Fast, affordable Internet access for all.
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Content tagged with "cable"
Evidence for the Looming Cable Monopoly
The Netflix Techblog has released a graph of performance by Internet Service Provider - which I modified to demonstrate the Looming cable monopoly as identified by Susan Crawford (and recently discussed here by Mitch Shapiro).
The trend is unmistakable. There are 2 distinct groupings - the cable providers all beat the DSL providers (Verizon is in the middle, likely due to its fast FiOS speeds averaging with much slower DSL connections). At the very bottom is Clear's 4G WiMax - you know, the superfast wireless that is the key to fast broadband!
Communities need to read this chart and take a lesson: the future of broadband is not pretty if you do not have a network that puts your needs first. Cable broadband speeds are increasingly more rapidly than DSL, meaning a local monopoly on high speed broadband, with DSL slowly becoming the modern dial-up.
Fort Wayne, Indiana: What Happens When You Beg
For years, I have heard Graham Richards, former mayor of Fort Wayne Indiana, brag about this "beg, borrow, buy, build" [pdf] philosophy as Mayor. I am not insulting him -- his brash style is quite likable, but it is bragging. He was somewhat of a celebrity among the broadband folks because he both understood the importance of broadband and had convinced Verizon to roll out FiOS in Fort Wayne when they had no plans to. His philosophy is to first beg, then borrow, then buy, and finally build the network if necessary -- a similar approach of many local governments. This is also often the path of least resistance (which, Utah Phillips reminds us, is what makes the river crooked).
Graham is a terrific guy and a great evangelist for broadband (though he never jumped into a frozen Lake Superior) -- but we have long argued that his priorities were wrong in the long term. Not owning the network means the network is unlikely to care about what the community needs. Unfortunately, our philosophy has proven prescient.
When we last discussed Frontier's radical price increases for the FiOS subscribers they bought from Verizon, we failed to note that Fort Wayne was one of the transferred communities. They begged for the network and they have no voice in how it is run. So when Frontier jacks up its FiOS prices and glibly encourages people to drop their high quality FiOS cable for lesser quality DirectTV (with a long contract), the folks in Fort Wayne have little choice but to shrug their shoulders.
Serfs may occasion upon a good Lord of the Manor, but mostly they didn't. Ownership of essential infrastructure offers long term benefits.
Photo used under Creative Commons, courtesy of Jenn Raynes
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.
Defending Public Access on the Television Channels
Of the 254 largest cities cablecasting their government meetings, 197 of them (78%) do so on channels that they themselves manage. Nonprofit organizations manage those channels in 20 of those cities, while the cable companies manage them in 28.These channels provide a crucial public service -- allowing the public to oversee their local government. If anything, we should not be considering decreasing access to this content, we should be finding ways to deliver it on-demand on the television. Ultimately, this programming should be available on all devices -- mobile, computer, television, and should be available as streaming and downloadable podcasts.
State of Telecommunications Policy in the US Today
Excellent lecture.
Susan Crawford: Why Comcast/NBCU Matters
The crucial thing to understand is that high-speed Internet access to the home really is a crushingly-expensive natural monopoly service to install. The telephone companies haven’t found a way to make this work, because it’s so much more expensive to dig up the streets to install fiber than it is to upgrade cable electronics to DOCSIS 3.0. So they have backed off. The cable industry has made its investment, and is ready to reap its rewards of scale and high fixed costs - secure in the knowledge that no competition is coming after it, and having divided up the country neatly among its members. Meanwhile, the telcos are steadly losing fistfuls of money. As Morgan once said of railroads, “The American public seems to be unwilling to admit . . . that it has a choice between regulated legal agreements and unregulated extralegal agreements. We should have cast away more than 50 years ago the impossible doctrine of protection of the public by railway competition.” In the cable world, we are deep into unregulated extralegal agreements, and competition is not going to rescue us.The longer communities wait to build this important infrastructure, the harder it will be. It is hard to imagine national candidate speaking more stridently about the important of the open Internet than did Obama and even he bowed to the pressure of the private Internet access providers. While we should pressure the federal government to regulate in the public interest, we must take responsibility for our future at the local level with smart investments.
Wilson's Greenlight Puts Election Debate on TV
Jon Jimison, Wilson Times editor, said his phone has been ringing off the hook since the debate at Fike High School was announced. Fike holds a little more than 900 people. With the tickets snapped up on the first day of availability, televising the debate was what Jimison wanted. "We're very happy the city and Greenlight are partnering with us on this event," Jimison said. "By having the debate aired on Greenlight it exponentially increases access to the debate so more residents can see it for themselves."Greenlight is the community fiber network built by Wilson's public power company and is owned by the City. Wilson is fortunate to have a publicly owned network able to step in and televise the network. In many towns, the incumbent is a private company that has little interest in helping out in such a situation. Thousands of towns do not even have a local cable presence they can call on if they were in this situation -- big carriers continuously consolidate and shut down local service centers to save money. I recently visited Sibley County, Minnesota, where they are considering a publicly owned fiber-to-the-farm network. The programming they see on their TV comes from another state - Iowa! This is yet another reason communities should have networks that are directly accountable to them.
Fibrant Laughs at Time Warner Cable Puny Upgrades
Salisbury's Fibrant Deals with Incumbent B.S. Before Launch
"We always work with customers to meet their needs and budget."The cable company, right? Well, that is Time Warner Cable's claim in the above Salisbury Post article. Later in the article, a local business owner expressed a different sentiment: "Time Warner has the worst customer service I have ever dealt with." The business owner goes on:
“Fibrant may have these same kind of issues, however I can actually go to the source to deal personally with someone who is vested in the community, not spend two hours on the phone and never solve the problem as I do with TWC,” he said. “Even if pricing is higher, I would make the change.
Community Broadband Network in Braintree Massachusetts Voted Best Internet Provider
With about 1,500 Internet customers solely from word-of-mouth advertising, BELD staff looked to expand the offerings from its HFC network. In 2000, a cable television plan and $3.5 million bond issue were approved at Town meeting. State-of-the-art digital cable service was launched before the end of that year, and by the end of 2001, BELD was serving 4,000 cable and nearly 3,000 Internet customers.As a measure of their success, citizens just voted BELD Broadband the top ISP of the area for the 3rd year in a row ...
The town also voted the department Best Cable TV Provider (for the second year) and Best Phone Service in 2010, casting votes via BestOfSurveys.com with Market Surveys of America, an independent survey company and member of the Better Business Bureau.You can follow BELD Broadband on twitter.