verizon

Susan Crawford recently posted "The Gentlemen's Agreement," noting that major cable companies have divided the national market and tend not to compete with each other (they actually help each other in some circumstances).

Though bad for everyone not named Comcast or Time Warner, this division is actually a historic accomplishment:

Even J.P. Morgan couldn’t get independently-owned railroads to agree not to compete with one another in the late 19th century. Not that he didn’t try. In 1890 one of Morgan’s associates was excited by the prospect of a Western Traffic Association that would include a director from each railroad and set uniform rates: “Think of it - all the competing traffic of the roads west of Chicago and Saint Louis placed in the control of about 30 men!” But the effort fell apart because some of the independents insisted on cutting rates and invading each other’s territories.

Cable and fiber-optic networks, as with railroads, have natural barriers to entry because the costs of building a network are very high; entrenched incumbents have nearly all the advantages should any competitor have the resources to surmount the barrier of sky-high upfront capital costs. In short, the market cannot self-regulate. We have a number of choices:

1. Do nothing, let Comcast, et al. do as they please.
2. Regulate: Hope the FCC or other Federal Agencies can stand up to the corporate lobbyists and regulate in the public interest.
3. Provide a Public Option

We prefer the public option route - communities can build their own networks and remain independent of corporate control of infrastructure.

However, many communities have chosen to do nothing -- some in hopes the federal government will get its act together and reign in the power of these companies as the U.S. falls behind international peers in broadband metrics.

Verizon's FiOS has brought fiber to the home in some cities (with many cities courting the company), but some quickly found FiOS comes with significant trade-offs. Karl Bode details some of these - like Boston being shunned because it wanted Verizon to pay property taxes.

Seattle and Portland have suburbs with FiOS but are stuck with Qwest and Comcast networks in their cities. Baltimore was not deemed worthy of FiOS - presumably for the same reason as so many others who remain stuck with Verizon DSL: they had the wrong demographics. Verizon's mission is to maximize returns for its shareholders, nothing more. Communities that pin their hopes to a company like Verizon will find that Verizon has all the power in their relationship.

In contrast, communities that build their own networks can offer the same fast speeds (and faster) while knowing that no company controls its digital future. Any by owning the network, the community can open it to competition, creating a true market for broadband that FiOS communities will likely never experience.

Though I did not spend a lot of time following stimulus proposals, two excellent proposals did catch my eye from Idaho and I hoped that at least one of them would be funded. Alas, neither was funded by NTIA or RUS. These are exactly the networks we need throughout the country, and Idaho is exactly the state that could benefit greatly from federal assistance. I hope these projects have better luck in the second round or in securing future funding from RUS outside the stimulus project. (This is not to suggest I disapprove of the Coeur d'Alene Reservation Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) Project that received funding - I am not as familiar with it and therefore have no comment on it.) The town of Ammon, some 13,000 people near Idaho Falls in eastern Idaho, developed a proposal for an a type of next-generation open access network in that it would offer greater flexibility to subscribers and service providers than many current open access networks. The other project, to serve the Northern Panhandle area, was designed with Ernie Bray, who previously consulted on the Powellink network in Wyoming. The Boise Weekly briefly discussed these projects a few weeks ago, noting their open access approach that would serve residents, businesses, and key institutional anchors with fiber-optics:

"Every entity we need to work with is already a stakeholder; we're ready to go," he said. "And we will use revenues for expansion and build out. We're trying to expand the concept of a service provider and services beyond just the triple play, voice-video-data," he said. "Telemedicine is a service, hospitals are service providers. We want to take fiber to every home and every business, then connect them to libraries, schools and job services so they can take advantage of programs to help lift them up."

Local jobs are at stake and incumbent providers are doing little to help:

Quest [Aircraft], who builds the Kodiak airplane, they've gotta exchange large engineering files in real time; 250 jobs are at stake.

Verizon is busy trying to offload all of its rural territories on Frontier (a company famous for slow and poor service) so it isn't about to upgrade facilities in Idaho. More recently, Boise Weekly revisited these projects because they have been officially rejected. At the time of that article, it seemed that projects would have to turnaround a new application in 2 weeks. Fortunately, deadlines have been pushed back in recognition of the difficulties for those projects that were in due diligence until recently receiving a rejection letter. Both Ammon and the Panhandle Project should be funded under the stimulus, but the rules for Round 2 seem to focus more on middle mile infrastructure (an approach that is less controversial than funding a network that "gets all up" in an incumbent's "grill"). Without these networks, who knows when these communities will get the infrastructure of the 21st century?

Evidently, the Comcast-provided I-Net in Norton - a city of nearly 20,000 west of the Cape - suffers frequent outages, outraging those who depend on it. The City has decided to build their own network (after originally hoping Verizon would fund it) to connect town offices, public safety, and school sites with fiber-optic cables.

Norton predicts significant savings from the new network - just as do hundreds of other cities that are building their own I-Nets to cut costs and dramatically improve services and reliability.

The projected costs are $116,000, according to this article.

Town Manager James Purcell said the main infrastructure that will be installed will be the beginning, and likened the expenditure to paying for the installation of a major sewer line with stubs to various buildings.

In a recent post the NY Times Bits Blog, Saul Hansell reports "Verizon Boss Hangs Up on Landline Phone Business" - something we have long known. Nonetheless, this makes it even more official: private companies have no interest in bringing true broadband to everyone in the United States.

Verizon is happy to invest in next-generation networks in wealthy suburbs and large metro regions but people in rural areas - who have long dealt with decaying telephone infrastructure - will be lucky to get slow DSL speeds that leave them unable to participate in the digital age. These people will be spun off to other companies so Verizon can focus on the most profitable areas.

For instance, Verizon found it profitable to spin off its customers in Hawaii to another company that quickly ran into trouble before unloading most of its New England customer on FairPoint, moves that enhanced Verizon's bottom line while harming many communities (see the bottom of this post and other posts about FairPoint).

Isen has been writing about it recently - picking up on FairPoint immediately breaking its promises to expand broadband access in the newly acquired territories. No surprise there.

Isen also delved deeper into Verizon's actions, with "Verizon throws 18 states under the progress train." He is right to push this as a national story - the national media focused intently on the absence of major carriers in the broadband stimulus package but they seem utterly uninterested in major carriers running away from broadband investments in rural areas.

Though Frontier likes to position itself as a company focused on bringing broadband to rural areas, it offers slow DSL broadband and poor customer service to people who have no other choices - more of a parasite than angel. As long as we view broadband as a vehicle for moving profits from communities to absentee-owned corporations rather than the infrastructure it truly is, we will farther and farther behind our international peers in the modern economy.

Perhaps the most frustrating angle of these transactions are the many ways in which Verizon benefits from stranding thousands of communities. West Virginia is one of the states most impacted by the proposed Verizon-Frontier swap and has generated in-depth coverage of the story.

She [Elaine Harris of Communications Workers of America (telephone employees union)] believes the payoff for Verizon is it cannot only make money selling off its assets, but it can take advantage of a federal tax loophole that allows tax-free mergers between companies. The smaller companies are left saddled with debt and, as a result, can't make the necessary upgrades to existing infrastructure, turning off customers and ultimately leading to work force reductions as dissatisfied customers turn somewhere else.

Trying to figure out how to force absentee-owned, profit-maximizing corporations to bring true broadband to everyone ignores the reality of our market system: we are trying to force the square peg through the round hole. These companies may well invest in urban and suburban areas (though these areas continue to fall behind major cities elsewhere in the world) but they have no reason to invest in rural America. To get the job done, we need smart public investments to ensure everyone benefits from the communications revolution.

When we expanded telephone and electrical infrastructure to everyone, everyone in the United States benefited because networks always become more valuable as they increase in size. More people on the network means increased markets, increased productivity, and a higher quality of life.

Ensuring everyone has quality broadband is not charity for rural folks, it is in all of our self-interest. The narrow self-interests of Verizon, Frontier, and FairPoint (this is not a shot at them, companies are designed to have a narrow self-interest for legitimate reasons) do not line up with our larger national interest - something that too few people understand when dealing with broadband policy.

This is a video offering good coverage of the FairPoint problems:

Photo by Derek Jensen, used under creative commons license.