — Tennessee’s largest telecom companies, both competing with municipal telecommunications providers like EPB.

¹ Analysis of Pole Attachment Rate Issues in Tennessee, State of Tennessee. 2007. p.23

² Analysis of Pole Attachment Rate Issues in Tennessee, State of Tennessee. 2007. p.12

United to grow AT&T’s revenue at the expense of rural America.

The National Farmers Union has a long tradition of protecting rural farmers and defending the rural economy, but has been completely taken in by AT&T’s proposal to abandon rural wired service.

In addition to AT&T appearing in fine print as a sponsor of the National Farmers Union’s 111th Anniversary Convention, the phone company won prominent placement at the group’s annual convention to deliver a speech about AT&T’s lobbying agenda on rural broadband courtesy of Ramona Carlow, AT&T’s vice president of public policy.

AT&T sends its lobbying forces to rural agriculture events with scare stories about impending wireless shortages and doom if the Federal Communications Commission does not hand over more spectrum. In an interview with Beth Canuteson, AT&T regional vice president of external affairs, she tells Brownfield – Ag News for America AT&T will run out of spectrum in seven years. (June 26, 2012) (6 minutes)
You must remain on this page to hear the clip, or you can download the clip and listen later.

The National Farmers Union joined several other rural farm groups in comments (never mentioned on the organization’s website) to the Federal Communications Commission applauding AT&T’s plan to abandon its rural “TDM” landline network:

The United States is poised for a historic transition in communications. Completing the transformation from legacy TDM-based network technology designed in the 20th century to the all-IP networks of the 21st century will allow every computer, laptop, smartphone, machine and tablet to communicate with each another and work seamlessly around the clock. These devices, connected with each other and with a host of other machines ranging from cars to thermostats via these IP-enabled networks, are changing almost every aspect of our lives in areas well beyond traditional communications. If the FCC grants AT&T’s Petition, the full build out of 21st century IP-based networks can being to spur growth, create jobs, and stimulate new opportunity across America, but especially in rural communities that are often handicapped by distance and other opportunity-limiting barriers.

AT&T has the money to upgrade its rural wireline networks.

Unfortunately for the rural farm members of the National Farmers Union, the future proposed by AT&T isn’t as rosy as the NFU would have you believe:

1. AT&T has neglected its rural landline network for years. Whether the technology is wired or wireless, the bean counters at AT&T are clear: there is no Return on Investment formula that works for the company at the current low prices charged for traditional rural landline and DSL service. AT&T has poured billions into a half-measure upgrade, a fiber-copper wire compromise called U-verse, but only in urban areas where it can justify that  investment to hungry shareholders. AT&T has no plans to deploy U-verse in rural areas. Instead, Wall Street’s economic expectation is that fixed wireless is the best solution for rural areas, because it delivers dramatically higher prices that accelerate return on investment and future enhanced earnings;
2. AT&T continues to be America’s lowest-rated wireless carrier — worst for dropped calls and worst for customer service. If you live in a rural area, you already know what AT&T wireless cell service is like. Do you want to depend on that network for all of your telecommunications needs, including emergency calls to 911?
3. AT&T’s DSL service starts at $15 a month on commonly available pricing promotions and has a barely enforced usage cap of 150GB a month. AT&T’s wireless smartphone plans start at $20 a month with a usage cap of 200MB a month. A 5GB plan costs $50 a month. On AT&T’s heavily marketed Family Share plan, 1GB of usage costs $40 a month. A typical broadband customer using between 15-20GB a month, now considered the national average, would pay $15 a month for AT&T’s DSL or $200 a month on AT&T’s wireless network, based on a plan designed to avoid overlimit fees;¹
4. AT&T’s plan also includes fringe benefits for itself: a transition to technology not subject to consumer protection and oversight laws, rate regulation, quality of service guarantees, and “carrier of last resort” obligations. In short, it means AT&T is not responsible if your wireless reception is unsuitable for voice or data use.

AT&T’s cash on hand. Q.: Where will they spend it, on their networks or on their shareholders? A.: “AT&T generated best-ever cash from operations and free cash flow in 2012, which let us return a record $23 billion in cash to shareholders, including dividends and share buybacks.” — AT&T 2012 Annual Report.

The National Farmers Union needs to consider whether AT&T’s proposal meets the terms the organization lays out in its own policy statement on rural telecommunications:

We support:

a) Efforts to ensure competitively priced, high-speed broadband access to the Internet for rural America, which should remain free of censorship and not interfere with other frequencies;

b) Collaborative efforts and public/private initiatives that leverage internet-based technology and use the internet to improve communications, reduce costs, increase access and grow farm business for producers and their cooperatives; and

c) Legislative action and efforts by the administration to encourage robust broadband and wireless deployment in rural America to drive economic development, better serve farmers and ranchers and to prevent a digital divide between rural and urban citizens.

Strong earnings growth.

Let’s consider how AT&T will manage with these tests:

• Wireless competition in rural America exists even less than in urban America. For most, there are one or two choices, typically AT&T and Verizon Wireless, which charge nearly identical, expensive prices;
• AT&T and its various front groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) lobby state lawmakers to prohibit public initiatives that would enhance rural broadband, particularly community-owned broadband networks. Advocating for AT&T’s imposed rural solution is a far cry from the NFU’s past. In 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt requested the group lead the charge for rural utilities cooperatives, owned and operated by the communities they served. In 2013, the group seems satisfied with whatever scraps AT&T is willing to throw the way of rural America;
• A digital divide can exist in many ways. The NFU proposes to cut the digital divide by introducing a pricing divide. Can most rural Americans afford $200 a month for AT&T’s wireless service, assuming they can get a good signal? AT&T returned $23 billion in excess cash to shareholders in 2o12². Imagine what half of that would offer rural America if the company chose to upgrade its existing landline network for the same 21st century service it proposes to offer urban customers.

¹-AT&T’s Mobile Share with Unlimited Talk & Text 20GB package, not including a $30 additional device fee for each smartphone on the account.

²- AT&T Annual Report 2012.

The Man from A.L.E.C. represents premiere members Time Warner Cable and AT&T.

The News & Observer has printed a rebuttal to a guest editorial from Christopher Mitchell and Todd O’Boyle accusing the two of misleading readers about the true state of North Carolina’s broadband.

The author, John Stephenson, is director of the Communications and Technology Task Force at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Considering North Carolina’s largest broadband providers — AT&T and Time Warner Cable — are both card-carrying members of ALEC, his response mouths their words.

Nearly 300 million Americans have access to at least one and, in most cases, two or three broadband providers. Moreover, wireless and satellite providers continue to invest in 4G wireless technology and new satellites that can now offer speeds rivaling wired broadband.

By contrast, government-owned broadband has demonstrated mixed results at best and abject failure at worst. Cities’ attempts to build and operate their own broadband networks have been marked by poor results, huge debts and accounting gimmicks that threaten taxpayers.

In North Carolina, broadband “consultants” persuaded cities like Salisbury and Mooresville to ignore basic economics and to compete against private providers. But the broadband networks recorded deficits and were forced to tap other sources of financing. Despite these losses, as many as three dozen North Carolina cities appeared ready to go down the same dangerous path.

Stephenson’s rebuttal regurgitates the usual Time Warner Cable and AT&T talking points — the same ones used to convince North Carolina legislators to ban community broadband (with contributions to their campaign coffers stapled to the back).

Fact: North Carolinians typically have at most two choices for broadband, the telephone and cable company. Only a few cities were lucky enough to construct community-owned alternatives before the hammer fell in the General Assembly. Stephenson’s alternatives include satellite broadband, which delivers slow speeds and a paltry usage allowance or wireless 4G broadband that will set you back a fortune. North Carolina’s largest providers AT&T and Verizon Wireless sell service with a starting monthly cap of 1GB. Anything more costs more. These are hardly comparable choices to wired broadband.

Fact: Community broadband in cities like Wilson and Salisbury dramatically outperform Time Warner Cable and AT&T and deliver a fair deal instead of temporary promotions and endless rate hikes from the cable/telco bully boys. Stephenson uses the case of Mooresville to trash community broadband, which is a weak example. That city bought a decrepit cable system from bankrupt Adelphia Cable and had to spend a fortune to rebuild it. It’s now on track to deliver for local residents. Those communities would have been better off with a fiber to the home system, but the rebuilt cable system still delivers more competition than Time Warner and AT&T ever gave one-another.

Stephenson also ignores the debts the cable and phone companies piled up when they first built their networks. It is the cost of getting into the telecommunications business. Cable companies needed 10, 20, or even 30 years to pay off construction costs. Community providers got into telecommunications with the knowledge it would take time to pay back the initial debt, but they hope to do it without gouging customers.

ALEC routinely pits community providers against private ones as “government funded unfair broadband competition.” But the group ignores the fact cities like Charlotte have doled out tax incentives and other goodies to Time Warner Cable for building its new headquarters there. AT&T is not doing too bad either, securing statewide video franchising and effective permission to drop its ugly U-verse cabinets on public easements all over the state.

The fact is, the only disruptive force in North Carolina’s broadband market comes from community-owned providers trying to break up the comfortable telco-cable duopoly that charges nearly the same prices for the same yesteryear service. That’s a story The Man from A.L.E.C. cannot afford to tell you.