Recently, Sunit Patel, the CFO of CenturyLink, told investors that the company would be focusing on expanding their broadband networks only to the most densely populated parts of its footprint. Further, the company will now focus on opportunities that maximize both their retail operations as well as their new wholesale business that comes from the purchase of Level3. This is not surprising, and this has undoubtedly been the Company’s philosophy for many years. However, this is something that you rarely hear said publicly by the large telcos. And that’s because saying it so plainly also means that the company is admitting that they are not spending capital for the less dense parts of the footprint.

The large telcos like CenturyLink, Verizon and AT&T have been ignoring the rural parts of their network for literally decades. And yet they rarely talk about this – no doubt due to a public relations edict inside the companies. It’s refreshing to hear one of them spell it out.

We’ve heard this same story from both AT&T and Verizon in the past, but couched in different language. They have tried to put a positive spin on their announcements about rural properties by framing them as upgrading customers to wireless instead of wireline. But this is just another way of saying that they want to tear down copper lines in rural areas and charge more to households that happen to live close enough to a cellular tower to serve them. What’s never said is that these rural transitions to wireless will leave a lot of homes that have poor cellular coverage with no broadband and no telephone coverage – a reversal of a hundred-year universal service effort to keep everybody in the country connected.

CenturyLink isn’t in the same position as the other two giant telcos in that they don’t have a cellular option for rural households. The company is in the process of making substantial upgrades to the rural copper network using money provided by the FCC as part of the CAF II program. This upgrade is intended to bring rural DSL speeds up to at least 10/1 Mbps. But this money isn’t covering everybody in rural areas and the company and the FCC excluded millions of the most rural homes from these upgrades. I’ve heard through the grapevine from technicians at some of the big companies that the telcos are using the FCC money to do their best effort and that not everybody will get the promised speeds. The telcos will do what they can with the FCC money until it is all spent.

What this means for rural customer of the big telcos is that good broadband is not coming. Many households are going to be offered somewhat faster DSL or else cellular broadband from the CAF II upgrades – but that’s a one-time upgrade and it’s unlikely that these companies are going to do any more upgrades beyond this one-time shot.

I find it unfortunate that rural households who don’t understand technology and don’t understand these big telcos probably think their broadband speeds will be improved. The press releases from these companies and even from the FCC make it sound like solutions are on the way.

I probably shouldn’t be so cynical, because for a home that doesn’t have any broadband today a 10/1 Mbps connection is going to be a welcome relief. But a connection at that speed is already inadequate today for any home that really wants to use broadband. That kind of speed is not going to easily let different family members use much broadband at the same time. And that speed will grow quickly obsolete as the amount of speed needed and the amount of total annual download for the average family continues to double every three years. Any connection that feels just barely adequate today is going to feel slow in five years and nearly non-functional in a decade.

I have to give credit to Mr. Patel for saying this so directly. There is no clearer signal to rural communities that they need to look for a broadband solution on their own. The big telcos will spend any money they get from the FCC on rural infrastructure, but otherwise the big companies are unlikely to devote any additional capital dollars towards improving rural networks. This is no change from the way it’s been for a long time, but finally we can point to somebody who said out loud what we’ve always known.