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Content tagged with "qwest"
Minnesota's Northeast Service Cooperative Middle Mile Network Breaks Ground
Thanks to Minnesota Public Radio for an update on stimulus broadband projects in NE MN. A massive non-profit middle-mile project called the NorthEast Service Cooperative will finally provide redundancy and modern connections to an area long neglected by Qwest.
Hundreds of miles of fiber optic cables will bring faster Internet access to the Arrowhead region of Minnesota by the end of this summer. Ground for a broadband network stretching 915 miles was broken yesterday. Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) and other politicians were on hand to tout the long-term economic significance of this federally funded project.
Soon, entire counties will not have to fear disastrous meltdowns from Qwest's inability to offer reliable services, as when they went 12 hours without any telecommunications, meaning police could not run background checks or run plates, credit cards and ATMs went offline, and border security had to use Canadian comms.
Northland News offered greater coverage as well as a video that would not embed here for reasons unknown.
The 915 miles of fiber optic network will stretch across eight counties in the Arrowhead Region and bring world class web speeds to the area.…
State lawmakers were also on hand at the ceremony and say this type of technology is pivotal to economic development.
"I want this to be the next step in people realizing that economic diversification on the Iron Range can be done because we are wired, we're ready to go, and we have a work force that is second to none," said state Sen. David Tomassoni.
We have to wonder how many of these legislators will support removing barriers in Minnesota law to communities building their own networks.
Note that the the NE Service Coop is a middle-mile network and that Frontier will be using it to improve their services.
WindomNet Saves Jobs, Provides Stellar Customer Service
Minnesota Public Radio, as part of its Ground Level Broadband Coverage has profiled WindomNet with a piece called "Who should build the next generation of high-speed networks?"
Dan Olsen, who runs the municipal broadband service in Windom, was just about to leave work for the night when he got a call. The muckety-mucks at Fortune Transportation, a trucking company on the outskirts of town, were considering shuttering their office and leaving the area. "They said, Dan, you need to get your butt out here now," Olsen recalls. "I got there and they said, 'You need to build fiber out here. What would it take for you to do it?'" Fortune, which employs 47 people in the town of 4,600, two and a half hours southwest of the Twin Cities, relies on plenty of high-tech gadgetry. Broadband Internet access figures into how the company bids for jobs, communicates with road-bound truckers, controls the temperatures in its refrigerated trucks and remotely views its office in Roswell, New Mexico. Fortune even uses the Internet to monitor where and to what extent drivers fill their gas tanks in order to save money. Yet, when it was time to upgrade company systems three years ago, Fortune's private provider couldn't offer sufficient speeds. That's where Windomnet came in. Though Fortune was a mile outside the municipal provider's service area, "We jumped through the hoops and made it happen," recalls Olsen. "The council said, "Do it and we'll figure out how to pay for it.' We got a plow and a local crew. We had it built in 30 days."I have thought about this story frequently when I hear claims that publicly owned networks are failures.
Qwest Renews Push to Gut Local Authority over Cable Television
It's 2011 and time for Qwest to renew a push to gut local authority in a number of states - Idaho and Colorado to start. An article for the Denver Post explains the argument:
Phone companies say state-level oversight of video franchising fosters competition because it is less cumbersome for new entrants to secure the right to offer services.
Many states have also eliminated the condition that new video competitors must eventually offer service to every home in a given municipality, a requirement placed on incumbent cable-TV providers.
Gutting local authority is the best way to increase the disparities between those who have broadband and those who do not. Qwest and others are only interested in building out in the most profitable areas -- which then leaves those unserved even more difficult to serve because the costs of serving them cannot be balanced with those who can be served at a lower cost.
The only reason that just about every American living in a city has access to broadband is because franchise requirements forced companies to build out everyone. Without these requirements, cable buildouts would almost certainly have mirrored the early private company efforts to wire towns for electricity -- wealthier areas of town had a number of choices and low-income areas of town had none.
In Idaho, those fighting back against this attempt to limit local authority are worried that statewide franchising will kill their local public access channels - a reality that others face across the nation where these laws have passed.
The channels, which are also used to publicize community events, provide complete coverage of Pocatello City Council, Planning and Zoning and School District 25 board meetings, as well as candidate forums before elections.
Without these local channels, how could people stay informed about what is happening in the community? Local newspapers are increasingly hard to find. In many communities, these channels are the last bastion of local news.
Customer Service From National Carriers is Terrible
Though it is rarely, if ever, the top motivation for a community to build its own broadband network, the idea of local customer service that is actually responsive to the community ranks usually among the top 5 motivations. We love the idea of a "strangle effect" -- coined by folks at Wilson's Greenlight in North Carolina. If something goes wrong, you can find someone nearby to strangle.
Compare that to these three stories.
First - a coworker of mine had to return a Comcast set-top box after cutting back on services. When he drove to the Comcast storefront, the outside drop box was full of gear, so he stepped inside to a room packed with Comcastic homicidal folks who had waited too long for attention from the overworked counter folk. He asked to just drop his box but they said he would have to take a number and wait... so he could set his Comcast box on the counter because no one had emptied the box outside where it should have been placed.
Another Comcast story comes to us from the Consumerist: where Comcast tries to repossess a cable modem is does not own.
Finally, David Pogue recently recounted the story of Qwest demanding that a customer call a specific phone number to report that his phone was not working. Rachel, the person who experienced the terrible service, writes:
Do you suppose all communications giants are like this? “We are abjectly sorry and have instructed our employees to grovel at your feet, but we are simply unable help you, value you though we do. Yes, we’re helpless. You know, we’re only a giant corporation. You can’t really expect us to help you, can you? We’re sure you understand. Please visit our Web site again to order more products!” Is it truly impossible to debug a VoIP modem problem via e-mail for some technical or philosophical reason?Yes, Rachel, those massive communications giant are all like that.
Another Telecom Exec Calls for Less Competition
As part of our continuing effort to shed light on the tendency of privately owned telcos and cablecos to consolidate rather than compete, we would like to note comments from Qwest's Chief Financial Officer. Stop the Cap! has the story:
Chief Financial Officer Joe Euteneuer said the time was right for Qwest to sell operations in the north-central and mountain west region because there were too many competitors in the marketplace. Euteneuer said the telecommunications market needs to resemble the cable-TV business, which has been heavily concentrated into two huge powerhouses — Comcast and Time Warner Cable.So not only do these executives think there is too much competition (find me a subscriber who believes that!), but believes we should have less and less competition moving forward. These folks are incredibly candid about their plans to diminish what little competition exists -- perhaps because the FCC has made it clear that it plans to take no actions to encourage further competition. The National Broadband Plan pretty much ignores this problem, perhaps its biggest failing. For those of us who care about the future of broadband and the communities that increasingly depend upon it, the spectre of even larger privately-owned incumbent providers (with increasingly distant headquarters) is daunting. Bigger and bigger incumbents mean it is that much harder to build better networks that will compete with them. These massive companies cross-subsidize their operations to dramatically cut rates in newly competitive areas specifically to drive out new competitors (public and private). Larger companies have greater advantages for securing discounts on key inputs, allowing them to offer lower prices than communities are naturally able. This is yet more evidence that the private-company approach to broadband infrastructure is bankrupt. If we are destined to have only a few entities owning the networks on which we depend, those entities must be directly accountable to the communities, rather than focused solely on increasing profits every year.
To communities that seize broadband initiative, benefits flow fast
On November 29, 2010, MPR published our commentary about community broadband. The Twin Cities has slower and more expensive broadband Internet than the nearby town of Monticello. The Twin Cities metro area has a population of 2.8 million and the highest density of people and businesses in the state. So why is our broadband Internet slower and more expensive than that enjoyed by Monticello, population 12,000? Several years ago, the city of Monticello (45 miles northwest of Minneapolis) recognized the increasing importance of reliable, high speed, low cost broadband. After the incumbent telephone and cable companies declined to build the network city leaders had in mind, the community decided to build one itself. Now, FiberNet Monticello offers some of the best broadband packages available in the country, while the Twin Cities is lagging. A new analysis by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance compares the available broadband speeds in Monticello to those available in the Twin Cities metro. In the metro, as in most of the United States, broadband subscribers choose between DSL from the incumbent telephone company (Qwest) and cable broadband from the incumbent cable company (Comcast). Monticello's offerings are faster at every price point, but Comcast appears to offer comparable downstream speeds in the highest tier of service. This apparent equivalence, however, is like comparing dirt roads with interstates. Both are roads that allow you to travel from point A to B, but they have fundamentally different characteristics in carrying capacity and reliability. For a variety of reasons, DSL and cable almost always fall short (and often, well short) of the advertised "up to" speeds, whereas full fiber networks regularly achieve the speeds they promise. In the metro, cable offers most residents the fastest option for broadband, but only one choice of provider. The Monticello network not only created a new choice for its residents, it induced the incumbent telephone company to greatly upgrade its network to remain competitive. Now, Monticello residents can choose between two extremely fast broadband providers, as well as a cable internet connection. The community-owned network may have only been the third broadband option, but it fundamentally changed the market.
The Internet That Might Have Been
The abstract immediately captured my attention:
Policymakers often tell us that the Internet succeeded because of a lack of government regulation. For instance, FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell recently noted that the “evolution away from government intervention has been the most important ingredient in the Internet’s success.” These views, while widely shared, happen to be inaccurate. In reality, a diverse range of federal regulations, subsidies, and nondiscrimination protections sustained the Internet’s historic growth. But what if, as many inaccurately assume, these regulations had never existed? What would today’s Internet look like in such a world? In this essay, I provide a fictional alternate history - in form of a satirical book review - to illustrate how differently the Internet might have developed in a truly privatized world. Although the essay below (beginning after this abstract) is fictional, it draws heavily upon both the regulatory history of the Internet and the policy arguments at issue in today’s leading regulatory proceedings.This article covers decisions like Carterfone, the FCC's Computer Inquires, giving control over TCP/IP to the National Science Foundation rather than AT&T, and the intentions of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. It also includes a reminder of the difference between open systems and closed systems:
One important way that open policies achieve this goal is by reducing various types of transaction costs. In open networks, new market entrants can completely avoid negotiating with companies who have “gateway control” over the network. The aspiring entrants do not have to pay—nor seek permission from—the network owners for access. Accordingly, these policies encourage vastly more experimentation and amateur “tinkering.” Closed networks, by contrast, produce relatively less innovation because they rely on centralized network owners to introduce—or at least approve—innovation before it becomes available.This is a fantastic read (really riveting telecom reading -- how often do you get that?) and a good history lesson for people who were not there to see it firsthand over the years.
Putting Shareholders and Profits ahead of the Community
One of the key differences between community owned networks and those driven by profit is customer service. Community-driven providers spend more and create more jobs in the community to ensure subscribers' needs are met. The massive private companies instead choose to outsource the jobs to call centers (sometimes in the U.S., sometimes outside) in order to cut costs (and jobs - see the report from the Media and Democracy Coalition).
We've seen a few examples of the big carrier approach in this arena - as when Cablevision billed apartment residents $500 after a fire for the DVR that was consumed in the blaze... stay classy, Cablevision.
Another difference between community networks and the big carriers is that big carriers see little reason to upgrade their anemic networks to ensure communities remain competitive in the digital age. As Free Press has long documented [pdf] big companies like AT&T have been investing less in recent years as the U.S. has continued falling in international broadband rankings.
Up here in Minnesota, Qwest has invested in FTTN - what they call fiber-to-the-node. We call it Fiber-to-the-Nowhere. For those who happen to live very close to the node, they get slightly faster DSL speeds that are still vastly asymmetrical. Meanwhile, Qwest has branded this modest improvement for some as "fiber-optic fast" and "heavy duty (HD)" Internet, misleading customers into thinking they are actually going to get faster speeds than Comcast's DOCSIS 3.
Much as I hate to praise the middling DOCSIS 3 upgrade, it certainly offers a better experience than any real results we have seen with Qwest. But as we carefully documented in this report, community networks offer more for less.
Two friends recently moved to Qwest. One, J, was convinced by a Qwest salesperson that Qwest would be much faster so he signed up for a 20Mbps down package.
Twin Cities Broadband in Slow Lane Compared to Nearby Small Community Network
Today, we at MuniNetworks.org have released the first of a series of regional broadband comparisons examining the benefits of community networks. We decided to start with the Minneapolis / St Paul area, where we live and work. Read the Analysis [pdf]
Importance of Customer Service
I was doing some research on the cost of business broadband services in the Twin Cities when I encountered one of the stark differences between local networks accountable to the public and the massive telcos (in this case, Qwest).
I was compiling some numbers on broadband costs and had just gotten through a very quick and efficient chat with Xmission - a service provider on the UTOPIA network.
For some reason, I thought getting similar information from Qwest would also be easy, particularly as we are in the middle of Qwest territory up here in Minnesota. But Qwest's website couldn't tell me what services are available in our area because it was convinced our address and phone number was outside their 14-state operating territory. Our office is in Minneapolis, which is certainly within the Qwest territory.
So I picked up the phone to call Qwest and find out what was available. After 4.5 minutes (which is a long time when one is already annoyed) listening to Qwest advertising in between being assured that my business was VERY important to them, I was connected to a rather friendly woman who tried to help.
For another four minutes, she tried to locate my building to tell us what services are available. She noted several times, as they all do, that the system was slow today and she was waiting for it to update. As a side note, this is the direct consequence of consolidation and the supposed economy of scale that results from bigness: we wait on hold to eventually talk to people across the country (or globe) while they wait for the computer to give us some probably inaccurate information because no one has any actual idea where services are available.
Alas, she found our address and was sorry to report that they only had slow services available for us because they have not yet lit the additional fiber necessary to offer services faster than 5Mbps down and .896Mbps upstream. Perhaps by the end of the year. Our office is located at the edge of the University of Minnesota in a dense area -- hardly the kind of place you would expect Qwest to struggle to offer decent connections.
I'm glad the customer service person was so pleasant because we spoke for almost ten minutes while waiting for their computers to find the information she needed to tell me.