LightSquared’s basic business plan of delivering a nationwide 4G network has been an open question ever since the company’s technology threatened to obliterate GPS satellite navigation technology.  Now the company is taking a page from the Washington’s Public Relations Firm Playbook by ingratiating itself with important lawmakers that can make or break the multi-billion dollar endeavor.

LightSquared announced it is donating equipment and service to Native American organizations, starting in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Arizona — all conveniently located in key lawmakers’ states and districts.  In addition to agreeing to provide satellite phone service to remote tribal communities completely unserved by other technologies, LightSquared is also contributing 2,000 satellite telephones to the Indian Health Service, the federal agency responsible for administering health care to native populations on reservations and throughout tribal communities in Alaska.

How can the company deliver service over a network threatened with legislative obliteration?  LightSquared’s donation to Native Americans will rely on the company’s satellite network, which has not been deemed an interference generator by opponents.

Satellite telephony has proved to be obscenely expensive and of limited interest outside of military, shipping, and forest service applications.  At rates averaging up to $5 a minute or more, keeping conversations short is key to avoid bill shock.  Such technology is completely out of reach for most tribal communities, who are among the most income-challenged of all North Americans.  The contribution may buy the venture some goodwill on Capitol Hill, where it is sorely needed as skepticism over the company’s 4G service, to be operated on frequencies adjacent to GPS satellites, has reached an all-time-high.

LightSquared is learning the time-tested ways of Washington, where substance and common sense often take a back seat to political posturing, special interest politics, and campaign contributions.

TDS Telecom, the Madison, Wisc. independent telephone company serving about 1 million landline customers in rural and suburban communities in 30 states, is losing 5.5 percent of those customers every year, as consumers increasingly drop their landline telephone service.

In second quarter financial results reported to investors this week, TDS noted it is increasingly dependent on selling DSL broadband and managed data services to stabilize long term revenues and minimize line losses.  Like many independent phone companies, TDS’ largely rural service areas offer the opportunity of delivering broadband service to areas unserved by cable broadband, and unlikely to find robust cell phone or wireless data coverage.

Vicki Villacrez, TDS’ chief financial officer, reports the phone company now has a 60 percent penetration rate for residential landline customers taking DSL service.

“High speed data subscribers grew 6% year-on-year.” Villacrez said. “We continue to attract healthy levels of new customers and they are taking higher speed. Over 80% of our data subscribers are taking speeds of three megabits or greater and 16% are taking greater than 10 megabit speeds.”

Because TDS customers are migrating to faster speeds, where available, the company’s average revenue per subscriber has remained stable at $37 per month.  That comes from a combination of the higher prices some customers pay for better service minus line losses, customer defections and retention offers delivering discounts to those threatening to switch providers.

TDS is also adopting similar strategies other phone companies are trying to hang onto customers: marketing their own triple play package of voice, broadband, and television service.  Like most smaller phone companies, TDS delivers voice and data over their existing copper wire network and relies on a resale arrangement with DISH Network to provide satellite television.

About 26 percent of TDS customers are enrolled in the company’s triple play package, up 2,700 customers in the quarter.

But the company’s cost control measures also signal TDS’ unwillingness to invest noticeably in expanding their DSL footprint to additional customers, or dramatically improve their existing network.  The company admits it plans to limit investment in new residential customers, and consolidated cash expenses were down 2.1% for the period, reflecting reduced spending.

Where is TDS willing to invest?  In data center assets and future acquisition opportunities.  TDS intends to broaden its presence in managed hosting and will continue to explore mergers and acquisition opportunities with other small, independent phone companies.

More than 45,000 Verizon landline workers are on strike this morning after union workers overwhelmingly rejected a proposed contract from Verizon Communications that could result in as much as $20,000 in reduced benefits per employee, per year.

Workers employed by Verizon East, which serves the company’s northeastern and mid-Atlantic regions from Massachusetts to Virginia, left their jobs as their contract with the company expired over the weekend.  Two unions — the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, are pitting the dispute as part of a corporate war on the middle class.

Verizon has been demanding serious concessions from union workers in negotiations for a new contract agreement.  But employees are expressing serious concern over draconian salary and benefit concessions that could drastically reduce their pay and benefits package.  According to William Huber, president of IBEW Local 827:

• Verizon is seeking to tie pay increases to company-defined performance reviews;
• Employees would pay significant sums towards health care premiums;
• Pensions would be frozen at the end of 2011;
• Sickness and death benefits would be eliminated;
• Disability benefits would be slashed from 52 to 26 weeks and authorized “sick time” curtailed.

Verizon officials claim the benefit and pay concessions are part of the reality of today’s landline telephone business, which has been in decline for several years.

“We need to reach a contract that addresses economic realities,” said Lee Gierczynski, a Verizon spokesman. “The wireline business is constantly in decline. In order for Verizon to compete, Verizon and the unions need to make some difficult decisions.”

That contention is seriously disputed by the two unions and employees.  The CWA called Verizon one of the most profitable companies in the U.S., noting the company earned $19.5 billion in profits in the last four years and paid over $258 million in compensation to just five top executives.

“So tell me, where is their loss?” said Dino Cantillo, a facilities technician and 17-year employee. Cantillo told the Star-Ledger that Verizon’s CEO, Ivan Seidenberg, earned more than $18 million in total compensation in 2010 – roughly $49,000 every day.

“It takes these guys a year to make that,” said Cantillo, pointing at the two dozen or so protesters who picketed in Howell, N.J.

“They are trying to get rid of the working class,” said Bill Gebhart, a lineman who has worked for Verizon for 15 years. “They are totally annihilating it.”

The unions are especially upset Verizon has been aggressively trying to contract work out of the region, hiring workers offshore in Mexico, the Philippines, and other countries to perform tasks formerly done by regional employees.  The unions also point to significant corporate welfare Verizon received recently — a $1.3 billion federal tax rebate paid for by taxpayers.

“These negotiations are all about good jobs,” said CWA District 1 Vice President Chris Shelton. “Companies like Verizon should be investing in rebuilding the American economy, not contributing to the destruction of good, middle-class jobs.”

Verizon appears to be in no hurry to negotiate, cancelling several bargaining sessions last weekend.

During the last strike by Verizon employees in 2000, requests for repair service, installation, and other construction work languished for weeks, so it is very likely consumers with phone or Internet service problems or new order requests will face growing delays the longer the strike lasts.  Union officials plan to move against company plans to reassign managers and workers from other regions with strike protests and what one union official said would be a “blizzard of paperwork.”

Union workers also suggest the quality of repairs and installations done by those pressed into service with little experience may be below standard.

The CWA recommended that union workers and supporters retaliate against Verizon by canceling their phone, Internet, and cell phone service.  That could be an expensive proposition, particularly for wireless customers who would certainly face the prospect of early termination fees.

[flv width=”640″ height=”500″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Verizon Strike 8-8-11.flv[/flv]

Visible strike actions by Verizon workers have served as catnip for local reporters, who are extensively covering the strike up and down the eastern seaboard.  Stop the Cap! has assembled coverage from stations all across the region. (28 minutes)

Nearly every week, phone companies like Frontier Communications are confronted with service outages that turn out to be more than just an errant gunshot that disrupted 911 service for hundreds of residents in Moses Lake, Washington.  When repair crews arrive to find no cabling to repair, they realize it’s yet another case of copper theft — a problem plaguing economically challenged areas across the country.

Unfortunately for phone companies, copper theft remains a misdemeanor in many states, including West Virginia, one of the hardest hit by wire thieves that literally strip phone lines right off the phone poles as they drive by in the dead of night.

An employee with Frontier Communications reported that on June 25 he received reports that the phone lines were out for residents along Paddle Creek Road near Fort Gay, W.V.

It apparently took two days for the employee to discover, on June 27, 800 feet of phone cable had been removed from a wooded area along the road. The value of the cable was estimated at $10,000.  The annoyance value for customers left without basic phone service?  Potentially more.

In St. Albans, nearly 400 Frontier customers were stripped of their landline service Friday when vandals cut a cable in a possible theft attempt.  Frontier said the most vulnerable cables are often in the most remote and rural locations, and this cable qualified, requiring more than a day to repair and restore service.

But the impact of copper theft can be greater than phone service knocked out for a few hundred residents.  In Kanawha County, West Virginia’s Department of Agriculture offices were left idle when the second copper theft in two months left their phone lines dead.

“We’re at a standstill,” said Gus Douglass, commissioner of agriculture. “It’s kind of ridiculous.”

[flv width=”480″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WSAZ Huntington Copper Thieves Dep Ag 6-28-11.mp4[/flv]

WSAZ-TV in Huntington, W.V. covered the second straight outage of phone service for the West Virginia Dept. of Agriculture in two months.  Copper thieves do strike twice in the same place.  (2 minutes)

Frontier has complained that because copper thefts are often treated as a misdemeanor, offenders are skating with a small fine and little or no jail time.  That makes repeat offenses likely, and risks for those just getting into the copper racket low.

Thieves are reselling the stolen copper for money.  Copper has become a hot commodity, and thieves often earn hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, for a night’s work.

Frontier believes strengthening criminal penalties for copper thefts will do more to deter would-be thieves more than installing surveillance equipment.

Kanawha County Prosecutor Mark Plants seems to agree.  His office is now charging offenders under a little-used state code that makes it a felony to disrupt telephone service.  A felony conviction can bring substantial fines and multi-year prison sentences, especially for repeat offenders.

“There is a push […] towards maximizing a prison sentence for all of these criminals,” Plants told WSAZ-TV.

[flv width=”480″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WSAZ Huntington Copper Thieves 6-29-11.mp4[/flv]

WSAZ-TV follows up on the copper theft outage that plagued the West Virginia Dept. of Agriculture with news of an arrest, and a demand for stronger penalties for copper thieves.  (2 minutes)

AT&T’s record of delivering reliable landline service has remained an open question for Bakersfield, Calif. residents for more than six months, as repeated outages leave several AT&T landline customers without access to a dial tone.  Even worse, some of the customers impacted have been left without any phone service for weeks on end, including one woman whose life literally depends on a working phone.

Andrea Williams, who lives alone in her Bakersfield home, suffered a stroke and has a heart condition — making access to a phone absolutely essential to her well-being.  Williams is also legally blind, making a cell phone an insurmountable challenge.  Instead, Williams says she has memorized the location of the buttons on her long-standing cordless landline phone, a phone that was out of service just after Christmas and largely stayed that way for three weeks.

Despite having made numerous calls to AT&T trying to get the problem corrected, Williams says no one from AT&T ever showed up.  It took an investigative report from Bakersfield’s KGET-TV newsroom to finally get AT&T to respond.

[flv width=”480″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KGET Bakersfield ATT Phone Lines Crossed 12-29-10 and 1-10-11.flv[/flv]

Back in December, AT&T in Bakersfield left hundreds of customers without service or cross-connected with other customers’ phone lines.  It all culminated three weeks later in one health-challenged resident breaking out in tears when local TV station KGET finally helped get her service restored.  (5 minutes)

Fast forward to late June, and AT&T’s reliability is again up for a challenge, as some residents in the unincorporated community of Glennville, 30 miles north of Bakersfield, are fed up with repeated outages, even after eight families collectively paid $16,000 to AT&T to extend wired phone service and broadband to their neighborhood.

Around the same time Williams was experiencing problems with her phone line in December, residents in Glennville began experiencing repeated outages of their own.

“I think from December to January, it was 15 times it went out,” said resident Ray Schill.  “From February to now, [the lines have been out] another 10-15 times.”

Residents in Glennville are especially concerned because they cannot count on their landlines, and cell service is spotty to non-existent in the area.

“My major concern is we’re going to have a big problem up here — someone is going to be ill, we’re going to have a fire, someone’s going to die — who is liable,” Kathryn Ervin, a Glennville resident told KGET News.

What happens when residents call AT&T for help?

We get the runaround, says Schill, with promises extending through the months of May, June, and now July 15.

Schill doesn’t hold much confidence in AT&T’s promises, especially after the company responded to an inquiry from the state’s Public Utilities Commission which culminated in his complaint being closed-as-resolved.

Once again, KGET-TV was on the case for the benefit of its viewers, and reporter Kelsey Thomas received a remarkable response from AT&T — the company “couldn’t handle the number of people using the phones in Glennville.” (population: 280)

The company promises to “upgrade its software” to resolve the problem, but could not give Thomas a time frame for when that would be complete.

[flv width=”360″ height=”290″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KGET Bakersfield Folks in Glennville fed up with ATT 6-27-11.mp4[/flv]

KGET-TV gets involved with AT&T once again, this time to help hundreds of residents of Glennville, Calif., who are also experiencing trouble with the company’s landline service.  (3 minutes)