Tag Archives: San Francisco

Urban Digital Divide Efforts

NATOA, the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors (NATOA) recently made Community Broadband and Digital Equity Awards to three communities and recognized the strides the cities have made in tackling the digital divide.

The City and County of San Francisco got an award for connecting public housing and other vulnerable neighborhoods to the City’s fiber network. The City’s program is seeking to bring free wired gigabit broadband to low-income residents who have been on the wrong side of the digital divide.

Silicon Harlem got an award for bringing affordable broadband and resiliency to small businesses in Harlem.  In partnership with the New York City Economic Development Corporation, Silicon Harlem launched RISE, a program that is bringing innovative technologies to small businesses. The RISE effort provides a disaster-resistant wireless mesh network to businesses at no cost. The BetterB program is bringing symmetrical 100 Mbps broadband to small businesses for $30 per month.

An award also went to SA Digital Connects, which is a collaboration between San Antonio and Bexar County. This collaboration has the goal of making sure that every household has safe and secure access to the Internet. SA Digital Connect has created a collaboration across government, public, and private partners and has secured funding for access, infrastructure, affordability, adoption, digital skills, and devices.

I’m highlighting these three awards as a way to talk about the work that is remaining to solve the digital divide. BEAD grants are going to solve a lot of the rural digital divide – although I’m predicting millions of homes will be missed by BEAD.  But the biggest remaining digital divide issue is to find solutions for urban broadband adoption.

These three efforts are in giant cities, but the issues recognized by these cities is present across the whole range of smaller cities. A lot of cities were excited when they heard about BEAD grants because they assumed some of this money would come their way – but BEAD is going to be used almost entirely in rural areas.

Solving the urban digital divide is a much more complex issue than tackling the rural broadband gap. I’ve been looking at various urban neighborhoods lately, and every neighborhood is different. It’s easier to attack the rural availability divide when you can easily identify areas with no fast landline broadband. It’s a lot harder to pinpoint areas within cities that the incumbent providers have ignored and where broadband is not as good as what is delivered in surrounding neighborhoods.

It’s hard to bring an immediate broadband solution to a neighborhood where residents don’t have computers or tablets and don’t know how to effectively use them. Everybody trying to solve the urban digital divide is wrestling with what to do first – because it does no good to give devices to homes without good broadband, but you can’t succeed in building a network when folks aren’t ready and able to use it.

One of the best tools to help solve the urban digital divide was ACP since an urban ISP could count on having a revenue of at least $30 per month from every low-income household. It’s a lot harder to justify building a network in neighborhoods where few people can afford a normally-priced broadband connection. Killing ACP increased the difficulty of tackling the urban digital divide. There is a significant amount of funding available for cities and neighborhoods to explore ways to solve their broadband shortfalls, but such efforts will be of no avail if ISPs can’t find a sustainable business model to support new networks.

But it’s still really good news that efforts like the ones described above are finding ways to tackle urban broadband issues. But for every City or neighborhood with one of these laudable efforts, there are dozens more where nobody is seeking a solution.

When BEAD was first announced, I remember folks being excited that there would be grant funding available to bring better broadband to ten million or more rural homes. Even then, my first reaction was that this effort was ignoring the much larger number of urban homes that are also on the wrong side of the digital divide.

Urban broadband issues are going to have to be solved one neighborhood at a time, and it’s awesome to see folks dedicated to making this happen. Here’s to hoping for the success of these specific projects, and I hope their efforts inspire others to tackle their own local problems.

NFL City Broadband

Every few years a large city takes a hard look at the broadband issue and considers building a citywide fiber network to make their city more competitive. A few years ago, San Francisco took a hard look at the issue. Before then, cities like Seattle, Baltimore, Cleveland, and others considered fiber networks.

The latest city that might be joining the fray is Denver where fiber proponents are pushing the City Council to have a 2020 ballot initiative for removing statewide restrictions on municipal participation in finding fiber solutions. Numerous smaller communities in Colorado have already held ballot initiatives that allowed their cities to opt-out of the restriction. Some of those cities have gone on to build fiber networks and others are now studying the issue.

If such a ballot initiative passed it would not necessarily mean that Denver would be considering building a fiber network. Instead, this would remove the restrictions created by a law sponsored by the big incumbent telephone and cable companies that requires a referendum before a city can even have a serious conversation about fiber.

A lot of people probably wonder why a large city would consider building a fiber network. It turns out that many cities have sizable pockets without adequate broadband. There are places in every big city where the cable companies never provided service – often to apartment buildings in poor neighborhoods. I’ve written several blogs about studies that show that AT&T redlined DSL deployment and that numerous poor neighborhoods still can only get DSL with speeds of 3 Mbps or less. I can’t remember any more who made the estimate, but I recall a paper published six or seven years ago that estimated that there were as many people in cities with no good broadband option as there are in rural America.

Even where cities have broadband, the big cities still have digital deserts where whole neighborhoods barely subscribe to broadband because of cost. The city of Buffalo, NY identified that the city has a huge homework gap and found that many students there didn’t have broadband. After some investigation, the city found that there were numerous neighborhoods where only 30 – 40% of residents could afford broadband. Buffalo has begun a program to provide free home WiFi for students, with the first deployment to cover 5,500 homes.

There have been several recent studies that have shown that affordability has become the number one reason why homes don’t have broadband. That issue is about to intensify as all of the big cable companies are starting to raise broadband rates annually. The big cable companies are also tamping down on special pricing that lets many homes get broadband for an affordable rate for a few years. Cities are recognizing that they have to find ways to solve the digital divide because they can see a huge difference between neighborhoods with and without broadband.

No NFL city has yet tackled building a fiber network to everybody, and perhaps none of them ever will. Building a fiber network of that magnitude is expensive and cities like San Francisco and Seattle got estimates of price tags over $1 billion to provide fiber everywhere. All big cities also already have some neighborhoods with fiber, making it harder to justify building fiber everywhere.

However, every big city has neighborhoods with poor broadband options and neighborhoods suffering from a huge homework gap and digital divide because of affordability. I expect more cities are going to tackle initiatives like the one undertaken in Buffalo to find ways to get broadband to those who can’t afford big-ISP prices.

Many cities are restricted from taking a serious look at broadband solutions because of statewide legal restrictions. The Colorado legislation that requires a referendum just to consider a broadband solution is typical of these laws. There are twenty-two states with some sort of restriction on municipal broadband which is intended to stop the cities in those states from looking for solutions.

The bottom line is that the only solutions for the digital divide and the homework gap are going to have to come locally. And that means that cities must be free to look for broadband solutions for neighborhoods that lack broadband options. There have been enough studies that demonstrate that students without home broadband underperform those with broadband in the home. I have no idea if the City Council in Denver is willing to at least tackle the ballot initiative to allow them to talk about the issue – but if they don’t, then their poorer neighborhoods are doomed to remain at a huge disadvantage to the rest the city.

City Authority in Rights-of-Way

The California Supreme Court just joined the fray in the battle over the placement of small cells and other wireless equipment in public rights-of-ways. Currently, there are numerous lawsuits challenging the FCC ruling that wireless carriers can put their devices anywhere in the public rights-of-way. The California lawsuit preceded that order and was asking if a City has the right to dictate the appearance of wireless electronics.

We’ve recently seen wireless carriers hanging some fairly hideous devices on poles. The FCC order allows them to hang devices as large as 28 cubic feet, and that’s large enough to hang devices that sprawl across the sightlines on poles. Cities look at some of the early examples of devices on poles and are fearful of the proliferation of similar devices as each large wireless carrier and others begin hanging small cells and 5G fixed wireless loop devices.

The original suit came from T-Mobile that claimed that San Francisco had no authority to set aesthetics requirements for wireless devices. It is an interesting challenge because government entities have been dictating aesthetics requirements for years – such as cell sites one sees all over Florida that are disguised to look like palm trees – but which never do.

My guess is that T-Mobile has been emboldened by the recent federal law that guarantees wireless carriers access to utility poles, light poles and other locations inside of public rights-of-way. The FCC order effectively tells municipalities that they can’t reject requests to place devices and I’m guessing T-Mobile hoped that meant that cities had no authority over them.

T-Mobile relied on language in section 7901 of the California public utilities code:

Telegraph or telephone corporations may construct lines of telegraph or telephone lines along and upon any public road or highway, along or across any of the waters or lands within this State, and may erect poles, posts, piers, or abutments for supporting the insulators, wires, and other necessary fixtures of their lines, in such manner and at such points as not to incommode the public use of the road or highway or interrupt the navigation of the waters. (I must admit that one of the reasons I like to read legal cases is the language used in laws. This one uses the term incommode which means to inconvenience or impede.)

T-Mobile interpreted that law to mean that they have the right to construct facilities as long as they don’t obstruct the transmission path. They further argued that San Francisco could not regulate anything that is not specifically allowed by this same language.

The courts disagreed with T-Mobile’s reading of the law. The courts said that a city has inherent local authority to determine the appropriate use of land within its jurisdiction. That authority includes the right to establish aesthetic conditions for land use. The Court said the case boiled down to whether Section 7901 somehow divested the city of that inherent authority.

The Courts also said that T-Mobile’s interpretation of the term incommode was incorrect, in that T-Mobile thought they could hang a wireless device anywhere as long as they didn’t impede public road use or the ability of other utilities to use the poles. The Courts said that incommoded generally means inconvenience and that the city could object to a pole placement if it inconvenienced the city in other ways such as generating noise, causing negative health consequences, or creating safety concerns.

While the California ruling was very specific and ruled that the City of San Francisco could require wireless carriers to meet aesthetic requirements, the ruling and the discussion in the decision can be interpreted as being directly in opposition of the FCC order that allows wireless carriers to place small cells anywhere they want, without city interference.

Lawsuits generally rely on precedents and judges often consider rulings made in other courts on similar issues. It seems likely that this California Supreme Court ruling is going to make it into the challenges to the FCC ruling that preempted local control over small cell placement. That FCC ruling loses its teeth if cities can consider things like public safety or the safety of technicians that work on poles.

Wireless carriers are currently acting as if the FCC order is a done deal, even as it is being challenged by numerous states and cities. I’ve heard several people refer to carrier behavior as a land grab, where the carriers are grabbing connection space on poles even when they have no immediate use for them – they are getting on poles before courts might make it harder to do so. This Supreme Court ruling makes it clear that the small cell issue is far from resolved and we’re probably going to be following this in courts for at least a few more years.

Sonic – the Transition from UNEs to Fiber

In my continuing series of writing about interesting competitors, today’s blog is about Sonic, a CLEC and fiber overbuilder working in the San Francisco Bay area and other communities in California. It’s an interesting company because they are the poster child for building a competitive telecom company based upon the rules established by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. That Act required that the large telephone companies unbundle their networks to allow competitors to use their copper lines.

Sonic got started in 1994 as an ISP, then became a CLEC in 2006 and followed the path envisioned by the 1996 Act. This meant collocating electronics in AT&T central offices to provide DSL to customers over unbundled copper loops (UNEs). The company found a receptive customer base since they offered faster broadband than AT&T’s at an affordable price. They grew to be collocated in 200 AT&T central offices around the Bay Area, Sacramento and greater Los Angeles. These offices are tied together by the use of unbundled interoffice transport – also created by the 1996 Act. They originally deployed DSL that used one copper pair but have migrated to VDSL2 and other faster versions of DSL that use two copper pairs and delivers significant bandwidth. They still have almost 50,000 customers in the region using this technology.

What’s interesting is that Sonic did this starting in 2006 – a time by which much of the rest of the industry had written off the use of telco copper. The UNE business plan got a sour reputation with many in the industry when the CLEC industry using UNEs spectacularly imploded in 2001-2002. This collapse of the CLEC industry was due to a perfect storm of economic events and had little to do with the benefits of using telco copper.

If anything, it’s easier to use telco copper today because today’s DSL technology is far better than the DSL in 2000. Sonic and other CLECs are able to provide fast and reliable broadband using ADSL2+ and VDSL2, bonded over multiple copper pairs. Most people in the industry are probably surprised to hear that Sonic can use bonded copper UNEs to provide speeds as fast as 400Mbps to serve businesses. The usefulness of unbundled UNEs is far from dead.

Sonic also reaches roughly 25,000 customers using resale. This allows them to sell the same DSL products sold by AT&T in locations where they don’t have collocations. All of the Sonic products offer a bundle with a voice product that includes all of the expected features plus unlimited calling to the US and to landlines in 66 other countries. They are still finding strong demand for the voice product – something that also might surprise many in the industry.

Five years ago the company decided to use the cash flow from the UNE business to build fiber. Their fiber network now covers roughly 1/3 of the City of San Francisco, plus Brentwood, Sebastopol, Albany, Kensington and Berkeley in the East Bay. They are eying other markets around the region, the state, and beyond. They are an aggressive competitor and their fiber product line starts with a symmetrical gigabit for $40 per month, bundled with the unlimited voice product. They won’t publicly disclose the number of fiber customers, but their goal is to soon have more customers on fiber than on DSL. In my opinion, this is the essence of the vision of the 1996 Act – a transition from UNEs to facility-based networks.

The company’s biggest worry right now is that the FCC recently got a petition from the large telcos asking to end the use of unbundled network elements (UNEs). The big telcos argue that the UNE business plan is obsolete and that there is sufficient competition in the marketplace without unbundling their copper – while also claiming that “In the residential marketplace, competition will not be materially affected by forbearance from Section 251 ( c )(3) because there is effectively no remaining UNE-based competition in that marketplace.” and that “To the extent CLECs serve residential customers using ILEC facilities, they do so on commercial platforms.

But Sonic and a number of other CLECs using UNEs show this to be untrue. Given that just Sonic alone serves nearly 50,000 California households with UNEs these claims are incorrect and misleading. Sonic is using the unbundled copper in exactly the manner envisioned by Congress when they wrote the 1996 Act – to allow competitors to place the best technology possible on the telco copper networks. The Congress at the time reasoned that telephone ratepayers had paid for the copper networks and that the public ought to derive any benefits possible from the networks they had paid for.

The big telcos have always hated the idea of unbundling their networks. They have slowly chipped away at some of the products envisioned by the 1996 Act such as access to telco dark fiber. They would love to kick CLECs like Sonic off their networks – and in Sonic’s case that would deprive 50,000 customers of fast DSL and telephone service at prices they can afford.

Almost every major market in the country, and many smaller ones have CLECs that use unbundled network elements to provide DSL – usually the newer and faster DSL that the telcos won’t invest in. The telcos are slowly walking away from DSL which can be seen by the huge numbers of customers switching to the cable companies.

But CLECs like Sonic have used the copper to bring products that people want – and, unlike the telcos they are pouring those profits back into building fiber to these same communities. That’s exactly what Congress had in mind in 1996 and it would be a shame to see the FCC choke off some of the companies who are offering a competitive alternative to the big cable companies.

The San Francisco Broadband Experiment

The City of San Francisco seems poised to tackle building fiber to everybody in the city. They have conducted several studies looking at the cost of building fiber. The city also created a Blue Ribbon Panel that has recommended in this recent report that the city should construct a fiber network.

The city is proposing to finance a fiber network in a new way. The city is looking at fiber connections in the same way as any other utility like electricity or water. The concept is that everybody in the city would pay a monthly utility fee that would fund the construction and operation of a fiber network. The number that was tossed around earlier this year was an average monthly fee of $26 per month to be charged to every household and business in the city. It’s hard to tell from the various reports if that’s the number still being considered. The Blue Ribbon report does recommend that the city seek private investment which would be used to lower that number.

The city wants to build the fiber network to everybody in the city, which differs from the typical ISP demand model that only builds to those that buy a broadband connection. The city does not want to be an ISP and wants to emulate some of the large cities in Europe which open up their fiber networks to multiple ISPs. The hope is that multiple ISPs using the network for a minimal charge will create competition and low-price broadband.

It’s an interesting concept. There are smaller municipalities in the country that are financing fiber with municipal bonds – but in most cases the expectation is that the fiber project will generate enough revenue to repay the bonds. But fiber construction is expensive in big cities and the utility fee is needed to finance a network that will cost more than $1 billion in San Francisco.

The city’s rationale for considering this is to provide world-class broadband to everybody. This is a city that is in direct economic competition with cities in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea – and the city views fiber as a necessary component to long-term financial success. Comcast is the biggest ISP in the city and they have fast broadband today with speeds now up to a gigabit download. AT&T offers DSL plus has built fiber to large businesses and MDUs. Sonic has been building some fiber to residences in the Bay Area. And like in every large city there has been some fiber built by ISPs and CLECs to selected locations in the city.

But the city is concerned that a significant percentage of the public can’t afford fast broadband access today. The Blue Ribbon Panel notes that the government-sponsored fiber network in Singapore reduced broadband prices from $90 per month down to $30 – $40 today while speeds leaped to a symmetrical gigabit connection.

No NFL city has yet tried to build fiber and this proposal is going to meet a lot of resistance. Certainly Comcast, AT&T and other big ISPs will do everything possible to derail such an effort. The city says that they don’t want to directly compete with commercial ISPs, but if the fiber network really lowers gigabit prices to $30 – $40 that will clearly get most of the customers in the city.

I foresee all sorts of attempts to try to stop this project. The big ISPs are enjoying unprecedented support today in Congress and the FCC, and one ISP tactic might be to legislate against the project – either at the federal or state level. My fear is that a legislative approach might also stop more traditional municipal broadband projects. I would also expect to see numerous lawsuits from ISPs challenging the project. It’s such a new concept that it’s hard to envision the basis for such lawsuits, but I fully expect them. I can also envision a few citizen lawsuits trying to stop a mandatory new utility fee – picture forcing Comcast employees to pay to construct a competing network.

The final big hurdle will be in getting enough quality ISPs on the network to offer real customer choice. The few open access networks in this country have not attracted the many quality ISPs. The open access model works in Europe because the old state-monopoly telcos and cable companies have been forced into competing with each by the formation of the European Union. And perhaps quality ISPs will take a chance on a network in an NFL city. But in this country there seems to be agreement among cable companies to not compete with each other and it’s unlikely that we would see Charter, Mediacom or others stepping in to compete against Comcast.

This is a really interesting idea and it could be a viable way to get gigabit broadband to everybody in a big city. The city has not made the decision to take the leap forward, and if they do they will certainly face an uphill battle to make it work. But this could be the first trial in trying to bring the European open access model to the US.

Broadband Access to Apartment Buildings

Seal_of_San_FranciscoMark Ferrel of the Board of Supervisors for San Francisco has proposed an ordinance that would require multi-tenant buildings to provide access to broadband providers. This would apply to both residential and commercial properties.

You can understand why the city wants to tackle this issue. The nationwide percentage of families living in apartments is around 35%, but in San Francisco apartments represent 63% of housing units. And the percentage of families living in apartments is high in a lot of big cities – in New York City it’s 68%; in Seattle it’s 54%; in Atlanta it’s 56%.

Cities understand that bringing fiber to their city is not enough if it only benefits single-family homes and standalone businesses. As I wrote in a recent blog there are millions of urban households that don’t have access to broadband, and a lot of these situations are due to apartment owners that have excluded broadband providers. It’s fairly normal for apartment owners to have made deals years ago with service providers to serve their buildings on a revenue-sharing basis. The landlord may or may not include the triple-play products in the rent, but they get a kick-back from the service providers as a reward for exclusive access.

A few years back the FCC put some restrictions on cable companies and ISPs from entering into certain kinds of exclusive arrangements with building owners. It was a fairly common practice, for example, for an ISP to agree to wire a building for free, but then retain ownership of all of the wiring. In these cases the owner gave up all rights to the cable company or telco and it’s those entities that keep out competition.

I think there is a general impression that the FCC order forbade the cable companies from entering into all exclusive arrangements. But unfortunately it did not and it instead bans only certain types of arrangements – but not all. So I would expect at some point for this ordinance to be challenged at the FCC when it bumps into arrangements that are still allowed. But I think cities expect legal challenges when they tackle new ground.

This is also not going to be as clean-cut as Mr. Ferrel is hoping for. The ordinance grants access to multi-tenant buildings to any state-licensed ISP. Unfortunately, in many buildings there are physical restrictions to allowing even a second ISP. There might be very limited space for an ISP to put a rack of equipment. There are often issues with having enough space in the risers (the conduits that carry wires between floors).

And many apartments can’t accommodate having ‘open access’ where any ISP can gain access to the wiring for any unit from some central location. Unfortunately many apartments are not wired with ‘home run’ drops that go from a core to each unit, but instead often share the same cabling for multiple units.

There are often limited options for getting new wires to apartments. I can picture some really messy situations if multiple ISPs are granted access to the same buildings and each tries to string cables through hallways or other public areas. You can picture the same sort of clutter that we often see on urban poles with too many wires crammed into limited space.

But even with all of these issues, Mr. Ferrel is on the right track. The fact is that many apartment dwellers are being denied access to fast Internet due to arrangements made by the building owners. This ordinance is the first attempt I’ve seen for solving the lack of broadband and choice for a large percentage of urban households.

The ordinance tries to be fair to apartment owners and allows them to expect reasonable compensation for access to their buildings. Obviously that concept will need work to put into practice, but the ordinance doesn’t open up buildings to anybody to build without rules.

There is one thing the ordinance doesn’t tackle. What if nobody wants access to an apartment? A significant portion of urban apartments without good broadband access are low-income housing and ISPs and incumbents have been accused of redlining such customers for years. So this kind of ordinance can’t solve everything – but it’s a start.

A New Model for Open Access?

Fiber CableThe traditional open access business model to serve residential customers has never worked in this country. I am familiar with the financial performance of most of the existing open access networks and from a purely financial perspective they are all failures. A few networks have failed outright like Provo. A few others have been able to generate enough revenues to cover annual operating costs, but most don’t even do that. And from what I’ve seen, none of the existing open access networks have ever been able to generate enough cash to pay anything towards the cost of building the fiber network, leaving the cities that build the network holding the financial bag for the initial investment.

There are a few reasons that this has never worked. First is that open access naturally drives ISPs towards cherry picking. Open access networks operate by charging fees to ISPs to use the network. If an ISP pays the typical $30 per month fee to use the network, they are not going to sell inexpensive broadband to anybody in the community. So when ISPs only sell high-priced products they don’t get enough customers and the city network owner doesn’t collect enough revenue to pay for the network. This has happened to every traditional open access network. None of them have signed up enough customers to pay for the networks and everyone who has built a network using this model ends up heavily subsidizing the open access network.

The other issue is that most cities have had trouble attracting very many quality ISPs. The whole concept of open access is to offer choices to customers. But most of the open access networks in the country only have a few ISPs, and even the ones they attract are often tiny, undercapitalized businesses. Attracting ISPs is so hard that there is one large open access network today that has been reduced over time to having only one residential ISP on the network. That’s not providing much customer choice.

But there are two cities looking at an alternative model. One is the small city of Ammon, Idaho, and the other is San Francisco. Both cities want residents to pay for the basic cost of the network. It’s an interesting idea.

In Ammon a household that wants broadband access will pay a tax levy of $10 to $15 per month and will also pay a utility fee of $16.50 per month. This means that each subscriber will pay $26 to $31 per month for the fiber network – a very similar charge to what is charged to ISPs on other open access networks. The Ammon commitment is voluntary and only those that sign up for broadband will pay the fees.

San Francisco is considering a similar proposal. There, residents would pay a monthly utility fee of $25 and businesses would pay as much as $115. In San Francisco this fee would be mandatory and everybody in the City would be assessed the fee. In an NFL city the fee probably has to be mandatory to assure that the network will be paid for.

Having customers pay a fee to the city takes the pressure off the cherry picking issue. By lowering what ISPs pay there is a lot better chance of having affordable products on the network. And that ought to result in more customers on the network.

But like any idea this one still leaves some open questions. For instance, how does the city make enough money over time to pay for the inevitable replacement of electronics or catastrophic events like storm damage? Or what does a city do if the ISPs don’t do a good job and customers don’t like them? The Ammon plan requires the payment of fees for a very long time, and small businesses like ISPs often don’t have the staying power to last for a long time. How will the business keep up with inflation – will the fees have to increase every year? And what happens if the city doesn’t get or keep enough customers to pay for this – will the fees go up for everybody else or will the city subsidize the network?

In a voluntary system like Ammon I also wonder what the consequences are for homes that change their mind over time. What if somebody has a financial problem and is unable to pay the fees? What happens when they want to sell their home – is this fee a tax lien of sorts? That’s what has happened to homes that buy solar power systems that are paid for over time. And what happens if a new buyer doesn’t want the fiber and doesn’t want to pay the fee? No doubt over time there will be legal issues to figure out.

The challenge to make this work in San Francisco seems much more difficult. It’s not hard to envision lawsuits from citizens who don’t want to pay the fees. And I can imagine a fierce battle with Comcast and the other current ISPs over the legality of a mandatory fiber utility fee. This seems like a concept that could take a decade of court time to resolve.

But the idea of having citizens somehow pay for the fiber network is an interesting one. Irrevocable customer pledges are a revenue stream that can be used to finance fiber construction. It’s hard to know if this concept will work until we see it in action. But it shows how serious cities are becoming to get good broadband. One has to think that if households are willing to sign long-term pledges to pay for fiber that it has to make a difference. I am sure communities all over the country will be watching to see if this works.

Another Municipal Model

Seal_of_San_FranciscoCity officials in San Francisco recently issued a report that takes a very different stance than most other cities that are looking at broadband issues. The city essentially rejects the normal demand-based commercial model for broadband and looks at a new structure that will bring broadband to everybody.

The report is authored by the office of supervisor Mark Farrell and reflects some of the recommendations from the San Francisco Municipal Fiber Advisory Panel. The report very correctly observes that today’s commercial broadband model leaves a lot of citizens without broadband. Numerous nationwide surveys have shown that the majority of households without broadband access today feel they cannot afford the market prices for service.

So the San Francisco report recommends that the City institute a $26 per month fee on all households – with a higher fee on businesses – to help pay for broadband to everyone. They further recommend a public private partnership model to operate the business and assume that tiered pricing will still allow for profitability for a commercial partner.

The numbers are based upon an estimate that it would cost $867.3 million to build a fiber network in the city and $231.7 million per year to maintain the network. In my experience in looking at other large cities, both numbers feel very high. One has to assume in an open access network where fiber was built to everybody that the ongoing maintenance expenses for a network would be far lower than that since much of those costs would accrue to the ISPs and not to the city.

The city is not the first place that has looked at paying for fiber using taxpayer money, but they are by far the largest. A few small communities like Leverett, Massachusetts have paid for fiber construction with tax levies. The city of North Kansas City built a network and essentially is giving free service to residents for the next ten years. And the Utopia system in Utah recently looked at the tax-payer funding model, although it looks like a lot of the communities involved are rejecting the idea.

It’s a very interesting concept that has a bunch of pros and cons. On the plus side this would certainly solve the digital divide if every household in a community had a fiber connection. There would still be the issue to solve of making sure that everybody has a computer, but that seems like an easier problem to solve than getting the fiber network built to everybody.

But I can foresee a few major hurdles in implementing such an idea in an NFL city, such as the following:

  • The City probably doesn’t have the right to insist that they can bring fiber into apartment buildings. The FCC has made it clear that building owners have the right to control the wiring and the access to services on their own property. Many of the apartment owners will already have made a long-term contractual arrangement and be doing revenue sharing with the local cable company or some other service provider.
  • One can envision multiple lawsuits from citizens and businesses that wouldn’t want the city solution or who won’t want to pay the fee. It’s one thing to do this in a tiny town like Leverett, MA where there was no existing broadband, but in a large city there are bound to be many who don’t want the city doing this.
  • This is such a drastic solution that it surely would invite legislative action and multiple lawsuits from the incumbent providers. California is one of the states that allows for municipal competition, but using direct tax revenues to compete against the existing broadband providers would raise legitimate concerns about unfair competition. One can envision attempts to pass state or national legislation that would outlaw the proposed business plan. ISPs would use every tool at their disposal to fight this for fear that it might work and could spread elsewhere.

As the report points out, cities have a broadband dilemma today. Even where there is fiber or good broadband today there are a lot of households that can’t afford broadband. The report estimates there are over 100,000 people in San Francisco that can’t afford the market price for broadband and another 50,000 that still use dial-up.

There is also the issue of carriers building to just some parts of a city. One only has to look at all of the east coast cities that have Verizon FiOS to see the result of allowing commercial broadband providers to cherry-pick in markets. These cities have some neighborhoods with fast fiber broadband and competition between the telco and the cable company (which many observe is not real competition). But they have many neighborhoods without fiber and none of these cities can formulate a business plan that can justify bringing fiber to the neighborhoods that Verizon bypassed as too expensive to build.

The San Francisco report was a little fuzzy on a few of the details, which is natural since those details can only be made clear through negotiations with carriers willing to operate on such a network. You have to give the city kudos for creativity. But I foresee a big uphill battle if they try to implement this. But it’s an idea that should work if it can overcome the opponents that will spend huge money to try to prevent it.

The Quiet Expansion of Wi-Fi Networks

Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi (Photo credit: kristinmarshall)

I am sure I am like most business travelers and one of the first things I look for when I get to a new place is a WiFi connection for both my laptop and cellphone. Finding WiFi lets me get online with the computer and stops me from racking up data charges on my cell plan.

And for the longest time there has been very little public WiFi outside of Starbucks and hotels. But that is starting to change, at least in some places. There are several companies that have quietly been pursuing w WiFi deployments.

The biggest of these is the cable companies. It’s hard to get accurate counts of how many hot spots they have deployed. In 2012 a consortium of cable companies  – Comcast, Cox, Time Warner, Bright House and Optimum – banded together as the Cable WiFi consortium to deploy hotspots. Comcast claims that the industry has deployed over 300,000 hot spots. However, the Cable WiFi web site claims over 200,000. But whatever the number this is far larger than anybody else.

The Cable WiFi networks are offered to the customers of those companies as a mobile data extension of their service. Today these hotspots are centered around big cities – the northeastern corridor, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Tampa, Austin and others.

The next biggest provider is AT&T which claims about 30,000 hot spots. AT&T claims over 705 million WiFi connections onto its WiFi network in the fourth quarter of 2012. However, Google has announced that it is getting in the game and nobody knows how big they might get with this effort. But their first announcement is that they are taking over all of the hotspots at Starbucks Coffee (which is a lot of the AT&T hotspots).

The cable companies have been deploying the hotspots in several ways. In some communities they are installing them on utility poles. In other situations they are going into establishments similar to the Starbucks WiFi.

WiFi is becoming more and more important to people’s daily life, so this trend is going to be very popular. Cellphone plans are getting stingier and stingier with cellular data at the same time that cell phones and tablets have the ability to use more and more data. If that data is not offloaded onto WiFi networks then customers are facing some gigantic cellphone bills.

WiFi is never going to be a replacement of cellular. For example, the technology used and the spectrum used make it very difficult to do dynamic handoffs like happens with your cell phone. You can literally walk out of WiFi coverage on foot where cellular coverage will stick with you driving at speeds of 60 miles per hour.

But people are finding more and more uses for WiFi all of the time, and so the desire for public WiFi is probably going to explode. The cable companies report that every time they open a new hot spot that usage explodes soon after people figure out it is available. One area where they have seen the biggest use is at the Jersey shore where vacationers and visitors are relieved to find WiFi available.

Anybody building a fiber network ought to consider a wireless deployment. There are several ways to monetize the investment. The obvious revenue from WiFi is through daily, weekly and monthly usage fees. But if you are a triple play provider, a more subtle benefit of wireless is in making your customers stickier since you are giving them a mobile component of their data service. Another revenue stream is to sell prioritized WiFi access to the local municipality, electric company and others, with priority meaning that their employees get a prioritized access to the network, with first responders trumping everybody else. There are also smaller revenue streams such as earning commissions on the DNS traffic for people who purchase products over your WiFi network.

How Vulnerable is the Internet?

OLPC: XO internet access

OLPC: XO internet access (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A question you hear from time to time is how vulnerable the US Internet backbone is in terms of losing access if something happens to the major hubs. The architecture of the Internet has grown in response to the way that carriers have decided to connect to each other and there has never been any master plan for the best way to design the backbone infrastructure.

The Internet in this country is basically a series of hubs with spokes. There are a handful of large cities with major regional Internet hubs like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, and Northern Virginia. And then there are a few dozen smaller regional hubs, still in fairly large cities like Minneapolis, Seattle, San Francisco, etc.

Back in 2002 some scientists at Ohio State studied the structure of the Internet at the time and said that crippling the major hubs would have essentially crippled the Internet. At that time almost all Internet traffic in the country routed through the major hubs, and crippling a few of them would have wiped out a lot of the Internet.

Later in 2007 scientists at MIT looked at the web again and they estimated that taking out the major hubs would wipe out about 70% of the US Internet traffic, but that peering would allow about 33% of the traffic to keep working. And at that time peering was somewhat new.

Since then there is a lot more peering, but one has to ask if the Internet is any safer from catastrophic outage as it was in 2007? One thing to consider is that a lot of the peering happens today at the major Internet hubs. In those locations the various carriers hand traffic between each other rather than paying fees to send the traffic through an ‘Internet Port’, which is nothing more than a point where some carrier will determine the best routing of the traffic for you.

And so peering at the major Internet hubs is great way to save money, but it doesn’t really change the way the Internet traffic is routed. My clients are smaller ISPs, and I can tell you how they decide to route Internet traffic. The smaller ones find a carrier who will transport it to one of the major Internet hubs. The larger ones can afford diversity, and so they find carriers who can carry the traffic to two different major Internet hubs. But by and large every bit of traffic from my clients goes to and through the handful of major Internet hubs.

And this makes economic sense. The original hubs grew in importance because that is where the major carriers at the time, companies like MCI and Qwest already had switching hubs. And because transport is expensive, every regional ISP sent their growing internet traffic to the big hubs because that was the cheapest solution.

If anything, there might be more traffic routed through the major hubs today than there was in 2007. Every large fiber backbone and transport provider has arranged their transport networks to get traffic to these locations.

In each region of the country my clients are completely reliant on the Internet hubs. If a hub like the one in Dallas or Atlanta went down for some reason, ISPs that send traffic to that location would be completely isolated and cut off from the world.

There was a recent report in the Washington Post that said that the NSA had agents working at only a handful of major US Internet pops because that gave them access to most of the Internet traffic in the US. That seems to reinforce the idea that the major Internet hubs in the country have grown in importance.

In theory the Internet is a disaggregated, decentralized system and if traffic can’t go the normal way, then it finds another path to take. But this idea only works assuming that ISPs can get traffic to the Internet in the first place. A disaster that takes out one of the major Internet hubs would isolate a lot of towns from the region around it from having any Internet access. Terrorist attacks that take out more than one hub would wipe out a lot more places.

Unfortunately there is no grand architect behind the Internet that is looking at these issues because no one company has any claim to deciding how the Internet workd. Instead the carriers involved have all migrated to the handful of locations where it is most economical to interconnect with each other. I sure hope, at least, that somebody has figured out how to make those hub locations as safe as possible.