The Free Press free book Changing Media has been under the Sunroom Desk paperweight for the past two weeks. The book explores broadband technology deployment, equal and open access to information, and the future of journalism.
The excerpts below describe the current state of telecommunications and broadband policy and the corporate, legal, and legislative moves that have shaped them:
Americans pay more per month for broadband than consumers in all but seven of the 30 nations in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
…Nowhere is this digital mediocrity more evident than in the state of competition in our broadband markets. In the aftermath of the 1996 Act [Federal Telecommunications Act of 1996], the average American consumer had access to more than a dozen ISPs; today, our broadband market is a stagnant duopoly. Nationwide, incumbent phone and cable companies control 97 percent of the fixed-line residential broadband market. When complementary (and slow and expensive) mobile data connections are factored in, the incumbent phone and cable companies’ nationwide market share stands at 95 percent.
…Today, the FCC throws almost $5 billion per year down the drain by inefficiently supporting legacy telephone technologies while, 20 million rural Americans live in areas unserved by any broadband provider. This is especially wasteful given the fact that in the 1996 Act, Congress directed the FCC to treat universal service as “evolving” and to modernize the support system to account for advances in technology.
… While cellular companies have widely deployed 3G-level “high-speed” Internet services, this technology has not yet shown to be a viable substitute for a dedicated fixed home broadband line (what’s more, the same incumbent telephone companies control more than 80 percent of the mobile high-speed Internet market, and these services are far slower and far more expensive than a typical DSL or cable modem line).
… The FCC first dealt with the issue of two-way cable modem communications in its consideration of the merger between AT&T and TCI cable. In that proceeding, many parties petitioned the Commission to require that independent ISPs be granted access to the cable system as a condition of the merger. The Commission in its 1999 ruling declined to mandate such open access on the grounds that the merging parties agreed to allow their customers unfettered open access to the Internet. A year later, in another cable merger proceeding, the FCC once again decided against imposing open access conditions on AT&T Cable because the company made promises that it would negotiate independent access contracts with unaffiliated ISPs. This is a typical pattern in broadband matters at the FCC: Give companies whatever anti-competitive “relief” they are seeking in exchange for unenforceable promises to allow third-party access at some future point.
… Not only are mobile data services not a substitute for fixed broadband, but these 3G devices are so slow they don’t deserve to be classified as “broadband.” Real world speed tests of devices that are supposed to be able to deliver more than 3 Mbps in downstream speeds reveals that these devices can only deliver about a third of that when used in a fixed setting. When used in a mobile setting, the downstream speeds drop well below 1 Mbps (see Figure 23).
… Verizon undertook a large-scale fiber-to-the-home deployment effort. Yet this effort is unique among the other incumbents, and only extends to a fraction of Verizon’s service territory; FiOS is available in less than 10 percent of U.S. homes. Companies like AT&T and Qwest have affirmatively decided against fiber-to-the-home deployments, instead choosing to milk the legacy copper network for years to come. AT&T, and, to a much lesser extent, Qwest, have finally recently deployed some limited “VDSL” upgrades. But overseas telcos implemented similar “innovated broadband capability” upgrades years ago and are already deploying even faster VDSL2+ pair-bonded technology.
This earlier post contains excerpts of the book dealing with internet open access, or “net neutrality.”