[flv width=”360″ height=”290″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WPRI Providence Call for Action Hotel guests not satisfied 8-5-12.mp4[/flv]

WPRI in Providence reports consumer satisfaction with many hotel chains is dropping as they follow the airline industry’s practice of charging extra for services usually included in the price of a ticket, or in this case, room. An increasing number of hotels are introducing new surcharges and fees for using their Wi-Fi networks.  (2 minutes)

While larger cities like Virginia Beach and Richmond have enjoyed broadband service for years, residents in the western half of the state often are not so lucky. The region is home to some serious broadband black holes, where residents have no access to Internet service beyond dial-up, satellite, or borrowing a friend’s expensive DSL connection in town.

Like West Virginia to the northwest, much of this part of the state suffers with very low speed DSL, occasional wireless Internet, and a handful of cable companies trying to provide access. In addition to the rural character of the region, landline networks have deteriorated over the years and large phone companies have focused their efforts on network improvements further east.

Now a series of government-funded broadband expansion projects, regional and local broadband and telephone co-ops, and local providers are working together to expand modern broadband into areas that have never had access before.

The Virginia Tech Foundation and the Mid-Atlantic Broadband Cooperative are now working to expand a fiber broadband middle-mile network from Bedford to Blacksburg — the areas surrounding Roanoke that have suffered with difficult Internet access for years.

Among the first clients is PemTel, a telephone cooperative in Pembroke. PemTel still speaks of DSL as a “new technology” in the area, and has speeds that reflect that:

PemTel started with an original plan offering just 256kbps — speed that does not even qualify as “broadband.” But increasing capacity is opening the door for Pembroke residents to get speeds that can at least manage today’s web pages. Customers are also glad to see the back of satellite “broadband” which severely limited usage.

With fiber middle mile networks now stringing through southern Virginia, local providers can access backbone capacity at lower prices, which can, in turn, deliver substantial broadband capacity to new high tech businesses setting up in the area.

[flv width=”512″ height=”308″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WDBJ Roanoke Fiber Through New River Valley 6-11-12.mp4[/flv]

The New River Valley in Virginia is building a multi-county fiber network to act like an interstate highway system for broadband.  WDBJ reports. (2 minutes)

[flv width=”480″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WSLS Roanoke Bedford to Blacksburg gets hi-speed internet boost 6-12-12.flv[/flv]

WSLS in Roanoke explores a new fiber network going in from Blacksburg to Bedford, Va., and what it could mean for broadband-deprived residents.  (2 minutes)

AT&T seems to have suddenly discovered it has millions of rural customers who are making due with the company’s poorly-rated, slow speed DSL service AT&T pondered selling off to somebody else.

In a sudden turnaround, CEO Randall Stephenson has decided it might be better to upgrade the company’s service instead of ditching it altogether.

Stephenson’s apparent decision not to jettison rural AT&T landlines on the open market may have more to do with the current regulatory climate than what’s best for shareholders in the short term. AT&T may also find few buyers for the millions of rural landlines the company has no plans to upgrade to its U-verse fiber to the neighborhood platform. The most likely would-be buyers are preoccupied with their current operations:

• Frontier Communications, which purchased rural assets from Verizon Communications, is facing an enormous debt payment in 2013 and a declining stock price;
• FairPoint Communications, which owns former Verizon landlines in northern New England, is still trying to make its business plan work after an earlier bankruptcy filing;
• CenturyLink is still attempting to absorb former-Baby Bell Qwest into its network;
• Windstream may be too small to buy the millions of customers in multiple states AT&T seemed to no longer want until recently.

Stephenson told investors at a Sanford C. Bernstein conference that the company is now considering keeping its rural customers and upgrading DSL technology to better serve them.

A DSLAM reduces the amount of speed-slowing traditional copper phone wiring between the telephone company's "central office" (CO) and your home's DSL modem.

With 15 million AT&T customers having no prospect of getting AT&T’s U-verse service, and 5 million without any AT&T broadband options at all, Stephenson says investment in Internet Protocol Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexers, better-known as IP DSLAMs, could extend service and also improve speeds for existing DSL customers, and not cost the company a fortune.

Stephenson noted the cost of the equipment needed to extend service has dropped considerably, in part because demand for DSL has been in decline as customers seek faster broadband, often from cable operators. The two largest phone companies in the country — AT&T and Verizon — had also shown little interest in further expanding their DSL networks.

For a reasonable investment on service upgrades, AT&T could bring speeds of 10Mbps or more to certain customers who now live with 6Mbps or less.

The challenge AT&T faces is reducing the amount of legacy copper telephone wiring between the phone company’s switching office and the customer. Customers who live more than 10,000 feet from a central office make due with very slow DSL speeds. Replacing some of that copper wiring with fiber optics can dramatically increase speeds.

AT&T U-verse works on a similar concept, except AT&T’s most advanced service needs as little copper phone wiring as possible. AT&T’s newest proposal for its rural customers would represent a middle ground — extending fiber to a handful of DSLAMs at distant points from the central exchange, with copper phone wiring carrying the signal the rest of the way to the subscriber’s home. This would open the door to DSL for customers who could not purchase the service before. It would also boost speeds for existing customers.

The decision marks a departure from AT&T’s interest in “solving” the rural broadband problem with heavily usage-limited wireless Internet access over its 4G network. Verizon Wireless is currently testing its own wireless broadband service designed for home users, but it costs $60 and only provides 10GB per month of usage.

While Stephenson has not backed away completely from selling off rural customers outside of U-verse service areas, he told investors he now has a more optimistic view of AT&T’s rural folk in light of marketplace changes.

“We are giving this a hard look,” Stephenson told investors on a recent JPMorgan conference call. Already-available DSLAM technology “brings broadband capability in a more cost-effective manner, with a better revenue profile than perhaps we would have thought two years ago.”

Six college towns will benefit from the nation’s first multi-community broadband gigabit deployment, thanks to $200 million in capital funding to get the broadband networks off the ground.

The Gigabit Neighborhood Gateway Program leverages local government, universities, private capital, and the public to jointly support and foster the development of new fiber optic networks.

The new program claims it will offer competitively-priced super-fast broadband through projects that will cover neighborhoods of 5,000-10,000 people and communities up to 100,000 in size.  Selection of the six winning communities will be announced between this fall and next spring.

“Gigabit Squared created the Gigabit Neighborhood Gateway Program to help select Gig.U communities build and test gigabit speed broadband networks with speeds from 100 to 1000 times faster than what Americans have today,” the company said in a statement.

“The United States is behind in the world for Internet speed,” said Mark Ansboury, Gigabit’s president and co-founder. “The goal is to help get us out front for a platform of innovation.”

That platform is certainly not forthcoming from the country’s largest broadband providers, who according to Ansboury have been pulling back on wired infrastructure upgrades in recent years, shifting focus to more profitable wireless networks.

Gigabit Squared defines the next generation of broadband Internet in terms of speed, declaring 2,000Mbps (2Gbps) as the target to achieve.

The winning projects will be sponsored by Gig.U members, which include:

• Arizona State University
• California Institute of Technology
• Case Western Reserve University
• Colorado State University
• Duke University
• Florida State University
• George Mason University
• The Georgia Institute of Technology
• Howard University
• Indiana University
• Michigan State University
• North Carolina State University
• Penn State University
• University of Alaska – Fairbanks
• University of Arizona
• University of Chicago
• University of Colorado – Boulder
• University of Florida
• University of Hawaii
• University of Illinois
• University of Kentucky
• University of Louisville
• University of Maine
• University of Maryland
• University of Michigan
• University of Missouri
• University of Montana
• University of Nebraska – Lincoln
• University of New Mexico
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• University of Oklahoma
• University of South Florida
• University of Virginia
• University of Washington
• Virginia Tech
• Wake Forest University
• West Virginia University

Blair Levin, executive director at Gig.U, believes private American telecom companies will always be constrained from delivering world class broadband comparable to South Korea or Japan because of Wall Street opposition to the investment required to construct them. In the eyes of investors, today’s slower networks, in their estimation, do just fine.

Gig.U believes that they have a solution, at least for towns with a sizable university system that can serve as host of the next generation broadband network:

First, any community that wants its residents to have access to a network that delivers world-leading bandwidth can do so. The barrier is not technology or economics. The barrier is organization; specifically, organizing demand and improved use of underutilized assets, such as rights of way, dark fiber, or in more rural areas, spectrum. The responses identified a multitude of ways local communities can improve the private investment case by lowering investment and risk, and increasing revenues for private players willing to upgrade or build new networks without budget outlays from the local government.

Second, the responses confirmed that university communities have the easiest organizing task and greatest upside. Their density, demographics and demand make the current economics more favorable for an upgrade than other communities. For example, the high percentage of the population in university communities living in multiple dwelling units makes the economics of an upgrade far more favorable than for communities composed largely of single-family homes. With the growing importance of Big Data for the economy and the society, university communities are the natural havens for such enterprises to be born and prosper. Through the Gig.U process, our communities are already exploring more than a half-dozen paths to achieve an upgrade; paths that will be replicable for others and will deliver a major step forward in providing America a strategic broadband advantage.

Outside of a handful of upstart private competitors like California-based Sonic.net, most fiber broadband expansion come from private companies like Google — building an experimental fiber-to-the-home network in Kansas City, community-owned broadband services coordinated by local town or city government, co-op telecommunications companies owned by their subscribers, or municipal utilities.

While those efforts are typically committed to the concept of “universal service” — wiring their entire communities — the Gig.U project targets funding only for networks in and around university campuses.

The New America Foundation builds on Gig.U’s premise in its own recent report, “Universities as Hubs for Next Generation Networks,” which argues affordable expansion of broadband can win community support when the public has the right to also benefit from those networks. While Gig.U’s approach suggests the project will target fiber broadband directly to the homes qualified to receive it, the New America Foundation supports the construction of mesh wireless Wi-Fi networks to keep construction costs low for neighborhoods targeted for service.

An earlier project in Orono and Old Town, Maine may afford a preview of Gig.U’s vision, as that collaboration between the University of Maine and private fiber provider GWI is already in its construction phase. For those lucky enough to live within range of the fiber project, broadband speeds will far exceed what incumbents Time Warner Cable and FairPoint Communications deliver. FairPoint has fought similar projects (and GWI specifically) for years.

Will private providers object to the Gig.U effort to win local governments’ favor in the six cities eventually chosen for service? History suggests the answer will be yes, at least to the extent local cable and phone companies demand the same concessions for easy pole access, reduced pole attachment fees, and easing of zoning restrictions and procedures Gig.U project coordinators expect.

Levin has stressed Gig.U projects are based on university and private funding sources, not taxpayer dollars. That may also limit how much objection commercial providers may be able to raise against the projects.

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WABI in Bangor previews the new gigabit broadband network being constructed in Orono and Old Town, Maine.  (2 minutes)

Wi-Fi access is about to become a lot more ubiquitous if you happen to buy broadband from Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, Bright House Networks, or Cox.  All five companies on Monday announced they will open up their free Wi-Fi hotspots to customers of any of these companies nationwide.

The collaborative agreement extends the authentication platforms cable operators use to verify customer accounts when granting access to services like TV Everywhere — the online video streaming services operated by pay television providers. By sharing basic account information, customers traveling outside of their home cable service area can “roam” on free Wi-Fi networks operated by the other providers.

For example, a Cablevision subscriber who lives on Long Island will be able to access Bright House Networks’ Wi-Fi in central Florida or Time Warner Cable’s growing wireless network in Los Angeles.

The cable industry calls it a back door entry into mobile data, and unlike its existing partnership with Clearwire for WiMAX 4G service, Wi-Fi hotspots are available at no additional charge.

“We believe that Wi-Fi is a superior approach to mobile data,” said Kristin Dolan, head of projects at Cablevision. “Cable providers are best positioned to build the highest-capacity national network offering customers fast and reliable Internet connections when away from their home or business broadband service.”

More than 50,000 Wi-Fi hotspots are to be included in the project, all unified under the name “CableWiFi.”

Eventually, the companies hope to unveil automatic log-ins on the network, regardless of where customers access it.

The industry is aggressively expanding Wi-Fi services to give subscribers another reason to stick with their local cable company. Some may require customers to maintain both a cable-TV subscription and broadband to qualify for the service, others will only require a current broadband account. The free add-on may also make subscribers think twice about canceling service if it means losing access.

Comcast, Cablevision, and Time Warner Cable already have a deal in place to share their networks in southwestern Connecticut, New York City, parts of New Jersey and Philadelphia.

Cable operators will target high-traffic areas for Wi-Fi expansion — especially public parks, beaches, malls, eateries, stadiums and convention centers.  Don’t expect cable Wi-Fi to be common in residential neighborhoods, and users will have to temper their expectations. Most provide access suitable for web browsing and e-mail, but often have trouble keeping up with streaming video and other high bandwidth services.