Comcast Takes Heat For Misleading ’10G’ Cable Broadband Branding

Broadband

from the this-one-goes-to-11 dept

Back in 2019 the cable industry, envious of all the attention 5G wireless was getting, pulled a new marketing term completely out of its ass. It simply started calling ordinary cable broadband upgrades 10G, based on absolutely no real-world standards or definitions. It was a hollow attempt to capitalize on wireless 5G hype because these companies hope to someday offer 10 Gbps cable broadband.

Fast forward to 2023, and Comcast has gotten an adorable little wrist slap for its abuse of the marketing term.

The National Advertising Division (NAD) is part of the advertising industry’s self-regulatory system run by BBB National Programs. It’s basically an attempt for industry to claim that you don’t need government regulators with any backbone policing misleading ads, because industry will regulate itself.

It’s all a bit performative; “punishments” occur long after the ads have run. There’s no serious penalty for telling the organization to piss off (outside of an empty threat to forward concerns to actual regulators, who also may or may not actually give a damn). Still, the organization last week urged that Comcast stop abusing the “10G term,” or at the very least make it clear the term is “aspirational”:

“Discontinue its “10G” claims or qualify them to (a) make clear that Comcast is implementing improvements that will enable it to achieve “10G” and that 10G is aspirational, or (b) use “10G” in a manner that is not false or misleading.”

If you actually want 10 gigabit per second broadband, you’ll have to subscribe to fiber, not cable, especially when it comes to upstream speeds. And even then, symmetrical 10 Gbps tiers are pretty hard to find. One of the very few ISPs offering this kind of speed is Chattanooga’s city owned utility provider, EPB, a project companies like AT&T and Comcast have long tried to sue and harass out of existence.

So this stuff does matter. But it’s extremely unlikely NAD’s gentle prodding actually results in any meaningful change at Comcast. And it’s equally unlikely that over-extended U.S. regulators at the FCC or FTC much care that everybody’s least-favorite cable giant misleads and confuses consumers in this way.

Filed Under: 10g, 5g, advertising, broadband, cable, chattanooga, epb, fiber, high speed internet, nad, telecom
Companies: comcast

Senator Ted Cruz Pretends To Care About Wasteful Broadband Subsidies

from the this-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things dept

We’ve noted a few times now how the 2021 infrastructure bill includes more than $42.5 billion to shore up broadband access. And while a huge chunk of that money will absolutely be going to giant telecom monopolies with a long history of subsidy fraud, a lot of the funding is genuinely going to help fund a parade of broadband expansion projects that simply wouldn’t have been possibly previously.

We’ve also noted how Republicans voted against the infrastructure bill, then have turned immediately around to take credit for the broadband deployments it enables among local constituents. Texas Senator Ted Cruz has been no exception; he’s repeatedly tried to take credit for highway projects only made possible by the infrastructure bill, while simultaneously criticizing the bill’s very existence.

It’s a very “have your cake and eat it too” situation where Republicans get to obstruct progress while simultaneously taking credit for improvements they opposed. After all, who’s going to correct their constituents’ perception in an ocean of partisan propaganda?

Last week, Ted Cruz came out swinging against the underlying broadband subsidy program (the Broadband Equity And Deployment (BEAD) program run by the NTIA) made possible by the infrastructure bill. One of his primary claims is that money is being “wasted” by “overbuilding” broadband into areas already served by giant incumbent monopolies like AT&T and Comcast:

“The report basically lays out the Republican view of broadband subsidies in recommending “fixes” for BEAD. Those include that the money should not be used to overbuild where there is already service and should not be biased in favor of fiber.”

But in telecom corruption land, “overbuilding” has generally been code for bringing competition to bear against industry giants. And even then, the BEAD program goes well out of its way to ensure that lion’s share of money will first be going to parts of the country that lack broadband access. This aversion to “overbuilding” is just an aversion to competition, dressed up to sound like adult policymaking.

The NTIA has also tried to prioritize the subsidization of fiber deployments because fiber is inherently more reliable and future proof than technologies like wireless. AT&T and a handful of fixed wireless companies didn’t like that.

The result is a “report” by Cruz that makes up various claims and data points I’d bet a toe was ghost written by industry. Its function is to basically shame government for spending any money on “duplicative or wasteful” competition to monopoly power. Its synopsis does a great job pretending that Republicans like Cruz actually care about telecom subsidy fraud:

“Forty-two billion dollars is more than enough money to deliver broadband to every American. Will it succeed in doing so? In light of these findings, count me skeptical. This report should serve as a call to action for the Biden administration and the states to ensure BEAD dollars are not funneled to duplicative and wasteful purposes, and instead are used to solve the nation’s connectivity challenges once and for all.”

(For what it’s worth, $42 billion isn’t close to enough to shore up U.S. broadband gaps, even under a scenario where the subsidy program was flawless).

If there’s a real problem with BEAD and other federal subsidy programs, it’s that giants like AT&T and Comcast — with long histories of taking taxpayer money for projects they half-complete — will almost certainly nab a disproportionate amount of funding using unreliable maps whose improvement they’ve long opposed. But Cruz doesn’t mention — or care about — that.

Cruz is silent when a Texas-based company like AT&T gets a $42 billion tax break for doing absolutely nothing. He’ll routinely have nothing to say if AT&T is accused of ripping off taxpayers and the nation’s school system. If you’re a modern Republican, taxpayer money set aside for broadband deployment subsidies is only deemed “wasted” if it goes to anybody other than the dominant local telecom monopoly that funds their re-election campaign.

Throwing taxpayer money at the regional telecom monopolies directly responsible for high prices, spotty access, and slow speeds doesn’t fix the real problem of monopoly power and muted competition. Throwing some of that money at things like city-owned utilities, cooperatives, and municipalities building open access, next-generation fiber does challenge those monopolies, which is why guys like Cruz oppose it.

Cruz and the modern GOP support banning your town or city from building better, faster, more affordable fiber networks, even in instances where there are no other options available. The GOP even proposed a nationwide ban on community broadband during the middle of a pandemic that brutally showcased the need for reliable and affordable home internet.

Again, both Texas Senators Cruz and John Cornyn like to take credit for projects only made possible by an infrastructure bill they voted against. Coryn took plenty of heat back in June when he tried to take credit for the $3.3 billion in federal funds being funneled into the Lone Star State (the most of any state) to expand broadband access. Despite voting against it.

Cruz, himself a sort of mindless and terrible work of performance art at this point, wants to simultaneously get credit for the infrastructure bill he voted against, while also putting on a little stage play about being concerned about government waste. But he only really considers taxpayer money wasted if it goes to competitors to Texas companies like AT&T. Sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Republicans are historically terrible on telecom policy, because their primary “policy” always involves mindlessly kissing the ass of companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast. Occasionally they’ll try to pretend their policies go deeper than that, and it’s routinely adorable.

Filed Under: BEAD, broadband, fiber, gigabit, high speed internet, john cornyn, ted cruz, telecom

Ting Disrupting Mediocre U.S. Broadband By Partnering With Annoyed Cities Like Colorado Springs

Broadband

from the there's-a-better-way-to-do-this dept

Back in 2015 domain registrar Tucows announced it would hope to modestly kickstart stagnant broadband competition by buying a small Virginia ISP by the name of Blue Ridge InternetWorks (BRI). Operating under the Ting brand name, the company said the goal was to bring a “shockingly human experience and fair, honest pricing” to a broken broadband market dominated by a handful of monopolies.

A lot has changed since then. Ting has subsequently expanded its broadband disruption efforts into six different states, and is currently either operating or building broadband networks in 16 different locations.

In many instances, Ting is partnering with local governments looking to provide better, faster, and cheaper broadband. That includes Colorado Springs, which is currently building its own “open access” fiber network via its existing electric utility, with Ting as the first anchor tenant. The city will be Ting’s biggest partner to date:

“Ting is an interesting type of fiber provider in the U.S., using different business strategies to deliver fiber to customers. Sometimes it builds and owns its own networks. But other times, it leverages municipal-owned backbone fiber and then builds last mile connections to residential customers. Or, in the case with Colorado Springs Utilities, it acts as an anchor tenant on the fiber network of a city or utility.”

The network is open access, meaning that while Colorado Springs owns the underlying infrastructure, numerous ISPs can come in and compete in layers. Everybody wins: the city makes money from lease agreements (and can ensure uniform coverage to marginalized neighborhoods), and ISPs can have access to local residents for a fraction of what it would have cost to build the networks themselves.

In some such deployments, like Ammon, Idaho, customers can switch ISPs in a matter of seconds using an online portal. Locally owned, such providers are usually more responsible to complaints since they actually live in the communities they serve. We discussed this and similar models in notable detail in our Copia report on broadband competition last year.

In Colorado Springs, Ting is providing 2 Gbps (gigabit per second) broadband connections for $89 a month with no caps, no hidden fees, and no long term contracts. Data routinely indicates that community owned, open access broadband networks tend to provide better, cheaper, faster service than regional incumbent monopolies. Such efforts have pushed the cost of gigabit service below $70 in many markets.

Unsurprisingly this model, where numerous competitors drive down prices and spur ISPs to actually try is a nightmare for companies like AT&T and Comcast, which is why they’ve worked tirelessly for years to ban such efforts on both the state and federal level. Such companies, routinely engaged in fraud and slathered in wasted subsidies, insist their opposition is strictly rooted in concern for taxpayer welfare.

Ting is moving cautiously, and currently only serves an estimated 85,500 addresses nationwide (though the Colorado Springs network is expected to serve around 200,000 residents). But the open access model they’ve been embracing is taking root all over the country, driving competition to markets where Comcast has been the only meaningful broadband provider for several decades.

All told, more than 900 communities have built their own broadband networks, either directly as a municipality, as an extension of the city-owned utility, or via local cooperatives. And it’s a trend that’s accelerating for two reasons: the billions now flowing into the sector courtesy of the infrastructure bill, and the widespread frustration communities had with substandard broadband during peak COVID.

Filed Under: broadband, colorado springs, competition, cooperatives, fiber, gigabit, monopolies, municipal broadband, open access, utilities
Companies: ting, tucows

Palo Alto Embraces A Community-Owned Multi-Gigabit Broadband Network After Decades Of Talk

Broadband

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

For all of the hype Silicon Valley gets as the birthplace of American technological innovation, the broadband networks in cities like Palo Alto have never kept pace. Like most towns and cities across the U.S., Palo Alto residents have long complained about the slow speeds, high prices, and comically terrible customer service they get from their regional broadband monopolies: Comcast and AT&T.

For twenty years, Palo Alto officials had talked about potentially building a city-owned fiber network with an eye on improving speeds, expanding service, and lowering prices. And after a lot of ups and downs and dead ends, the city is finally moving forward on the plan, which will involve delivering cheap, multi-gigabit fiber access via the city’s existing electrical utility:

Palo Alto officials tell ILSR that the project will be spearheaded by the city-utility, and deployed in coordination with a major upgrade of the city’s electrical systems. Phase One of the city’s planned fiber deployment should begin later this year, delivering fiber access to around 20 percent of the city–or 6,500 homes and businesses.

Phase One will be funded entirely from the utility’s existing cash reserves. Profits from that deployment will then be used to expand affordable, multi-gigabit fiber access to all of the city’s 63,210 residents.

Anger at America’s shitty telecom monopolies long ago birthed a grassroots, movement toward locally-owned and operated broadband networks, which take on a range of forms including city-owned municipal networks, cooperatives, or broadband delivered via the city utility. Over 800 such networks now exist, and contrary to federal narratives, have broad bipartisan support.

The COVID home education and telecommuting boom added fuel to the fire and painfully showcased the downsides of monopolized broadband access. Like when a photo of two kids in Salinas, California forced to huddle in the dirt outside of a Taco Bell just to attend online class went viral.

With federal policymakers in both Congress and the FCC lobbied into a feckless stupor by telecom giants, communities are increasingly taking matters into their own hands, which often means treating affordable broadband like the essential utility it clearly always was. The one bit of federal help they have received has come courtesy of the billions now flowing their direction via the infrastructure bill.

Data consistently shows that community-owned and operated broadband networks provide better, faster, cheaper service. Numerous community-owned ISPs, like Chattanooga’s EPB (delivered via the city’s electrical utility) have one repeatedly won awards for both speed and popularity. Owned and operated by locals, such networks are generally more directly accountable to locals.

Palo Alto still faces numerous hurdles. To complete the network, they’ll need access to many of the utility poles the city co-owns with AT&T, a would-be direct competitor. AT&T has a history of exploiting its control over utility poles to slow down any attempt to disrupt the monopoly status quo (Google Fiber ran into this very problem when they tried to expand fiber into Nashville).

While ISPs (and the consultants, think tankers, and lobbyists paid to love them) like to whine incessantly about how such networks interfere in the operation of the “free market,” it’s important to remember U.S. broadband was never really a free market. It’s a government pampered, hugely taxpayer subsidized coagulation of duopolies that long ago gave up on innovation or consumer welfare.

Instead of battling community broadband by offering better, cheaper, more uniformly available broadband, companies like AT&T turned to a corrupt government to protect them. That resulted in 16 states passing laws banning or hamstringing community-owned broadband networks. The GOP even attempted to ban such networks nationwide during a pandemic.

The corruption and market failure have never been particularly subtle.

What Palo Alto and hundreds of other communities are engaged in has been a long time coming. Instead of waiting for regional monopolies to behave, or for federal policymakers to grow a backbone, they’ve increasingly been taking matters into their own hands. It’s a local, grass roots attack of a very broken status quo, and U.S. monopolies have earned every last iota of disruption headed their way.

Filed Under: broadband, digital divide, fiber, gigabit, high speed internet, municipal broadband, palo alto, telecom

Verizon Fails Again, Shutters Attempted Zoom Alternative BlueJeans After Paying $400 Million For It

Failures

from the heckuva-job,-brownie dept

Pretty much every time Verizon wanders outside of its core competencies (operating telecom networks, lobbying to hamstring competition, undermining the most basic of regulatory oversight), the telco amusingly falls flat on its face. It’s quite honestly starting to get a little weird.

Whether it’s the company’s Go90 video streaming platform, its video joint venture with RedBox, its news website Sugarstring (which you may recall tried to ban reporters from talking about surveillance or net neutrality), its app store, its “me too” VCAST apps, the billions wasted on Yahoo, the effort to run Tumblr into the ground, or any of a dozen other attempted pivots, Verizon has failed. Usually semi-spectacularly.

During peak COVID Verizon spent somewhere around $400 million to acquire BlueJeans, which was pitched as a videoconferencing alternative to Zoom. But of course in typical Verizon fashion the app went nowhere, and in an email to users Verizon stated they’ll be shutting the service down August 31. In the email, Verizon paints the app nobody has heard of as “award winning”:

BlueJeans is an award-winning product that connects our customers around the world, but we have made this decision due to the changing market landscape.

These repeated failures by Verizon would be less of an issue if the company didn’t have such a long history of skimping on essential broadband network upgrades. Whether it’s New York, New Jersey, or Pennsylvania, the telco has a long history of taking tax breaks, subsidies, or regulatory favors in exchange for promised DSL to fiber network upgrades that somehow never fully materialize.

While with the other hand, Verizon adores simply setting vast swaths of money on fire to please Wall Street’s myopic lust for “growth for growth’s sake” projects, even if execs routinely lack the chops to manage any of the efforts. With Verizon now facing major financial remediation headaches due to a lot of lead in their cables, much of that cash would probably come in handy.

Despite endless pretense, telecoms can’t innovate. At least outside of finding creative new ways to over-charge captive customers or undermining government oversight. It’s not clear how many examples we need before Verizon and the folks pouring money into these doomed projects figure that out.

Filed Under: app, dsl, failed pivot, fiber, innovation, telecom, videoconferencing
Companies: bluejeans, verizon

Comcast, Centurylink Fail To Derail Community-Owned Gigabit Fiber Network In Bountiful, Utah

Broadband

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

More than 600 communities across the U.S. have decided to build their own broadband networks after decades of predatory behavior, slow speeds, and high prices by regional telecom monopolies.

That includes the city of Bountiful, Utah, which earlier this year voted to build a $48 million fiber network to deliver affordable, gigabit broadband to every business and residence in the city. The network is to be open access, meaning that multiple competitors can come in and compete on shared central infrastructure, driving down prices for locals (see our recent Copia study on this concept).

As you might expect, regional telecom monopolies hate this sort of thing. But because these networks are so popular among consumers, they’re generally afraid to speak out against them directly. So they usually employ the help of dodgy proxy lobbying and policy middlemen, who’ll then set upon any town or city contemplating such a network using a bunch of scary, misleading rhetoric.

Like in Bountiful, where the “Utah Taxpayers Association” (which has direct financial and even obvious managerial tethers to regional telecom giants CenturyLink (now Lumen) and Comcast) launched a petition trying to force a public vote on the $48 million in revenue bonds authorized for the project under the pretense that such a project would be an unmitigated disaster for the town. (Their effort didn’t work).

Big ISPs like to pretend they’re suddenly concerned about taxpayers and force entirely new votes on these kinds of projects because they know that with unlimited marketing budgets, they can usually flood less well funded towns or cities with misleading PR to sour the public on the idea.

But after the experience most Americans had with their existing broadband options during the peak COVID home education boom, it’s been much harder for telecom giants to bullshit the public. And the stone cold fact remains: these locally owned networks that wouldn’t even be considered if locals were happy with existing options.

You’ll notice these “taxpayer groups” exploited by big ISPs never criticize the untold billions federal and local governments throw at giant telecom monopolies for half-completed networks. Or the routine taxpayer fraud companies like AT&T, Frontier, CenturyLink (now Lumen) and others routinely engage in.

And it’s because such taxpayer protection groups are effectively industry-funded performance art; perhaps well intentioned at one point, but routinely hijacked, paid, and used as a prop by telecom monopolies looking to protect market dominance.

Gigi Sohn (who you’ll recall just had her nomination to the FCC scuttled by a sleazy telecom monopoly smear campaign) has shifted her focus heavily toward advocating for locally-owned, creative alternatives to telecom monopoly power. And in an op-ed to local Utah residents in the Salt Lake Tribune, she notes how telecom giants want to have their cake and eat it too.

They don’t want to provide affordable, evenly available next-generation broadband. But they don’t want long-neglected locals to, either:

Two huge cable and broadband companies, Comcast and CenturyLink/Lumen, have been members of UTA and have sponsored the UTA annual conference. They have been vocally opposed to community-owned broadband for decades and are well-known for providing organizations like the UTA with significant financial support in exchange for pushing policies that help maintain their market dominance. Yet when given the opportunity in 2020, before anyone else, to provide Bountiful City with affordable and robust broadband, the companies balked. So the dominant cable companies not only don’t want to provide the service Bountiful City needs, they also want to block others from doing so.

Big telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast (and all the consultants, think tankers, and academics they hire to defend their monopoly power) love to claim that community owned broadband networks are some kind of inherent boondoggle. But they’re just another business plan, dependent on the quality of the proposal and the individuals involved.

Even then, data consistently shows that community-owned broadband networks (whether municipal, cooperative, or built on the back of the city-owned utility) provide better, faster, cheaper service than regional monopolies. Such networks routinely not only provide the fastest service in the country, they do so while being immensely popular among consumers. They’re locally-owned and staffed, so they’re more accountable to locals. And they’re just looking to break even, not make a killing.

If I was a lumbering, apathetic, telecom monopoly solely fixated on cutting corners and raising rates to please myopic Wall Street investors, I’d be worried too.

Filed Under: bountiful, community broadband, competition, fiber, gigabit, gigi sohn, high speed internet, open access, utah
Companies: centurylink, comcast, lumen

FCC Slowly Stumbles Toward Updating Its Pathetic, Industry-Friendly Definition Of ‘Broadband’

Broadband

from the congratulations-for-doing-the-bare-minimum dept

Under the Communications Act, the FCC is supposed to occasionally survey the state of the broadband industry to ensure that affordable broadband is being deployed on a “reasonable and timely basis,” and do something about it if it isn’t.

Of course the captured, bumbling agency doesn’t actually do that.

Despite spending $400 million on the effort, the FCC has long struggled to even accurately map where broadband is available. It usually can’t be bothered to hold giant telecom monopolies accountable for outright fraud. It routinely downplays or ignores competition problems. And the agency has long held a pathetic, dated definition of what constitutes “broadband” just to please industry.

Broadband was originally defined as any 200 kbps connection. In 2010, that pathetic definition was changed to a slightly less pathetic definition: 4 Mbps downstream, 1 Mbps upstream. In 2015, it was changed again to a slightly more reasonable but still pathetic 25 Mbps downstream, 3 Mbps upstream, where it resides today.

For eight years straight everybody from consumer groups to the GAO told the FCC that the sluggish 25/3 definition didn’t reflect modern standards, and let the telecom industry get away with providing substandard service. The Trump FCC’s response was to propose lowering the definition even further.

While the FCC dawdled, other agencies like the NTIA have adopted a more aggressive 100 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up standard for most federally subsidized broadband builds.

Last week, the FCC (once again) stated that yeah, it should probably get around to changing the definition of broadband to something slightly more forward thinking:

the Notice of Inquiry proposes to increase the national fixed broadband standard to 100 megabits per second for download and 20 megabits per second for upload, and discusses a range of evidence supporting this standard, including the requirements for new networks funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Keep in mind, this is just the agency saying it’s beginning discussions of a higher standard. Actually implementing it will require a Democratic voting majority, which they don’t have thanks to the telecom industry’s scuttling of the Gigi Sohn nomination (the White House, key Congressional Democrats, and agency boss Jessica Rosenworcel offered zero real messaging support to Sohn as she faced down an industry-manufactured smear campaign, alone).

Even the new proposed 100 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up standard isn’t particularly aggressive in an era where any number of cooperatives, utilities, and municipalities are delivering multi-gigabit symmetrical broadband (Chattanooga’s city-owned utility is pushing toward 25 Gbps).

The 20 Mbps upstream standard in particular is being kept low to keep cable companies, wireless providers, and telcos selling aging DSL happy. It’s a long overdue update that still doesn’t really represent modern deployments or any meaningful goal. And while the agency hints at a 1 Gbps down, 500 Mbps up definition sometime in the ambiguous future, it’s hard to take them seriously.

As part of the FCC’s announcement, Rosenworcel also stated how she was dedicated to delivering broadband to 100 percent of the population, with a broader eye on affordability:

Chairwoman Rosenworcel proposes that the Commission consider several crucial
characteristics of broadband deployment, including affordability, adoption, availability, and
equitable access, when determining whether broadband is being deployed in a reasonable and timely fashion to “all Americans.”

Granted this promise isn’t really new. Part of the much-hyped Obama-era “National Broadband Plan” was to deliver 100 Mbps down, 50 Mbps up service to all Americans. We failed completely at that goal, and nobody much likes to talk about it. We failed because telecom monopolies effectively control Congress, and thereby key regulators. We failed because of corruption.

The GOP has been wholly corrupted by the telecom industry. Any time it holds the Presidency, the FCC becomes a mindless rubber stamp for telecom and media giants, gutting consumer protections, rubber stamping mergers, eroding media consolidation limits, and pretending U.S. broadband is wonderful. The GOP opposes any meaningful broadband definitions whatsoever.

Some Democrats are slightly better on telecom policy, but the kind of feckless careerists appointed to key leadership positions generally don’t like rocking the boat. So you get some good ideas, but mostly just empty rhetoric about the ambiguous “digital divide.” Nothing that seriously challenges monopoly power. The DNC supports baseline broadband definitions, but nothing particularly ambitious.

The FCC has increasingly been criticized as useless on broadband consumer protection. It took a major reputational hit for bungling a major rural subsidy program, resulting in the Biden administration shifting a lot of responsibility for managing the infrastructure bill’s broadband funding to other agencies.

Even within its dwindling authority, FCC boss Jessica Rosenworcel has a strange allergy to even acknowledging that the real reason for America’s substandard broadband access is a bunch of government-coddled regional monopolies that have crushed competition underfoot.

It’s not of interest to the press, but lobbyists for AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and Charter, have effectively kept the FCC on the consumer protection sidelines for the better part of the last decade. These industry giants whine like a full-diapered toddler any time anybody suggests a more robust definition of broadband, and the FCC always lowers the bar to please industry.

So yeah, it’s good the FCC finally decided to start upgrading our sorry ass definition of broadband nearly a decade after the fact. And it’s good that the agency is at least talking about affordability. But again, it’s hard to applaud an agency for belatedly doing the bare minimum, especially given its absolute refusal to so much as even criticize the monopoly power responsible for substandard US broadband.

Filed Under: 100 Mbps, broadband, definition, dsl, fcc, fiber, gigabit, gigi sohn, high speed internet, jessica rosenworcel, telecom, upstream, wireless

After FCC Debacle, Gigi Sohn Shifts Focus To Challenging Comcast, AT&T With Community-Built Broadband Networks

Broadband

from the pass-go,-and-absolutely-collect-$200 dept

Last March, popular telecom and media reformer Gigi Sohn’s appointment to the FCC fell apart, after telecom and media giants (with the GOP’s help) waged a year long lobbying and propaganda campaign falsely framing her as a radical (The Verge has a good new interview with Sohn on what happened, in case you missed it).

The campaign was highly illustrative of not just the level of corruption in Congress and the regulatory nominee confirmation process, but how terrified companies like Comcast, AT&T, and News Corporation are of regulators who actually pursue policies of interest to the public (like say lower broadband prices, net neutrality, privacy protections, or media consolidation limits).

Sohn has since shifted focus to an arena I’d argue has more of a real-world impact than the majority of what the FCC is doing: community owned and operated broadband networks. Sohn’s now the head of an organization dubbed the American Association for Public Broadband, which advocates for locally-owned and operated alternatives to the lumbering, regional telecom monopolies we long ago normalized.

Frustrated by decades of monopoly dysfunction, towns and cities all over the country have decided to build their own networks, whether it’s municipal, built on the back of city-owned power utilities, or via cooperatives. There’s a lot of very cool stuff happening in this space that was supercharged by the peak COVID frustration with unreliable broadband and home schooling.

After being railroaded by telecom monopolies, Sohn’s now working to ensure that billions in historic new broadband subsidies (made possible by COVID relief and the infrastructure bill) will be spent on direct competitive challenges to their power. Organizations custom built by locals, which see broadband as a utility, and are simply interested in connecting everyone and breaking even:

These municipal network models would be essential in closing the digital divide because they are motivated by different incentives than private companies to “go to places that incumbent won’t,” Sohn argued.

“They are not interested in return on investment,” she added. “They are interested in making sure everybody is connected.”

Politicians and regulators talk a lot about how they want to “bridge the digital divide.” But most of them lack the political courage to correctly identify why that divide still exists in 2023: regional telecom monopolies, protected by corrupt state and federal politicians, that have worked tirelessly over thirty years to consolidate power, crush all meaningful competition, and jack up the cost of service.

The result is obvious everywhere you look: half-completed networks, high prices, comically terrible customer service, slow speeds, plenty of fraud, and massive gaps in the kind of low income, minority, and rural markets Wall Street doesn’t have the patience or interest to serve.

Enter community broadband networks; smaller, locally owned and operated efforts focused on treating broadband like an essential utility. Data keeps showing these networks offer cheaper, better service than regional monopolies, and, given they’re run by locals, they’re more accountable to locals (see our recent Copia report). Sohn’s goal: to double the number of such networks within the next five years.

The parallels to America’s electrification efforts 100 years ago are everywhere. Especially as it relates to cooperatives expanding broadband to areas lazy and greedy incumbents won’t. With federal regulators and lawmakers largely corrupted (and their power increasingly being curtailed by a rightward lurching Supreme Court), the real fight in broadband access has shifted to the local level, where armies of pissed off residents are challenging monopoly power with creative new deployments, block by block.

As a reformer Sohn could have done a lot of good work at the FCC. But I’d argue that the grass roots, local, bipartisan efforts to build better, faster, and cheaper community-owned broadband networks is where all the real action currently is anyway. And there’s no greater revenge to be taken upon monopolies like AT&T and Comcast than driving popular competition right into their backyards.

Filed Under: broadband, community broadband, digital divide, fcc, fiber, gigi sohn, high speed internet, monopolies, net neutrality, redlining, telecom

Biden Re-Announces $42 billion Investment In Broadband, Because Apparently People Didn’t Notice The First Time

Broadband

from the if-at-first-nobody-notices... dept

While the Biden administration has been a bit of a hot mess on broadband consumer protection (see: the Gigi Sohn fiasco), the administration has done some amazing things for overall investment in broadband. Largely thanks to both COVID relief legislation (The American Rescue Plan Act, ARPA) and the IIJA (Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act).

When the IIJA was signed into law in late November of 2021, the administration, and most of the press, clearly pointed out the bill included a whopping $42 billion to shore up broadband access. Apparently nobody noticed, because the White House is… announcing it again now that money is about to start flowing in earnest:

President Biden on Monday is set to announce more than $42 billion to expand high-speed internet access nationwide, commencing the federal push to help an estimated 8.5 million families and small businesses finally take advantage of modern-day connectivity.

The money, which the administration plans to parcel out to states over the next two years, serves as the centerpiece of a vast and ambitious campaign to deliver reliable broadband to the entire country by 2030 — ensuring that even the most far-flung parts of the United States can reap the economic advantages of the digital age.

It didn’t get much traction the first time around because it’s not as attention-grabbing as falsely claiming rudimentary “AI” chatbots will kill us all or falsely claiming poorly drawn NFTs will revolutionize the planet. But it’s going to be transformative all the same. You can see a breakdown here of how much each state is prepared to receive in broadband subsidies, and the totals are historic.

I spend pretty much every week now talking to a different city, town, utility, or cooperative, and they’re all busy using (or planning to use) either COVID relief money or infrastructure bill cash to build amazing things. Many of them are in the process of delivering affordable, gigabit-capable fiber to rural regions for the first time in history, or building open access fiber network that will finally drive competition to markets long ago monopolized by companies like AT&T and Comcast.

The problem, of course, will be several fold. One, despite spending $400 million on the problem, the government still doesn’t have particularly accurate broadband maps. And while the FCC is working to slowly fix that, the end result has been a bit of a mess so far, and it’s something entrenched monopolies can exploit to overstate coverage and misdirect essential funds away from promising challengers.

The new FCC maps do have a welcome new challenge system (where municipalities or locals can challenge inaccurate data), but state leaders routinely tell me the system favors the deep-pocketed monopolies over often under-funded local representatives. It’s hard to fix a problem you can’t measure, and we’re still struggling to measure U.S. broadband gaps.

The other problem is we still don’t really have an FCC that’s willing to stand up to monopolies. Nor do many U.S. states (the ones in charge of dispersing the funds). As a result we’re already seeing telecom and cable giants (with a long, long history of subsidy fraud) exploit state corruption to funnel a big chunk of historic funding away from potential competitors and back into their own pockets.

So while some states are going to use the funds to shore up funding of independent challenges to monopoly power (like open access fiber networks shared by multiple competitors), significantly more are going to throw the lion’s share of this money at the very monopolies responsible for the problem we’re trying to fix.

So yes, there’s going to be an historic, welcome infusion of broadband subsidies to areas that need it, but I’m also positively certain that without competent state and federal corruption reform — and a general lack of interest in reining in monopoly power (in both markets and across government) — there are also going to be telecom boondoggles, waste, and fraud on a scale we’ve never quite seen before.

The end result might still be a net overall benefit, but it won’t have the same overall impact it could have had if we had lawmakers and regulators keen on genuinely taking aim at the real reason the “digital divide” still exists in 2023: regional telecom monopolization and the corruption that protects it.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, fcc, fiber, gigabit, high speed internet, infrastructure bill, monopoly, open access, telecom