Category Archives: Jeers

Bad news.

Bill Alert: SB190 also targeting UTOPIA, could scuttle Macquarie deal

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It appears the legislature is determined to chase off a $300M investment in our state’s broadband infrastructure to appease CenturyLink. Sen. John Valentine is running SB190 which has been very specifically crafted to prevent any UTOPIA city from using the same utility fee that Provo has to pay down the bonds. Moving to a utility fee to provide transparency on the cost of the UTOPIA bonds has been a key part of the Macquarie discussions so far, so it could very well put the deal in jeopardy.

Just like with Rep. Curt Webb, all you have to do is follow the money. Since 2008, Sen. Valentine has taken $200 from the Utah Rural Telecom Association, $1500 from CenturyLink/Qwest, and a whopping $7250 from Comcast with at least one donation every single year. He’s heard from the incumbents; now he needs to hear from us.

SB190 isn’t currently on the Senate Business and Labor Committee agenda, but I’ll let you know when it is. If it passes, it could hamper the deal to have Macquarie complete gigabit fiber to over 150K homes and prevent them from expanding beyond current UTOPIA cities. Now is the time to contact the members of the committee and tell them to kill this bill.

Bill Alert: HB60 dropped from the agenda AGAIN

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I’m beginning to think that Rep. Curt Webb is trying to win a “most indecisive legislator” award or something. I’ve gotten word (from three sources) that HB60 has been pulled from the House  Government Operations Committee hearing yet again. There’s no indication yet on when it will now be heard, but we’re certain to get at least 24 hours of notice. With the President’s Day holiday coming up, I think we can at least stand down for the weekend.

As always, I’ll provide updates when they’re available.

Zombie Bill: HB60 comes back, committee hearing Friday at 8AM

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Despite looking like it’s dead, HB60 is coming back for a committee hearing on Friday at 8AM. This is the best chance to kill the bill for good, so it’s very important that as many opponents as possible come to the hearing and voice their opposition. The bill is currently fourth on the agenda, so even if you’re a bit late, you’ll likely be able to get a chance to speak.

Now is the time to email, call, or visit members of the committee to urge them to oppose this bill. Showing up will make the most difference. If it dies in committee, there’s a good chance it won’t come to a floor vote at all.

Bill Alert: HB60 held again

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Rep. Curt Webb has held HB60 again to make some additional modifications. It will be heard again either Wednesday or Friday. I’ll post more as it becomes available, though notice of the agenda change wasn’t made until minutes before the committee meeting. CenturyLink is definitely watching this one as their head lobbyist, Eric Isom, was spotted outside the committee room.

Rep. Webb was also on a radio interview opposite Pete Ashdown and was reportedly unable to articulate a good reason to pass the bill. I’m hoping he withdraws it before there’s more egg on his face.

More than a coincidence? HB60 would kill access to UTOPIA as CenturyLink preps business gigabit

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We’d like to think that incumbents are a well-oiled lobbying machine, but they often do things so ham-fisted and amateurish that you’re left wondering if Gomer Pyle is in charge. This week is proving no different. After getting a legislator who took their money to propose cutting off UTOPIA at the kneecaps, CenturyLink announced that they would be offering gigabit service to office parks along the Wasatch Front. You know, the same ones that HB60 really wants to keep UTOPIA from providing service to.

So let’s recap our timeline here:

  • CenturyLink sends campaign cash to a legislator.
  • Said legislator runs a bill to kick UTOPIA out of business parks that paid to have the service built to them.
  • CenturyLink comes in behind that and sells their own service, most likely at a much higher cost. This includes state agencies such as UDOT, UEN, and UTA.

Could it be any more obvious as to what’s going on around here? CenturyLink has convinced a legislator, Rep Curt Webb, to run a bill to kick their competition out so that they can take those customers. I’m furious about that arrangement. You should be too. It’s time to yell about this one from the rooftops.

Bill Alert: HB60 would ban UTOPIA construction outside member cities

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In a completely ill-considered move, Rep Curt Webb is running a bill, HB60, which would restrict any municipal fiber network (but, curiously, not cable, DSL, wireless, or any other technology) from building anything outside the boundaries of member cities. This is aimed squarely at UTOPIA only, and it is meant to be a purely punitive measure.

So what prompted this? Probably the developers and companies who paid out of their own pockets to expand the network. Hamlett Homes extended it into South Salt Lake communities, and a number of businesses near the backbone but outside of member cities have done the same. These extensions help lessen the burden on taxpayers as a whole by shifting more of the costs onto subscribers, but it doesn’t cost any city a red cent.

As the bill is currently written, UTOPIA wouldn’t just be prevented from building to people willing to pay for it. They could also be required to shut down any existing services and be prohibited from maintaining their backbone that links cities together. It would effectively be a death sentence on any network that isn’t entirely within member cities AND can connect to an exchange point to reach ISPs and the rest of the Internet.

Naturally, I had to follow the money and it explains a lot. Rep. Webb has taken contributions from CenturyLink and the Utah Rural Telecom Association. What’s he got planned next? Duplicating the anti-Google Fiber bill from Kansas?

Is CenturyLink About to Ditch Copper?

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CenturyLinkIt’s no small secret that Verizon has been working really, really hard to ditch copper access lines. In areas where they haven’t rolled out FIOS, they’re letting older copper plants rot on the vine, ceding the wired space in those communities to the local cable companies. In areas of New York where Hurricane Sandy wiped out the copper plant, they’re flat-out refusing to rebuild any landlines, instead offering a high-margin fixed wireless service.

AT&T hasn’t been too much better. Their anemic speeds on FTTN constantly lag behind their cable counterparts. Like Verizon, most of their money comes from wireless operations, so that’s where their efforts have been focused. In fact, when was the last time you heard anything about U-Verse in the news?

It seems to me that CenturyLink is ready to follow suit. They recently announced that they would be building fiber to 19-20K cell towers in their service areas. I can’t say I blame them. This is a highly profitable business, one that I wish UTOPIA or its providers could crack. Given the slow and steady loss of both landlines and broadband customers (the latter due to a lack of network upgrades), I’m sure they’re looking at whatever boosts the bottom line.

You’ll note, however, that upgrading DSL users to ADSL2+, their FTTN solution, is a footnote. Their CFO and SVP more-or-less states it outright:

“We try to design the routes to bring fiber to the towers to where they can serve other needs that we have to in terms of providing fiber closer to business customers and closer to residential customers to provide some of the higher bandwidth services,” Ewing said.

That’s right: CenturyLink is stating rather plainly that their main concern is to get fiber to those cell towers, then, if it’s “feasible” (read: dirt cheap), you can have the leftover table scraps. Cable companies (and most other phone companies) have posted subscriber gains in broadband, yet CenturyLink, who hasn’t upgraded speeds past 40Mbps since 2009, is losing thousands of customers per quarter. Odds are good that any areas getting this fiber will just now be moving off of vanilla DSL to the same 40Mbps speed (or lower) that they’ve been pushing for the last four years. When Comcast is pushing 105Mbps and UTOPIA and Google Fiber are doing gigabit, how is it anything but a giant middle finger to current and potential customers?

CenturyLink is choosing to let copper customers loose for the same reasons that Verizon and AT&T are: it’s expensive to provide service, and they can make the same or more money from wireless (albeit on different ends) with lower costs and a lot less competition. The copper network has paid for itself many times over, so writing it off as it continues to degrade is no big deal. The money they invest in cell towers has a much better ROI than investing in wireline services, so what limited funds they have will be going there.

This isn’t just a problem for CenturyLink customers. As they slowly back away from consumers and shift their core business to wholesale transport for other businesses, most users in Utah will be left with just the cable company, Comcast, to fill the void. With only a single wireline provider in most of the state, speeds will stagnate, prices will rise, and service will worsen. When there’s no incentive to compete, why would you?

Google Fiber: The Deal That Keeps Getting Worse

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landoIt’s no secret I’ve soured on Google Fiber, and I was pretty loud in saying that Provo wasn’t making a very good deal with the advertising giant for iProvo. They threw open access under the bus. They killed the prospect of public-private partnerships. They gave businesses the cold shoulder. Now they’re going one further: their boilerplate ToS bans running servers just like Comcast and CenturyLink.

This matters. It matters a lot. The point of a faster upload speed isn’t just to send pictures to Facebook faster. It would let you share content directly with other users. Most ISPs go with an asymmetrical connection precisely to dissuade you from creating content, preferring to drive you to content consumption that costs them less bandwidth. A symmetrical connection is supposed to facilitate this.

What should we expect to see? Will a small business be cut off because they decided to host their own mail server? Will a start-up be scrambling to move their site to a hosting company (with additional costs) because they setup a web server? Would someone’s home Minecraft server for their friends result in a disconnection of service? The history of other ISPs suggests that it will be enforced unevenly and without explanation.

Google seems to have a habit of altering the terms of the deal in ways that favor them. It’s much easier to just have your own hosting your can rely on. Picking up a cheap server using a HostGator Cyber Monday Deal 2016 coupon is a smarter, easier decision with less mental stress in the end. Provo, you’d going to start feeling a lot like Lando Calrissian, that the deal is getting worse all the time. Don’t let Darth Google get away with it. If you can.

Is CenturyLink doing fiber-to-the-home or fiber-to-the-press release?

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Before I could publish this, Chris Mitchell at MuniNetworks.org did a much more in-depth version of what I wrote here. I highly recommend reading his article for the nitty gritty details. Unsurprisingly, we both reached the same conclusion.

When Google announced they would be building a gigabit network in Austin, AT&T wasted no time trying to jump on that bandwagon for damage control. Of course, nobody believed it. How could a company who has shown no interest in network investment suddenly decide that they might want to get on that? I find myself in the same position with CenturyLink’s announcement of an FTTH testbed in Omaha. Moreso, they’re not even equipped to do it.

Bear in mind that this is going to be a very small deployment, just 48,000 homes. It’s focused on an area where CenturyLink provides TV service, a product they haven’t even put into trial in most markets after shutting it down and starting it back up again. This makes some sense as most fiber networks need multiple product offerings to make the network achieve the desired revenue goals. That also means that areas without TV trials are probably not likely to see the service anytime soon.

Then there’s the matter of money. CenturyLink is a cash-poor, debt-heavy behemoth that’s been shedding voice customers to cell carriers and broadband customers to anything that isn’t them. When was the last time they did a new ADSL2+ footprint anywhere in Utah? It’s been several years now with not a red cent of network improvement. Omaha is a testbed not because they don’t sorely need to upgrade their entire network, but because that’s likely all the money they can afford to spend. Without a highly profitable wireless business or a lead against their cable competitors, it doesn’t look like the picture is going to improve anytime soon either. Investors don’t seem to think so.

I’m sure CenturyLink will build out their “testbed” in Omaha. Heck, they’ll probably even expand it to the surrounding suburbs. But will they pick up enough steam to push it nationwide? I wouldn’t put money on it.

The Alternate Reality of the Standard-Examiner

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The Standard-Examiner published an anti-UTOPIA editorial yesterday that, quite frankly, makes me wonder if some sort of illicit substances are in use by their editorial board. Granted, these kinds of opinion pieces are not uncommon, but this one sets a new “standard” in incoherence and inaccuracy. Allow me to “examine” the various ways in which their editorial could only make sense in a conveniently parallel dimension.

Fife wondered why suggested prices quoted by Beehive Broadband are so pricey…

Actually, $45 per month for service is actually not too shabby. The only plan that Comcast offers near that price is both a temporary 6-month introductory offer and significantly less speed. It also undercuts Beehive’s own pricing on their own FTTH network ($60/mo and up to a $895 install) for what I can assume is less speed (20Mbps both ways). On UTOPIA, they charge either $45 per month (half of which disappears in about 20 years) or $22 per month with a $2750 install cost. In a pure apples-to-apples comparison, UTOPIA is offering a very competitive price, especially when you compare like speeds (or as like as you can get) from Comcast and CenturyLink. But they deny this reality as well:

If the Beehive Broadband deal is approved, customers will still have to pay Internet prices that frankly, are not very much different from prices that can be found in the private sector.

Oh really? Comcast charges around $60/mo for 25Mbps down, 4Mbps up. CenturyLink will do 40Mbps down, 5Mbps up for the same price. XMission and InfoWest are happy to sell you a 50Mbps bi-directional connection for that much, and $23 of that monthly cost vanishes when you’ve paid off the connection.

The fact-free piece doesn’t end there, though. Consider this gem:

While elected officials in UTOPIA-yoked cities are for the most part, too stubborn to admit they made a mistake hooking up with the public/private group…

Wait, what? Cities didn’t join UTOPIA, cities created UTOPIA. It’s their baby. As much as choice elected officials like to disown it for cheap political points, that’s about as asinine as insisting that the fire department is a separate entity.

While it’s pretty obvious that the editorial board is already failing math and civics, they decide to flunk out on history as well.

And again, as mentioned, while UTOPIA may provide quality services, the prices are still similar to what could have been garnered without cities having shelled out millions in dollars.

That’s another thing that just isn’t so. Brigham City tried for years to get Comcast and Qwest to deploy more broadband with no success. Lindon even offered to pay them for it and was declined. Tremonton residents could barely get 1.5Mbps DSL, a connection that would have been top-notch more than a decade ago. Once they decided to join UTOPIA, higher-end services magically became feasible in their town and the incumbents got busy digging. Had they not joined, what would they have right now?

I don’t necessarily have an issue with someone opposing UTOPIA. I do, however, have a problem with people who have zero grasp of the facts and try to do so. It appears that the editorial board of the Standard-Examiner is such an uninformed group, although to such a degree as to have me question if they are perhaps in the wrong line of work. We expect our journalists to dig in a find facts, a task to which they appear to be ill-suited.