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Content tagged with "qwest"

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Minnesota's Most Rural Counties Get FTTH Following Stimulus Awards

I just spoke with Danna MacKenzie of Cook County and Gary Fields of National Public Broadband (working with Lake County) to find out just how excited they are about yesterday's announcement of broadband stimulus awards. Both Lake and County (separate projects) have been funded to build fiber-to-the-home networks to everyone on the power grid in the region. They are pretty excited. In a few years, these North Shore Communities will likely have better broadband options than the metro region of Minneapolis and Saint Paul -- a far cry from the beginning of this year when a single fiber cut stranded the whole north shore. Bob Kelleher at Minnesota Public Radio covered the awards:

Combined, they will connect 37,000 residents, 1,000 businesses and 98 institutions such as hospitals and schools.

Cook County actually has a double whammy - they already stood to benefit from the North East Service Cooperative, which is building high capacity fiber-optic lines through the North Shore to offer middle-mile backhaul and connect local government facilities and schools. As of yesterday, they will also get a fiber-to-the-home network from the Arrowhead Electric Cooperative. Cook, currently served in part by Qwest, has little access to true broadband -- some 37% have access to anemic DSL connections and the rest are stuck with dial-up. Details of the award from Kelleher at MPR:

Joe Buttweiler, who directs membership services with the Lutsen-based Arrowhead Electric Cooperative, said 70 percent of the federal award is a grant and the remainder a loan. He said the cooperative will add another $600,000 for capital.

Back in April, Blandin's Broadband blog published the short summary of the Arrowhead project:

Private Sector Broadband Providers are Anti-Competition

We previously covered Qwest's admitted attempts to drive out competition in Utah, but the story has continued with the personal story of another subscriber forced to leave his independent service provider for Qwest's services.
I called XMission and they said the speed problem was with Qwest. I called the Utah PSC and got an expert on the line who explained the Telecommunications Act of 1996. He confirmed Qwest being able to choke out other ISPs on substandard speed-limited connections, while Qwest offers much higher speeds than our earlier DSL if Qwest is ISP. We sadly switched, after calling XMission and commiserating with them about this monopolistic practice. The PSC acknowledged this seems anti-competitive, but it’s the law. Who made such a law for Utah!?
As we have said on numerous occasions, without community broadband networks, the future of broadband competition is quite bleak... at least in the U.S. Canada's telecom regulator has shown far more courage than our FCC.

Broadband Competition is Pathetic, But Even That is Too Much For Qwest

A Qwest sales person admits on tape that Qwest is trying to eliminate competition by purging the network of independent ISPs. Listen to the conversation here.

Customer: "Qwest is trying to eliminate competition?"

Customer Service Rep: "In a way."

Undoubtedly, Qwest will (if it has not already) disavow this quote and suggest the CSR just didn't know what she was talking about. But they are clearly trying to remove competition - something we have witnessed in the Twin Cities of Minnesota as the good ISPs (for instance, IP House) are slowly strangled because they are not permitted resell the faster circuits. Additionally, I believe allegations that Qwest deliberately allows more congestion on lines they resell than lines where they are the sole retailer. Our office uses IP House and we have never had anything but good experiences with them. But we need a faster services, so we can choose between slightly faster options with Qwest or much faster options with Comcast. We have no choice but to take service from a crappy massive company if we want to maintain productivity. Some would claim that we have additional choices because USIW runs a Wi-Fi network in Minneapolis (subsidized by the City) but the network's speeds cannot compare to Comcast and it is far less reliable than the wired network alternatives (though Qwest's reliability in some areas may actually be worse). I found this story via the Free UTOPIA blog but it links to the original source on Xmission - a UTOPIA service provider and DSL resellter.

Colorado's Least Populous County Wires Itself

Ran across this interesting story out of Silverton, Colorado - where Qwest has refused to provide a reliable telecommunications connection to the least populous county in Colorado. Recall that Qwest's refusal to offer redundancy in Minnesota's most rural County led to a total communications blackout for twelve hours, shutting down public safety and businesses alike. Silverton is the only town in rural San Juan County. The City is splitting the costs ($121K) of a new publicly owned fiber-optic loop with the County and apparently the State is offering a grant for the balance. As we emphasize time and time again, cities that move from leasing multiple lines from the incumbent to owning their network radically increase available speeds while cutting costs. Silverton estimates it will save 50% or more in its telecom expenditures. These savings will pile up over time because owning the network typically leads to decreasing costs over time whereas leasing lines offers much less control over future telecom budgets. But perhaps the more interesting aspect of this story is that San Juan County is the only County in the state not connected with fiber-optic lines. Qwest has:
a 10-year, $37 million contract to provide high-speed connectivity to every county seat in Colorado, forming a statewide network known as the Multi-use Network, or MNT.
To save money, Qwest is using a microwave (wireless) connection for San Juan County, which is far less reliable than would be a fiber-optic connection. For such a rural area, microwave might be a good secondary connection, offering a backup in the case of a fiber cut or natural disaster. However, making that the primary connection is what happens when Qwest is calling the shots. Qwest is not looking out for the interests of first responders, residents, or businesses in Silverton, it is looking for "a compelling business case" in their own words. And this is exactly why Qwest should not be in charge of essential infrastructure.

Free UTOPIA Podcast - Discussion with Provider Brigham.Net

Jesse Harris continues his monthly podcast show with an interview of Ken Sutton from Brigham.Net - a service provider from Brigham City that recently started offering services on the UTOPIA network. Brigham.Net has developed a very loyal customer base -- an impressive feat as it was dependent on leasing loops from Qwest, its biggest competitor. In that part of Utah, Qwest still has to share its lines with third parties but Qwest still goes out of its way to make life difficult for those third parties. Qwest poached customers from Brigham.Net - a common practice if one talks to any ISP that has leased lines from Qwest to resell. By getting on the open access network, Brigham.Net has expanded its customer base - it is on track to double the customer base in Brigham City when the UTOPIA network is fully available to residents. The discussion is interesting and shows why unbundling requirements are inferior to a publicly owned network operating on an open access basis.

Minnesota Providers Push for Draconian Limits on Public Networks in Minnesota

Minnesota is one of the eighteen states that have enacted specific barriers to prevent the public sector from building networks (protecting incumbents from any competition). It presently has the uniquely high - 65% - referendum requirement on communities that want to build a network that will offer telephone services (which thereby includes all fiber-to-the-home triple play networks). However, up in Cook County, they could not meet that threshold. They had a referendum in which 56% voted yes - a majority but not satisfactorily large for a 1915 MN law. State Representative Dill and Senator Bakk realized this was crazy - state law set too high a bar for the County they represented. Cook would be unable to build the network they need - remember that the whole County was isolated following a single fiber cut because Qwest does not invest in communities where profits are scant (let's not blame Qwest though - private companies are not supposed to be charities and they should not be expected to build the essential infrastructure communities need). Rep Dill and Sen Bakk introduced a bill to reduce the 65% to 50% referendum but the private providers must have thrown some sort of tantrum. Before the bill could even be heard, incumbent providers had reached some sort of a deal with Rep Dill and Sen Bakk, agreeing that they would not oppose the bill if it only applied to Cook County. Cook would be able to build its network, but all other local governments, many very rural and in similar but not equal severity, would be stuck with the 65% referendum requirement if they wanted to build a similar network. In the House, this "compromise" has flown through multiple committees with little debate. In the Senate, some fought back, wondering if perhaps massive incumbent providers shouldn't be the ones to determine if communities can build modern networks -- especially when the providers won't. So the bill was introduced in the Senate. It was quickly amended to the incumbent demanded-text, but was then amended back again to a 50% majority for all MN (better than the 65% in current law). This was all in the Senate Committee dealing with Telecom.

Qwest Isolates Entire Minnesota Counties with Fiber Cuts

For some 12 hours last week, entire communities found themselves without access to telecommunications due to a fiber cut to a Qwest cable that services the entire region. This is not the first time such a cut has marooned everything from Homeland Security to long distance phone calls to businesses that can no longer accept credit card transactions -- but Qwest has refused to invest in a redundant cable, showing their disregard for those communities. I wonder how many businesses were hurt by their sudden and unplanned isolation from clients, partners, and others. How many missed contracts or deadlines? It shows the insanity of putting barriers before communities that are trying to build the very networks companies like Qwest promise but never deliver (barriers like the 65% referendum to offer telephone services for publicly owned networks). Both Lake and Cook Counties are waiting to hear the status of their applications for federal broadband stimulus funds, with which they will build broadband networks. Companies like Qwest and Mediacom have opposed new networks in an effort to protect their turf, even while refusing to invest in those areas because they do not generate sufficient profits. These County initiatives have not been denied stimulus funding but have also not moved into the "due diligence" phase, placing them in limbo and forcing them to prepare additional applications for the second round of funding before they even know why their application was denied (if it is denied) in the first round. Somewhere, Joseph Heller is smiling.* MPR provided good coverage of this fiber cut even though they did not air an explanation as to why Qwest finds it reasonable to keep these communities connected with a single cable.
Bank ATM's failed. No one could use their credit cards. But as bad as that was for business, the 12-hour-long outage knocked out what the federal government calls a "vital part of our nation's emergency response system." The outage killed 911 emergency service in Cook County, Chief Deputy Leif Lunde said. ... With no 911 service, county officials turned to volunteer firefighters to field emergency calls from normally un-staffed fire halls. Fire truck radios relayed the information back to Grand Marais.

Dubuque Considers Its Telecom Options

I caught an interesting article asking whether Dubuque, Iowa, should build a publicly owned broadband network. Iowa already has a number of publicly owned networks, mostly cable HFC networks, that serve communities. The article starts with some history, noting that the small community of Hawarden, Iowa, was the first to build a public cable system in the state and had to defend its rights to do so in court.
The northwest Iowa community of about 2,500 people more than a decade ago built a $4 million cable system, only to be temporarily shut down by an Iowa Supreme Court injunction. Hawarden survived the court's order prohibiting municipalities from being in the telecommunications business, and in many respects blazed the trail for publicly run cable, Internet and phone service in Iowa.
More communities may be considering building their own networks (though they will build now with fiber rather than HFC) following Iowa's statewide franchising rules that preempt local authority, giving greater power to private cable companies. The way it was written, existing franchise agreements may be nullified if a competitor announces plans to serve the community. Fortunately, many Iowa communities voted to formed telecommunications utilities back in 2005, though few have yet exercised that authority. Unfortunately, the article's author was clearly misled by either Qwest or Mediacom's public relations flacks because he wrote about UTOPIA, as though the problems of a purely open access model under a different regulatory environment poses important lessons for communities in Iowa that may build their own networks. The successes and failures of UTOPIA teach us very little about how Iowa communities should move forward. Smaller Iowa communities do have a serious disadvantage - building modern networks is very difficult the smaller they get. Below 5,000 subscribers, it can be difficult to make the network pay for itself (though exceptions exist) - suggesting to me that joint efforts combining communities could be a good option. Unfortunately, though the technology has no problems crossing political boundaries, the politics are much more difficult.

Longmont, Colorado, Considers Broadband Options

As I noted previously, a community in Colorado - Longmont - will soon vote on whether the local government should be allowed to sell retail Internet services. This community has tried a number of approaches to expanding broadband competition but have not yet succeeded in getting the networks they need. The local paper opposes the measure. However, the editorial frames the issue in a curious way. It claims the ballot measure will "override" state law, which is utterly false. State law says the community has to approve it before they can do it - so the City is complying with the state law.
Those against the measure point to failed municipal-run telecommunication efforts as another reason not to support this measure. That’s fairly compelling, especially when we have no specifics about what type of telecommunications projects the city will pursue.
Those against the measure claim that municipal-run telecommunications efforts have failed. They often point at successful community networks (or even failed privately owned networks, oddly enough), call them failures, and rightly assume that no one will fact-check the assertions. Often, they will gin up some false numbers that suggest a far-off network has lost a lot of money (using their same methodology, it would be crazy for anyone to borrow to buy a house). Regarding the concern over what specific project the city will pursue if authorized, this is an interesting catch-22 because it makes little sense to expend a lot of money on a business plan before a community has the authority to build something. Either decision is difficult and requires a trust in the local leadership and democratic process. Comments to that editorial rightly note that Comcast and Qwest will not prioritize investments in Longmont until they see competition. The private sector has failed to generate competition on its own, so the community is smart to consider spurring competition themselves.