Frontier Communications claims its expansive broadband deployment efforts in West Virginia will take the Mountain State from the bottom of the broadband barrel to the very top within a few years.

Dana Waldo, Frontier’s senior vice president and general manager, said the company has completely turned around landline and broadband service in West Virginia just over a year after Verizon Communications left the state.

In a wide-ranging radio interview with MetroNews, Waldo claims complaints are way down while DSL broadband deployment is way up.  In just about a year, Frontier has expanded broadband to 76 percent of its West Virginia service area, adding 85,000 additional homes and businesses that previously had no access to wired broadband.

“We made a commitment to spend about $310 million, from the time of the transaction through 2013, to improve the network, to expand broadband across the state and for other capital improvements,” Waldo told MetroNews Talkline.

Frontier Communications’ Dana Waldo talks with MetroNews Talkline about phone and broadband service in West Virginia. July 19, 2011. (11 minutes)
You must remain on this page to hear the clip, or you can download the clip and listen later.

Currently, West Virginia ranks 47th in the United States for broadband access, mostly because large sections of the rural, mountainous state simply don’t have access to any provider.  What access most do have, outside of major cities like Charleston, Huntington, Wheeling, and Parkersburg comes from telephone company-provided DSL.  Verizon used to be the dominant provider in West Virginia, with Frontier providing service in limited areas.  But after Verizon sold its operations in the state to Frontier, the independent telephone company is now the only telecommunications provider for many rural communities.  For the majority of customers outside of the largest cities, Frontier markets DSL at speeds up to 3Mbps, hardly cutting-edge.

Frontier’s backbone network is deemed the worst in the nation for a wired provider, according to statistics collected and analyzed by Netflix.

“When comparing broadband in states like New York or New Jersey with West Virginia… there is no comparison,” shares Stop the Cap! reader Steve who lives in Hempstead, N.Y., but owns a cabin outside of Beckley, W.V.  “You can get Cablevision’s cable broadband at rocket ship speeds or Verizon FiOS fiber-to-the-home, which is even faster, in New York.  For my neighbors and me in West Virginia, there is one choice – Frontier Communications’ DSL, which can manage 800kbps on a good day.”

“I almost drove off the road laughing as I listened to the sheer nonsense of Mr. Waldo’s empty promises,” Steve shares. “This company’s idea of broadband access is up to 3Mbps DSL while nearby states like Virginia and Pennsylvania are getting fiber or cable broadband speeds ten times faster.  How he expects to make West Virginia a top-5 broadband state with their obsolete DSL is a question the gushing host never bothered to ask.”

Steve doesn’t think too many of his Mountain State neighbors are as excited as Mr. Waldo by Frontier.

“God help you if your line goes out, because they can take days to get around to fix it,” Steve says. “Waldo tries to sell you his possum pie with claims the company takes longer to effect repairs so they are ‘done right the first time,’ which is a real hoot considering all of the repeated outages customers experience.”

Steve doesn’t lay the blame entirely at Frontier, however, claiming Verizon fled the state after mangling their outdated landline network and keeping it running with electrical tape.

“Frontier bought into a real mess, and I’m sure they will eventually fix a lot of the problems Verizon didn’t ever care to fix, but that doesn’t make West Virginia a broadband nirvana — certainly not with Frontier’s DSL.”

Martin

While thousands of West Virginians continue to struggle without any broadband service, the state government is having trouble finding a way to spend up to $40 million in broadband stimulus money on institutional broadband projects that often already have cutting edge fiber networks.

State officials won $126 million in federal stimulus grant money last year, from which the state announced it would lay more than 2,400 miles of fiber optic cable to wire government offices, schools, and libraries.  Now, a vocal critic says a combination of government waste, preferential treatment for the state’s largest phone company — Frontier Communications, and bad planning could leave up to $40 million of the grant money on the table, unspent for better broadband.

Jim Martin, president of business broadband provider Citynet, says the state overestimated the number of public facilities that need broadband improvements.  Many of the facilities involved already have high speed service, and do not require additional infrastructure.  As the grant expires, Martin says he would not be surprised if the state only managed to fund the installation of 300 miles of fiber.

Martin believes funds should be redirected to bolstering the state’s “middle mile” network — fiber infrastructure that would serve as an open network backbone to ensure capacity exists to support growing broadband demands in the state.  Instead, Martin told the Charleston Gazette, the state has been spending money providing fiber broadband to small libraries with fewer than a dozen computers that are unlikely to have the resources to pay the monthly fees Frontier Communications will charge for the service.

“There’s no value to any of this to anyone but Frontier,” Martin said.

In fact, Martin believes many of the current projects funded by taxpayer dollars deliver enormous benefits to Frontier’s bottom line, but only incremental improvement to some institutional users.

Martin claims Frontier has, in some cases, only spent enough money to install fiber from the pole to the building. That assures Frontier of being the only provider that can deliver ongoing service to institutional users.  Martin has a dog in this fight — his company competes with Frontier for business service contracts.

West Virginia's current broadband map shows large areas of the state have access to no broadband at all. (Olive color = No broadband.) (Click to enlarge)

Before the grant expires in February 2013, the state is hurrying to bolster its list of would-be recipients.

Jimmy Gianato, the state’s homeland security chief, said his office recently identified 330 additional “replacement locations” — higher education facilities, schools, health departments and state-owned hospitals — that could be eligible for the project, according to the newspaper.

Not on the list are individual consumers and small businesses who currently do not have access to any broadband service.  One of the ongoing problems of broadband stimulus funding is that public funds are often available to bolster broadband for state and locally-owned institutions, such as government offices, health care facilities, schools and libraries, but no funding to improve infrastructure for individual broadband service for “last mile” users.  This can result in Cadillac-style installations for small schools and libraries who win superb quality networks they ultimately cannot afford to operate on an ongoing basis.  For most, that service would come from Frontier Communications.

Martin already accused the state of investing in more than 1,000 routers without being certain if they were needed or where they would be installed.  At $20,000 each, Martin called the routers “Lamborghinis” and suggested they were largely unnecessary.

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.

Scrap copper wire

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)

Phillip Dampier

While North American ISP’s call 3Mbps DSL “revolutionary” for rural America and dream of Internet Overcharging schemes like usage caps and consumption billing everywhere else, Australia is poised to take broadband to a level North America can only imagine.  Watch this documentary on Australia’s fiber-based National Broadband Network future and how it will transform their economy and culture, and then ponder what your Internet Service Provider is doing these days.

While we scratch our heads wondering how to wire West Virginia for slow speed DSL, Australia is planning to rip out copper wire networks everywhere.  While we fight over communities trying to get their citizens 21st century broadband speeds from community-owned providers private companies want to ban, Australia will deliver the same fiber speeds to 90 percent of the country, whether it’s ‘economically viable’ (to investors) or not.  As we watch a handful of giant telecom companies try to mess with broadband pricing to further increase their profits without delivering any improvements in service, Australia is going to rid itself of artificial limits on broadband usage.

But Australia’s NBN goes much farther than just delivering fast broadband.  It builds a foundation to transform virtually every aspect of Australian life:

• Rural Australia’s economic viability is guaranteed a future with the availability of fast and reliable broadband for businesses large and small;
• Telemedicine means patients seeking routine care and follow-ups can conduct them from the comfort of their own homes;
• Telecommuting means less energy consumption, less traffic, and reduced costs in roadway maintenance as workers do their jobs away from the office without wasting precious time in traffic;
• Telelearning provides rural students with access to the same high quality education city students receive, and ongoing education can be managed anytime, anywhere, even for those with existing jobs and families;
• Australian businesses can reach new customers across the world, increasing sales, whether they sell a digital product or one that leverages online shipping and tracking tools to complete delivery anywhere;
• Millions of Australians will have access to the same high speed broadband, delivering a platform for the development of large-scale, next generation applications that don’t make sense in countries where broadband is a patchwork of speeds, service, and basic availability.
• It means a broadband network so far advanced above that found across North America, it could change Australia’s standing in global commerce, and impact our own.

Embarrassed yet?  Worried about America and Canada becoming broadband followers instead of leaders?

You should be.

[flv width=”640″ height=”500″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Australia’s NBN June 2011.flv[/flv]

Australia’s National Broadband Network  (38 minutes)

At least 41 percent of West Virginian economic development professionals responding in a new survey rate their area’s existing broadband service as “not very good,” a result that could have profound implications for high tech economic development in the state because of poor quality business broadband service.

Some of the results of the survey, conducted by Internet Service Provider Citynet:

• 77% said government involvement in steering broadband policy was “very important.”
• 78% believe modern, reasonably priced broadband Internet infrastructure is “extremely important” or “very important” in competing against other locations for jobs.
• On a 10-point scale, broadband Internet infrastructure (8.56) rates as slightly more important than road improvements (8.26) and water infrastructure (8.26).

“Seventy-eight percent of respondents say it has been their experience that businesses considering locating in their areas place high priority on access to affordable, high-speed Internet when evaluating site selections,” said Jim Martin, president and chief executive officer of Citynet. “And 66 percent say cost and capacity of broadband service are factors more than half of the time when discussing new business prospects.”

Some participants in the survey said they are losing business prospects in part due to the lack of broadband capacity, its speed or cost. Most of the professionals said they were “very familiar” or “somewhat familiar” with broadband expansion programs, such as middle-mile infrastructure, being implemented in adjoining states.

In West Virginia, most broadband expansion is being done by “last-mile” service provider Frontier Communications, which took over most of the state’s landlines from Verizon.  For most homes and businesses outside of areas where cable companies compete, Frontier provides DSL broadband service ranging from 1-3Mbps in smaller communities, perhaps 7Mbps or slightly better in larger cities.

West Virginia has proved to be one of the least impressive states for broadband owing to its terrain and large number of rural communities, providing few incentives for robust competition.  That has meant slow speed service at high prices.

Survey respondents were less than impressed:

• “I have a project pending [and] will probably lose it based on costs of broadband.”
• “The lack of high speed service in the rural areas totally extinguishes the possibility of new small business start-ups.”
• “Prospects don’t look here because of the lack of high speed, affordable, reliable broadband…. Current speeds of up to 3 mb while may be suitable for residential use are not suitable for business.”
• “Not only do too many areas still not have broadband, but too many places where people live do not have it and that affects the quality of life issue when attracting a prospect to live, work and play in WV.”
• “We were looking at a possible location of a data center and the lack of affordable, large capacity broadband was a deciding factor in them not locating in WV.”
• “We need the middle-mile and trunk-line services in West Virginia to remain competitive for many of today’s industries. What good is it if we get high-speed to every place in West Virginia, when we can only reach each other and do not have the facilities to get out of the state and into the major lines?”
• “[We] lost a company that looked at an existing building located in an area that doesn’t have high-speed access. They ended up locating in another area.”
• “You are not in the game without it.”
• “What are we waiting for?”

Citynet has a dog in this fight.  Martin has tangled with Frontier Communications in the past year over broadband stimulus funding and where taxpayer dollars are being spent in the state.  While Frontier has touted “fiber projects” in West Virginia, those are primarily directed at increasing capacity for Frontier’s middle-mile network between its telephone exchanges, in hopes of expanding DSL further out into rural areas.  The company is also trying to address congestion issues that have grown since buying out Verizon’s landline-based broadband business.

Martin has criticized state officials for supporting Frontier’s efforts because the company will end up owning and controlling the network built, in part, from taxpayer dollars.

Stop the Cap! hears regularly from ordinary consumers in the state who are dissatisfied with their broadband choices, especially when they come from just a single provider — Frontier.  Slow speeds, poor service, and repeated service outages have been documented here and by the state’s local media.  Some outages are attributable to Verizon’s poor quality infrastructure (now owned by Frontier), others to Frontier’s unwillingness to replace that infrastructure — instead choosing to repair it, even if further outages occur later.