FCC Accused Of Falsely Inflating U.S. Gigabit Broadband Availability

from the rose-colored-glasses dept

However spotty and uncompetitive U.S. broadband is, it's particularly bad when it comes to faster speeds. Why? Because in many areas regional telcos simply refused to upgrade their aging DSL lines since doing so wasn't profitable enough, quickly enough for Wall Street's liking. As a result we've literally let these networks fall apart with no regulatory attention. That, in turn, has given cable giants like Comcast massive monopolies that cover huge swaths of the U.S., resulting in spotty coverage, higher prices, slower speeds, and routinely poor customer service.

Granted, the Ajit Pai and Trump FCC haven't been a big fan of data that accurately measures this problem. The agency has been caught time and time again leaning on data it knows isn't accurate to paint a rosy picture of U.S. broadband, which is designed to justify repeatedly kissing the ass of U.S. telecom monopolies.

Last week, the agency was again caught aggressively overinflating the availability of gigabit-speed broadband in the U.S. According to the official FCC tallies, gigabit broadband speeds are available to roughly 84% of the U.S. public, up from just 4 percent in 2016. This, the FCC will be quick to tell you, is thanks to its decision to kill net neutrality and neuter its consumer protection authority over giant broadband providers.

But when researchers at BroadbandNow did their own independent research to verify that data, they found that time and time again, the FCC's data was not just inaccurate, but immensely incorrect. Places the FCC claimed had gigabit broadband service consistently did not:

"We manually checked 75 addresses in zip codes where the FCC shows gigabit coverage, but BroadbandNow data shows that there is not an internet plan sold at that speed. We checked these addresses by calling internet service providers and asking if gigabit service was available. In all 75 cases, none of them had a gigabit service available."

In reality, somewhere around 56% of Americans may have an active gigabit connection, but even that estimate is considered optimistic given that the FCC's form 477 data collected from ISPs routinely isn't confirmed to be accurate. This creates inaccurate broadband availability maps (including the FCC's $300 million public facing one), which in turn prop up the agency's false claims that U.S. broadband is largely wonderful thanks to mindless deregulation of the sector. Worse, despite repeated criticism, the FCC's methodology remains comically bad, also resulting in an overestimate of both speed and availability:

"Chief among them is the caveat that a provider can mark a given census block – the level of granularity used within the form – as “covered” if so little as one home within the block has service in reality. This has led to widespread issues of over-reporting when it comes to where plans are actually available at the neighborhood level."

There's the added irony that a lot of the growth the U.S. did actually see during this period is thanks to things the Trump FCC either had nothing to do with, like the 2015 AT&T/DirecTV merger conditions requiring additional fiber deployment, or the hundreds of community-run municipal broadband networks agency commissioners have repeatedly demonized and have supported banning outright. This FCC then, in Trumpian fashion, claims that improvements it had nothing to do with, and those that succeeded despite it, justify deregulating Comcast and AT&T.

There's a reason that folks like Ajit Pai, hand in hand with industry, aren't fans of hard, clear data showing U.S. broadband is uncompetitive and overly expensive: somebody might just get the crazy idea to try and do something about it.

Filed Under: ajit pai, broadband, competition, data, fcc, fiber, gigabit, lies, mapping

Comcast Belatedly 'Introduces' Faster Broadband To City It Sued To Keep From Doing The Same Thing Years Ago. It Didn't Go Well

from the reap-what-you-sow dept

Back in 2008, Comcast sued the city of Chattanooga shortly after the city-owned utility (Electric Power Board, or EPB) announced plans to deliver the kind of cheap, ultra-fast broadband Comcast long refused to. After being saddled with legal expenses, EPB ultimately won that lawsuit, and in 2010 began offering ultra-fast fiber broadband. But it wasn't long before the community-owned broadband network ran into another obstacle: a Tennessee state protectionist law -- quite literally written by AT&T and Comcast -- that hamstrung the operation and prohibited it from expanding.

Fast forward nearly a decade, and EPB now offers symmetrical gigabit connections for around $70 a month -- at least to the parts of Chattanooga ISP lobbyists have allowed it to. A 2016 survey by Consumer Reports ranked EPB, outside of Google Fiber, as the only ISP with a truly positive consumer satisfaction rating among the 30 national ISPs ranked by the magazine. Chattanooga's Mayor, meanwhile, has cited EPB as a major contributor to the city's reinvention.

Facing this weird new phenomenon known as competition, Comcast this year finally broke down and brought its own gigabit offering (technically 1 Gbps down, 35 Mbps up) to the city. But Comcast being Comcast, it simply couldn't help but saddle the offering with a number of restrictions. Specifically, Comcast's offering the gigabit option to Chattanooga residents for $70 a month -- but only if they're willing to sign a three year contract. If users refuse -- the price of the service not only is jacked to $140 per month -- but you'll face usage caps and overage fees -- which are only avoidable if you sign the absurdly long contract.

Hoping to get Chattanooga residents excited about the new option when it finally arrived a few weeks ago, Comcast posted an announcement to Facebook "introducing" the city to gigabit broadband service. It didn't go well. The company began taking an absolutely ferocious beating from area locals tired of Comcast's high prices and legendarily-bad customer service:

Take note of the automated Comcast "support" representative that appears to believe they're "helping" without any understanding of the context of the concerns. The beating proceeds like this for an amazingly long time, consistently citing slow speeds, high prices and poor service:

You may notice a consistent theme or two brought up by Chattanooga locals. The beating was so severe it made the Chattanooga Times Free Press, via which Comcast tried to claim that the response to the company's quickly-backfiring ad campaign was a "misunderstanding":

Comcast says the ongoing backlash is the result of a misunderstanding. The cable giant says that it didn't mean to imply it was rolling out the city's first gigabit service. Rather, it was introducing Xfinity's first gigabit service for residential customers.

"Comcast's recent advertisement on Facebook was intended to remind customers in Chattanooga that our 1-gigabit internet service is now available in their area," said Alex Horwitz, vice president for public relations at Comcast. "The service is offered via cable modem technology, which makes Chattanooga one of the first markets in the nation to enjoy this new service."

There's no misunderstanding. Chattanooga locals understand all too well that Comcast has thrown millions at lawmakers on both the local and state level to try and stifle competition, then expected locals to be awed when the company belatedly introduced its own, inferior and restriction-laden product -- nearly a decade later. There's a reason that Tennessee remains one of the least connected states in the union (pdf), and it has absolutely everything to do with Comcast being an anti-competitive bully with a near-total stranglehold over the state legislature and politicians like Marsha Blackburn.

Tennessee isn't alone in spending the majority of its time bending over backwards to please the country's biggest broadband incumbents to its own, obvious detriment. And more restrictive state laws are being passed all the time. And instead of fixing this corruption on the state or federal level, we're now looking at axing consumer privacy protections and killing net neutrality. Because, you know, that's certain to deliver the kind of broadband Utopia Chattanooga and countless other U.S. markets have been begging for over the last decade.

Filed Under: broadband, chattanooga, competition, customer service, gigabit, muni broadband
Companies: comcast, epb

Tennessee Man Builds His Own Gigabit Network Thanks To State's Protectionist Broadband Law

from the protect-the-status-quo dept

We've noted how Tennessee is one of twenty states that has passed state laws, quite literally written by companies like AT&T, prohibiting towns and cities from wiring themselves with broadband -- even if nobody else will. When the FCC announced it would be taking aim at these protectionist broadband laws last year, Tennessee politicians threw a hissy fit, suing the FCC for "violating states rights." That incumbent ISPs are being allowed to write awful state law that's hampering a generation of business development in the state? Not apparently much of a concern.

As an unsurprising result, Tennessee remains one of the least connected broadband states in the nation, and state residents have increasingly been giving beholden state politicians an earful. Those who can, like Tennessee developer John "Thunder" Thornton, have started taking matters into their own hands and building their own gigabit networks. To do so, Thorton had to get the aid of a power cooperative in Alabama, a state that has a slightly less restrictive municipal broadband law in place:

"Unable to gain high-speed broadband at what he deemed an affordable price from AT&T or Charter Communications and limited from service extensions from EPB's ultra-fast Internet in Chattanooga, Thornton created his own Internet service provider last year. The private developer spent more than $400,000 to build his own fiber network and link it with a power cooperative in Stevenson, Ala., where fast broadband is available."

According to Thorton, the money he spent to wire his hilltop development cost a third of what AT&T was charging:

"Thornton said when he approached AT&T about providing Gig service to Jasper Highlands he was quoted a price of $1.3 million to serve his mountaintop development — more than three times what it ended up costing Thornton to build his own network connected to Alabama.

"Our costs are much less, but then I don't have to pay for 27 lobbyists in Nashville like AT&T does," Thornton quipped.

So yeah, Tennessee lawmakers have done such a bang up job letting AT&T write awful state telecommunications law, state residents are being forced to spend their own money to get broadband at a relatively sane price. Sadly, most of the people that can't get decent broadband can't afford to go Thorton's route. And while you'd think the cacophony of complaints from Tennessee residents would be enough to get some movement in the state legislature after a decade, all recent efforts to overturn the state's protectionist law have gone nowhere.

Tennessee's law prevents a popular Chattanooga-based utility-run ISP, EPB, from expanding its up to 10 Gbps offerings into any more markets. But attempts to repeal the law earlier this year went nowhere after mammoth pressure from incumbent ISP lobbyists. When that didn't work, one lawmaker tried to pass a compromise bill that would have allowed EPB to expand into just one neighboring county. That proposal was shot down as well, one of the dissenting votes being that of Rep. Patsy Hazlewood, a former AT&T executive.

That leaves the FCC as the best, current option in getting some of these miserable laws overturned.

As it stands, the FCC is arguing that Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act allows it to preempt state laws that conflict with the agency's Congressional mandate to guarantee "reasonable and timely" broadband deployment. While there's twenty such laws, the FCC is currently trying to overturn just two: in Tennessee and North Carolina; the hope being the legal precedent then rolls downhill. But both states have taken the FCC to court, bravely defending their right to take campaign contributions -- in exchange for protecting incumbent broadband providers from necessary and inevitable evolution.

Filed Under: broadband, fcc, gigabit, john thornton, tennessee