More than 100,000 Verizon customers in New York City asking for FiOS fiber optic service are still waiting — 75% of them for more than a year — for a service Verizon promised would be available to every city resident by 2014.

In many of those cases, Verizon gave customers nothing but excuses and false information, sometimes in apparent violation of Verizon’s contract with the City of New York.

That was the opening contention of Vincent J. Gentile, chairman of the New York City Council’s Committee on Oversight and Investigations, in a four and a half hour-long hearing on Verizon FiOS availability held Oct. 14.

City officials are frustrated with Verizon’s performance under its FiOS franchise. Complaints about service availability have persisted for years and Mayor Bill de Blasio has been critical of Verizon’s foot-dragging to make fiber service available to every New Yorker that wants the service. As little as 30 minutes before the hearing, complaints continued to reach public officials from customers being told FiOS was not available. In fact, many were instead steered to a Verizon package that bundled satellite television instead of fiber optics.

New York City is Verizon’s largest market for FiOS fiber optic service. Verizon’s Leecia Eve, vice president of government affairs for the Tri-State Region, claimed the company has invested more than $3 billion upgrading New York City for fiber service and took umbrage at suggestions the company was reneging on its commitments, telling committee members Verizon fulfilled its FiOS commitments “one thousand percent.”

Such claims cause Verizon FiOS-less customers across New York City to bristle. In August, the New York Times reported Barbara Cooke-Johnson, a resident on Putnam Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn had waited for two years for Verizon to reach her block. She isn’t alone. City Council members have been inundated with complaints from residents unable to get FiOS service, even after placing orders well over a year ago.

“For years, I have heard complaints from residents in my district, who have attempted to sign on to the Verizon FiOS service, but learned their area did not provide coverage, “said council member Annabel Palma, who represents the neighborhoods of Parkchester, Soundview, Castle Hill, Clason Point and Harding Park in the Bronx. “New Yorkers need affordable and reliable high-speed broadband access throughout all the five boroughs, but especially in the Bronx.”

Several council members blamed the prior Bloomberg Administration for negotiating a broadly Verizon favorable contract that maintained a largely hands-off policy on oversight of the company’s fiber optic deployment, with few penalties at the city’s disposal to keep Verizon to its word. The Bloomberg Administrated granted multiple requests made by Verizon between 2008-2011 to reduce the performance bond the company agreed to secure as an assurance to city officials it would meet the terms of its franchise agreement.

Kevin Service (L), vice president, region operations – New York City and Leecia Eve (R), vice president of government affairs – New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut testify before the City Council of New York.

Verizon’s agreement with the city required it to “pass all households” with fiber optic service within the franchise service area by June 30, 2014. Verizon blamed Hurricane Irene and Superstorm Sandy for missing that deadline, but claims it finally achieved it in October 2014.

Councilman Gentile pressed Service for more information about the gap between what city officials consider to be “homes passed” and what Verizon considers that term to mean.

“We do consider it to be passed if we’re in the realm of ‘substantial fiber placement,'” responded Kevin Service, Verizon’s vice president of region operations – New York City. “I’m not a lawyer, so here is what I would say. We’ve passed a household if when we get a request for service and have the necessary rights of way, what we have left to do does not create a delay in bringing service to that customer. Under that ‘Kevin Service definition,’ we’ve passed every household in New York City.”

Gentile countered that Verizon officials sent documents to the city admitting 23.6% of New York City blocks that Verizon deems “passed” have no buildings with Verizon FiOS service installed.

Much of the dispute between Verizon and New York City officials now centers on a widening gap between the city’s definition of “homes passed” and the one Verizon is now relying on to defend itself against charges it is violating its agreement.

Both sides agree nobody bothered to precisely define “premises passed” in the contract. The term is commonly used by the cable industry to reflect availability of cable service. Nielsen Media, among others, defines it to mean, “households with the ability to receive a particular cable service, and which may opt to subscribe.” The Fiber to the Home Council offers a more detailed definition, one used by the city’s auditors reviewing Verizon’s performance:

“The number of “Homes Passed” is the potential number of premises to which an operator has capability to connect in a service area, but the premises may or may not be connected to the network. This definition excludes premises that cannot be connected without further installation of substantial cable plant such as feeder and distribution cable (fiber) to reach the area in which a potential subscriber is located.” (emphasis added).

Verizon dismissed the Fiber to the Home Council’s definition as one prepared only “for purposes of its ‘market research,'” and claimed it had no standing because the organization is not party to the agreement between Verizon and the city.

Verizon used a dictionary to create its own definition of the phrase in a rebuttal to the city audit:

“General dictionary definitions of the term refer to going by, past, beyond, or through a place (such as a building), and include no requirement as to how close a place must be approached in order to constitute a “passage.” Thus, there is nothing inherent in the word itself that would require Verizon to run cable directly in front of every building in the City in order to “pass” those buildings.”

“The argument that ‘passing’ a premises with fiber optic cable includes no requirement of any proximity to that premises is manifestly untenable,” city auditors concluded.

If the dispute ends up in court, Verizon’s definition loophole may not prove much of a defense when a judge reviews the rest of the agreement. Whether Verizon has fiber facilities sufficiently nearby or not may not matter once a customer requests service. Under the terms of the contract, Verizon generally has to deliver FiOS within 6-12 months of a customer request, and there is ample evidence Verizon is not meeting that obligation.

The auditors found Verizon customer service agents were quick to tell customers FiOS service was unavailable to them and often failed to offer customers a “non-standard installation” (NSI), which starts the 6-12 month deadline to provide service. Even requesting an NSI was no guarantee of getting fiber service. Auditors found 74.68% of the 41,928 customer requests for an NSI were still outstanding as of Dec. 31, 2014, more than 12 months after the order was taken.

A raucous audience in the hearing room frequently jeered Verizon’s claims it was in full compliance with its franchise contract. Verizon officials defended the company’s performance, noting it was the first in New York City to offer service to every borough to compete with Cablevision and Time Warner Cable (and their predecessors) — cable companies that built their networks under the protection of a monopoly and given more favorable terms to gradually expand their infrastructure over a decade or more. Eve said Verizon achieved success despite the obstacles that have arisen, including objections from some building owners that have refused to admit Verizon technicians to install FiOS service for tenants.

Service admitted Verizon currently has a backlog of at least 100,000 requests for Verizon FiOS service in the city it has not yet met. Service blamed that number mostly on building access disputes, an excuse that allowed him to insist Verizon was in compliance with its agreement.

Service also suggested the city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT – pronounced “Do-It”) and some of the company’s unions have sought to muddy the waters by unilaterally redefining Verizon’s contract with New York.

[flv]http://phillipdampier.com/video/WNBC New York Verizon FiOS Not Installing High-Speed Internet for 25 Percent of NYers Who Want It 7-15-15.flv[/flv]

WNBC-TV in New York reported 25% of New Yorkers seeking Verizon FiOS Internet were turned away by the company. [Report originally aired: July 15, 2015] (2:01)

“To simplify the issue, the pass all homes obligation involves strategically placing fiber optic cables throughout the streets of New York City such that the fiber optic network can then be extended into specific buildings upon request, provided that we can get access to the building and into that building,” Service said. “It does not mean, contrary to some public confusion, that Verizon’s network would have been extended into every New York City household. Where we have not brought our FiOS service to a customer that has requested it, it’s because we haven’t yet secured all the necessary rights of way to do so.”

Verizon workers install fiber optic cables in New York City.

“I think it’s important to note that the city’s franchise agreements with Cablevision and Time Warner included an express obligation to run facilities in front of each building in the city,” Service reminded the audience. “In stark contrast, Verizon’s agreement does not include that language. This is no accident. The parties recognized while the agreement was being negotiated that Verizon would deploy its all-fiber network as an upgrade to its existing copper network, running the fiber along the same routes as it historically used to serve the buildings in the city. […] Although there are now attempts by some to unilaterally and retroactively revise the intent and meaning of the agreement, the word ‘passed’ was always understood and used by Verizon and the city in that context.”

Service explained getting FiOS service involves a multi-step process and it is not as simple as passing a fiber cable through a neighborhood.

“In order to fulfill [our] obligation [to provide FiOS] to a resident in an [multi-dwelling unit] not only does the building have to be passed by Verizon’s facilities, as all buildings are today, it also must be network created,” Service said. “In other words, the deployed fiber used to serve the building must be extended into the building from the street or backyard, or is frequently the case, through adjoining buildings to provide service to the individual units in the building.”

Customers can expect delays if they are the first in a building to request FiOS service.

“When a single resident requests service, it is Verizon’s policy to make the entire building ready for FiOS service. After that is complete, subsequent requests for service will no longer be considered NSI requests. Instead they are standard installation requests,” Service added, noting this is more efficient than simply provisioning service one customer at a time.

Union members who work for Verizon scoffed at Service’s explanations, accusing the company of systematically cutting back on FiOS spending and diverting money into its more profitable Verizon Wireless operation.

“They tend to blame landlords,” CWA representative Pete Sikora told Gothamist. “They tend to blame everyone but themselves. They didn’t have a gun held to their heads; they signed that agreement willingly, because they want to make more money. What they’re doing here is effectively picking and choosing which streets to serve.”

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/CWA Verizon FiOS Broken Promises 10-13-15.mp4[/flv]

The Communications Workers of America have begun running ads criticizing Verizon for failing to bring FiOS service to New Yorkers. (0:30)

Customers didn’t readily accept Verizon’s explanations either.

“As a board member of my co-op, I’ve been trying to get FIOS in our building for four years now,” wrote one Gothamist reader. “I’ve spoken with everybody at Verizon about this and the outcome has been that Verizon will wire the block and its buildings when Verizon feels like it.

Council member Brad Lander

Most of those seeking FiOS service and not getting it learn FiOS is “not available” from Verizon’s website or a customer service agent. When asked when the service might be available, it is common for representatives to answer they have no idea. Critics say that violates the terms of the contract, which requires Verizon to make a good faith effort to give an estimated wait time before an installation can be made. Service was on the defensive explaining why customers are routinely told no service is available.

“There is no area in the city [we do not service] and nobody should be told that,” Service said. “Having said that, we have 12,000 employees — we have a large employee body that we are constantly training and retraining and to the extent that they have told somebody that service is not available, that’s an indication that we have more to do in that area.”

“I must tell you that Councilman Lander just whispered in my ear that he was told 30 minutes ago that where he lives in Brooklyn is not serviced,” responded Councilman James Vacca.

Councilman Brad Lander, the deputy leader of policy, later confronted the two Verizon representatives about his own unsuccessful attempts to get FiOS service at his own home in Park Slope and questioned their solution to the problem.

“It sounds to me like you are saying the problem is not that FiOS is unavailable at my house, the problem is that Stacy [a Verizon customer service representative] didn’t say to me ‘Mr. Lander it’s available in your neighborhood, just not to you.'”

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Council Member Brad Lander Takes Verizon Apart.mp4[/flv]

Council member Brad Lander shares his experience not being able to get FiOS service from Verizon at last week’s City Council hearing. (2:45)

Phillip Dampier: A cable trade publication is lecturing its readership on better broadband the industry spent years claiming nobody wanted or needed.

Remember the good old days when cable and phone companies told you there was no demand for faster Internet speeds when 6Mbps from the phone company was all you and your family really needed?

Those days are apparently over.

Multichannel News, the largest trade publication for cable industry executives, warns cable companies gigabit broadband speeds are right around the corner and the technological transformation that will unleash has been constrained for far too long.

Say what?

Proving our theory that those loudest about dismissing the need for faster Internet speeds are the least equipped to deliver them, the forthcoming arrival of DOCSIS 3.1 technology and decreasing costs to deploy fiber optics will allow cable providers to partially meet the gigabit speed challenge, at least on the downstream. Before DOCSIS 3.1, consumers didn’t “need those speeds.” Now companies like Comcast claim it isn’t important what consumers need today — it’s where the world is headed tomorrow.

Comcast 2013:

Comcast executive vice president David L. Cohen writes that the allure of Google Fiber’s gigabit service doesn’t match the needs or capabilities of online Americans.

“For some, the discussion about the broadband Internet seems to begin and end on the issue of ‘gigabit’ access,” Cohen says, in a nod to Google Fiber. “The issue with such speed is really more about demand than supply. Our business customers can already order 10-gig connections. Most websites can’t deliver content as fast as current networks move, and most U.S. homes have routers that can’t support the speed already available to the home.” Essentially, Cohen argues that even if Comcast were to deliver web service as fast as Google Fiber’s 1,000Mbps downloads and uploads, most customers wouldn’t be able to get those speeds because they’ve got the wrong equipment at home.

Comcast 2015:

“We’ve consistently offered the most speeds to the most homes, but with the current pace of tech innovation, sometimes you need to go to where the world is headed and not focus on where it is today.”

“The next great Internet innovation is only an idea away, and we want to help customers push the boundaries of what the Internet can do and do our part to inspire developers to think about what’s possible in a multi-gigabit future.  So, next month we will introduce Gigabit Pro, a new residential Internet service that offers symmetrical, 2-Gigabits-per-second (Gbps) speeds over fiber – at least double what anyone else provides.”

Nelson (Image: Multichannel News)

Rich Nelson’s guest column in Multichannel News makes it clear American broadband is behind the times. The senior vice president of marketing, broadband & connectivity at Broadcom Corporation says the average U.S. Internet connection of 11.5Mbps “is no longer enough” to support multiple family members streaming over-the-top video content, cloud storage, sharing high-resolution images, interactive online gaming and more.

Nelson credits Google Fiber with lighting a fire under providers to reconsider broadband speeds.

“Google’s Fiber program may have been the spark to light the fuse — Gigabit services have fostered healthy competition among Internet and telecommunications providers, who are now in a position to consider not ‘if’ but ‘when and how’ to deploy Gigabit broadband in order to meet consumer’s perceived ‘need for speed’ and maintain their competitive edge,” Nelson wrote.

But the greatest bottleneck to speed advances is spending money to pay for them. Verizon FiOS was one of the most extravagant network upgrades in years among large American telecom companies and the company was savaged by Wall Street for doing it. Although AT&T got less heat because its U-verse development costs were lower, most analysts still instinctively frown when a company proposes spending billions on network upgrades.

Customer demand for faster broadband is apparent as providers boost Internet speeds.

The advent of DOCSIS 3.1 — the next generation of cable broadband technology — suggests a win-win-win for Wall Street, cable operators, and consumers. No streets will have to be torn up, no new fiber cables will have to be laid. Most providers will be able to exponentially boost Internet speeds by reallocating bandwidth formerly reserved for analog cable television channels to broadband. The more available bandwidth reserved for broadband, the faster the speeds a company can offer.

Many industry observers predict the cable line will eventually be 100% devoted to broadband, over which telephone, television and Internet access can be delivered just as Verizon does today with FiOS and AT&T manages with its U-verse service.

The benefits of gigabit speeds are not limited to faster Internet browsing however.

Nelson notes communities and municipalities are now using gigabit broadband speeds as a competitive tool selling homes and attracting new businesses to an area. According to a study from the Fiber to the Home (FTTH) Council, communities with widely available gigabit access have experienced a positive impact on economic activity — to the tune of more than $1.4 billion in GDP growth. Those bypassed or stuck in a broadband backwater are now at risk of losing digital economy jobs as businesses and entrepreneurs look elsewhere.

The gigabit broadband gap will increasingly impact the local economies of communities left behind with inadequate Internet speeds as app developers, content producers, and other innovative startups leverage gigabit broadband to market new products and services.

The Pew Research Center envisioned what the next generation of gigabit killer apps might look like. Those communities stuck on the slow lane will likely not have access to an entire generation of applications that simply will never work over DSL.

But before celebrating the fact your local cable company promises to deliver the speed the new apps will need, there is a skunk that threatens to ruin your ultra high speed future: usage-based pricing and caps.

At the same time DOCSIS 3.1 will save the cable industry billions on infrastructure upgrade costs, the price for moving data across the next generation of super high-capacity broadband networks will be lower than ever before. But cable operators are not planning to pass their savings on to you. In fact, broadband prices are rising, along with efforts to apply arbitrary usage limits or charge usage-based pricing. Both are counter-intuitive and unjustified. It would be like charging for a bag of sand in the Sahara Desert or handing a ration book to shoreline residents with coupons allowing them one glass of water each from Lake Ontario.

Cox plans to limit its gigabit customers to 2TB of usage a month. AT&T U-verse with GigaPower has a (currently unenforced) limit of 1TB a month, while Suddenlink thinks 550GB is more than enough for its gigabit customers. Comcast is market testing 300GB usage caps in several cities but strangely has no usage cap on its usage-gobbling gigabit plan. Why cap the customers least-equipped to run up usage into the ionosphere while giving gigabit customers a free pass? It doesn’t make much sense.

But then usage caps have never made sense or been justified on wired broadband networks and are questionable on some wireless ones as well.

Stop the Cap! began fighting against usage caps and usage pricing in the summer of 2008 when Frontier Communications proposed to limit its DSL customers to an ‘ample’ 5GB of usage per month. That’s right — 5GB. We predicted then that usage caps would become a growing problem in the United States. With a comfortable duopoly, providers could easily ration Internet access with the flimsiest of excuses to boost profits. Here is what we told the Associated Press seven years ago:

“This isn’t really an issue that’s just going to be about Frontier,” said Phillip Dampier, a Rochester-based technology writer who is campaigning to get Frontier to back off its plans. “Virtually every broadband provider has been suddenly discovering that there’s this so-called ‘bandwidth crisis’ going on in the United States.”

That year, Frontier claimed most of its 559,300 broadband subscribers consumed less than 1.5 gigabytes per month, so 5GB was generous. Frontier CEO Maggie Wilderotter trotted out the same excuses companies like Cox and Suddenlink are still using today to justify these pricing schemes: “The growth of traffic means the company has to invest millions in its network and infrastructure, threatening its profitability.”

Just one year later, Frontier spent $5.3 billion to acquire Verizon landline customers in around two dozen states, so apparently Internet usage growth did not hurt them financially after all. Frankly, usage growth never does. As we told the AP in 2008, the costs of network equipment and connecting to the wider Internet are falling. It still is.

“If they continue to make the necessary investments … there’s no reason they can’t keep up” with increasing customer traffic, we said at the time.

We are happy to report we won our battle with Frontier Communications and today the company even markets the fact their broadband service comes without usage caps. In many of Frontier’s rural service areas, they are the only Internet Service Provider available. Imagine the impact a 5GB usage cap would have had on customers trying to run a home-based business, have kids using the Internet to complete homework assignments, or rely on the Internet for video entertainment.

So why do some providers still try to ration Internet usage? To make more money of course. When the public believes the phony tales of network costs and traffic growth, the duped masses open their wallets and pay even more for what is already overpriced broadband service. Just check this chart produced by the BBC, based on data from the Organization for Economic Co‑operation and Development. Value for money is an alien concept to U.S. providers:

The usual method of combating pricing excess is robust competition. With a chasm-sized gap between fat profits and the real cost of the service, competitors usually lower the price to attract more customers. But the fewer competitors, the bigger the chance the marketplace will gravitate towards comfort-level pricing and avoid rocking the boat with a ruinous price war. It is one of the first principles of capitalism — charging what the market will bear. We’ve seen how well that works in the past 100+ years. Back in 2010, we found an uncomfortable similarity between broadband prices of today with the railroad pricing schemes of the 1800s. A handful of executives and shareholders reap the rewards of monopolistic pricing and pillage not only consumers but threaten local economies as well.

The abuses were so bad, Congress finally stepped in and authorized regulators to break up the railroad monopolies and regulate abusive pricing. We may be headed in the same direction with broadband. We do not advocate regulation for the sake of regulation. Competition is a much more efficient way to check abusive business practices. But where an effective monopoly or duopoly exists, competition alone will not help. Without consumer-conscious oversight, the forthcoming gigabit broadband revolution will be stalled by speed bumps and toll booths for the benefit of a few giant telecommunications corporations. That will allow other countries to once again leap ahead of the United States and Canada, just as they have done with Internet speeds, delivering superior service at a lower price.

China now ranks first in the world in terms of the total number of fiber to the home broadband subscribers. So far, it isn’t even close to the fastest broadband country because much of China still gets access to the Internet over DSL. The Chinese government considers that unacceptable. It sees the economic opportunities of widespread fiber broadband and has targeted the scrapping of every DSL Internet connection in favor of fiber optics by the end of 2017. As a result, with more than 200 million likely fiber customers, China will become the global leader in fiber infrastructure, fiber technology, and fiber development. What country will lose the most from that transition? The United States. Today, Corning produces 40% of the world’s optical fiber.

Global optical fiber capacity amounted to 13,000 tons in 2014, mainly concentrated in the United States, Japan and China (totaling as much as 85.2% of the world’s total), of which China already ranked first with a share of 39.8%. Besides a big producer of optical fiber, China is also a large consumer, demanding 6,639 tons in 2014, 60.9% of global demand. The figure is expected to increase to 7,144 tons in 2015. Before 2010, over 70% of China’s optical fiber was imported, primarily from the United States. This year, 72.6% of China’s optical fiber will be produced by Chinese companies, which are also exporting a growing amount of fiber around the world.

John Lively, principal analyst at LightCounting Market Research, predicts China could conquer the fiber market in just a few short years and become a global broadband leader, “exporting their broadband networking expertise and technology, just like it does with its energy and transportation programs.”

Meanwhile in the United States, customers will be arguing with Comcast about the accuracy of their usage meter in light of a 300GB usage cap and Frontier’s DSL customers will still be fighting to get speeds better than the 3-6Mbps they get today.

Customers of Lithuania’s Teo are getting a free speed upgrade — from 500Mbps before to 600Mbps now — on the company’s fiber to the home network. They are also paying less than half the price of what you pay for 15Mbps.

“Internet bandwidth is constantly increasing and high-speed becomes a market norm,” said Teo’s Nerijus Ivanauskas. “Therefore, we see that the added value that customers receive from purchasing a basic service becomes an increasingly important factor when choosing a service provider.”

Lithuanians have several choices for broadband service and price competition has kept broadband speeds faster than what North Americans typically receive, at a fraction of the price. Fiber to the home service is increasingly common in populated areas and is very affordable. Budget-minded customers happy with 100/100Mbps Internet access can get it from Teo for less than $13.50 a month.

Teo’s fiber network passes 837,000 households as of the first quarter of this year. That represents almost 70% of Lithuania. Lithuania was already well ahead of the United States and Canada, with an average broadband speed of 45.11Mbps — 4th place in the European Union and 9th fastest country in the world. Teo also leads the world in fast Wi-Fi. More than 3,000 Teo hotspots serve up speeds averaging 15.4Mbps to every connected client.

As broadband speeds continue to soar in Lithuania, Internet Service Providers have been forced to offer extras to customers to compete. Teo offers 300GB of free cloud storage space, free anti-virus protection, and special parental controls to help protect children from adult content.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Teo Internet Speed Lithuania 6-2015.mp4[/flv]

A Teo advertisement showing off its fiber broadband speeds, ubiquitous free Wi-Fi network, anti-virus and child protection features. (0:45)

Editor’s Note: This editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is reprinted in its entirety. It comes from a newspaper that has covered Charter Communications since its inception. The Post-Dispatch reporters are also some of Charter’s subscribers — the cable company serves all of metropolitan St. Louis. Charter has never been received particularly well in St. Louis and in other cities where it provides generally mediocre service. Communities across Missouri that have endured poor cable and broadband service have recently taken a serious look at doing something about this by building their own public broadband networks as an alternative. But big money telecom interests, especially AT&T, have found it considerably less expensive to lobby to ban these networks from ever getting off the ground than spending the money to upgrade networks to compete.

On May 15, the last day of this year’s session of the Missouri Legislature, House Bill 437 finally was assigned to a committee, where it promptly died. Given the power of the American Legislative Exchange Council, it may well be back next year.

HB 437, sponsored by Rep. Rocky Miller, R-Lake Ozark, was full of gobbledygook about “municipal competitive services,” but its effect would have been to condemn Missourians to ever-higher prices for broadband Internet service. Cities would have been forbidden from establishing their own broadband services to compete with private operators, thus holding down prices.

ALEC, which wines and dines state lawmakers and then gets them to pass pro-business “model legislation” in their states, had succeeded in getting restrictions on public Internet providers in 20 states. But in February, the Federal Communications Commission struck down North Carolina’s ALEC-inspired law, so the future of other such laws is uncertain.

About 22 percent of Missourians are still regarded as “underserved,” having no reliable access to broadband service of at least 25 megabits per second — what’s needed to stream video without lags. About 1 in 6 Missourians have only one wired access provider to choose from. More than 400,000 Missourians have no wired broadband at all.

Missouri is ranked 38th “most connected” in the nation by the federal-state Broadband Now initiative. In the 21st century, this is like being underserved by railroads in the 19th century or power lines in the early 20th. In parts of rural Missouri, it’s hard to do business, which helps explain why HB 437 died in committee.

Rep. Rocky Miller (R-Lake Ozark)

The basic question is whether companies that invest in high-speed Internet infrastructure should be able to charge whatever they can get away with, or whether broadband service should be treated as a public utility. If it’s the latter, as the FCC determined in February, then government must make sure it’s affordable.

Which brings us to Charter Communications proposed $56 billion takeover of Time Warner Cable and its $10.4 billion acquisition of Bright House Networks. Both deals were announced May 26; both will need approval from the FCC and the Justice Department’s antitrust regulators.

In St. Louis, we have a love-hate relationship with Charter, a homegrown company built atop what was once Cencom Cable. It has dominated the cable TV market here almost as long as there’s been a cable market.

Charter customers endured years of poor service, its bankruptcy, its legal challenges, its ownership and management changes. Just when it got itself together, in 2012, the headquarters was moved from Des Peres to Stamford, Conn., though it retains a significant presence here.

Today our little Charter is a big fish; the Time Warner and Bright House deals would make it the nation’s second-largest cable company, with 24 million customers, behind only Philadelphia-based Comcast, with 27 million.

But cable TV no longer drives cable TV. Internet-based video services, like YouTube and Netflix, have revolutionized the way people, particularly younger people, watch TV. When cable companies first started connecting customers to the Internet through the same cables that delivered TV programming, it was regarded as a nice add-on business. Now broadband delivery is seen as a far bigger part of the future than providing TV programs.

Indeed, when Comcast tried to acquire Time Warner last year, the dominance (nearly 60 percent of the market) that the combined company would have had over broadband service caused federal regulators to look askance. Comcast abandoned its bid in April.

By contrast, a Charter-Time Warner-Bright House combination (it will do business as Spectrum) will control 30 percent of the broadband market. Charter Spectrum will have 20 million broadband subscribers, compared with 22 million for Comcast.

So what can customers expect? Charter’s CEO Tom Rutledge has promised “faster Internet speeds, state-of-the-art video experiences and fully featured voice products, at highly competitive prices.”

This begs the question, competitive with whom? Comcast? Mom-and-pop operations that can’t afford the infrastructure? Municipal service providers who are being ALEC’d out of business?

Neither Charter nor Time Warner has particularly good customer service ratings (though to be fair, Charter is miles ahead of where it used to be, at least in St. Louis). Still, Charter will take on lots of debt to finance the deal, much of it in high-yield junk bonds. The broadband business provides leverage. As analyst Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson told the Wall Street Journal: “Broadband pricing is almost an insurance policy for cable operators, in that if all else fails, you’ve always got the option to raise broadband rates.”

America wouldn’t let a private operator own 30 percent of its roads and highways. It wouldn’t allow two of them to control half the electricity. If broadband Internet service is a public utility, it must be regulated strictly.

The lesson is old as the hills: The free-marketeers who talk most passionately about competition are generally in the business of trying to eliminate it. Charter and Time Warner are both members of ALEC.

The Charter-Time Warner deal clearly is not in the public interest. The upside for shareholders is huge. The upside for Charter executives is even bigger. But it’s hard to see how Charter’s customers would see much benefit at all.

Hong Kong Telecom Group (HKT) chief technical officer Paul Berriman believes copper phone wiring is a thing of the past and is nonplussed by efforts to wring a few more years of life out of infrastructure that cannot reliably support high-speed Internet and is costly to maintain. The only solution that makes sense is to get rid of the copper and replace it with fiber optic wiring.

While America talks about 1Gbps limited rollouts, he is thinking about speeds ten times faster with his announcement Hong Kong Telecom is preparing to launch 10 gigabit service across the territory and was continuing its efforts to tear out obsolete copper wiring.

The man partly responsible for ensuring Hong Kong’s broadband future is a fast and reliable one says HKT has 1.6 million broadband customers — 530,000 on fiber to the home service and 200,000 on less-desirable VDSL2 with vectoring, which still relies in part on copper wiring. He is not happy with copper wiring’s performance and support costs and wants it out of his network. His minimum target speed is 100Mbps and if he finds a building that for any reason does not deliver more than 30Mbps at all times, he instructs engineers to immediately tear out the copper and replace it with fiber.

Berriman

Overall, Hong Kong has an average Internet speed of 87 megabits per second, according to figures by Akamai. “Our (HKT) average is about 116Mbps,” he said. It is about to get much faster. The two major wired fiber competitors are HKT and HKBN and both compete fiercely for broadband customers.

HKT has three tiers of unlimited use fiber broadband (regular prices shown in U.S. dollars, prices lower for certain bundles and promotions):

• 300/300Mbps for $64.21/mo;
• 500/500Mbps for $77.10/mo;
• 1000/1000Mbps for $90/mo.

When the 10Gbps upgrade is complete, HKT is likely to further boost speeds and/or cut prices.

Berriman acknowledges that the densely packed multi-dwelling apartments and condos common across Hong Kong makes large fiber projects less expensive than elsewhere in the world, but believes costs can be managed by deploying incremental upgrades. For example, HKT today has fiber extending into 85 percent of Hong Kong’s buildings and can connect fiber to 79 percent of homes in Hong Kong within three days of receiving an order.

Depending on a customer’s requirements, HKT can save money by serving DSL over short lengths of existing in-building copper wiring for customers not subscribed to ultra-fast broadband speed tiers. The length of wiring is short enough to guarantee speed is not affected for these customers. When customers do need the fastest speeds, fiber is strung directly to their apartment. Despite this, HKT is progressively migrating away from “fiber to the basement” to an all-fiber network to simplify its facilities and increase reliability, especially as the demand for faster speeds continues to grow.

“Once we get to 50 or 60 percent usage of the fiber in the building we start to look at converting the rest to get rid of the [older DSL] electronics,” Berriman said.

HKT also operates a mobile network it acquired from “Sunday” in 2006 and has also bought out Telstra’s share of the formerly joint owned CSL. The wireless company has a 31 percent market share and 4.6 million customers on two different networks — one supplied by ZTE and the other from Huawei. To supplement its wireless mobile network and offload traffic, HKT also operates 14,000 Wi-Fi hotspots across Hong Kong and is a leader in the use of EAP-SIM, which makes it easy for connections to be handed off between its mobile and Wi-Fi networks without interruption.