Big Telecom companies like Verizon and AT&T use phony numbers and perpetuate myths about broadband traffic and network investments that have conned investors out of at least $1 trillion in unnecessary investments and consolidation.

Alexander Goldman, former chief analyst for CTI’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act grants, is warning Wall Street and investors they are at risk of losing millions more because some of the largest telecom companies in the country are engaged in disseminating bad math and conventional wisdom that relies more on repetition of their talking points than actual facts.

Goldman’s editorial, published by Broadband Breakfast, believes the campaign of misinformation is perpetuated by a media that accepts industry claims without examining the underlying facts and a pervasive echo chamber that delivers credibility only by the number of voices saying then same thing.

Goldman takes Verizon Communications CEO Lowell McAdam to task for an editorial published in 2013 in Verizon’s effort to beat back calls on regulators to oversee the broadband industry and correct some of its anti-competitive behavior.

McAdam claimed the U.S. built a global lead in broadband on investments of $1.2 trillion over 17 years to deploy “next generation broadband networks” because networks were deregulated.

Setting aside the fact the United States is not a broadband leader and continues to be outpaced by Europe and Asia, Goldman called McAdam’s impressive-sounding dollar figures meaningless, considering over the span of that 17 years, the United States progressed from dial-up to fiber broadband. Wired networks have been through a generational change that required infrastructure to be replaced and wireless networks have been through at least two significant generations of change over that time — mandatory investments that would have occurred with or without deregulation.

Over the past 17 years, the industry has gotten more of its numbers wrong than right. An explosion of fiber construction in the late 1990s based on predictions of data tsunamis turned out to be catastrophically wrong. University of Minnesota professor Andrew Odlyzko, the worst enemy of the telecom industry talking point, has been debunking claims of broadband traffic jams and the need to implement usage-based pricing and speed throttling for years. In 1998, when Wall Street was listening intently to forecasts produced by self-interested telecom companies like Worldcom that declared broadband traffic was going to double every 100 days, Odlyzko was telling his then-employer AT&T is was all a lot of nonsense. The broadband traffic emperor had no clothes, and statistics from rival telecom companies suggested Worldcom was telling tall tales. But AT&T executives didn’t listen.

“We just have to try harder to match those growth rates and catch up with WorldCom,” AT&T executives told Odlyzko and his colleagues, believing the problem was simply ineffective sales, not real broadband demand. When sales couldn’t generate those traffic numbers and Wall Street analysts began asking why, companies like Global Crossing and Qwest resorted to “hollow swaps” and other dubious tricks to fool analysts, prop up the stock price and executive bonuses, and invent sales.

Nobody bothered to ask for an independent analysis of the traffic boom that wasn’t. Wall Street and investors saw dollars waiting to be made, if only providers had the networks to handle the traffic. This began the fiber boom of the late 1990s, “an orgy of construction” as The Economist called it, all to prepare for a tidal wave of Internet traffic that never arrived.

After companies like Global Crossing and Worldcom failed in the biggest bankruptcies the country had ever seen at the time, Odlyzko believes important lessons were never learned. He blames Worldcom executives for inflating the Internet bubble more than anyone.

A bubble of another kind is forming today in America’s wireless industry, fueled by pernicious predictions of a growing spectrum crisis to anyone in DC willing to listen and hurry up spectrum auctions. Both AT&T and Verizon try to stun investors and politicians with enormous dollar numbers they claim are being spent to hurry upgraded wireless networks ready to handle an onslaught of high bandwidth wireless video. Both Verizon’s McAdam and AT&T’s Randall Stephenson intimidate Washington politicians with subtle threats that any enactment of industry reforms by the FCC or Congress will threaten the next $1.2 trillion in network investments, jobs, and America’s vital telecom infrastructure.

Odlyzko has seen this parade before, and he is not impressed. Streaming video on wireless networks is effectively constrained by miserly usage caps, not network capacity, and to Odlyzko, the more interesting story is Americans are abandoning voice calling for instant messages and texting.

That isn’t a problem for wireless carriers because texting is where the real money is made. Odlyzko notes that wireless carriers profit an average of $1,000 per megabyte for text messages, usually charged per-message or through subscription plan add ons or as part of a bundle. Cellular voice calling is much less profitable, earning about $1 per megabyte of digitized traffic.

Wireless carriers in the United States, particularly Verizon and AT&T, are immensely profitable and the industry as a whole haven’t invested more than 27% of their yearly revenue on network upgrades in over a decade. In fact, in 2011 carriers invested just 14.9% of their revenue, rising slightly to 16.3 percent in 2012 when companies collectively invested $30 billion on network improvements, but earned $185 billion along the way.

While Verizon preached “spectrum crisis” to the FCC and Congress and claimed it was urgently prioritizing network upgrades, company executives won approval of a plan to pay Vodafone, then a part owner of Verizon Wireless, $130 billion to buy them out. That represents the collective investment of every wireless provider in the country in network upgrades from 2005-2012. Verizon Wireless cannot find the money to upgrade their wireless networks to deliver customers a more generous data allowance (or an unlimited plan), but it had no trouble approving $130 billion to buy out its partner so it could keep future profits to itself.

Odlyzko concludes the obvious: “modern telecom is less about high capital investments and far more a game of territorial control, strategic alliances, services, and marketing, than of building a fixed infrastructure.”

That is why there is no money for Verizon FiOS expansion but there was plenty to pay Vodafone, and its executives who walked away with executive bonuses totaling $89.6 million.

As long as American wireless service remains largely in the hands of AT&T and Verizon Wireless, competition isn’t likely to seriously dent prices or profits. At least investors who are buying Verizon’s debt hope so.

Goldman again called attention to Odlyzko’s latest warning that the industry has its numbers (and priorities) wrong, and the last time Odlyzko had the numbers right and the telecommunications industry got its numbers wrong, telecommunications investors lost $1 trillion in the telecommunications dot.com bust.

As the drumbeat continues for further wireless consolidation and spectrum acquisition, investors have been told high network costs necessitate combining operations to improve efficiency and control expenses. Except the biggest costs faced by wireless carriers like Verizon are to implement strategic consolidation opportunities like the Vodafone deal, not maintain and grow their wireless network. AT&T is putting much of its spending in a proposed acquisition of DirecTV this year as well — at a cost of $48.5 billion. That could buy a lot of new cell towers and a much more consumer-friendly data plan.

Voice to text substitution (US)

Cell phone network companies (if you can believe their SEC filings) are incredibly profitable, and are spending relatively little on infrastructure:

Verizon’s FiOS expansion is still as dead as Francisco Franco.

Verizon is prepared to watch up to 30% of their copper landline customers drift away because the company is adamant about no further expansion of its FiOS fiber to the home network.

Fran Shammo, chief financial officer at Verizon, told attendees of the Jefferies Global Technology, Media & Telecom Conference that Verizon will complete the buildout of its fiber network to a total of about 19 million homes, and that is it.

“Look, we will continue to fulfill our FiOS license franchise agreements,” Frammo said. “[We will] cover about 70% of our legacy footprint. So 30%, we are not going to cover. That is where we are still going to have copper.”

That is bad news for Verizon customers stuck with the company’s copper network because Verizon isn’t planning any further significant investments in it.

“We will continue to harvest that copper network and those customers and keep them as long as we can,” Frammo said. “But we will not be building FiOS out for those areas.”

In fact, Frammo admitted ongoing cost-cutting at Verizon’s landline division is allowing the company to shift more money and resources to its more profitable wireless network.

Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam doesn’t want to spend money on non-FiOS areas when more can be made from its wireless network.

“It is also taking cost structure out,” Frammo said.  “As I mentioned, the migration of copper to fiber has been very big for us. Our Lean Six Sigma projects have really significantly helped us in our capital investment in the wireline which is why I can put more money into the wireless side of the business.”

Verizon has shifted an increasing proportion of its capital investments towards its wireless division year after year, while cutting ongoing investment in wireline. Ratepayers are not benefiting from this arrangement, and critics contend Verizon landline customers are effectively subsidizing Verizon’s wireless networks.

Verizon will still complete the FiOS buildouts it committed to earlier, particularly in New York City, but it is increasingly unlikely Verizon will ever start another wave of fiber upgrades.

In fact, Michael McCormack, the Jefferies’ Wall Street analyst questioning Shammo at the conference foreshadowed what is more likely to happen to Verizon’s legacy copper customers.

“We have talked extensively in the past about the non-FiOS areas and I guess in my second reincarnation as a banker, I will try to help you get rid of those assets,” said McCormack.

McAdam

The head of Verizon believes two concepts will become Internet reality in the short-term future:

1. Those that use a lot of Internet bandwidth should pay more to transport that content;
2. The “intelligent” Internet should prioritize the delivery of certain traffic over other traffic.

Welcome to a country without the benefit of Net Neutrality/Open Internet protection. A successful lawsuit brought by Verizon to toss out the Federal Communications Commission’s somewhat informal protections has given Verizon carte blanche to go ahead with its vision of your Internet future.

Lowell McAdam, Verizon’s CEO, answered questions on Tuesday at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference, attended by Wall Street investors and analysts.

McAdam believes groups trying to whip Net Neutrality into a major issue are misguided and uninformed about how companies manage their online networks.

“The carriers make money by transporting a lot of data,” McAdam said. “And spending a lot of time manipulating this, that accusation is by people that don’t really know how you manage a network like this. You don’t want to get into that sort of ‘gameplaying.'”

McAdam believes there is nothing wrong with prioritizing some Internet traffic over others, and he believes that future is already becoming a reality.

“If you have got an intelligent transportation system, or you have got an intelligent healthcare system, you are going to need to prioritize traffic,” said McAdam. “You want to make sure that if somebody is going to have a heart attack, that gets to the head of the line, ahead of a grade schooler that is coming home to do their homework in the afternoon or watch TV. So I think that is coming to realization.”

But McAdam also spoke about the need for those generating heavy Internet traffic to financially compensate Internet Service Providers, resulting in better service for content producers like Netflix — not considered ‘priority traffic’ otherwise.

“You saw the Netflix-Comcast deal this week which I think — or a couple weeks ago — which is smart because it positions them farther out into the network, so they are not congesting the core of the Internet,” said McAdam. “And there is some compensation going back and forth, so they recognize those that use a lot of bandwidth should contribute to that.”

McAdam reported to investors he had spoken personally with FCC chairman Tom Wheeler, who seems to be taking an even more informal approach to Net Neutrality than his predecessor Julius Genachowski did.

Verizon’s machine-to-machine program is likely to be a major earner for the company.

“In my discussions with Tom Wheeler, the Chairman, he has made it very clear that he will take decisive action if he sees bad behavior,” McAdam said, without elaborating on what might constitute ‘bad behavior.’ “I think that is great; great for everybody to see that. And I think that is what we would like to see him do, is have a general set of rules that covers all the players: the Netflixes, the Microsofts, the Apples, the Googles, and certainly the Comcasts and the Verizons. But the only thing to do is not — you can’t just regulate the carriers. They’re not the only players in making sure the net is healthy. And I think we all want to make sure that investment continues in the Internet and that customers get great service.”

Verizon has already reported success monetizing wireless broadband usage that has helped deliver growing revenue and profits at the country’s largest carrier. Now McAdam intends to monetize machine-to-machine communications that exchange information over Verizon’s network.

McAdam believes within 3-4 years Americans will have between five and ten different devices enabled on wireless networks like Verizon’s in their cars, homes, and personal electronics. For that, McAdam expects Verizon will earn between $0.25 a month for the average home medical monitor up to $50 a month for the car. Verizon is even testing wireless-enabled parking lots that can direct cars to empty parking spaces.

For those applications, McAdam expects to charge enough to guarantee a 50% profit margin.

“These can be very nice margin products,” McAdam told the audience of investors. “So even at $0.25 if you are doing 10 million of them and it’s 50% or better margins, those are attractive businesses for us to get into.”

Verizon’s Home Phone Connect base station

Despite assertions that Verizon created Voice Link as a solution for customers suffering from chronic landline problems, in reality the wireless landline replacement is nearly identical to Verizon Wireless’ Home Phone Connect and was produced only because of a complicated business relationship the wireless carrier had with its part owner Vodafone.

A Verizon spokesman told Stop the Cap! in June Voice Link was created for use where Verizon’s copper customers had chronic repairs issues:

Verizon will maintain the copper network where it makes customer service and business sense to do so.  Please keep in mind that the vast majority of our copper customers have no issues at all with their service; we are only considering the universe of customers where the copper network is not supporting their requirements.  Again, the exception is the storm-impacted areas in the western portion of Fire Island and a few New Jersey Barrier communities where copper facilities were damaged beyond repair.  In these locations Voice Link will be the single voice option available to customers. Verizon will offer these customers the opportunity to use our state-of-the-art, tried and tested wireless network at the same rate (or better) that they pay today.

Business sense appears to have played a great deal in Verizon’s strange decision to produce and market two nearly identical products. Hired by Verizon, William E. Taylor, a special consultant with National Economic Research Associates, Inc., testified last week that both Voice Link and Home Phone Connect are intended to compete in the landline replacement marketplace:

Home wireless services are a rapidly growing alternative to wireline plain old telephone service for many customers throughout New York State. In competition with Verizon’s Voice Link service, AT&T offers a Wireless Home Phone and Internet service with unlimited nationwide voice service at $20 per month with broadband internet service at higher prices, wherever its 4G LTE network is available. Sprint offers a competing wireless home service at $20 per month, as does U.S. Cellular. Wal-Mart sells its comparable Straight Talk prepaid wireless home voice service for $15 a month together with additional optional prepaid broadband internet access service. These offerings are similar to Verizon Wireless Home Phone Connect service, and differ in some features from Verizon New York’s Voice Link service but compete directly with both services.

Thus, one immediate and real competitive effect of the public release of Verizon’s wireline and Voice Link cost data would be to enable these four competitors (and others) to assess Verizon’s price floor for wireline voice service as an element in pricing their wireless home network services and calculating the profitability of expanding their wireless networks to provide wireless home phone service on Fire Island and elsewhere.

Verizon Voice Link

Taylor’s provided his declaration as part of Verizon’s case not to reveal certain documents (for competitive reasons) to the public about Voice Link deployment in New York and New Jersey. Verizon has offered Voice Link either as an option or, originally, as a sole landline replacement in areas considered uneconomical for landline restoration. But Taylor’s testimony also suggests Voice Link wasn’t necessarily created to solve chronic landline problems or replace landlines in natural disaster areas. In fact, Taylor testified Voice Link is just one of several competitors in the landline replacement market, including one from Verizon Wireless. In 2011, Verizon Wireless began national marketing of Home Phone Connect, a home wireless landline replacement product marketed to cord-cutters.

Verizon Communications chief financial officer Fran Shammo explained why Verizon Voice Link and Verizon Wireless Home Phone Connect both exist during remarks at the Wells Fargo Technology, Media & Telecom Conference on Nov. 12. Shammo blamed a complicated business relationship between Verizon, Verizon Wireless, and Vodafone which owned 45% of Verizon’s wireless venture for the near-twin services. The result was an informal “wall” between two Verizon entities, one devoted to landline and FiOS service, the other wireless — both selling essentially the same wireless product.

“The easiest way I can explain this is if you look at our product called Home Phone Connect, which was developed on the wireless side of the house,” Shammo said. “This is the product that you plug into your wall at home, converting the copper wire inside your home to an LTE network for voice. So in essence it is a copper voice replacement product. Now you would think that we would be able to take that same product and market it on the wireline side of the house. But we were prohibited because of governance and affiliate transactions. So the wireline business went out and developed their own product called Voice Link, which now they sell to their copper and DSL customers.”

Shammo admitted creating both Home Phone Connect and Voice Link was “a pretty inefficient way to develop product.”

So when this governance affiliate transaction-wall is taken away, you then can become a much more efficient company to launch one product to your customer, whether it is a wireline product or a wireless product,” he added. Shammo also believes tearing down that wall and tightly integrating Verizon’s wireline and wireless businesses will create “the soft synergies of the new Verizon that we believe we can create here.”

That might be bad news for Verizon’s rural landline customers, because Verizon’s current CEO is no fan of maintaining rural copper landline service when Verizon Wireless can do the job for less money and the open the door to higher profits.

“In […] areas that are more rural and more sparsely populated, we have got [a wireless 4G] LTE built that will handle all of those services and so we are going to cut the copper off there,” said Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam in June of last year. “We are going to do it over wireless. So I am going to be really shrinking the amount of copper we have out there and then I can focus the investment on that to improve the performance of it. The vision that I have is we are going into the copper plant areas and every place we have FiOS, we are going to kill the copper. We are going to just take it out of service and we are going to move those services onto FiOS. We have got parallel networks in way too many places now, so that is a pot of gold in my view.”

The wall that divided Verizon and Verizon Wireless may eventually be rebuilt between rural landline customers transitioned to wireless service as the only available landline replacement technology and urban and suburban customers offered Verizon’s fiber-to-the-home service FiOS.

Verizon’s moratorium on further expansion of its fiber to the home service will continue for “the next couple of years.”

Verizon FiOS won’t be coming soon to a home near you, unless that home is inside a community with a standing agreement with the phone company.

Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam made it clear to attendees at Tuesday’s Goldman Sachs 22^nd Annual Communacopia Conference his priority continues to be investing in the company’s highly profitable wireless business, while the company’s wired infrastructure is being targeted for more cost cutting, especially in areas designated to see existing copper infrastructure decommissioned. As for expanding FiOS into new communities, McAdam said he instead preferred to concentrate on improving market share and profits for the next few years in areas already getting the fiber optic service.

McAdam noted John Stratton, president of Verizon Enterprise Solutions, has been hard at work pruning Verizon’s wireline products and services targeted to business and government customers.

“I think [he] killed about 2,000 products this year, and we have taken 350 systems offline last year,” McAdam noted. “I think we are already at 250 this year. That sort of discipline gives you the ability to streamline your infrastructure.”

For residential customers, Verizon has two sets of offerings: one for customers served by FiOS fiber optics, the other for customers unlikely to see fiber upgrades indefinitely.

Inside Existing FiOS Service Areas

“We are doing some major technology shifts within FiOS to make it more efficient,” McAdam said. “We’re going to concentrate there for the next couple of years.”

McAdam’s signals to Wall Street were loud and clear: no more FiOS expansion into new communities for now.

McAdam

Instead, Verizon will focus on improving existing service in several key areas:

• Verizon has almost two million optical terminals that McAdam says were active at one point and are now sitting idle, suggesting FiOS has won and lost nearly two million customers since launching, either because the customer switched providers or moved away. McAdam said he wants to improve Verizon FiOS’ product set enough to attract those customers back. He noted with the terminals and cables already in place, the capital costs to win back a former customer are near zero;
• Verizon is introducing a new terminal this fall. Verizon’s FiOS Media Server “eliminates the requirement for coax, once you get into the optical terminal in the basement or wherever in the house,” McAdam said. “That slashes the installation time, and therefore makes the product a lot more profitable for us going forward. It eliminates set-top boxes, it is all IP-based going forward.”
• Verizon will continue to expand Verizon FiOS, particularly in New York City where it has a commitment to offer service.

Verizon FiOS has managed to build a much larger market share than its nearest neighbor, AT&T U-verse. McAdam claimed Verizon FiOS has achieved a 39 percent market share in broadband and around 34 percent on its television service so far. McAdam’s goal is to boost that to 45 percent. In areas of Texas where Verizon first introduced its FiOS fiber optic service, the company already has a penetration rate above 50 percent for broadband and 50 percent for television, demonstrating room to grow market share. AT&T’s U-verse TV penetration rate is 20.1 percent.

For Those Unserved by FiOS

Verizon’s 4G LTE Broadband Router with Voice

Except for Fire Island, N.Y., there are no significant announcements of FiOS expansion. Instead, Verizon has focused on investing to improve its wireless 4G LTE cell networks with the hope existing landline customers will consider switching to higher-profit wireless service. An attempted trial of Verizon Voice Link, intended to be an entry-level wireless replacement of landline service, failed badly on Fire Island due to an avalanche of complaints about poor quality reception, dropped and incomplete calls, and lack of support for data.

Now Verizon is back with a new offering, its 4G LTE Broadband Router with Voice ($49.99 2-yr contract with $175 early termination fee/$199.99 month-to-month).

“Securely connect wired and wireless devices to the 4G LTE network, and connect your landline phone to make calls,” Verizon’s website says. “Combine voice and data on a Share Everything Plan for added savings.”

The device can function as both a wireless landline replacement and router for data. The unit includes three Ethernet ports and Wi-Fi to share your connection. A landline phone or cordless phone base station can be plugged in as well.

Verizon charges an extra $20 a month for Home Service Monthly Line Access on Share Everything Plans, which covers your telephone service. Customers get unlimited local, long distance, call forwarding, call waiting, three-way calling, and voice mail. 911 is available, but Verizon disclaims any responsibility if you cannot reach an operator. The device also supports TTY-TTD calling.

Verizon claims users can expect 5-12Mbps downloading and 2-5Mbps uploading on Verizon’s 4G network, assuming there is solid coverage where you use the device. Usage caps apply. A backup battery keeps the service running for up to four hours of voice calling in the event of a power outage.

McAdam admitted the thing that keeps him up most at night are regulatory issues. He particularly called out Europe, which he believes is hostile for investment. But Europeans pay considerably less for wireless service than North Americans pay, and often have more choices due to competition and regulatory oversight.

“I think the beauty of the ’96 Telecom Act was that it was such a light touch on broadband and mobile,” said McAdam. “And that is — and I sit in Europe talking to investors all the time — that is the biggest difference between the U.S. and Europe.”

To head the FCC off from pursuing any additional regulatory oversight, McAdam claims he reluctantly approved Verizon’s lawsuit against the government on Net Neutrality.

“We have had to take some positions, frankly, that we didn’t want to take,” McAdam said of the lawsuit. “It opened the door for them to get into price regulation of broadband. And I think that is not their charter, and I think it would be a mistake for the U.S. economy and certainly the telecommunications ecosystem.”

[flv width=”488″ height=”300″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Verizon 4G LTE Broadband Router with Voice 9-25-13.flv[/flv]

Verizon Wireless’ latest 4G LTE router supports wireless landline service and 4G data.  (1 minute)