The Charleston Gazette

While the eastern seaboard begins to assess the damage of several feet of water invading New Jersey and New York, West Virginia continues to contend with several feet of heavy snow left by Hurricane Sandy. More than 8,400 customers and climbing have reported service outages to the state’s largest phone company — Frontier Communications, which has crews contending with storm-damaged infrastructure ranging from widespread power outages to downed trees and utility lines.

Although parts of the state anticipated heavy snows from Sandy, cities further south including Charleston were unprepared for the wallop of wet, heavy snow that was expected to remain further to the north. Sandy’s heaviest precipitation bands were on the west side of the storm — bad news as far west as central Ohio and Kentucky. While temperatures remained in the 50’s further north, the cold core of Sandy resulted in precipitation falling largely as snow in the Appalachians.

As of noon, more than 200,000 homes in the state remain without power, which also impacts Frontier Communications’ operations.

Sandy knocked out power to at least 32 of the company’s 230 central offices in West Virginia, but the company reports all but three are still running with the assistance of backup generators — some acquired after last summer’s derecho, which knocked out power at half of Frontier’s switching offices.

Frontier says it is trying to get the remaining three switches back in operation, but some remote locations remain inaccessible because of poor roads and downed trees. Tucker County is reportedly among the most difficult to reach.

West Virginia’s Panhandle region has an estimated 1,000 customers without Internet service as of yesterday, particularly in hard-hit Jefferson, Berkeley, and Morgan counties.

Although customers may find their landline phone service working, broadband service could be more intermittent because of power outages affecting remote terminals that help extend service into rural locations. Those are vulnerable to electricity interruptions which Frontier’s Dan Page reports are widespread across the state, with the exception of the Wheeling area.

Frontier won’t say how many customers in West Virginia are currently without service, but noted many will have to wait until power restoration efforts are complete. Frontier’s crews have secondary priority and will repair services after electric service crews move on.

The storm impacted Frontier customers all the way west to Indiana, where fewer than 1,000 customers were without service in the Terre Haute area.

Any customer experiencing trouble with their phone or Internet should call Frontier at 1-877-462-8188, option 2 to request repair (or 1-800-921-8101). Repair technicians are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Suddenlink is throwing a hissyfit over Frontier’s aggressive advertising.

Now come on, you are both pretty… slow that is.

Suddenlink Communications is crawling mad that Frontier Communications has been hammering the cable company over their broadband speeds, which PC Magazine this week proclaimed were nothing to write home about. The cable operator successfully challenged some of Frontier’s ads with the National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus.

The group recommended Frontier cease making claims that its DSL service offers “dedicated” lines to the Internet in contrast to Suddenlink, which forces customers to share their connection with the whole neighborhood.

Frontier claims Suddenlink’s network can bog down during peak hours, while Frontier makes sure customers consistently get the speeds they pay for.

Many of the ads targeted customers in West Virginia, who regularly tell Stop the Cap! neither provider competing there offers particularly good service.

“Is Frontier kidding?,” says Shane Foster, a former Frontier customer in West Virginia. “I was supposed to be getting up to 6Mbps service and I was lucky to get 1.5Mbps at 2 am.”

Foster says he believes Frontier oversold its DSL network in his area, with speeds slowing even further during the evening and weekends when everyone got online. While Frontier may not require customers to share a line from their home to the company’s central office, congestion can occur within Frontier’s local exchange or on the connection Frontier maintains with Internet backbone providers.

“The technician sent to my house even privately admitted it,” Foster tells Stop the Cap!

Foster switched to Suddenlink, but he is not exactly a happy customer there either.

“Their usage caps suck, the service is slow, and their measurement tool is always broken,” Foster shares. “West Virginia doesn’t just get the bottom of the barrel, it gets the dirt underneath it.”

Frontier Communications says it has been making improvements in West Virginia and other states where it provides DSL broadband. Some areas can now subscribe to 25Mbps service because of network upgrades. Foster says he would dump Suddenlink and go back to Frontier, if they can deliver speeds the rest of the country gets.

“Sorry, but 1.5Mbps is not broadband and with their prices, tricky fees and contracts it is robbery,” says Foster. “They need to clean up their act and I’ll come back. I hate usage caps with a passion.”

Frontier says it will appeal the NAD’s decision. But Frontier might do better advertising its broadband service as usage cap free — something customers consistently value over those running Internet Overcharging schemes.

Frontier Communications is ready to deliver some customers faster DSL speeds in portions of West Virginia that have, until now, been stuck with 3-6Mbps from the phone company.

Residential and business customers in certain exchanges within Kanawha and Putnam counties can now upgrade to speeds up to 25Mbps for $54.99 a month, which Frontier claims also includes a combination modem-wireless router. Small business customers can get up to 40Mbps DSL service, where available.

Dana Waldo, senior vice president and general manager for Frontier’s operations in the state told the Charleston Daily Mail the company’s new Broadband Ultra and Ultimate DSL will be gradually extended within both counties by the end of this year. In order to sell faster DSL service, Frontier has to replace portions of its existing network with fiber optics and install new equipment to reduce the length of copper wire between the phone company and the customer.

Larger businesses in West Virginia are being marketed an even faster Metro Ethernet product, which can deliver gigabit speeds and beyond, for an exceptional amount of money.

The speed expansion, which covers both the city of Charleston and the growing suburbs to the west in Putnam County along Interstate 64 towards Huntington, is likely designed to curb customer defections to competing cable providers, which have delivered faster speeds in the rapidly growing region.

Frontier has not indicated when it plans faster broadband service for the rest of the state.

One of the rural groups fighting to keep funding for rural broadband networks.

The Republican platform on telecommunications and its criticism of the Obama Administration’s handling of broadband inspired a blogger at the Washington Post to ponder the question, “Whatever happened to Obama’s goal of universal broadband access?”

Brad Plumer sees the Republican criticism as valid, at least on the surface:

Does anyone remember when the Obama administration promised to bring “true broadband [to] every community in America”? The Republican Party definitely does, and its 2012 platform criticizes the president for not making any progress on this pledge:

“The current Administration has been frozen in the past…. It inherited from the previous Republican Administration 95 percent coverage of the nation with broadband. It will leave office with no progress toward the goal of universal coverage—after spending $7.2 billion more. That hurts rural America, where farmers, ranchers, and small business manufacturers need connectivity to expand their customer base and operate in real time with the world’s producers.

So whatever happened to the Obama administration’s plan to expand broadband access, anyway? In one sense, the Republican critics are right. Universal broadband is still far from a reality. According to the Federal Communications Commission’s annual broadband report, released in August, there are still 19 million Americans who lack access to wired broadband. Only about 94 percent of households have broadband access. Obama hasn’t achieved his goal.

Stop the Cap! has been watching the rural broadband debate since the summer of 2008, and believes the failure to do better isn’t primarily the fault of Republicans or Democrats — it lies with the nation’s phone companies — particularly AT&T and Verizon. But both political parties, to different degrees, have helped and hindered along the way.

Plumer slightly misstates the commitment of the Obama Administration at the outset. The Obama-Biden Plan never promised to successfully complete universal broadband access in the United States. Here is their actual pledge (emphasis ours):

Deploy Next-Generation Broadband: Work towards true broadband in every community in America through a combination of reform of the Universal Service Fund, better use of the nation’s wireless spectrum, promotion of next-generation facilities, technologies and applications, and new tax and loan incentives. America should lead the world in broadband penetration and Internet access.

Big Phone Companies Struggle to Abandon Landlines in Rural America

The Obama-Biden Plan for broadband never promised you a rose garden. It simply promised the administration would get to work planting one.

By far, AT&T and Verizon Communications are the most culpable for leaving rural Americans without broadband service. Over the last four years, both companies have diverted investment away from their landline networks into wireless. AT&T has also spent millions lobbying state governments to free itself from the requirement of serving as “the carrier of last resort,” a critical matter for rural landline customers, particularly because rural wireless coverage remains lacking.

In most states, the dominant phone company is still mandated to provide basic telephone service to every customer who wants it. Universal electric and telephone service goes all the way back to the Roosevelt Administration, who saw both as essential to the rural economy.

The Communications Act of 1934 that the Republicans today dismiss as outdated established the concept of universal telephone service: “making available, so far as possible, to all the people of the United States a rapid, efficient, nationwide and worldwide wire and radio communication service with adequate facilities at reasonable charges.”

The concept of universal service was reaffirmed, with the blessing of the telephone companies, under the sweeping deregulation of the landmark Telecommunications Act of 1996. Republicans call that law outdated as well.

Rural America Can’t Win Better Broadband If Their Providers Don’t Play

Decided not to participate in rural broadband funding programs.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provided the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS) with $7.2 billion to expand access to broadband services in the United States. Of those funds, the Act provided $4.7 billion to NTIA to support the deployment of broadband infrastructure, enhance and expand public computer centers, encourage sustainable adoption of broadband service, and develop and maintain a nationwide public map of broadband service capability and availability.

This first round of serious broadband stimulus was designed to help defray the costs of bringing broadband to rural areas where “return on investment” formulas used by large phone companies deemed them insufficiently profitable to service.

Remarkably, America’s largest phone companies declined to participate. In March 2009, AT&T and Verizon delivered their response to the Obama Administration through Bloomberg News:

Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T Inc. may have this response to the U.S. government’s offer of $7.2 billion for high-speed Internet projects: Keep it.

Unlike the businesses that welcomed the $787 billion stimulus package approved by Congress last month, the two biggest U.S. phone companies have reservations. They’re urging the government not to help other companies compete with them through broadband grants or to set new conditions on how Internet access should be provided.

The companies have remained noncommittal as they lobby to shape rules for the grants.

“We do not have our hand out seeking government funds,” James Cicconi, AT&T’s senior executive vice president, told reporters March 11. While the company is “open to considering things that might help the economy and might help our customers at the same time,” he said AT&T’s primary focus for broadband is its own investment program.

Also declined to participate.

AT&T’s own financial reports illustrate its “investment program” was largely focused on its wireless services division, not rural broadband. Many other phone companies filed objections to projects they deemed invasive to their service areas, whether they actually provided broadband in those places or not.

When the final NTIA grant recipients were announced, the overwhelming majority were middle-mile or institutional broadband networks that would not provide broadband to any home or business.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service managed the rest of the broadband grants and loans, and the majority went to exceptionally rural telephone companies, co-ops, and tribal telecommunications. AT&T did participate in one aspect of broadband stimulus — its legal team and lobbyists appealed to grant administrators to change the rules to be more flexible about how and where grant money was spent.

In the past year, both AT&T and Verizon have signaled their true intentions for rural landline service:

Verizon’s McAdam: Ready to pull the plug on rural landlines.

Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam: “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,” McAdam said. “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.”

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson: “We have been apprehensive on moving, doing anything on rural access lines because the issue here is, do you have a broadband product for rural America?,” Stephenson told investors earlier this year. “And we’ve all been 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.”

More recently, Verizon has nearly disinherited its DSL service, making it more difficult to purchase (impossible in FiOS fiber to the home service areas). In states like West Virginia, it effectively slashed expansion and infrastructure investment as it prepared to exit the state, selling its network to Frontier Communications. AT&T has shown almost no interest expanding the coverage of its DSL service either. If you don’t have access to it today, you likely won’t tomorrow.

A good portion of the broadband stimulus funding provided by the government is actually in the form of low-interest, repayable loans. Despite rhetoric in the Republican platform about supporting public-private partnerships to expand rural broadband, the Republicans in Congress launched coordinated attacks on the Broadband Access Loan Program offered by the USDA’s Rural Utilities Service in the spring of 2011. Various right-wing pundits and pressure groups joined forces with several Republican members of Congress attempting to permanently de-fund the program, starting with $700 million in federally-backed loans in April, 2011. The loans were targeted to public and private rural telecommunications companies attempting to expand or introduce broadband service.

Attacks on the effectiveness of President Obama’s broadband campaign pledges in the Republican platform ring a little hollow when Republican lawmakers actively blocked the administration’s efforts to keep those promises.

Killing Community Broadband: Priority #1 for Providers With the Help of Corporate-Backed ALEC and State Politicians

AT&T’s Stephenson: Doesn’t have a solution for the rural broadband problem, so why try?

Stop the Cap! has repeatedly reported on the challenges of community broadband in the United States. Launched by towns and villages to provide quality broadband service in areas where larger companies have either underserved or delivered no service at all, publicly-owned broadband is often the only chance a community has to stay competitive in the digital age.

That goal is shared by the GOP’s platform, which states how important it is to connect “rural areas so that every American can fully participate in the global economy.”

Unfortunately, unless your local phone or cable company is providing the service, all too often they would prefer communities continue to receive no service at all.

AT&T is among the most aggressive phone companies lobbying state officials, often through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), to pass state laws hindering or banning community broadband development. ALEC supporters, overwhelmingly Republican, accept company-drafted legislation as their own and introduce it in state legislatures, hoping it will become law. Generous campaign contributions often follow.

In the past few years, AT&T and Time Warner Cable have been especially active in broadband backwater states like North and South Carolina and Georgia, where rural counties often receive nothing more than DSL service at speeds that no longer qualify as “broadband” under the Obama Administration’s National Broadband Plan. In North Carolina, Democratic state politicians well funded by Time Warner Cable helped push bills forward, but it took a Republican takeover of the North Carolina legislature to finally get those laws enacted. South Carolina presented fewer challenges for state lawmakers, despite protests from communities across the state bypassed by AT&T and other phone companies.

The efforts to de-fund broadband stimulus and tie the hands of communities seeking their own broadband solutions have done considerable damage to the rural broadband expansion effort.

Universal Service Fund Reform: Not Much Help If America’s Largest Phone Companies Remain Uninterested

The Obama Administration has also kept its pledge to reform the Universal Service Fund, recreating it as the Connect America Fund (CAF) to help wire rural America.

Hopes for rural broadband drowned in the cement pond.

In its first phase of broadband funding, $300 million dollars became available to help subsidize the cost of rural broadband construction. Deemed a “mild stimulus” effort that would test the CAF’s grant mechanisms, only $115 million of the available funding was accepted by the nation’s phone companies — all independent providers like Frontier, FairPoint, CenturyLink, Windstream, and smaller players. Once again, both AT&T and Verizon refused to participate. There is no word yet on whether the two largest phone companies in the country will also effectively boycott the second round of funding, estimated to allocate over $1.8 billion to expand rural broadband.

“Getting to 100 percent is going to be a very difficult long-term goal, given the size of the U.S. landmass and the huge expense to reach those final couple of percentage points,” John Horrigan of the Joint Center Media and Technology Institute told Brad Plumer.

Politics and provider intransigence seem to be getting in the way just as much as America’s vast expanse. Many conservative and provider-backed groups have called America’s claimed 94% broadband availability rate a success story, and don’t see a need to fuss over the remaining six percent that cannot buy the service (and pointing to a larger number that don’t want the service at today’s prices).

Beyond the partisan obstructionism and middle mile/institutional network “successes” that ordinary consumers cannot access, the real issue remains the providers themselves. You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make him drink.

It seems as long as AT&T and Verizon treat their rural landline customers as hayseed relatives they (and Wall Street) could do without, the rural broadband picture for customers of AT&T and Verizon will remain bleak at current stimulus levels regardless of which party promises what in their respective platforms.

Phillip “The Company Paid by Suddenlink to Issue a Third Party Guarantee Makes All the Difference” Dampier

When Stop the Cap! and Broadband Reports reader Simon contacted us about Suddenlink’s fact-free usage measurement tool that managed to rack up nearly 23GB of usage for one West Virginia customer on the same day his service was out for most of the evening, he probably did not think one customer catching the cable company’s fingers in the usage cookie jar would make much difference.

But it did.

Suddenlink spokesman Pete Abel, initially responding to complaints about the usage tool’s accuracy, told Light Reading last week its meter was “consistently accurate, as was demonstrated in the tests we ran before we launched this program.”

Four days later, the company effectively disavowed that, put the meter’s built-in overlimit fee scheme on hold and plans to hire a third party company to “validate the accuracy of its system,” after finding it was faulty after all.

Suddenlink won’t say what is causing the inaccuracies, but blamed “unusual” circumstances for the problem. The company is now refunding customers billed overlimit fees of $10 per 50GB and waiving future charges until its system is reviewed and validated by “a trusted third party.”

Stop the Cap! believes that does not come close to satisfying the company’s responsibility to its customers for accurate billing.

Suddenlink has never demonstrated it actually needs an Internet Overcharging scheme with usage limits and overlimit fees. The company proves that when it claims only a “relatively small number of customers” were ever billed overlimit fees. With no demonstrable usage problem, the company’s need to implement its Project Imagine “Allowance Plan” is sorely lacking.

Easy as counting anyway we like.

Additionally, the accuracy of providers’ usage measurement tools has proven highly suspect, and not just with Suddenlink. All of the companies caught with inaccurate meters always strongly defend them, until overwhelming evidence suggests they should not. Even super-sized companies like Bell Canada (BCE) and AT&T have enforced usage limits with meters the companies later had to disavow. Suddenlink is only the latest.

The scale in your grocery store is checked and certified. So is the corner gas pump, your electric meter, water meter, and gas meter. Why should broadband usage be any different?

Consumers are right to suspect Suddenlink’s usage meter. No official regulatory body verifies the accuracy of usage measurement tools and whatever company Suddenlink chooses to “verify” its meter has a built in conflict of interest — it works for a company that depends on a certain result in its favor. Suddenlink clearly has no business in the usage measurement business when it insists on the accuracy of a meter it disavows just a few days later.

With only murky details available to consumers about what caused the problem and why Suddenlink did not see it until a customer managed to catch them in the act, there is little confidence the company will actually solve a problem it never realized it had. There is also nothing to assure us — “third party guarantee” or not — it cannot happen all over again.

Suddenlink customers need to reach out and tell Suddenlink its “Allowance Plan” is completely unacceptable. Tell the cable company you don’t want to worry about their unverifiable and proven-inaccurate metering program. Ask them why you should remain a customer when they spend time and money on a scheme that the company itself admits is not really needed — targeting just a small number of “heavy users.”

Suddenlink’s customer service team does not think much of customers who use their broadband service a lot, as this recent “Who’s On First” exchange illustrates:

Lisa (Suddenlink): “Well, you show heavy OVERUSAGE of the Internet, you drew 14GB of data yesterday.”

Customer: “Okay, let’s back up, explain to me how I drew 12GB of data when my power was off and I wasn’t home on June 30.”

Lisa: “I didn’t say anything about June 30.”

Customer:  “If you have sooo much faith in your meter, explain to me how I drew 12GBs of data on June 30, while I didn’t have power, and wasn’t home.”

Lisa:  “I didn’t say anything about June 30.”

Customer:  “I’m asking, how did I draw 12GB of data without power to my house?”

If Suddenlink has a problem with a handful of users creating problems for other subscribers on its broadband network, it has always reserved the right to contact those customers directly and work out the problem one on one. That is a far better solution than inconveniencing all of their customers with endless rounds of “usage roulette,” where the big winner could find themselves with Bill Shock from overlimit fees, whether they actually deserve them or not.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/CNBC Internet v. Cable 8-20-10.flv[/flv]

CNBC interviewed Suddenlink CEO Jerry Kent in August 2010 on how his company intends to deal with “invasive online video,” threatening to erode cable-TV profits. Kent proved Suddenlink doesn’t really need any extra money from overlimit fees — the days of big spending on capacity are over, but the money is nice to have anyway.  (8 minutes)