New York State Embraces Community Broadband

Broadband

from the do-it-yourself dept

We’ve noted for a long time how data makes it clear that, contrary to claims by telecom monopolies, community broadband networks are hugely beneficial. They generally offer faster speeds at lower prices with better customer service than regional monopolies, and they also tend to push said monopolies to try a little harder to compete on price, and expand and improve service.

While federal lawmakers under the sway of the telecom lobby often refuse to grasp this reality, many states are taking things into their own hands (a recurring theme in competent telecom policy). For example New York State just passed a new budget that specifically paves the way for greater participation in the broadband ecosystem by community broadband networks.

The recently passed $220 billion New York State budget bill includes $1 billion for the state’s ConnectALL initiative. That initiative in turn establishes a “municipal assistance program” that will help drive funding to municipalities, state and local authorities that are planning local broadband networks:

Municipal grant recipients, the bill says, will be required to build broadband infrastructure to “facilitate projects that, at a minimum, provide reliable Internet service with consistent speeds of at least 100 Megabits per second (Mbps) for download and at least 20 (Mbps) for upload.” That shouldn’t be a problem as most municipal broadband projects use fiber optics that can deliver far more than that.

It’s a little thing, but just getting state and federal leaders to acknowledge that community broadband is an essential part of improving U.S. broadband has been a steep uphill climb. Some states have been actively doing the inverse; buckling to pressure from AT&T and Comcast lobbyists to specifically ensure federal broadband grant money can’t go to anything that would vaguely resemble competition.

That risks putting states in conflict with language in the infrastructure bill, meaning they could potentially forfeit billions in once-in-a-lifetime broadband funding, all to please some local monopolies. And while there was initially some concern that New York’s budget included some of that language, the final budget appears to be free of such arbitrary restrictions.

Such networks take a wide variety of forms. Some are cooperatives, some are built on the backs of existing utility fiber, and some are public/private partnerships. The telecom lobby has done a “phenomenal” job in getting the right wing to frame this as “socialism run amok” or a “government takeover of the internet,” despite obvious benefits and the fact they have broad, bipartisan support.

Again, if big ISPs like Comcast and AT&T really wanted to thwart community broadband, they could improve their customer service, boost service quality, and lower their prices (which they do, sometimes). But with many U.S. state and federal lawmakers so easily bought and sold, it’s often way less expensive to lobby them into fighting against their constituents own best self interests.

Filed Under: broadband, community broadband, competition, digital divide, monopolies, monopolization, municipal broadband, new york, states, telecom

Nebraska Latest State Looking To Roll Back Dumb Restrictions On Community Broadband

Broadband

from the community-broadband-works dept

For years a growing number of US towns and cities have been forced into the broadband business thanks to US telecom market failure. Frustrated by high prices, lack of competition, spotty coverage, and terrible customer service, some 750 US towns and cities have explored some kind of community broadband option.

While the telecom industry routinely insists these efforts always end in disaster, that’s never actually been true. While there certainly are bad business plans and bad leaders, studies routinely show that such services not only better customer satisfaction scores, but better, faster service at lower, more transparent pricing than many dominant broadband providers.

Hoping to thwart this organic community response to market failure, big ISPs like AT&T and Comcast have waged a multi-pronged, several decade attack on such efforts: (1) by lobbying for (and usually ghost writing) protectionist laws in roughly 19 states either hamstringing or banning cities from building their own networks, and (2) by funding economists, consultants, and think tankers (usually via proxy organizations) happy to try and claim that community broadband is always a taxpayer boondoggle — unnecessary because private sector US broadband is just that wonderful.

But something happened during COVID. People realized it’s stupid to put these kinds of restrictions on the pursuit of better, faster, broadband. Especially if voters approve it. So Washington State and Arkansas either eliminated or massively scaled back longstanding restrictions in their states. Colorado also has been slowing stripping back these restrictions town by town.

Now Nebraska is hoping to do the same thing:

As reported by The Daily Nonpareil, Wayne’s proposed bill “would create a process allowing first- and second-class cities, as well as villages, to provide municipal broadband services if the city or village is in an underserved or unserved area.”

Granted, this still has to pass the state legislature, something that’s no easy feat when companies like AT&T (or regional cable broadband monopolies Comcast or Charter) have lobbied state lawmakers into a state of status quo beffudlement. Any attempt to role back such restrictions is met by a cavalcade of lobbying and astroturfed opposition.

In some states, these restrictions ban community broadband altogether, even if locals were to vote to approve it (basically giving Comcast executives in Philadelphia veto power over what your town can or can’t do). In other cases, the laws are designed to be a ban in everything but name only, greatly restricting financing options or where such options can or can’t be built.

Again, the COVID crisis highlighted very loudly how broadband is more essential utility than “nice to have” luxury. It also highlight how monopolization and corruption has directly led to market failure. Instead of making such efforts unnecessary by building better, faster, cheaper networks, telecom giants have spent 20 years instead paying state lobbyists to maintain perpetual (but profitable) dysfunction.

Filed Under: broadband, community broadband, competition, nebraska

Yet Another Telecom-Backed Think Tank Insists U.S. Broadband Is Great, Actually

Broadband

from the ignore-the-man-behind-the-curtain dept

U.S. broadband suffers from significant regional monopolization, which directly results in the country being mediocre on nearly every broadband metric that matters… be it broadband prices, coverage, speeds, and customer service. This isn’t something to debate; the data is everywhere, and anybody who has spent much time dealing with giants like AT&T or Comcast knows the sector has major problems. By developed national standards U.S. broadband is slow, expensive, inconsistently available, with terrible customer support. The cause has always been regional monopolization and the state and federal corruption that protects it.

Granted if you asked think tanks funded directly by the telecom industry, U.S. broadband is secretly fantastic, and critics are unhinged radicals. For example, the “Information Technology and Innovation Foundation,” which has AT&T, Charter, Comcast, Verizon, and T-Mobile as financial backers, penned a new report this week trying to frame every single meaningful criticism of the sector as falsehoods being spread by “radicals” and “broadband populists” exclusively looking to undermine the industry. I was tagged by the study’s author, so I guess I’m to assume I’m one of the radical populists being mentioned?

Using cherry picked data (or no data at all), the whole piece amusingly tries to argue that every major criticism of the U.S. broadband sector is false, whether we’re talking about the sector’s high prices (due to a lack of competition) to its well documented privacy scandals. The obvious motivation for the piece? The industry isn’t very happy about the continued rise of local community broadband networks as grass roots alternatives to monopoly control:

“The anticorporate broadband populists (and radicals) know that calling for the replacement of large Internet service providers (ISPs) with smaller community-based and municipal providers is likely a losing strategy.”

Of course that’s not true. Over 1,000 communities around the U.S. have started building their own broadband networks as a direct, organic, grass roots response to market failure. The movement saw renewed growth during COVID, thanks to ongoing frustration with cost and availability. Several studies (like this one out of Harvard) indicate such options often provide better, faster, cheaper service by folks with a vested interest in the communities they serve (because they often live in said communities). The solutions are far from homogenous: they come in all shapes and sizes, from local cooperatives and public/private partnerships, to broadband built on the backs of local utilities. And they’re usually tailored to local needs in a way service from AT&T, well, isn’t.

The “study” tries to frame these efforts as those of “radicals” and “socialists,” despite the fact that most community broadband networks are being built in conservative cities. Again, these folks aren’t getting into the broadband business because they’ve been spurred by “radical socialist ideology,” they’re building these networks because they’re angry about literally 30 years of market failure (and the federal failure that accompanies regulatory capture). This organic, bipartisan market response to monopolization is framed by the ITIF as some kind of nefarious plot to ruin AT&T and Comcast’s good time:

“As such, broadband populists understand that a more effective strategy is to burrow into the foundations, gradually chipping away at the credibility of the industry (which they derisively label ?Big Broadband?), and advancing endless claims about poor performance, including that U.S. corporate-provided broadband speeds are too slow, coverage and privacy protection are too limited, prices and profits are too high, and the ?pipes? are not neutral.”

The industry’s credibility isn’t in the gutter because some “radical populists” were mean to AT&T. The industry’s credibility is in the sewer for literally decades of well documented, terrible behavior, relentless bullying of competitors, high prices, slow speeds, and statistically some of the worst customer satisfaction ratings of any industry in America (really think about that last one for a moment). If the industry really wanted to thwart the movement, they could offer better, faster, cheaper service. Instead they’ve found it cheaper to lobby lawmakers into apathy (aka regulatory capture) and pay for reports that deny factual reality.

The combination of limited competition and feckless regulators means the U.S. telecom industry generally doesn’t see much accountability for market failure. If you’re a regional monopoly like AT&T or Comcast, creative, local broadband solutions with broad bipartisan public support are just about the only real, existential threat to your continued domination of a broken sector. And instead of directly addressing the problem by spending money on better support and better service, it’s far less expensive to lobby DC and portray critics as unhinged radicals exclusively interested in attacking “traditional values.”

Filed Under: broadband, community broadband, competition, lies, rob atkinson
Companies: at&t, comcast, itif, verizon

Telecom Monopolies Are Exploiting Crappy U.S. Broadband Maps To Block Community Broadband Grant Requests

Broadband

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

We’ve noted repeatedly that despite a lot of breathless rhetoric about America’s “quest to bridge the digital divide,” U.S. government leaders still don’t actually know where broadband is or isn’t available. Shoddy broadband mapping has generally been a good thing for regional U.S. telecom monopolies, who not only have been allowed to obscure competition gaps (and the high prices and poor service that result), but hoover up an endless gravy train of subsidies and tax breaks for networks that…mysteriously…always wind up half deployed. Our failure to measure deployment success has been painfully, repeatedly exploited.

But there are other ways that incumbents exploit our ongoing failure to map broadband to their advantage. Case in point: roughly 230 U.S. communities have applied for broadband grants being doled out as part of the National Transportation Infrastructure Agency (NTIA)’s $288 million Broadband Infrastructure Program. But when a town or local cooperative/utility/public-private partnership looking to build its own, better broadband network applies for the grant, they’re facing baseless challenges by ISPs which claim they already serve these areas.

Grafton, New Hampshire, for example, is looking to build its own fiber network after years of market neglect. It had 3,000 of the 4,000 census blocks they applied for grant money for falsely challenged by regional giants Comcast and Charter Spectrum:

“Of the 4,000 census blocks covered by Grafton?s grant application, Coates said that incumbent ISPs challenged 3,000 of them, even those dominated by cemeteries. In the majority of the challenges, telecom giants overstated available speeds and existing coverage, he noted. ?My immediate response was that this was them telling us to go boil water,? Coates said. ?Here you go, prove that you can do this in these three thousand census blocks. Have fun figuring it out.?

As we’ve noted, there’s a big lobbying push afoot by entrenched monopolies to ensure as little government stimulus money as possible goes toward building out competition to their regional dominance, no matter what that competition looks like (cooperatives, utilities, local governments, smaller private ISPs, private/public partnerships). To justify their obstruction to local community grants, big ISPs like Comcast and Charter point to FCC broadband maps they know aren’t accurate to insist nothing needs to be done. That perpetuates the sub-par service and high prices created by monopolization.

Except the FCC’s maps routinely overstate both coverage and speeds, and have for decades. The FCC’s methodology also declared (until only recently) that an entire census block is “served” with broadband, if an ISP claims it can serve just one home in that census block. While there have finally been some meaningful improvements to FCC mapping pushed through Congress, it’s still going to be several years (and significantly more funding) before most of those fixes can be properly implemented. Some states have developed their own alternative mapping solutions, but for many, engaging in a bureaucratic battle with deep-pocketed monopolies to disprove their coverage claims isn’t financially viable.

While the NTIA has made some progress of its own on mapping, it’s still being tasked with doling out $42 billion in additional broadband grants as part of the recently passed infrastructure bill — despite still not having an entirely accurate picture of the problem it’s trying to fix. That is, and will continue to be, exploited by entrenched monopolies like AT&T, Comcast, Charter, or Verizon which have not only fought against better mapping for years (knowing more accurate data would only spur calls for reform), but have a vested interest in fighting tooth and nail against any effort to disrupt the uncompetitive status quo.

Filed Under: broadband, broadband maps, community broadband, digital divide, fcc, grants, ntia, telecom

Ohio Republicans Forced To Back Off Unpopular Ban On Community Broadband

Broadband

from the good-luck-with-that dept

Ohio Republicans have been forced to back off an attempt to ban community broadband networks in the state after massive public opposition. As we recently noted, state Republicans included a last-hour amendment to a state budget bill (at AT&T and Charter’s behest) that would have effectively outlawed community and municipal broadband. Such networks are an organic, grass roots response to market failure at the hands of regional telecom monopolies. And instead of addressing them by offering better, cheaper service, giant ISPs often find it’s cheaper to just lobby state and federal lawmakers.

The Ohio proposal was so unpopular, none of the Republican backers were willing to even publicly acknowledge their support. After several weeks of significant backlash, the Ohio Senate conference committee was forced to scrap the proposal. That’s good news to FairlawnGig, a locally-owned ISP built on the back of a local power utility, which offers significantly faster fiber broadband at lower rates than most national providers. From an email the ISP sent out Monday morning:

“We?d like to thank everyone in Fairlawn and Summit County for their support in rallying together to tell elected officials in Columbus how important municipal broadband is to them,? says Ernie Staten, Director of Public Service for Fairlawn. “Municipalities only enter the broadband space when forced to by the inaction of the private sector. The competition and service we bring is the key difference for many communities to compete and thrive in the 21st century economy.”

Again, most of the major ISPs lobbying for these kinds of restrictions want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to operate as apathetic regional monopolies providing expensive, spotty, and slow service, but they don’t want anybody, at any real level, to do anything about it. Their own inaction created the trend of locally-built broadband networks, but instead of getting out ahead of the issue by doing better, they’ve repeatedly attempted to tilt the playing field in their favor. So instead of finishing the fiber networks taxpayers have paid billions for, they’ve passed 17 state laws prohibiting community broadband.

Because community broadband sees such bipartisan popularity, dominant ISPs also fund an entire cottage industry of pundits, academics, and regulators who like to insist that desperate cities trying to build better telecom infrastructure is “socialism” or “government run amok.” While community broadband isn’t some mystical panacea, the data is pretty clear that such options usually provide faster, cheaper service. They also pour local money back into the local economy, instead of funneling it to Comcast or AT&T executive compensation half a world away.

Of course it doesn’t have to be an either/or scenario. There are plenty of opportunities for collaboration and public/private partnership. But giants like AT&T, Comcast, Charter, and others really like the existing US approach to broadband policy, which for thirty-five years now has basically involved throwing billions in subsidies at industry giants for half-completed networks, paying some empty lip service to the “digital divide,” ignoring the perils of regional monopolization (and the corruption that protects it), while pretending the US broadband market is the pinnacle of free market innovation.

Filed Under: broadband, community broadband, competition, ohio

Support For Community Broadband Could Be On Chopping Block As 'Bipartisan Broadband Negotiations' Continue

Broadband

from the concessions-only-go-one-direction dept

We’ve already noted how the Biden broadband plan was good, but arguably vague. As in, the outline proclaims that the government will boost competition and lower prices, but it doesn’t actually get at all specific about how it actually hopes to do that. For example the plan proposes providing more support for community broadband, but with 17 ISP-backed state laws prohibiting such efforts (and new ones popping up in states like Ohio), it’s not clear what that support will actually look like.

Telecom giants like Comcast and AT&T have been relentlessly lobbying both parties. They generally want one thing: more subsidies thrown their direction to fill in the coverage gaps they should have shored up a decade ago, and less money thrown at generating competition across their existing footprints. 83 million Americans live under a broadband monopoly, and incumbents spend countless billable hours covertly working to protect this profitable dysfunction.

As a result, the scope of the Biden broadband plan (and the infrastructure proposal) continue to shrink. The $100 billion plan is now a $65 billion plan, and it seems fairly likely that many of the restrictions AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast have been gunning for will make their way into any final proposal. It’s also pretty unlikely Republicans, who consistently try to ban communities from building better, faster broadband networks, will support community broadband:

“Congressional Republicans have tried to ban municipal broadband nationwide, so it’s highly unlikely that they would have agreed to Biden’s stated goal of giving public networks priority over private ISPs in the next big round of government subsidies.”

When it comes to broadband policy, what’s often passed as “concession and compromise for the sake of bipartisanship” isn’t actually that. In reality it’s usually just select Democrats and Republicans, prodded by AT&T and Comcast to weaken proposal language, pretending their opposition is due to being principled spendthrifts. But the same politicians who don’t want to spend money on broadband now, saw no problem with throwing billions in tax breaks at these same companies for absolutely no reason or beneficial outcome. So there’s no logic to much of this stuff, but we like to pretend otherwise.

It has to be made clear that this country has thrown untold billions in subsidies, tax breaks, and regulatory favors at regional monopolies for networks that are routinely half completed. And notice that when there are “concessions” bandied about, they almost uniformly only seem to go one direction: in the direction of what’s beneficial to regional telecom monopolies not coincidentally tethered to our intelligence-gathering apparatus. It’s a relentless, corrupted process, all covered up by ambiguous and breathless political support for “fixing the digital divide.”

Not to be too cynical; there’s still some notable improvements that could be done with the reconciliation process and some grit. But with broadband, generally the outcome of “bipartisan compromise” is almost always immense fecklessness. As in, a broadband plan that talks a lot about “curing the digital divide” and the “miracle of 5G,” then just throws yet more poorly tracked subsidies at entrenched broadband monopolies. All while refusing to do much to tackle the increasingly obvious reason US broadband remains mired in mediocrity: regional monopolization and corruption.

Filed Under: broadband, community broadband, infrastructure

Ohio Republicans Are Using State Budget Battle To Kill Community Broadband

Broadband

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

Frustrated by high prices, a lack of competition, spotty coverage, and terrible customer service, some 750 US towns and cities have built some form of community owned and operated broadband network. While not some silver bullet, studies have shown these networks often provider faster, cheaper, better service than most apathetic regional telecom monopolies. They also tend to put money back into the local community, as well as being somewhat more accountable given they’re run by folks with a vested interest in the community they live in.

Instead of preventing such efforts by offering better, faster, cheaper service, giant regional mono/duopolies ISPs like AT&T, Charter, and Comcast have historically found it cheaper to write and lobby easily corruptible state lawmakers. There are currently laws in 17 states either hamstringing or outright banning cities from building their own networks, almost all of them ghost written by industry.

As COVID highlighted the essential nature of broadband, some states have realized the counterproductive nature of such proposals. For example Arkansas and Washington both eliminated their state restrictions earlier this year, arguing that such creative, local niche solutions can go a long way in shoring up access and lowering prices.

But Ohio is taking a different tack. State Republicans embedded a new amendment in the state budget earlier this month that would effectively outlaw community broadband in the state. The provision is so unpopular among consumers, none of the Republicans pushing for it are willing to affix their name to it:

“On June 9, the Ohio Senate approved a new budget bill. But a last-minute amendment shoveled into the bill is angering state residents and locally-owned ISPs, who say it?s an underhanded effort by AT&T and Charter to protect their regional broadband monopolies…Ohio?s restrictions were implemented without any public notice or input. One local Cleveland outlet noted that the effort is so unpopular, Ohio Republicans sponsoring the amendment are refusing to even officially acknowledge their support.

Like many ISP-backed proposals, it’s a “death by a thousand cuts” approach that pretends to not be an outright ban. The Ohio restrictions would for example prohibit the building of any community broadband in areas where 10 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up broadband is already available. But such a standard doesn’t even meet the FCC’s already fairly pathetic definition of broadband (25 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up), and given that expensive, capped satellite broadband is available in most areas, it allows a regional cable broadband monopoly like Charter to proclaim most places as already “served,” and therefore bans community broadband.

The restrictions also prohibit any community-owned and operated ISP from utilizing taxpayer resources (even if voters wanted to), as well as prohibiting such operations from using federal money to fund operations (something that undermines the point of many COVID relief initiatives, and attempts to scuttle planned community broadband funding in the looming Biden broadband plan). While nobody wants to acknowledge their support of the amendment, several Ohio lawmakers previously worked on government policy and lobbying for Time Warner Cable, now Charter.

If you sit down with most voters and ask them whether Comcast or AT&T should be dictating what their town or city can or can’t do with their own infrastructure and resources, they’d quite correctly tell you that AT&T and Comcast should go to hell. So instead, large ISPs hire an army of economists, consultants, and think tankers (usually via dodgy proxy organizations with names like “Very Sincere Taxpayer Lovers United”) happy to try and claim that community broadband is always a taxpayer boondoggle — unnecessary because private sector US broadband is just that innovative and wonderful.

Most of these critics fixate relentlessly on the idea that community broadband is “government run amok” (it’s not) or “socialism” (it’s not, many such efforts are public/private partnerships or utility backed), while ignoring that incumbent ISPs like AT&T are not only bone grafted to the government (see: the NSA) but get countless billions in tax cuts, subsidies, and regulatory favors in exchange for fiber networks that always mysteriously wind up half deployed.

As in, these telecom-backed stunt policy groups and consultants really care about taxpayer waste when it’s a frustrated town and city forced to get into the broadband business due to market failure, yet disappear from the conversation entirely when it comes to discussing how far, far more state and federal taxpayer money is going to giant national ISPs which then waste it with minimal accountability.

But honestly Ohio Republicans couldn’t even be bothered to take this usual disingenuous route. They just shoveled Charter and AT&T’s agenda into a budget bill without telling the public, and hoped nobody would really notice. The Ohio House and Senate now have until June 30 to reconcile House and Senate budget bills and strip out the offending language. Local community owned ISPs like Fairlawn Gig (which runs on the back of a local utility) are begging Ohio residents to call their representatives to complain, but it’s not sure their concerns will be heard over the din of the daily US news cycle.

Filed Under: community broadband, competition, ohio

AT&T Whines About Biden Focus On Community Broadband

Broadband

from the want-some-cheese-with-that dept

We noted how while the Biden broadband plan was arguably vague, a big part of its core focus was community broadband. In stark contrast to the Trump administration and GOP — which think such efforts should be banned — the Biden administration seems to recognize such efforts are a helpful and organic local response to market failure. While such efforts aren’t a mystical panacea, they’re a helpful way to both drive some needed regional broadband improvements to underserved areas, and force regional telecom monopolies to try just a little harder.

Enter AT&T, which historically has used every trick in the book to prevent community broadband from ever becoming mainstream. That has included dodgy telecom industry funded “studies” falsely claiming such networks are inevitable taxpayer boondoggles, as well as multi-decade support for terrible state laws restricting such efforts, even if locals voted for them.

Last week, AT&T CEO John Stankey, in an interview with the Economic Club, insisted that embracing community broadband (read: competition) was “misguided,” claiming that it’s not the government’s job to get into the broadband business:

“It would be a shame that we take taxpayer money or ask local governments to go into a business that they don’t run today,” Stankey said. “You know, their job is to deliver water, patch streets, things like that, not be in a capital-intensive technology business that requires constant refresh and constant management.”

Except these local governments aren’t getting into the broadband industry because it’s fun or they want to make Stankey cry. They’re doing it because of a multi-decade market failure that has left countless US markets with a lack of broadband options, patchy service, high prices, and substandard customer service.

Stankey is also ignoring the fact that his company has received countless billions in subsidies, tax breaks, and regulatory favors in exchange for fiber networks the company routinely only half deploys. Most recently that included both a $42 billion Trump tax break and the repeal of net neutrality, both of which AT&T promised would result in soaring network investment and significant job growth. In reality, the opposite happened. Why? Because as an apathetic regional monopoly operating under regulatory capture, there’s little to nothing prompting AT&T to actually try.

With the exception of local community broadband, that is.

Like most incumbent broadband executives, Stankey insists there is no US broadband problem that needs fixing, and that the 10 Mbps upstream speeds it offers in many markets is good enough:

“Stankey claimed there isn’t much of a broadband problem to be solved, as networks “functioned incredibly well for the vast majority of citizens in the United States” during the pandemic. “Why would we want to go overbuild in areas where there’s already great infrastructure?” Stankey said, saying that would be a “waste” of subsidy dollars.”

Except we don’t have “great infrastructure.” The US remains largely mediocre on every developed nation broadband metric that matters (especially pricing). Despite decades of throwing billions of subsidies at giants like AT&T, up to 42 million Americans still lack access to broadband, with 83 million living under a monopoly (usually Comcast). It’s fairly clear that lobotomizing our regulators then dumping billions into AT&T’s lap isn’t fixing the problem, but AT&T executives would greatly appreciate it if nobody noticed that.

Filed Under: community broadband, competition, infrastructure, joe biden
Companies: at&t

Detroit The Latest City Forced To Cobble Together Working Internet Thanks To Telecom Market Failure

Broadband

from the so-heartwarming! dept

Frustrated by slow speeds, high prices, and spotty broadband availability (read: market failure) more than 750 US towns and cities have explored some kind of home-grown broadband option. Sometimes that’s a local cooperative. Sometimes it’s an extension of the locally owned power utility. Sometimes it’s a public/private partnership with an existing internet provider. And sometimes it involves building an entire local broadband network from scratch. But always it’s motivated by one thing: an ever growing, multi-decade frustration at the lack of competition and options in the US broadband market.

Enter Detroit, which is the latest city where annoyed users are being forced to build an entirely new ISP block by block:

“Detroit has historically been one of the least connected cities in America, with about 40 percent of Detroit residents lacking any home internet access at all. Things are changing, though, thanks in large part to projects like the Equitable Internet Initiative (EII), a collaboration between the Detroit Community Technology Project and a network of community organizations.”

The effort involves relying on voluntary bandwidth provided by local enterprise provider 123Net. From there, locals are getting speeds of 25 Mbps via point to point wireless. That’s a notable improvement for the 40% of the city that has no access to broadband at all. Or other major chunks of the city, where aging AT&T DSL may be their only option. If you’re really lucky, an expensive Comcast cable line is your only broadband option.

But there’s something that grates on me about these stories and it’s this: for whatever reason, most major press outlets covering broadband in 2021 act as if the “digital divide” is this thing that just dropped from the sky one day. But the reason it still exists in 2021 is due to the regional monopolization and the corruption (federal and local) that protects it. Consumer groups have repeatedly showcased how with no competition and feckless regulatory oversight, AT&T just often simply refuses to upgrade its aging network. They’ve also shown how this impacts marginalized and low-income communities the hardest:

But for whatever reason, The Hill writes an entire story about Detroit’s broadband problems and… doesn’t mention AT&T’s regional monopolization or political and regulatory corruption at all. There’s just no shortage of stories like this that cover America’s broadband dysfunction and the ad hoc solutions people are forced to come up with to get online, yet just fail completely to explain why this is happening. And kind of like stories where a local kid has to crowdfund his open heart surgery because our medical system is broken, the press tends to frame these efforts as heartwarming.

But it’s extremely rare you see major outlets clearly explain that US broadband dysfunction was an active policy choice. It’s the direct result of 25 straight years of prioritizing the interests of regional monopolies, and coddling giants like Verizon, AT&T and Comcast. It’s the direct result of signing off on mindless consolidation and harmful megamergers. It’s the direct result of choosing not to embrace pro-competition policies. It’s the direct result of repeatedly neutering telecom regulatory oversight under the (false) promise this somehow results in telecom Utopia (despite 25 years of evidence this isn’t true).

At this point our broadband failures aren’t a matter of technology, or cost. After all, we’ve thrown countless billions of dollars at these incumbent broadband giants for fiber networks that mysteriously always wind up half completed. They’re the result of leadership failure and corruption. But instead of clearly acknowledging and fixing these problems, we seem obsessed with (as the Trump era made fairly clear) doubling down on the bad choices that created them. Then dismissing the high prices, spotty coverage, and substandard service as just something that appeared one day, utterly free of any meaningful causation.

Filed Under: community broadband, competition, detroit, fcc, municipal broadband

Cable Lobby Working Hard To Ensure Biden Broadband Plan Doesn't Encourage Real Competition

Broadband

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

While the Biden administration’s $2 trillion American Jobs Plan set aside $100 billion for broadband infrastructure, the details of how that money is to actually be spent remains murky. Enter cable industry lobbyists, who are hard at work attempting to dictate who gets access to those funds, while also trying to make sure the funds aren’t used for anything that could threaten their regional monopolies. They’re particularly worried about the Biden administration’s promise that a big focus of the effort will be on giving aid to locally owned and operated broadband networks, as detailed in this good piece by Issie Lapowsky at Protocol:

“Comcast, Charter, AT&T and their respective industry associations have spent years beating back municipal broadband networks in states across the country, lobbying for laws that prohibit such networks and arguing that government-funded broadband puts the thumb on the scale of competition. With potentially $100 billion in federal funding on the line, the last thing the cable lobby wants is to see those restrictions lifted and funding diverted to cities, not their own coffers.”

Granted as we’ve noted for years, these communities aren’t getting into the broadband business because it’s fun. They’re doing so as an organic, voter-backed response to decades of market failure and regional monopolization. Said monopolization is obviously hugely profitable, and the cable industry lobby is working overtime to prevent anything upsetting that broken status quo. As Lapowsky notes, Charter and Comcast alone spent $7 million on lobbying Congress last year, and that doesn’t including the millions in additional dollars spent by their policy and lobbying organizations like the NCTA (run by former FCC boss Mike Powell).

Nor does that tally include the millions spent annually by AT&T and Verizon on an army of consultants, lobbyists, think tankers, academics, and astroturfers, all of whom are now working overtime to ensure a lot of that money goes into their pockets, and not the pockets of regional community broadband networks threatening to bring real competition to bear. Networks that wouldn’t exist if America’s entrenched telecom monopolies actually cared about things like competition and consumer welfare.

Historically, the telecom lobby has had success after success when it comes to ensuring the U.S. government doesn’t take regional monopolization and corruption seriously. But as Protocol notes, COVID (specifically news stories showing toddlers having to huddle in the dirt just to get online for class because home broadband either isn’t available or is too expensive) has changed the dynamic and really showcased the harm of monopolization and corruption:

“But as this fight moves from the states to the federal level, local broadband proponents have some advantages they haven’t had before. They don’t just have the backing of the White House and support of Democrats who control Congress. They also have more than a year’s worth of examples of how people on the wrong side of the digital divide in both cities and rural America have struggled during the pandemic ? and how cable giants have failed to fill the gap.”

Even then, some community broadband proponents are expressing concern that the telecom lobby is already having a negative impact on the important terminology being used at departments like Treasury to dictate where U.S. government funding is going to go:

“Earlier this year in March, the Biden Administration signed the American Rescue Plan Act, which included, among many other things, multiple sources of funds for broadband infrastructure. The U.S. Department of Treasury was tasked with writing the rules of how local governments can spend the various funds. The Interim Rule has been published and it appears to significantly limit local ability to invest in needed networks.”

While community broadband is framed by telecom as “socialism run amok” or a “government takeover of the internet” to try and encourage partisan division, being pro-competition and pro-accountability is yet another subject that isn’t actually partisan. Most community broadband networks have been built in conservative areas with the support of local voters. And again, the telecom lobby has a 25 year history of fighting tooth and nail against all broadband competition, not just community-run broadband. While getting slathered in tax breaks and subsidies for networks they routinely half deliver.

It has taken a quarter century to even get the U.S. broadband policy conversation to the point where we can admit (barely!) that monopolization and regulatory capture (corruption) are the two primary reasons U.S. broadband is expensive and mediocre. It’s not clear how many more decades it will take to actually do something about it.

Filed Under: american jobs plan, broadband, community broadband, competition, infrastructure, joe biden, municipal broadband