Google Fiber’s 2016 Expansion Freeze May Be Coming To An End

Broadband

from the a-little-something-called-competition dept

When Google Fiber launched back in 2010, it was heralded as a game changer for the broadband industry. Google Fiber, we were told, would revolutionize the industry by taking Silicon Valley money and disrupting the viciously uncompetitive and anti-competitive telecom sector.

Initially, things worked out well; cities tripped over themselves offering all manner of perks to the company in the hopes of breaking free from the broadband duopoly logjam. Google got endless free press for doing something truly disruptive. And in markets where Google Fiber was deployed, prices dropped thanks to this added competition (fancy that!).

The fun didn’t last.

In late 2016, a new era of Alphabet execs began getting cold feet about the high costs and slow returns of the project, and effectively mothballed the entire thing — without admitting that’s what they were doing. The company blew through several CEOs in just a few months, laid off hundreds of employees, froze any real expansion, and cancelled countless installations for users who had been waiting years.

And while Google made a lot of noise about how it would be shifting from fiber to wireless to possibly cut costs, those promises also remained stuck in neutral.

But there are some faint indications that the Google Fiber freeze might be thawing somewhat. Last year, Google announced it had started working with officials in West Des Moines, Iowa on a potential expansion into the city. More recently, the company indicated it was expanding into Mesa, Arizona. And it’s also pushing harder into select portions of Utah:

“We’ve expanded to a bunch of new cities around our Utah footprint. We’ve also expanded to Smyrna, for example, around Tennessee, within our Nashville footprint,” Strama told Government Technology. “We’ll continue to be expanding around our existing footprint for the long term.”

To be clear, many of these efforts remain somewhat… modest, and it’s clear Google Fiber’s overall ambitions have scaled back. In a country where 83 million live under a broadband monopoly, and somewhere between 20-40 Americans lack any broadband at all (see our recent report on this), some scattered deployments in limited portions of mid-tier cities can only go so far.

Still, it’s good to see Google trying all the same. For a while there after the freeze, it seemed entirely possible the company could pack it in and sell the network (much like it sold out its principles on concepts like net neutrality). And while Google Fiber (much like Google) isn’t the same disruptive force it was in 2010, when it comes to mediocre U.S. broadband, every last bit helps.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, digital divide, dirsuption, fiber, google fiber, high speed internet
Companies: google

Billions In Broadband Funding Begin To Flow… Before We’ve Mapped Broadband Gaps

Broadband

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

As we’ve previously noted, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will dole out an historic $65 billion to shore up broadband access. $42 billion of that total will directly fund a Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grant program overseen by the NTIA. It’s a massive infusion of money, and much of it should have a genuine, productive impact on the nation’s longstanding broadband gaps.

The continued problem: we still haven’t accurately measured where U.S. broadband is or isn’t available, and there’s still no hard date for when long-awaited mapping improvements will be finished.

Yet the NTIA announced it’s starting to dole out the money starting this week:

To participate in the BEAD Program, states and other eligible entities must submit a letter of intent and a planning funds budget, which will unlock $5 million in planning funds and allow states to begin creating their five-year action plan. Each state will have direct support from dedicated NTIA staff through every step of the process. Each participating state is guaranteed a minimum $100 million allocation, with additional funding determinations made based on the forthcoming coverage maps from the Federal Communications Commission.  

That we still haven’t actually accurately mapped broadband availability (after spending $350 million on an FCC broadband map) continues to be a stunning policy failure we just like to glaze over.

Not only do many states not have accurate maps to determine where broadband is needed, many don’t have effective broadband offices or staff to do a lot of this heavy lifting. And the lifting will be heavy; to prevent the program from being abused by fraud (a good thing), the NTIA has saddled the funds with a lot of requirements industry watchers like Doug Dawson say may be costly and problematic:

When I started to make a full list of all of the grant requirements suggested by the NOFO, I realized that these are going to be the most complicated broadband grants ever – more complicated even than ReConnect grants. It looks like the NTIA made a list of everything that could possibly go wrong with a project or an ISP and made each into a grant requirement.  Here are just a few of the new requirements I’ve never seen in a grant before: a cybersecurity plan, a climate resiliency plan, a supply chain risk management plan, a middle-class affordability plan, and a project workforce continuity plan if not using union labor.

The grant funds are going to be considered a taxable income by the IRS. The requirements will add a lot of costs that wouldn’t be present were a local community to explore construction and financing options on its own. That in turn might discourage a lot of new broadband providers from even bothering, assuming, again, their state can determine where broadband is and has the staff to tackle the grants.

Another problem: ISP lobbyists have convinced several states to restrict funding from going to any companies that compete with regional monopolies (which is forbidden by NTIA rules, but may or may not be enforced). Those same regional monopolies are also using existing, unreliable maps to saddle grant applications with costly additional challenges aimed at derailing projects.

Again, this isn’t too pooh-pooh broadband subsidies. They can be an exceptionally useful way to spur deployment of fiber to needed areas. The point here is to highlight how much potential for abuse exists given we failed to do the fundamentals, and how it’s a bit more complicated than just throwing billions of dollars at the problem and then claiming “mission accomplished.”

U.S. telecom has spent thirty-plus years mired in monopolization, and federal regulators have been so feckless and captured they’ve failed to even measure the scope of the problem. Throwing billions of dollars at the “digital divide” before fixing the underlying rot is like building a new house on a gigantic termite mound.

Filed Under: affordable access, BEAD grants, broadband, broadband maps, digital divide, fiber, high speed internet, ntia, regulatory capture, subsidies, telecom

Broadband Giant Frontier Dinged Yet Again For Lying About Crappy Broadband Speeds

Broadband

from the if-you-get-caught,-just-lie-lie-again dept

We’ve long discussed how if you really want to understand how the highly monopolistic U.S. broadband industry really works, you should look at regional phone monopoly Frontier Communications. Especially in states like West Virginia, where the company has spent decades lagging on fiber upgrades and DSL and phone repairs under a regime of regulatory capture that rarely holds them accountable for fiber under-investment, outright ripping off taxpayers, or failing to adhere to even basic quality standards.

After more than a decade of this dysfunction — including a completely bungled acquisition of some unwanted Verizon phone, DSL, and fiber customers — the company went bankrupt in 2020.

Since then, Frontier has been engaged in a kind of image reclamation effort, in which it admits that under-investing in fiber was a big part of its downfall, and claims that it will stop doing all of the things that brought it to this point. Yet if there’s no real competition in many of the markets the company services (83 million Americans live under a monopoly), there’s no organic incentive to truly improve.

Enter telecom regulators, who, in functioning economies and democracies, step in to nudge things along when the market fails, even if that is largely little more than a few belated wrist slaps. For example the FTC last week announced it would be taking action against Frontier because the company routinely advertised broadband speeds its aging DSL network couldn’t actually provide:

“Frontier lied about its speeds and ripped off customers by charging high-speed prices for slow service,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “Today’s proposed order requires Frontier to back up its high-speed claims. It also arms customers lured in by Frontier’s lies with free, easy options for dropping their slow service.”

The FTC’s original complaint and lawsuit against Frontier, filed just about a year ago, was jointly filed with the AGs of Arizona, Indiana, Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, and the district attorneys’ offices of LA County and Riverside County, California. All pointing out that the company routinely, for years, advertised DSL speeds it knew its network wasn’t delivering.

As a result of the deal Frontier needs to adopt more transparency in its pricing. But most of the benefits are exclusive to users in California. Frontier has to dole out $8.5 million in civil penalties and costs to the Los Angeles County and Riverside County District Attorneys’ offices on behalf of California consumers. But it also has to upgrade 60,000 California customers on crappy DSL to fiber at a cost of $50 to $60 million.

Granted the FTC’s authority here is limited. It can only act when something is very clearly “unfair and deceptive” under the FTC Act. And the FCC’s ability to police a lot of this stuff was curtailed courtesy of the Trump FCC’s net neutrality repeal.

A telecom giant simply has to engage in a small bit of creativity in order to rip off captive U.S. subscribers with relative impunity (see: various surcharges with bullshit names affixed to your cable and broadband bills, or technically unnecessary monthly usage caps). Still, accountability usually finds its way through the haze of lobbying-induced apathy.

The Minnesota AG blasted the company for routinely failing to upgrade or repair its aging network. Washington State’s AG fined Frontier for ripping off subscribers with bogus fees. These efforts have a positive impact overall, but they’re often too scattered to meaningfully derail such practices industry wide. And again, notice that Frontier customers in West Virginia (or other states) see no accountability.

The financial penalties Frontier will face are nothing compared to the money made off the back of captive customers without any competitive alternatives to flee to. Policymakers could avoid these outcomes by tackling the real source of the problem: monopolization and the corruption that protects it. But given that creates political risk, the U.S. instead likes to apply band-aids after the fact, and consider the case closed.

Filed Under: broadband, digital divide, dsl, false advertising, fiber, ftc, high speed internet
Companies: frontier

Satellite Broadband Options Like Starlink Shouldn’t Be Getting Precious Broadband Subsidies

Broadband

from the future-proof dept

While Elon Musk often crows about his disdain for subsidies, Musk companies routinely hoover up billions in government assistance. For example, Starlink gamed the FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) subsidy auction to nab nearly a billion dollars to deploy broadband to areas that didn’t need it: including some airport parking lots and a few parking medians.

Not too surprisingly, the fiber broadband industry isn’t particularly thrilled with the idea of government funding going to satellite broadband, in part because options like Starlink lack the kind of capacity needed to truly fix the U.S. broadband problem, and even Musk concedes they may not be financially viable over the longer haul, meaning that money could be wasted.

But Fiber Broadband Association CEO Gary Bolton notes that every time a satellite broadband company like Starlink gets awarded government broadband subsidies, it precludes another company willing to deliver faster, better fiber from getting that money:

Bolton noted that those homes are not eligible for deployments funded through other government programs that have come into being since the RDOF auction because they are supposed to get the SpaceX service [and] fiber broadband should be made available to everyone in the U.S. because it is the most future-proof technology available.

“We don’t want to be able to discriminate based on your zip code,” he said. “To solve societal issues, we have to make sure everyone has more bandwidth than they could ever use.”

While it’s not too surprising to see the fiber industry unhappy that other technologies are getting government subsidies, they’re not wrong. Organizations like the EFF have also repeatedly noted that if we’re going to subsidize broadband, that money should be going toward “future proof” fiber, with 5G and fixed wireless filling most of the gaps.

Low-orbit satellite broadband solutions like Starlink are fine, they’re just constrained by the laws of physics, which is why Starlink’s initial launch not only can only serve 500-800k subscribers max, but the 250,000 customers that have signed up are already seeing network slowdowns.

Starlink can and is a good niche solution for users without alternative options. But physics are physics, and it simply doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to be throwing millions of dollars at a billionaire-backed broadband solution that can’t scale and may not even exist in several years. If you put fiber in the ground, even if the company goes to hell, that fiber is still useful.

Filed Under: 5g, broadband, elon musk, fiber, gov't subsidies, high speed internet, satellite, subsidies
Companies: spacex, starlink

After Going Bankrupt For Underinvesting In Fiber, Frontier Communications Pretends It Has Seen The Light

Broadband

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

We’ve long discussed how if you really want to understand how the highly monopolistic U.S. broadband industry really works, you should look at regional phone monopoly Frontier Communications. Especially in states like West Virginia, where the company has spent decades lagging on fundamental fiber upgrades, or DSL and phone repairs under a regime of regulatory capture that never holds them accountable for fiber under-investment, outright ripping off taxpayers, or failing to adhere to even basic quality standards.

After more than a decade of this dysfunction — including a completely bungled acquisition of some unwanted Verizon phone, DSL, and fiber customers — the company went bankrupt in 2020.

There were a lot of reasons for this, including terrible customer service, an unwillingness to repair its aging phone and DSL lines, taking on “growth for growth’s sake” merger acquisitions of dying phone networks it couldn’t really afford, and having just a seeming disdain toward its paying, often captive customers who lack competitive alternatives. Filings to the SEC also acknowledged something the company denied for years: its refusal to meaningfully upgrade its aging network to fiber was a big part of its unraveling.

Two years later the company is on an image-reclamation effort to portray itself as more cutting edge. That included an announcement this week that the company would be offering 2 Gbps fiber for $150 a month “network wide.” Of course, by “network wide” the company actually means locations that already have fiber, not the millions of Frontier customers still stuck on aging DSL lines:

“We’re thrilled to become the first and only major ISP to deliver network-wide 2 Gig internet service, as we unleash the power of our fiber network,” said Nick Jeffery, President and CEO of Frontier. “Today is proof that Frontier is doing what customers want and cable can’t–bringing faster speeds and greater value to consumers as we Build Gigabit America.”

Many news outlets were happy to parrot the company’s “network wide” rhetoric in headlines without really discussing the company’s long history of fiber deployment failures in any meaningful detail. The goal for Frontier is to try and get folks to forget it spent a decade fighting competition and shirking on network upgrades as it tries to slow defections to dominant cable providers like Comcast. Other recent company press releases herald the ISP’s transformation into a “fiber first” company, noting that it deployed fiber to an additional 638,000 locations in 2021. That’s not nothing, but in a country where 20-40 million still lack broadband of any kind, it’s not revolutionary either.

The problem here is several fold. One, many phone companies underinvested in fiber because Wall Street is generally only interested in short term profit gains; prolonged, expensive fiber deployments have always been despised (they still are), and companies are simply responding accordingly. That’s not going to magically change just because Frontier claims to have seen the light. Monopoly service sucks, prices are high, and upgrades are spotty in part because Wall Street wants regional monopolies to exploit limited competition to raise rates, cut customer service, and engage in mindless acquisitions for growth to deliver quarterly returns.

So if you don’t actually tackle the lack of competition in Frontier markets (read: unchecked monopolization), or the regulatory capture (read: state and federal corruption) that protect apathetic telecom giants, there’s no real reason to believe that Frontier has fundamentally changed. And because U.S. broadband maps continue to suck, state and federal regulators still don’t have the tools necessary to determine if a company like Frontier is even telling the truth about fiber deployments in the first place.

This all opens the door to a trend I affectionately call “fiber to the press release,” where a telco makes a bunch of fiber deployment promises nobody independently verifies, and the press happily parrots them. Customers in many markets then call their local telco to sign up for “2 Gbps fiber,” only to find it’s still not available. Rinse, wash, repeat.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, fiber
Companies: frontier

Fresh Off Its Merger Failure(s), AT&T Gets Back To Promising Big Fiber Investments That May Or May Not Happen

Broadband

from the back-to-basics dept

We’ve noted for years how AT&T has this pattern in which they’ll promise a massive wave of new fiber investment and jobs if they get “x” (X=merger approvals, deregulation, tax breaks, a bunch of new subsidies, whatever). Then, a few years later, somebody will realize they failed utterly to meet those obligations. This happens over and over and over and over again, and not only does AT&T never see much in the way of accountability, nobody in state or federal leadership seems to learn much of anything from the process (usually because they’re, well, corrupt).

We’d seen a bit of a break from this cycle the last few years as AT&T was fixated on its disastrous $200 billion Time Warner and DirecTV mergers as part of an effort to dominate online streaming and video advertising. With that effort an abject failure, AT&T has shifted back to focusing more on doing something it should have been doing all along: deploying modern generation fiber. Or at least pretending to in a practice I’ve long affectionately called “fiber to the press release.”

This week AT&T issued a press release stating it would soon be offering ultra-fast 2 Gbps ($110 per month) and 5 Gbps ($180 per month) fiber tiers to 5.2 million customer locations now, with the goal of offering the ultra-fast options to 30 million locations by 2025. Feeling growing (but very spotty) competitive pressure from community broadband fiber deployments, AT&T also announced that it will be ditching most of its caps, sneaky fees, and surcharges on these faster tiers:

“Also starting today, we?re rolling out straightforward pricing across our consumer AT&T Fiber portfolio. For new customers, this means no equipment fees, no annual contract, no data caps and no price increase at 12 months ? just the fastest internet, plus AT&T ActiveArmor SM internet security, next-gen Wi-Fi, and HBO Max included on our fastest speed plans ? at no additional cost.”

These are, on the surface, welcome improvements and a sign AT&T has given up on its media ambitions and gotten back to its core competency: building and managing networks. The problem, of course, is that this isn’t the first time AT&T has made promises of this type. And thanks to unreliable FCC mapping and feckless regulatory oversight, AT&T knows nobody will actually bother to follow up and confirm whether this goal of 30 million locations are ever met.

AT&T has a long history of avoiding minority neighborhoods with these kinds of upgrades. They also have a long history of claiming a market is “launched” with next-gen fiber when in reality they’ve only upgraded a few blocks or high end developments in a city. Users excited about new options then go to check to see if faster speeds are available, usually to find they aren’t (regardless of what the AT&T website claims). There’s a whole lot of users still stuck on ancient AT&T DSL lines the company has repeatedly refused to upgrade (as of last year only an estimated 28% of AT&T customers had full fiber).

Weirdly, few, if any, news outlets that cribbed AT&T’s press release so much as even hinted at the company’s history of empty promises and getting money for fiber upgrades that never materialized. Good news is good news, and if AT&T has truly seen the error of its ways and is interested in seriously competing in broadband by expanding faster access and ditching annoying fees, that’s great. But as somebody who has tracked the company’s promises for twenty years now, I’ve found that a healthy dose of skepticism is almost always warranted.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, fiber, investments
Companies: at&t

California's 'Open Access' Fiber Broadband Plan Is Making Telecom Giants Like AT&T Nervous

Broadband

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

Back in 2009, the FCC funded a Harvard study that concluded (pdf) that open access broadband networks (letting multiple ISPs come in and compete over a central, core network) resulted in lower broadband prices and better service in numerous locations worldwide. Of course when the Obama FCC released its “National Broadband Plan” back in 2010, this realization (not to mention an honest accounting of the sector’s limited competition) was nowhere to be found. Both parties ignored the data and instead doubled down on our existing national telecom policy plan: letting AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast do pretty much whatever they’d like. Something, of course, taken to ridiculous new heights during the Trump era.

Since then, “open access” has become somewhat of a dirty word in telecom policy, and even companies like Google Fiber — which originally promised to adhere to the concept on its own network before quietly backpedaling — are eager to pretend the idea doesn’t exist. Why? Because having ISPs compete in layers over a centralized network may improve service, boost speeds, and reduce prices (see: this community-run network in Ammon, Idaho), but it would eat into the revenues of the regional monopolies bone-grafted to our intelligence gathering apparatus, and you simply can’t have that.

Which is why it was surprising to see California recently pass a $6 billion broadband infrastructure bill that does something unique: it mandates the creation of a massive “middle mile” fiber network that will be open access, which should encourage increased competition. The original announcement breaks down the spending this way:

$3.25 billion to build, operate and maintain an open access, state-owned middle mile network ? high-capacity fiber lines that carry large amounts of data at higher speeds over longer distances between local networks.

$2 billion to set up last-mile broadband connections that will connect homes and businesses with local networks. The legislation expedites project deployment and enables Tribes and local governments to access this funding.

$750 million for a loan loss reserve fund to bolster the ability of local governments and nonprofits to secure financing for broadband infrastructure.

That’s a lot of money that could be potentially going somewhere other than entrenched telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast. That means increased competition, something AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and others fight tooth and nail (rather successfully) to avoid. You can tell AT&T in particular is nervous about it, because the new bill’s passage forced the company to recently launch this silly astroturf website claiming to represent “Californians for broadband equity.” The website is chock full of stock photos of children, and lots of empty lip service to “fixing the digital divide”:

Only if you look at some of the materials posted in the page’s resources section do you see the site is backed by AT&T and Frontier Communications.

To be very clear, dominant regional monopolies in California like AT&T and Frontier love the decades-old US telecom policy approach to broadband. Namely, throw billions of dollars in tax breaks and subsidies at incumbent monopolies, which then fail to deliver what was promised, refuse to give back the money, and then pretend they’re not part of the problem.

There’s an entire universe of AT&T-linked orgs and individuals that suffer an absolute embolism anytime taxpayer resources are used to build local community broadband efforts. But those same groups and individuals are nowhere to be found every time AT&T gets a $42 billion tax cut for doing absolutely nothing. Or gets billions in subsidies and regulatory favors in exchange for fiber networks that are always, mysteriously, half deployed.

In short, AT&T and Frontier want the focus to remain exclusively on giving them yet more money to shore up access in areas they’ve neglected for years. What they don’t want is any money going toward competition within their existing footprint. Despite the fact that high prices due to limited competition are one of the highest barriers to access for many communities (something particularly pronounced during COVID). US broadband is expensive and mediocre thanks to regional monopolization and the state/federal corruption that protects it. There’s a lot of time and money spent trying to ignore or deny that fact.

If you didn’t understand this context you might stumble into this new AT&T website thinking it’s a well intentioned group just super interested in helping poor toddlers get broadband. But it’s really just incumbent monopolies trying to ensure more of California’s new broadband budget goes to them, and less goes to pesky competitors that might force them to (gasp) compete on price. Should AT&T and Comcast not get their adequate slice of California’s planned broadband budget, you can expect a lot more lobbying and policy theatrics of this sort in the fall.

Filed Under: broadband, california, competition, fcc, fiber, open access
Companies: at&t, frontier

Chattanooga Built Its Own Broadband Network. Now It's The Top Ranked 'Work From Home' City In The US

Broadband

from the build-it-and-they-will-come dept

PC Magazine recently unveiled their list of the best cities to work at home from. To make the list, the magazine examined affordable housing, the availability of fast gigabit broadband, reasonably priced internet connections in general, and the presence of employers with friendly work from home policies. At the top of the list? Chattanooga, Tennessee:

“Our number-one remote-working town in the US is Chattanooga, known as “Gig City,” which rolled out a citywide fiber network in 2010. As we recounted in a 2018 story, Chattanooga has been pushing hard to attract tech workers and companies based on its affordable real estate, business-friendly administrations, and widely available broadband internet. In 2019, according to the Census, 6.8% of Hamilton County, TN residents worked from home, compared with 5.7% of all Americans.”

One of the city’s primary policies was to embrace community-run broadband, offering locals ultra-fast and affordable fiber via the local city’s utility. It’s an effort that incumbent broadband providers like Comcast first tried to strangle via state law, then attempted to destroy via lawsuit. Neither worked, and now Chattanooga residents have access to some of the fastest and most affordable broadband in the United States (the ISP won Consumer Reports’ top ISP award in 2018), which has in turn helped drive business growth and employment in the city.

This is, it should be made clear, the kind of innovation and growth we’ve crippled by letting incumbent telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast not only carve out geographical monopolies, but also literally write state and federal telecom law. Both companies are predominately responsible for the 20 some odd state laws that hamstring (or ban outright) towns and cities looking to get into the broadband business. They’ve also spent the better part of twenty years funding a coalition of dollar-per-holler think tankers and academics who try (usually poorly) to smear such efforts.

This farmed opposition to community broadband is usually built on the flimsy premise that it’s “unfair” for governments to compete with the private sector. Or that these efforts are inevitable “taxpayer boondoggles” (you’re to ignore the billions we throw at giants like AT&T for absolutely nothing). Both arguments are intentionally false and misleading.

Cities like Chattanooga aren’t getting into the costly business of building broadband networks because it’s fun, they really want to spend the money, or they want to make Comcast and AT&T executives cry. They’re doing it because of market failure. They’re building their own networks because incumbent providers have heavily monopolized the sector, resulting in spotty upgrades, slow speeds, high prices, privacy violations, and dodgy customer service. And when cities have tried to buck this status quo, they’re usually sued, misrepresented, bizarrely demonized, or legislatively hammered by state and federal governments in mindless thrall to monopolist campaign contributions.

That’s not to say that community broadband is some mystical panacea that fixes every city’s ills. Nor is it to suggest that every city has the financial and technical skills or resources to pull off a successful business plan. But community broadband is a useful tool in the toolbox, particularly when it comes to nudging government-pampered regional telecom monopolies out of their comfort zones. Community-owned ISPs also tend to be more responsive to the complaints of locals, because they are locals. It’s ignorant and counterproductive to ban such options in a country where 42 million have no access to broadband and another 83 million only have the choice of one ISP. Yet it’s still happening.

In Chattanooga, the city has been blocked from expanding its award-winning network because of a Comcast-backed law passed decades ago. A law that served no function outside of protecting entrenched monopoly revenues from disruption. Historically, efforts to get states to dismantle such dumb, protectionist restrictions have been glacial, but as the COVID pandemic illustrates how truly counterproductive such restrictions are in a world were broadband is utterly essential, you can feel awareness and consensus start to shift.

Filed Under: broadband, chattanooga, competition, fiber, gig city, municipal broadband, tennessee, work from hom

A 90 Year Old Shouldn't Have To Buy A $10,000 Ad Just To Get AT&T To Upgrade His Shitty DSL Line

Broadband

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

Last week I wrote over at Motherboard about 90 years old North Hollywood resident Aaron Epstein, whose family has been an AT&T subscriber since the 1930s. Epstein himself has been a loyal AT&T subscriber since around 1960, and has had the company’s DSL service since it was first introduced in the late 90s. Unfortunately for Epstein, much like countless millions of other Americans, his DSL line only delivered speeds of 1.5 to 3 Mbps, and he’s been waiting for decades for faster speeds to no avail.

To try and nudge AT&T to action, Epstein recently took out a $10,000 ad in the Wall Street Journal just to yell at AT&T CEO John Stankey:

When I spoke to him on the phone, he told me that AT&T had advertised faster speeds in his area for five years, but when he called to see if upgrades were actually available, they never were. But after a full week of national press coverage (the story quickly bounced around the country) about the lengths Epstein had to go to, AT&T finally scrambled to upgrade his line to fiber to help manage the PR crisis. AT&T, for its part, issued a statement that tried to pretend these upgrades were “planned” all along (there’s no real indication that’s true):

“Earlier this week we completed our planned expansion of AT&T Fiber in this customer’s neighborhood, and we were pleased to provide him the upgrade he wanted. This neighborhood was already planned to receive fiber and is part of our ongoing fiber expansion in the larger Los Angeles area. Nationally, we recently announced that we will bring AT&T Fiber to an additional 2 million residential locations this year.”

In reality, AT&T’s fiber expansions had been slowed dramatically (stopped entirely in many areas) so the company could throw nearly $200 billion at the DirecTV and Time Warner megamergers in a bid to dominate the video (and video advertising space). That’s not going well. AT&T has been losing video subscribers hand over fist and is preparing to offload DirecTV for a song.

Meanwhile, Epstein’s predicament isn’t uncommon. And unfortunately, most folks who have begging for upgrades for years don’t have $10,000 to throw at an ad in a major newspaper. AT&T has been accused for decades of “redlining” marginalized communities it doesn’t deem worthy of seeing network upgrades despite billions in subsidization and regulatory favors. The same story has played out in Detroit, Dallas, and Cleveland where users continue to wait for upgrades, which taxpayers already likely paid for in one form or another, that never arrive.

AT&T has spent years nabbing billions in tax cuts, subsidies, and regulatory favors in exchange for networks it routinely only half deploys, assuming those networks arrive at all. Time after time, AT&T promises that it will meaningfully upgrade its aging DSL lines to fiber if it gets “X,” where X is a merger approval, deregulation (the death of net neutrality for example), subsidies, and tax cuts, and time and time again AT&T only partially delivers what’s promised. If it delivers anything at all; recall the company received a $42 billion tax break from Trump in 2017, and all America got in exchange were 42,000 layoffs.

According to one union study, only 14.93 million of the 52.97 million households in AT&T’s 21-state wireline service area have access to fiber service. This game of empty promises has gone on for decades, and state and federal government leaders and regulators legitimately just pretend this monopolization and regulatory capture isn’t happening. Why? Because AT&T isn’t just politically powerful and a major campaign contributor, they’re now permanently tethered to both our intelligence gathering apparatus and our first responder response systems, making them effectively beyond the reach of any oversight beyond a wrist slap or two.

Needless to say, elderly people wouldn’t have to take out $10,000 ads just to get their broadband upgraded in a country that took the threat of monopolization and corruption seriously. And until we do, some variation of these stories just keep repeating themselves indefinitely.

Filed Under: aaron epstein, dsl, fiber, los angeles, newspaper ad, upgrade
Companies: at&t