AT&T Sues Nashville To Keep Google Fiber At Bay

Broadband

from the utterly-terrified-of-competition dept

We’ve been talking about how the latest front in the battle for better broadband competition is the boring old utility pole. As Susan Crawford highlighted last month, getting permission from an ISP that owns a city’s utility poles can be a slow, bureaucratic nightmare, since the incumbent ISP has every incentive to stall would-be competitors. As such, Google has been pushing for “one touch make ready” proposals that use an insured, third-party contractor agreed to by all ISPs to move any ISP’s gear during fiber installs (often a matter of inches).

But again, because this would speed up Google Fiber’s time to market, incumbent ISPs like Comcast, AT&T, Frontier and Time Warner Cable have all been fighting these reform efforts. Excuses provided by the ISPs range from claims that such reform violates their Constitutional rights, to unsubstantiated claims that such a policy would result in massive new internet service outages. AT&T has taken things one step further, and has been suing cities like Louisville for passing such reform laws.

After the city council voted to approve similar reform last week in Nashville, AT&T has now filed suit against the city of Nashville (pdf), claiming city overreach and immediate injunctive relief. The complaint trots out all of AT&T’s greatest hits for opposing the streamlined pole attachment rules, including claims that it allows random troublemakers to “seize” AT&T’s property:

“The Ordinance thus purports to permit a third party (the Attacher) to temporarily seize AT&T?s property, and to alter or relocate AT&T?s property, without AT&T?s consent and with little notice. AT&T would be deprived of an adequate opportunity to assess the potential for network disruption caused by the alteration or relocation, and to specify and oversee the work on AT&T?s own facilities to ensure any potential for harm to its network, including harm to the continuity and quality of service to its customers, is minimized.”

Except that’s not true. Most implementations of “one touch make ready” give ISPs ample warning of impending work. Meanwhile, Google Fiber currently needs to wait for incumbent ISPs to prepare the poles for attachment — a process that can take as long as 9 months if the incumbent ISP has an incentive to stall the process (worse if Google Fiber has to wait for multiple ISPs working in concert). That’s something that Google Fiber documented in a blog post recently that has been a real problem in Nashville, where just 33 of the approximately 44,000 poles in the city have been prepared for Google Fiber work.

From Texas to California, AT&T has been accused for years of using its control over city utility poles as yet another avenue to discourage broadband competition. And the telco is surely furious somebody is finally doing something about it in Tennessee, a state whose legislature is so eager to protect AT&T’s monopoly it effectively lets the telco write awful state law. Hell, Nashville’s city council last week even had the gall to shoot down a Comcast and AT&T written proposal that would have bogged Google Fiber down in committee for months.

Of course these incumbent ISPs know they can’t win. Pole attachment is generally supported by communities, many tech associations and government alike, all collectively tired of AT&T’s stranglehold over the status quo. But the goal isn’t to stop deployment but to slow it down, giving incumbent ISPs more time to not only lock down existing customers into long-term contracts, but to fuel ongoing rumors that Google Fiber is out of its depth.

Filed Under: google fiber, nashville, one touch make ready
Companies: at&t, google

Nashville Council Member Admits AT&T & Comcast Wrote The Anti-Google Fiber Bill She Submitted

Broadband

from the hired-marionettes dept

We’ve been talking about how the next great battlefield in broadband is utility pole attachment reform. In many cities, the incumbent broadband provider owns the utility poles, giving them a perfect opportunity to hinder competitors. In other cities, the local utility or city itself owns the poles, but incumbent ISPs have lobbied for laws making it more difficult for competitors to access them quickly and inexpensively. Google Fiber has been pushing “one touch make ready” rules in several cities aimed at streamlining this bureaucracy by letting a licensed, third-party installer move any ISP’s gear (often a matter of inches).

And while incumbents like AT&T and Comcast will often breathlessly proclaim they’re all for streamlining regulations, in this instance they’re actively preventing the streamlining of these rules in a feeble attempt to slow Google Fiber down. In Louisville, AT&T sued the city after it passed one touch make ready rules. And in Nashville, both Comcast and AT&T have been actively working to prevent Google Fiber from getting similar rules passed. In a recent blog post explaining the stand off, Google Fiber highlights just what this entrenched, anti-competitive regulatory capture looks like in graphical form:

This week Nashville’s city council is planning the final in a series of votes to approve Google Fiber’s one touch make ready rules. But AT&T has already promised to sue the city if Nashville passes the ordinance. Meanwhile AT&T and Comcast have taken another route to try and delay Google Fiber; they’ve urged a Nashville city council member to propose an alternative city resolution that would supplant Google Fiber’s plan with a plan that doesn’t appear to actually do anything outside of stalling the Google Fiber proposal.

Under this alternative “right touch” proposal, pole attachment would see only modest changes, leading Nashville city councilman Jeremy Elrod to deride the move as little more than a last gasp effort by AT&T and Comcast to protect their duopoly fiefdom:

“Google Fiber service and other competitors will be forced to rolling out their service at a trickle, when under the One Touch ordinance it will be like opening the floodgates,” Elrod said in an emailed statement.

“This resolution coming at the last minute, to be considered the same night as third reading of the One Touch bill, just shows it?s the last gasp of Comcast and AT&T, desperately trying to hold on to their top place on the utility pole. “These two companies should not be the gatekeepers that get to decide when and where their customers get access to a competitor, but (a Memorandum of Understanding) like this one enshrines that they stay that way. Comcast and AT&T would win, and competition and consumers would lose.”

AT&T and Comcast’s competing resolution was proposed by Nashville council member Sheri Weiner, who amusingly admits to Ars Technica that the incumbent ISPs wrote the proposal, and while she intended to edit some of it herself, that just didn’t happen:

“I told them that I would file a resolution if they had something that made sense and wasn?t as drastic as OTMR,? Weiner told Ars in an e-mail today, when we asked her what role AT&T and Comcast played in drafting the resolution. Weiner said she is insisting on some changes to the resolution, but the proposal (full text) was submitted without those changes.

When asked why she didn’t put her suggested changes in the version of the resolution published on the council website, Weiner said, ?I had them [AT&T and Comcast] submit it for me as I was out of town all last week on business (my day job).” Weiner said an edited resolution will be considered by the council during its next meeting.

Yeah, whoops-a-daisy. If the AT&T and Comcast proposal passes, it will likely delay Google Fiber’s market entry by a notable margin. If it doesn’t, AT&T will simply sue the city of Nashville, insisting the city council overstepped its authority. Either way, Google Fiber gets delayed thanks to regulatory capture. And note this is all occurring while AT&T lobbyists happily mock Google Fiber for receiving “government favoritism.”

Again, this is all par for the course for American broadband, where beholden lawmakers on every level from city council to state legislature work tirelessly to make sure incumbent ISPs like Verizon, Comcast, AT&T and Charter never have to work too hard, lest the campaign contributions stop flowing. And again, while any day of the week you’ll find these companies’ executives and lobbyists prattling on at length about how they despise “onerous regulation,” when push comes to shove you’ll repeatedly find them aggressively supporting just such regulation — if it protects them from having to actually compete.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, corruption, google fiber, nashville, one touch make ready, pole attachments, sheri weiner
Companies: at&t, comcast, google

Town Loses Gigabit Connections After FCC Municipal Broadband Court Loss

Broadband

from the don't-build-it-and-they-won't-come dept

Back in February the FCC voted to use its Congressional mandate to ensure speedy broadband deployment to dismantle protectionist state laws intentionally designed to hinder broadband competition. But the FCC recently found itself swatted down by the courts, which argued the agency lacks the authority to pre-empt even the worst portions of these laws. As a result municipal broadband providers continue to run face first into protectionist provisions written by incumbent ISP lawyers and lobbyists solely concerned about protecting the current broken broadband market.

The impact of the FCC’s loss is very real. Ars Technica notes that one of the broadband ISPs that originally asked for help from the FCC, Wilson North Carolina’s Greenlight, has had to disconnect one neighboring town or face violating state law. With state leaders tone deaf to the problem of letting incumbent ISPs write such laws, and the FCC flummoxed in its attempt to help, about 200 home Internet customers in Pinetops will thus lose access to gigabit broadband service as of October 28:

“We must comply with our state law,” Agner said. But city council members were very vocal in their opposition to the law and regret having to disconnect the service, she said. “We have not identified a solution where Greenlight can serve customers outside of our county,” Wilson City Manager Grant Goings told The Wilson Times earlier this week before the city council vote. “While we are very passionate about reaching underserved areas and we think the laws are atrocious to prevent people from having service, we?re not going to jeopardize our ability to serve Wilson residents.”

Greenlight’s fiber network provides speeds of 40Mbps to 1Gbps at prices ranging from $40 to $100 a month, service that’s unheard of from any of the regional incumbent providers (AT&T, CenturyLink, Time Warner Cable) that lobbied for the protectionist law. Previously, the community of Pinetops only had access to sluggish DSL Service from CenturyLink:

Wilson already had fiber in Pinetops, which has been an electric customer of Wilson’s for more than 40 years. Before deploying Internet access to Pinetops, Wilson was laying fiber in the town to support smart grid initiatives. After the FCC voted to let city Internet services expand outside their boundaries, Wilson extended the fiber network to pass the roughly 700 homes in Pinetops, Agner said. Prior to this, Pinetops residents’ only option was CenturyLink DSL, she said.

That’s the same CenturyLink that’s currently using the lack of competition in its markets to begin saddling already slow and expensive DSL service with usage caps and overage fees. ISPs have been very successful in sowing partisan discord by framing municipal broadband as a partisan issue (pesky government interfering in private enterprise!). In reality, most municipal broadband networks have been built in Conservative areas and see broad, bi-partisan support. Disliking the local phone and cable company (and the market failure that built them) is actually something that tends to bring bickering partisans together.

Still, with the FCC’s loss there’s nothing really stopping ISPs from continuing to use state legislatures as their personal playthings. Currently there’s twenty such laws protecting broadband duopolies in place, and despite growing attention to the practice, new protectionist laws are being passed each year.

Filed Under: competition, dsl, fcc, fiber, municipal broadband, north carolina, pinetops, wilson
Companies: centurylink, greenlight

This Bill Could Stop Protectionist State Broadband Laws, But ISP Control Over Congress Means It Won't Pass

Broadband

from the get-the-hell-out-of-the-way dept

We’ve noted for years that one way incumbent broadband providers protect their duopoly kingdoms is by quite literally buying state laws that protect the status quo. These laws, passed in roughly twenty different states, prevent towns and cities from building their own broadband networks or in some instances from partnering with a private company like Google Fiber. Usually misleadingly presented by incumbent lobbyists and lawmakers as grounded in altruistic concern for taxpayer welfare, the laws are little more than pure protectionism designed to maintain the current level of broadband dysfunction — for financial gain.

Earlier this year, the FCC tried to use its Congressional mandate under the Communications Act to eliminate the restrictive portions of these laws in two states. But the FCC’s effort was shot down as an overreach by the courts earlier this month, and the FCC has stated it has no intention of continuing the fight. That leaves the hope of ending these protectionist laws either in the hands of voters (most of whom don’t have the slightest idea what’s happening) or Congress (most of whom don’t want the telecom campaign contributions to stop flowing).

Undaunted, Representative Anna Eshoo this week introduced the Community Broadband Act of 2016 in the House, which is intended to be a companion bill to the existing bill of the same name already introduced in the Senate by Senators Cory Booker and Ron Wyden. Both bills would ban states from passing any law that prohibits a city, municipality or public utility from providing “advanced telecommunications capabilities” to state communities. In a statement, Eshoo expressed her displeasure at the ongoing efforts to thwart alternative broadband options:

“I?m disappointed that a recent court ruling blocked the FCC?s efforts to allow local communities to decide for themselves how best to ensure that their residents have broadband access,? Eshoo said. ?This legislation clears the way for local communities to make their own decisions instead of powerful special interests in state capitals.”

“Rather than restricting local communities in need of broadband, we should be empowering them to make the decisions they determine are in the best interests of their constituents. Too many Americans still lack access to quality, affordable broadband and community broadband projects are an important way to bring this critical service to more citizens.”

Which is all true, though both bills have virtually no chance at passing. Incumbent ISPs have been very successful in paying lawmakers to argue that any attempt to eliminate these protectionist laws is an “assault on states’ rights,” as argued by the likes of Marsha Blackburn. Of absolutely no concern to these critics is the fact that large companies are writing and buying the passage of state laws that ensure many states remain broadband backwaters solely to protect incumbent ISP revenues.

On the bright side, the rise of alternative (though limited) options like Google Fiber — and the FCC’s fight — have shined a very bright spotlight on a practice that has been ongoing for fifteen years with little to no public and press attention. As such, ISPs (and the politicians that love them) are having a much harder time than ever convincing locals that laws keeping them on expensive, sluggish broadband are in their collective best self-interest.

Filed Under: competition, congress, fcc, municipal broadband

New York City Threatens To Sue Verizon For Failure To Meet Fiber Deployment Promises

Broadband

from the fool-me-twice dept

We’ve noted for years now how Verizon’s modus operandi is to promise uniform fiber deployment to a city or state in exchange for all manner of subsidies and tax breaks, then walk away giggling to itself with the job only partially complete. This story has played out time and time again thanks to city and state contracts struck behind closed doors without public transparency, allowing Verizon to bury numerous loopholes in the contract language. Other times, Verizon can lobby to weaken oversight so that there’s simply nobody left to hold Verizon accountable when it decides to laugh off the contract requirements.

In 2008, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg struck a closed-door deal with Verizon delivering all manner of tax breaks and incentives in exchange for what the city thought would be 100% deployment of Verizon’s FiOS fiber optic service by 2014. Fast forward to last year, when the new city administration realized that Verizon had absolutely no intention of seriously deploying fiber uniformly across the city. This week, the city released the results of a survey it conducted that found that fiber is unsurprisingly still hard to come by:

“The city recently sampled 52,000 addresses for Fios availability, and found that outer boroughs were more likely to have access than Manhattan. For instance, 90% of Staten Island residents could likely get Fios within seven days, while the same is true for just 19% of people in central Brooklyn and 11% in upper Manhattan. About two-thirds of the more than 300 public-housing developments, which are home to more than 400,000 people, have no access to Fios, the city says.

Meanwhile, a letter from the city to the telco (pdf) complains that Verizon is in violation of at least three parts of the original agreement, failed repeatedly to deliver documentation requested during an audit of Verizon’s progress, and cites at least 38,551 addresses where Verizon failed to deliver service despite order requests that are more than a year old.

Verizon, as it is wont to do, tries to spin the narrative on its head by claiming that New York City is being “adversarial”:

“It is unfortunate and disappointing that the City is taking an adversarial approach to the only company that has challenged New York City?s cable monopolies,? Mr. McConville said. “The City should be working with Verizon to make choice available to more residents, not discouraging competition.?

Except Cities have every right to be adversarial with a company that has shown repeatedly that it doesn’t deliver on its promises. Verizon has tried to claim that grumpy landlords are to blame for its failure to deliver FiOS evenly across the city. And while landlords can play a role in delaying some installations, reporters have subsequently discovered that the excuse just doesn’t hold water and Verizon’s simply not doing the work.

While it was a contract signed under a previous administration, New York City isn’t blameless. Reporters at the time pointed out that the city’s contract had ample loopholes and should have been negotiated in the full light of public transparency, but nobody listened. So while New York City says it’s mulling a lawsuit against Verizon, that suit may run repeatedly into contract caveats carefully crafted by a company that never had any intention of uniform fiber deployment. The contract reflected this had anybody actually bothered to read it.

The amusing (or annoying) thing is that cities keep making the same deals with the proverbial devil over and over again. Philadelphia recently complained that Verizon failed to meet its obligations there as well. And While Verizon’s overall FiOS deployment has been frozen, the city just struck a similar deal with Boston — with few if any in the press bothering to note the tail of frustration and broken promises trailing miles behind the telco and its lawyers.

Filed Under: fiber, fios, nyc, promises
Companies: verizon

Comcast Already Whining About New FCC Cable Box Plan, Despite It Being The Cable Industry's Idea

Broadband

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

We’ve noted how the FCC’s plan to bring competition to the cable box fell apart over the last few months, thanks to a massive disinformation effort by the cable industry involving a flood of hugely misleading editorials and some help from the US Copyright Office. In short the cable industry used a sound wall of hired voices to claim that cable box competition would hurt consumer privacy, violate copyright, result in a huge spike in piracy, and was even racist. Despite these claims being nonsense, the unprecedented PR campaign managed to sway several FCC Commissioners that had originally voted yes on the proposal.

With his ally commissioners waffling on the original plan, FCC boss Tom Wheeler was forced to offer up a new watered down proposal (pdf). Under the new plan, cable operators would have two years to develop apps that let all cable customers access content (small cable ops are exempt) on the streaming hardware of their choice. In an editorial defending the plan being circulated to numerous websites, Wheeler makes it abundantly clear that cable providers can use any standard of their choice to develop the app, and have control of their content from end to end:

“While our primary focus during this proceeding was to promote consumer choice and fulfill our congressional mandate, we recognize that protecting the legitimate copyright interests of content creators is also key to serving the public interest. To ensure that all copyright and licensing agreements will remain intact, the delivery of pay-TV programming will continue to be overseen by pay-TV providers from end-to-end. The proposed rules also maintain important protections regarding emergency alerting, accessibility and privacy.”

Except the copyright concerns weren’t legitimate, because cable box competition has nothing to do with copyright. The cable industry’s opposition to real cable box competition is driven by two simple things: a desire to retain control as users flee legacy TV (or more accurately the illusion of control), and a desire to protect $20 billion in annual revenue from cable box rental fees. But the sector obviously can’t just come out and say this, so instead they’ve hidden their motivation behind a litany of hyperbole and bloviation.

Amusingly, it was the cable industry that originally approached an “app based” alternative to Wheeler’s initial plan (the flaws in which we’ve previously dissected here). Yet it didn’t take Comcast long to circulate a statement to various press outlets stating that it didn’t like this new proposal, either:

“While we appreciate that Chairman Wheeler has abandoned his discredited proposal to break apart cable and satellite services, his latest tortured approach is equally flawed. He claims that his new proposal builds on the marketplace success of apps, but in reality, it would stop the apps revolution dead in its tracks by imposing an overly complicated government licensing regime and heavy-handed regulation in a fast-moving technological space.

By “discredited” proposal, Comcast means that it paid an ocean of think tankers, academics, lobbyists, consultants and others to lambaste the plan at every conceivable opportunity (with news outlets rarely disclosing the financial ties). And by “fast moving technological space” Comcast means a sector historically known for doing everything in its power to not only cripple consumer choice, but punish consumers for seeking out better alternatives to legacy TV. And again, the FCC effectively gave the cable sector the app-based approach its own lobbyists pushed for, and Comcast’s still not happy:

“It perpetuates many of the concerns that led hundreds of Members of Congress, content creators, diversity and civil rights organizations, labor unions, and over 300,000 individuals to object to his original flawed approach, including problems with privacy, copyright protection, content security, and innovation. Heavy-handed government technology mandates have a long history of failure. The Chairman?s approach would likely meet the same fate, while causing real damage to the thriving apps marketplace and real harm to consumers.”

Again, it’s wise of Comcast to avoid mentioning that Comcast paid for, either overtly or covertly, the lion’s share of opposition to the FCC’s plan. It’s also probably smart of Comcast to avoid mentioning that the FCC’s counter proposal is almost exactly what cable industry lobbyists asked for. The FCC says it will vote (again) on its cable box proposal at its meeting on September 29, meaning the next few weeks you’ll see a barrage of new editorials trying to claim that cable box competition will hurt the children, frighten puppies, and almost certainly rip a giant hole in the time-space continuum.

Filed Under: apps, competition, copyright, fcc, set top boxes
Companies: comcast

Users Say Comcast Broadband Usage Meters Don't Work, May Result in Hundreds Of Dollars Of Errant Charges

Broadband

from the show-your-math dept

We’ve noted for years that usage caps on fixed line broadband connections are little more than a major, unnecessary price hike on uncompetitive markets. But while caps certainly are little more than a cash grab, there’s another less talked about problem at play: nobody is making sure ISP usage meters are accurate. That has resulted in a number of instances where an ISP will bill users for consumption when the power is off, and even some instances where ISPs confused MAC addresses and billed the wrong customer for additional monthly consumption.

As you might expect, Comcast is often at the heart of these conversations. This week, they’re making the news once again for overbilling a customer $1500 for phantom bandwidth consumption, then refusing to provide any solid evidence this phantom consumption actually occurred. Like many users before them, the customers discovered a major discrepancy between their own router logs and and ISP’s usage meter. But Comcast being Comcast, the company’s historically-bad customer service usually only makes a bad situation worse:

“So far, despite all the calls we have made, no one is willing to even provide us with one shred of proof this data was consumed, by what method or website(s) it was used on. They just keep telling us to trust them, the data was used. We have asked for investigations of the Internet history to prove this usage, and they say they will do so, but they never do.”

As is so often the case, only once the media was involved was Comcast willing to “help.” In this case, Ars Technica demanded Comcast prove the errant usage was actually happening, but the company not only couldn’t provide any hard data whatsoever — but it tried to claim the terabytes of extra consumption were being caused by an Apple TV unit that apparently became sentient and started downloading screensavers on its own (subsequently disproven). With Comcast charging hundreds of extra dollars and just simply refusing to show its math, Ars gets to the real meat of the problem:

“The months of testing, without any firm conclusions, raise one question with no straightforward answer. If Comcast, the nation’s largest Internet provider, can’t determine what’s pushing its subscribers over their data caps, why should customers be expected to figure it out on their own? On top of that, few customers other than Brad receive such extensive testing. And even that testing would never have happened if his father hadn’t contacted a journalist.

For what it’s worth, Comcast has long stated that it uses a firm by the name of NetForecast to measure its meter accuracy, and that this firm consistently finds that Comcast’s meters are accurate to within 1%. But that’s not the story coming from Comcast’s actual consumers, who get to enjoy the one-two punch of first being charged hundreds of extra dollars for nothing, then having to navigate Comcast’s horrendous and inflexible customer service to fix a problem that shouldn’t exist in the first place. And as Comcast keeps pushing its caps into new, uncompetitive areas, the volume of complaints will only grow.

There are two subjects that telecom regulators simply refuse to address. One being the misleading and often completely fabricated below-the-line fees ISPs use to jack up the price of broadband after a sale. The other being the punitive, unnecessary and potentially anti-competitive usage cap, not to mention the ISP desire to bill like utilities, but their total unwillingness to actually be regulated as such. As a result, no objective third party is ensuring that logged bandwidth consumption is accurate, a major problem as more and more ISPs look to usage caps to milk uncompetitive markets.

Filed Under: broadband, broadband meters, competition, net neutrality, toll booth
Companies: comcast