Tag Archives: MO

CenturyLink Ready to Launch Gigabit Broadband in Springfield, MO

It’s rare to be surprised by events in the telecom world. The announcement last summer that CenturyLink will be an ISP on a city-owned fiber network in Springfield MO was one of the most surprising things I’ve heard since the announcement years ago that Google was going to become a gigabit ISP. The joint venture has been progressing and CenturyLink says it should be adding customers in the community this spring.

The partnership between the city and CenturyLink is interesting:

  • CenturyLink has agreed to lease the network over 15-years at a payment that made the city comfortable enough to build the network. The city says they won’t have to raise electric rates since the lease revenue stream justifies the cost of the new $120 million fiber expansion.
  • The city is providing dark fiber and CenturyLink will provide all of the electronics. There have been no public announcements saying which party pays for the fiber drops. Since this is being touted as an expansion of smart-grid, it would make sense that the city owns the drops.
  • The arrangement is described as non-exclusive, meaning that other ISPs are free to serve on the network. The announcements don’t say if CenturyLink gets a head-start over other ISPs through some period of exclusivity before open access kicks in. That’s been the case in similar arrangements.
  • CenturyLink is offering $65 gigabit broadband ‘for-life’ with a guarantee that the price will never be increased. Speeds are advertised ‘up to 940 Mbps. In other CenturyLink markets the gigabit product requires paperless billing and prepayment with a credit card or bank debit. CenturyLink charges $5 for an optional WiFi modem.

There are a few other similar well-known arrangements in the industry. This is similar to the Google Fiber arrangement with Huntsville, Alabama. It’s similar to the Ting arrangement in Westminster, Maryland and Charlottesville, Virginia. What’s unusual and surprising about this deal is that it’s with one of the big incumbent telcos. However, CenturyLink is not the incumbent in Springfield and enters the market purely as an outside ISP. CenturyLink will be competing side-by-side with AT&T, the first instance of two large incumbents telcos competing in a residential market. The other competitor and the incumbent cable provider in Springfield is Mediacom.

There are some in the industry touting this as a new paradigm for bringing gigabit fiber – but I’m not sure that is so. Like with any business model, all of the facts and the numbers must line up for any market to be a good target for overbuilding with fiber. It’s possible that there are unique characteristics of Springfield that might make this model hard to replicate in most other places.

Springfield owns a municipal electric utility and the utility decided years ago to build fiber to serve its own needs and to bring fiber to businesses in the city. The city started this new venture already owning 700 miles of fiber – much of which will likely be the backbone for building the last-mile for this venture. Springfield is also touting this as a smart grid initiative, meaning the electric utility is likely picking up a piece of the cost of the new fiber construction. There is a good chance that the math would not look nearly so favorable for a city without an electric utility – because in that case the venture would be starting with no existing fiber and the new fiber venture would have to absorb 100% of the cost of the new construction. I’ve looked at this lease model for cities that don’t own existing fiber or an electric utility and the math is often not pretty.

Don’t read those last statements as a criticism of the fiber lease model, but rather just as a recognition that all of the financial factors must align just right for this kind of venture to work. Any city owning an electric utility ought to do the math and consider this model. Cities with low construction costs for fiber might also be good candidates.

The surprising part of this arrangement is that this is being done by CenturyLink. This is an incumbent telco that is well known throughout rural America for operating lousy copper networks. The company has been ignoring the customers in rural markets, and CenturyLink customers living in rural Missouri can’t be thrilled to hear that the company will be offering gigabit fiber in a new market while continuing to ignore their broadband plight. CenturyLink is not going to sink a lot of capital in Springfield, but it’s paying for the cost of electronics and installation.

I have to give CenturyLink credit for tackling this venture. They were building fiber-to-the-home networks before Jeff Storey, the new CEO put a kibosh on spending capital for projects earning ‘infrastructure returns’. The FTTP businesses is an economy of scale business and CenturyLink can take advantage of the staff and platforms they already have in place to operate efficiently in Springfield. Since this is dark fiber the company can still do everything the CenturyLink way – which is an important factor for a big telco. We’ll have to wait to see if this is a new business line for CenturyLink or if Springfield is a unique case.

The Pushback Against Smart Cities

If you follow the smart city movement in the US you’ll quickly see that Kansas City, Missouri touts itself as the nation’s smartest city. The smart city movement got an early launch there when the City was announced as the first major market for Google Fiber. That gigabit fiber network attracted numerous small tech start-ups and the City also embraced the idea of being a technology leader.

The city’s primary smart city venture so far has been to bring smart city technology to a 54-block area in downtown. But this area only covers about 1% of the total area of the City. The City is currently contemplating expanding the smart city into the neglected east side neighborhoods near downtown. This is an area with boarded up storefronts and vacant lots, and the hope is that investing in smart city will bring a boost to this area as a way to kick-start economic development.

So far the primary smart city applications include smart parking, smart intersections, smart water meters and smart streetlights. The city also installed video surveillance cameras along the 2.2-mile downtown corridor.  The existing deployment also includes public WiFi provided through 25 kiosks placed throughout the smart city neighborhood. As of last fall there had been a reported 2.7 million log-ins to the WiFi network.

In the east side expansion WiFi will take on a more significant role since it’s estimated that only 40% of the residents in that area have home broadband today – far below the national average of 85%. The city is also looking to implement a rapid transit bus line into the east side as part of the smart grid expansion.

The new expansion into the east side is slated to have more surveillance including new features like gun shot detectors. There has been public fear voiced that this system can be used to disadvantage the largely minority population of the area.

The biggest hurdle to an expanded smart city services is money. The initial deployment was done through a public-private partnership. The city contributed $3.7 million, which it largely borrowed. Sprint, which manages the WiFi network contributed about $7 million and Cisco invested $5 million. The cost to expand the smart city everywhere has been estimated to cost half a billion.

It is the public-private partnerships that bring a troublesome aspect to the smart city concept. It’s been reported that Sprint collects data from those who log in to the free WiFi network – information like home zip code and results of Internet searches. It’s also been reported that Sprint can track people who have once subscribed to the service, even if they don’t log in. Sprint won’t say how it collects and uses customer data – but as we are learning throughout the tech world, it is the monetization of customer data that fuels many ISPs and online services.

There is also growing public concern about surveillance cameras. It’s starting to become clear that Americans don’t want to be tracked by cameras, especially now with the advent of decent facial recognition technology. We saw Seattle have to tear down a similar surveillance network before it ever went into service. We’re seeing huge pushback in Toronto about a proposed smart city network that includes surveillance.

We only have to look at China to see an extreme example of the misuse of this technology. The country is installing surveillance in public places and in retail areas and tracks where people are and what they do. China has carried this to such an extreme that they are in the process of implementing a system that calculates a ‘citizen score’ for every person. The country goes so far as to notify employers of even minor infractions of employees like jaywalking.

It’s going to be an uphill battle, perhaps one that never can be won for US cities to implement facial recognition tracking. People don’t want the government to be tracking where they are and what they do every time they go out into public. The problem is magnified many times when private companies become part of the equation. As much as the people in Kansas City might not fully trust the City, they have far less reason to trust an ISP like Sprint. Yet the smart city networks are so expensive it’s hard to see them being built without private money – and those private partners want a chance to get a return on their investment.

Plummeting Franchise Fees

The City of Creve Coeur, Missouri recently filed a suit against Netflix and Hulu claiming that the companies should be paying the same local franchise fees as Charter Communication, which is the incumbent video provider in the community. The City claims that it is losing franchise tax revenues as people cut the cord and they want to tax the companies that are taking that business away from Charter. They argue that Netflix and Charter ride the same wires and rights-of-way to deliver content and both should be taxed the same.

My quick reaction is that the lawsuit will get little traction due to the numerous differences between Charter and Netflix. However, I’ve learned over the years that it’s hard to predict tax disputes and it’s certainly possible that a judge might agree that Netflix can be taxed. If the courts see this as a regulatory battle the case will likely get referred to the FCC, but there’s no telling what happens if it’s instead considered as a tax dispute.

Most cable franchise taxes around the country are levied against the amount of cable TV revenues sold in a community. The nature of franchise agreements varies across the country and there are some jurisdictions that also tax telephone and broadband services.

There some interesting differences between a cable provider like Charter and Netflix.

  • I’ve read a lot of franchise agreements and one of the most common characteristics of these agreements is that, while the assess the tax levy on cable revenues, the basis of the agreement is to grant access to public rights-of-way to allow a cable provider to hang wires or bury cable in the community. Charter owns a wired network in the City while a company like Netflix does not.
  • Franchise agreements almost always create an obligation for a cable provider to serve everywhere in the community, or at least to the parts of the community that have a certain level of home density. For instance, cable companies are often required to build wires to any parts of town that have at least 15 or 20 homes per linear mile. The same obligation can’t really be applied to Netflix – they can only sell to homes that have sufficient broadband to use their service.
  • There are often other requirements that come with a franchise. For instance, the franchise holder might be required to dedicate a channel for local government programming. Franchise holders are often required to provide fiber or bandwidth to the City. Netflix wouldn’t be able to meet any of these obligations.

I don’t know if the City ultimately wants Netflix and Hulu to sign a franchise agreement, but if they do the City might not like the result. Current regulations require that a City can’t demand concessions from one franchise holder that doesn’t apply to all franchise holders. I can picture a stripped-down franchise agreement for Netflix for which Charter would immediately demand to use if Netflix was excused from any obligations required of Charter.

The FCC does not want this issue handed to them because it opens the door to defining who is a cable company. The agency opened an investigation into this issue a few years ago and quietly let it drop, because it’s not a decision they want to make. The FCC is constrained on many issues related to cable by laws passed by Congress. I think the FCC decided early in the investigation that they did not want to tackle the sticky issues of declaring online programmers to be cable companies. Had the FCC done so then this suit might have good traction.

Even a few years ago at the early start of online content the FCC could see that the online content world would become messy. There are now companies like Sling TV and DirecTV Now which look a lot like a cable company in terms of programming. But there are far more online providers that don’t fit the mold. Is a company that only streams British comedy, or soccer, or mystery movies really a cable company? Is a web service that streams blogs a content provider? I think the FCC was right to let this issue quietly die. I’m sure the day will come when the FCC finally acts on the issue, but when they do it’s more likely that traditional cable companies will be freed from regulation instead of dragging OTT providers into regulation.

It’s hard to think any city can justify the legal expense of pursuing this to the end – even winning might not give them the results they want. Without congressional action the City would have to tackle each of the hundreds of online video content providers to somehow get them to also pay a tax. This feels a lot like tilting at windmills. However, many taxes we pay today started when one jurisdiction tackled the issue and others climbed aboard – so this is worth keeping an eye on.