[We are reprinting this because it succinctly and persuasively proves a point we’ve been making at Stop the Cap! since 2008.  Broadband is not just a “nice thing to have.” It is as important as a phone line, electricity, and safe drinking water.  News, education, commerce, and culture increasingly utilize the Internet to share information and entertain us. Essential utility services can either be provided by a private company operating as a monopoly with oversight and regulation, or operate strictly in the public interest in the form of a customer-owned cooperative, a direct service of local government, or a quasi-public independent non-profit.

In North America, broadband was originally considered a non-essential service, and private providers in the United States lobbied heavily to maintain absolute control of their broadband networks, free to open them to share with other providers, or not.  They also won sweeping deregulation and are still fighting today for decreased oversight.  The results have been uneven service.  Large, compact cities enjoy modern and fast broadband while smaller communities are forced to live with a fraction of the speeds offered elsewhere, if they have access to the service at all.

With broadband now deemed “essential,” local governments have increasingly sought to end the same old excuses with the “don’t care”-cable company or “what’s in it for me”-AT&T and provide 21st century service themselves, especially where local commercial providers simply won’t step up to the plate at all.  Suddenly, big cable and phone companies are more possessive than your last boy/girlfriend. The companies that for years couldn’t care less about your broadband needs suddenly obsess when someone else moves in on “their territory.” They want special laws (that apply only to the competition) to make sure your broadband future lies exclusively in their hands.

Susan P. Crawford understand how this dysfunctional, controlling relationship comes at the expense of rural America.  She’s a visiting professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and Harvard Law School. In 2009, she was a special assistant to President Barack Obama for science, technology and innovation policy. Her opinions were originally shared with readers of Bloomberg News.]

In cities and towns across the U.S., a familiar story is replaying itself: Powerful companies are preventing local governments from providing an essential service to their citizens. More than 100 years ago, it was electricity. Today, it is the public provision of communications services.

The Georgia legislature is currently considering a bill that would effectively make it impossible for any city in the state to provide for high-speed Internet access networks — even in areas in which the private sector cannot or will not. Nebraska, North Carolina, Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee already have similar laws in place. South Carolina is considering one, as is Florida.

Mayors across the U.S. are desperate to attract good jobs and provide residents with educational opportunities, access to affordable health care, and other benefits that depend on affordable, fast connectivity — something that people in other industrialized countries take for granted. But powerful incumbent providers such as AT&T Inc. and Time Warner Cable Inc. are hamstringing municipalities.

At the beginning of the 20th century, private power companies electrified only the most lucrative population centers and ignored most of America, particularly rural America. By the mid-1920s, 15 holding companies controlled 85 percent of the nation’s electricity distribution, and the Federal Trade Commission found that the power trusts routinely gouged consumers.

Costly and Dangerous

In response, and recognizing that cheap, plentiful electricity was essential to economic development and quality of life, thousands of communities formed electric utilities of their own. Predictably, the private utilities claimed that public ownership of electrical utilities was “costly and dangerous” and “always a failure,” according to the November 1906 issue of Moody’s Magazine. Now more than 2,000 communities in the U.S., including Seattle, San Antonio and Los Angeles, provide their own electricity.

Today, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which advocates for community broadband initiatives, is tracking more than 60 municipal governments that have built or are building successful fiber networks, just as they created electric systems during the 20th century. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, for example, the city’s publicly owned electric company provides fast, affordable and reliable fiber Internet access. Some businesses based in Knoxville — 100 miles to the northeast — are adding jobs in Chattanooga, where connectivity can cost an eighth as much.

Meanwhile, less than 8 percent of Americans currently receive fiber service to their homes, compared with more than 50 percent of households in South Korea, and almost 40 percent in Japan. Where it’s available, Americans pay five or six times as much for their fiber access as people in other countries do. Fully a third of Americans don’t subscribe to high-speed Internet access at all, and AT&T Chief Executive Officer Randall Stephenson said last month that the company was “trying to find a broadband solution that was economically viable to get out to rural America, and we’re not finding one, to be quite candid.” America is rapidly losing the global race for high-speed connectivity.

Tamping Down Enthusiasm

Like the power trusts of the 20th century, the enormous consolidated providers of wired Internet access want to tamp down any enthusiasm for municipal networks. Last year, telecom lobbyists spent more than $300,000 in a failed effort to block a referendum in Longmont, Colorado, to allow that city to provide Internet access. Time Warner Cable managed to get a North Carolina law enacted last year that makes launching municipal networks there extraordinarily difficult. The pending measures in Georgia and South Carolina are modeled on the North Carolina bill.

The Georgia bill is chock-full of sand traps and areas of deep statutory fog from which no local public network is likely ever to emerge. In addition to the ordinary public hearings that any municipality would hold on the subject, a town looking to build a public network would have to hold a referendum. It wouldn’t be allowed to spend any money in support of its position (there would be no such prohibition on the deep-pocketed incumbents). The community wouldn’t be allowed to support its network with local taxes or surplus revenues from any other services (although incumbents routinely and massively subsidize their networks with revenue from other businesses).

Most pernicious of all, the public operator would have to include in the costs of its service the phantom, imputed “capital costs” and “taxes” of a private provider. This is a fertile area for disputes, litigation and delay, as no one knows what precise costs and taxes are at issue, much less how to calculate these amounts. The public provider would also have to comply with all laws and “requirements” applicable to “the communications service,” if it were made available by “a private provider,” although again the law doesn’t specify which service is involved or which provider is relevant.

The end result of all this vague language will be to make it all but impossible for a city to obtain financing to build its network. Although the proponents of Georgia’s bill claim that they are merely trying to create a level playing field, these are terms and conditions that no new entrant, public or private, can meet — and that the incumbents themselves do not live by. You can almost hear the drafters laughing about how impossible the entire enterprise will be.

Globally Competitive Networks

Right now, state legislatures — where the incumbents wield great power — are keeping towns and cities in the U.S. from making their own choices about their communications networks. Meanwhile, municipalities, cooperatives and small independent companies are practically the only entities building globally competitive networks these days. Both AT&T and Verizon have ceased the expansion of next-generation fiber installations across the U.S., and the cable companies’ services greatly favor downloads over uploads.

Congress needs to intervene. One way it could help is by preempting state laws that erect barriers to the ability of local jurisdictions to provide communications services to their citizens.

Running for president in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt emphasized the right of communities to provide their own electricity. “I might call the right of the people to own and operate their own utility a birch rod in the cupboard,” he said, “to be taken out and used only when the child gets beyond the point where more scolding does any good.” It’s time to take out that birch rod.

A Philadelphia community group is accusing Comcast of keeping its low-income budget Internet program a secret and denying needy families access for the flimsiest excuses.

Action United, which fights for low and moderate income Pennsylvanians, dropped off complaints with federal officials in Philadelphia from residents who are upset because they never heard of the discounted Internet access program or were disqualified from applying.

Comcast’s Internet Essentials offers families who qualify for the federal student lunch program access to 1.5Mbps broadband for around $9.95 a month.  But an informal survey by the group found scores of residents who never heard of the program and would have applied if they had known it existed.

The group, which says it has 44,000 members in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg and Allentown, says it could find only two families among its members that actually qualified to sign up for the service.  Some were disqualified because they didn’t participate in the school lunch program, others because they already have Internet service or had a long-forgotten past due bill.

“I feel as though the Internet service will help my son to progress in math, reading, spelling,” Dawn from North Philadelphia told CBS Philadelphia. But she says Comcast refused to sign her up.

“They told me I had a back bill from 10 years ago, so I was not qualified,” Dawn said.

As Stop the Cap! reported in September, Comcast’s program is effectively designed to reap positive publicity for the cable company while discouraging customers from applying and actually obtaining the service.

Action United says area schools, an obvious place to promote low cost Internet for students, knew nothing about the program.

Comcast counters it sent mailings about Internet Essentials to 4,000 school districts, which covers 30,000 schools.

The group originally planned to protest Wednesday in front of Comcast’s corporate headquarters in Philadelphia to draw attention to the problem.  Earlier today, Action United announced it had reached an agreement to meet with Comcast executives to discuss the program and help cut some of the red tape for families experiencing trouble applying.

Comcast’s decision to offer budget Internet service came as a result of negotiations with the federal government to approve its merger with NBC-Universal. Critics contend Internet Essentials is too restrictive and requires applicants to navigate through a cumbersome qualification process.  After approval, the program only provides discounted service for a period of three years and can be terminated if a family falls past due on their account.

From the byzantine terms and conditions for enrollment in the Comcast Internet Essentials program:

The program is only available to households that (i) are located where Comcast offers Internet service; (ii) have at least one child who receives free school lunches through the National School Lunch Program (the “NSLP”) and as confirmed annually while enrolled in the program; (iii) do not have an overdue Comcast bill or unreturned equipment; and (iv) have not subscribed to any Comcast Internet service within the last ninety (90) days (sections 1(i)-(iv) collectively are defined as “Eligibility Criteria”). This program is not available to households that have children who receive reduced price lunches under the NSLP. The program will accept new customers for three (3) full school years, unless extended at the sole election of Comcast. Comcast reserves the right to establish enrollment periods at the beginning of each academic year in which it accepts new customers that may limit the period of time each year in which you have to enroll in the program.

2. In order to confirm your eligibility for the program, Comcast will need to verify that your children receive free school lunches through the NSLP in the initial enrollment year and each subsequent year you are enrolled in the program. In order to confirm eligibility, participants in the program will be required to provide copies of official documents establishing that a child in the household is currently receive free school lunches through the NSLP. Each year you will be required to reconfirm your household’s current eligibility by providing Comcast or its authorized agent with up-to-date documentation. If you fail to provide documentation proving your eligibility in the program, you will be deemed no longer eligible to participate in the program.

3. You will no longer be eligible to participate in the program if (i) you no longer have at least one child living in your household who receives free school lunches under the NSLP; (ii) you fail to maintain your Comcast account in good standing; (iii) Comcast ceases to provide the Covered Service to your location; or (iv) your account opened under the program is closed. A change in address may result in your account being closed, even if you continue to receive Comcast services at a different address. Program participation also may be terminated if the Covered Service is upgraded, altered or changed by you for any reason. If you are no longer eligible for the program, but continue to receive the Covered Service from Comcast, regular rates, and any other applicable terms and conditions will apply to the Covered Service.

The city of Savannah, Georgia is at the mercy of Comcast Cable, and city officials and local residents are fed up with high bills, the “don’t care” attitude from customer service, and cable and broadband that fails repeatedly, sometimes extending for weeks.

The fervor came to a head in December when city council had accumulated more than 150 complaints from local residents, deciding public hearings were warranted to deal with the city’s dominant cable company, Comcast.

“Comcast Destroyed My House”

Diana Thibodoux called Comcast to deal with a cable issue in her Ardsley Park home and never expected the service call would turn into an expensive nightmare.

Thibodoux says the Comcast technician who showed up decided on his own to rewire the house for cable and began drilling through brick and expensive plaster, stringing easily visible black coaxial cable along outside walls, inside baseboards and up over doors, all in plain sight.

“My house looks like a frat house,” Thibodoux complained to Comcast officials who were on hand to listen to customer complaints at the first of four public “town hall” meetings.

“I’ve never dealt with a company so incompetent,” another local resident said.

[flv width=”640″ height=”500″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WTOC Savannah Ive never dealt with a company so incompetent 2-6-12.mp4[/flv]

WTOC in Savannah shares the horror story of Diana Thibodoux, who says Comcast destroyed her house thanks to an overzealous, incompetent repairman.  (3 minutes)

Residents used the public sessions to vent about long hold times which can extend to as much as two hours, poor quality service, and what city officials call the predictable outcome of a company that has “a stranglehold” over Savannah’s cable TV market.

“Comcast has treated Savannah like a third world country for years, delivering the best service to the wealthiest neighborhoods while leaving cable lines dangling on the ground in the areas they don’t care about,” said Stop the Cap! reader Jenny Child, who has kept a folder of papers documenting more than a dozen service calls regarding poor Internet service at her small business.

“If it rains in Savannah, and it does so a lot, our Internet goes out,” Child complains. “We have called and called but the technician shows up when it is bright and sunny and shrugs his shoulders and says there is no problem.”

Child and her two employees now handle their online business activities based on local weather forecasts.

“If the man says we’re getting rain today, we handle our Internet things real quick, because as sure as I’ll be in church on Sunday, we won’t have service after the first drops fall from the sky,” she says.

Child keeps calling Comcast when her Internet service drops out, but long hold times to reach the company’s outsourced-to-India customer service department have cut into her business.

“I can’t be sitting here on hold with Comcast for 45 minutes waiting for some representative’s nails to dry so she can pick up the phone and deal with customers,” Child complains. “It’s the biggest cable company ever, and don’t they own NBC? How many people do they have working there that they can’t answer the phone. Maybe everyone else is calling to complain too.”

Comcast’s Business Broadband Blockade Prompts Whining When Potential Competition Shows Up

While fielding complaints from more than 50 local residents at a second meeting held to address complaints, Comcast executives questioned whether the city of Savannah was giving favorable treatment to Hargray, a new entrant pushing to bring 21st century broadband into the city of Savannah for businesses Comcast has refused to serve for years.

Comcast complained they didn’t mind competition, but wanted “a level playing field,” a statement that prompted an immediate and angry response from some members of the city council, who blasted the cable company for its attitude.

Aldermen Tony Thomas, John Hall, and Tom Bordeaux all noted Comcast has steadfastly refused to wire many downtown business buildings for cable broadband service, despite years of requests.  Comcast claimed the relatively low number of customers did not justify the cost to expand the service.

All three could not understand why Comcast had a sudden urgency to complain about unfair treatment when a competitor sought to provide the service they never did.

“If [Comcast] did not want to offer that service previously and someone else is coming in to provide the service, where is the sticking point?” Thomas said.

Bordeaux was more blunt in his remarks intended for Comcast.

“Tell them to sue us,” he said.

In contrast to service from AT&T and Comcast, which often markets 3-6Mbps broadband in Savannah, Hargray’s fiber broadband project will deliver speeds up to 1Gbps, first to business customers. But the company promises it is considering selling to residential customers as well.

Great Deals, But Only for “Selected Neighborhoods”

As Comcast’s bad press has become fodder for the nightly newscasts on several of the city’s television outlets, Comcast literally took to the streets to try and mitigate their public relations nightmare. In the process, they created a new one.

Councilman Tony Thomas is happy Comcast is approaching upset customers and offering them substantial discounts on their cable bill.  But he’s not happy Comcast is only extending those deals to certain customers, not all.

Thomas wants the deals offered to everyone, something that he says is not happening today.

Andy Macke, Comcast’s Vice President of Communications counters, “All they have to do is call 1-800-COMCAST and they will hear the same deals that the same people are getting from those reps going from door to door.”

“Comcast’s attitude in Savannah is see no evil, hear no evil,” says Jeff White, a Comcast customer who has watched the scuffle. “They don’t even admit there is a problem until it runs on the evening news and city council waves 150 complaints they are getting at the camera — the ones Comcast ignored.”

Macke himself told WJCL-TV, which has covered the dispute with Comcast repeatedly, he was “unaware of the extent of the concerns that our Savannah customers had with us.”

Despite promises to make things right, Alderman Thomas says many complaints are still unresolved.

“We were told that all of those folks had been contacted and that their problems were being worked on. I have since found a few of these people [who] have had no contact whatsoever with Comcast,” Thomas told the TV station.

“Under no circumstances should City Council let the situation with Comcast get pushed under the rug,” one person wrote in the Vox Populi column in the Savannah Morning News. “We the people need help!”

No Help On the Way

Unfortunately for that reader, and other Savannah residents, an attempt by Savannah city officials to attract competing cable service has met with no success and no interest.  Cable operators almost never compete head to head, each respecting the service areas of fellow providers.  Hargray’s interest in Savannah is primarily serving business customers, and the option for municipal service may not be possible much longer if a bill supported by Comcast, SB 313, ever becomes law.

[flv width=”640″ height=”500″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Comcast in Savannah 2-8-12.flv[/flv]

A compilation of news reports from WJCL, WSAV, and WTOC exploring Comcast’s performance problems in the city of Savannah, Georgia.  (15 minutes)

Perhaps the most the world ever hears about the tiny British island of St. Helena, a home in the South Atlantic for 4,000 residents, is the annual St. Helena Radio Day when the nation takes to the shortwave radio dial to say hello to friends on every continent.

Beyond that, St. Helena is mostly known as an out-of-the-way tourist destination and potential point of contact for ships traversing the South Atlantic between South America and southern Africa.  St. Helena’s residents live with three television stations, two radio stations, two newspapers, and a single satellite connection to the Internet providing one 10/3Mbps circuit shared by all 4,000 residents.

Signing up for “broadband” is an expensive ordeal.  Individual residents can purchase strictly usage-limited DSL Internet service at prices ranging from $31 a month for 128/64kbps service (limited to 300MB per month) to $190 for 384/128kbps service, with a 3.3GB monthly allowance.  Overlimit fees start at around $0.15 per megabyte.

Local residents find life without the modern day definition of broadband service a major hindrance, especially for education.  Students have left St. Helena for the United Kingdom to pursue studies.  Economically, self-sustained employment is next to impossible on the island.

“I’m an IT engineer and I would love to return to my island to start an IT business, but because of the slow, expensive and unreliable Internet connection this is simply impossible,” said Jonathan Clingham, an IT infrastructure engineer now working in Wiltshire, England.

Now a grass-roots campaign has been launched to help convince several telecommunications companies financing a new underseas fiber cable project laid between Brazil, Angola, and South Africa to reroute the cable slightly through the island of St. Helena, opening the door to modern broadband for the island.

The group is calling on supporters to help draw attention to the project, arrange for the British government to help underwrite the expense of an extra 50 kilometers of cable needed to reach St. Helena, and providing assistance to lease a circuit on the new cable:

• If you are an British citizen or UK resident please sign our e-petition to connect St Helena.
• Show your support by liking our Facebook page.
• Spread the word and let everybody know about our campaign.
• Ask the following entities/persons for support:
  • the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office
  • the UK Department for International Development
  • as a UK citizen your MPs and Lords

Correction: In an effort to concatenate two stories regarding Springfield, we erred in reporting about Springfield’s move to sell its municipal cable operation to Knology.  That story referred to Springfield, Fla., not Springfield, Mass.  We appreciate one of our readers bringing this to our attention, and we regret the error. –PMD

Comcast customers in Massachusetts are hopping mad over the latest round of rate increases from the state’s largest cable operator — the second in 10 months in some areas.  Higher cable bills for customers will start arriving by early spring.

City officials in Boston expect eastern Massachusetts customers will face up to 2.9% more for basic service this spring.  In western Massachusetts, Springfield city officials finally resolved a prolonged legal battle with the cable operator and granted the company a 10-year franchise renewal that preserves senior discounts for existing customers.

Boston mayor Thomas M. Menino said an examination of Comcast’s cable rates over the past few years proves deregulation “has failed” consumers across greater Boston.  Menino says basic cable rates have increased by 80 percent in the three years since the city’s rate control agreement expired.

Menino wants restored authority to regulate cable rates, and has asked the FCC for permission to bring back the city’s oversight powers.

[flv width=”480″ height=”290″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WCVB Boston Cable Rates Going Up For Some Customers 1-17-12.mp4[/flv]

WCVB in Boston talks with city mayor Tom Menino about the latest round of rate increases for Comcast customers.  Some Boston locals are responding by dumping cable television altogether.  (2 minutes)

Comcast basic service will rise another 4.9 percent this spring, bringing the mostly local-broadcast-channel cable service to $16.58 a month.

The only other major cable provider in Boston, RCN, which serves mostly apartment buildings and other multi-dwelling units, is not planning to increase its prices on the lowest price tier. However, RCN already charges more than Comcast — $17.50 — for comparable service.  Other RCN customers face general rate increases this spring.

Verizon says it has no plans to increase prices in Boston either.  That statement was deemed ironic by some, considering the fact the phone company has never provided FiOS fiber-to-the-home cable service inside the city of Boston.

All affected providers blame increasing programming costs for the rate hikes.

[flv width=”480″ height=”290″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WGGB Springfield Cable Rates Going Up 1-18-12.mp4[/flv]

WGGB in Springfield led a recent evening newscast with news Comcast and competing satellite providers are increasing rates in western Massachusetts, with local residents increasingly questioning the value of their cable-TV services.  (2 minutes)