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fairpoint
Content tagged with "fairpoint"
New Year, Same Lame Cable and DSL Monopolies
Vermont Network Takes Local Ownership to Next Level
ECFiber is using an innovative funding method to extend its network, supported by local citizens who lend funds that enable build-out to local neighborhoods within and across member towns. Citizens who invest as little as $2500 allow ECFiber to reach all households along designated routes. ECFiber determines where it will build by choosing routes that reach the greatest number of unserved businesses and households, which are then connected to ECFiber’s state-of-the-art fiber-optic service.These people are literally investing in themselves. ECFiber is an InterLocal Contract with a Governing Board composed of a representiative from each member town (of which there are 23). Investors are purchasing tax exempt 15 year promissory notes that effectively earn 6% interest (due to the one year holiday from interest and principal). They have raised $340,000 in this round of financing, which will allow the network to pass 60-65% of Barnard's 950 residents.
A Survey of National Private Sector Broadband Providers
According to the complaint (pdf), Verizon not only made out like a financial bandit up front, but took advantage of regulatory delays to strip mine the assets of anything of value, including core IP network components, business services, and localized billing and support assets required to support the three states. Verizon then billed out their support assistance for millions per month during the very rocky transition, during which time 911 and other services saw repeated outages, resulting in millions more in refund penalties.Karl Bode is right to criticize the state authorities that allowed this fiasco to occur. Their inability to regulate in the public interest has hurt everyone stuck in the mess. While we can expect powerful companies like Verizon to try to game the system at every opportunity, there is no excuse for making it so easy for them. As long as we are talking about Verizon shedding its rural investments, let's take a look at how Frontier is doing since it inherited thousands upon thousands of FiOS customers as part of its recent deal with Verizon.
FairPoint Undermining Broadband Access in Vermont
Unfortunately FairPoint, the successor to Verizon for landlines in Northern New England, wants Vermont to choose between protecting a badly flawed FairPoint business plan or improving the economic future of Vermont’s rural areas. The choice is stark: use the federal “middle mile” stimulus grant already awarded to the Vermont Telecommunication Authority (VTA) to bring fiber closer to rural Vermonters and make wholesale backhaul and institutional broadband affordable in rural areas of the state or forfeit the grant and leave these areas without adequate business, residential and cellular service.Vermont should move forward with its stimulus project to expand open access middle mile connections across the state. Appeasing FairPoint yet again is not only bad for Vermont's many underserved, it would further embolden FairPoint in its fight against any competition, public or private. The VTA was formed to improve broadband access while not providing services directly. There is no reason it should not invest in these middle-mile networks. Quoting again from Evslin op-ed:
Now President of FairPoint in Vermont, Mike Smith said yesterday in an interview broadcast on WCAX that he never meant that the VTA should build fiber networks and provide middle-mile (backhaul) service.
The Burlington Telecom Mess in Perspective: a Letter to the Community
We are posting another perspective about Burlington Telecom, this time from Tom Streeter, a Professor of Sociology at UVM and author of Selling the Air, The Net Effect and other works about telecommunication. He circulated this letter in the community and gave us permission to republish it here. Read his original PDF here.
There's no doubt that the Burlington Telecom situation is a serious mess. But in all the accusations and counter-accusations, it can be hard to get some perspective on the nature of the problem. I've been studying things like cable TV, the internet, and telecommunications for most of my career, and I think a sense of the larger picture might help.
First, nobody has been accused of lining their private pockets with public money. There is nothing about the current scandal reminiscent of the one surrounding BT's former legal antagonist Adelphia Cable, whose CEO is still cooling his heels in jail for essentially stealing from his own company. Second, Burlington Telecom is hardly alone in having a hard time paying the bills. Vermont's primary telephone service provider, Fairpoint, filed for bankruptcy late in 2009, and cable providers nationwide are scrambling for ways to stay alive nationwide in the face of the first annual decline in cable subscriptions in the industry's history. Times are extremely tough throughout the industry, and the fact that BT is in a financial tight spot is by itself hardly surprising.
FairPoint Continues Fight Against Competition in Maine
... Maine Fiber Co., won a $25.4 million grant to build what is called the Three-Ring Binder, an middle-mile fiber optic network that will include three fiber rings in Western, Northern, and Downeast Maine. Maine Fiber’s intent is to lease dark fiber as an open access network, and not to sell commercial services.More details about the Three Ring Binder are available here and here. The Maine Fiber Company is a private sector entity that has partnered with the University of Maine System. Though the company will run the network, some fibers will be reserved for the schools - this is a common private-public partnership that is mutually beneficial. This network will be open access - meaning that all can use it on equal terms (as opposed to being monopolized solely by the owner, as FairPoint does with its network). But FairPoint sure doesn't want to deal with competition in the many areas that it currently monopolizes with poor service at high prices.
It [Three Ring Binder Network] is now facing a challenge from FairPoint Communications Inc.
Folks in Maine Resent FairPoint's Lobbying Against Broadband Awards
FairPoint is demanding that Maine law prevent the university from selling access to its network to any customer outside the governmental sector. Instead, those customers would have to take their business to FairPoint. If FairPoint could take care of the customers it already has, and if it was keeping up with its promises to serve more of the state with high-speed Internet, it might have a stronger case.People in Maine need to realize they will remain behind in network infrastructure so long as they depend on companies like FairPoint rather than the old New England values of self-reliance. Absent public competition, FairPoint will remain the only "option" because no private provider will find profits competing in these rural areas.
Verizon Actions Show Carriers Will Not Wire Rural America
FairPoint unfairly competing with UMaine?
Even if the company was competing directly with UMS, at least Maine residents could be certain the University will even exist a year from now. But as it stands, Fairpoint isn't competing with the University of Maine. They're competing with a public private partnership of which the University is only a member. Applications for Federal funds are open to public entities and private companies. Given recent history, giving taxpayer dollars to somebody other than the regional dysfunctional incumbent might not be the worst idea in the world.Bangor Daily News argues that rural Maine cannot afford to fight over who will expand broadband access. Unfortunately, Bangor Daily News' why-can't-we-all-just-get-along approach ignores the very real damage Fairpoint has already done to the state. Their suggestion that these competing networks just "be merged" seems like a call for open access but ignores the need for Fairpoint to maximize profits (right after it gets out of bankruptcy) rather than invest in communities. The larger point is ominous: the idea that large institutions should suffer with whatever crummy service Fairpoint provides (at the high prices they will provide it) in order that Fairpoint can expand its poor DSL service to rural areas, misses the important point that Fairpoint cannot and will not offer the services that Maine needs. As Mayor Joey Durel of Lafayette suggested, maybe Maine should just send its jobs down to Lafayette, where they are building the necessary infrastructure for the future.
Fairpoint May Declare Bankrupty
In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company warns that if the offer does not go through, it might not be able to make its interest payments due Oct. 1. In a worst-case scenario, it said, this could lead to "an alternative restructuring plan (that) may include a bankruptcy."If this were a publicly owned network, it would be championed by cable and phone companies as proof that those networks fail. We are not suggesting the opposite - that this is proof that all private networks in rural areas are doomed to failure, but it does offer evidence that a purely private sector-based model in rural areas is foolhardy. Verizon is now getting rid of more rural assets by selling them to Frontier - a company better poised than Fairpoint to handle them, but also a company known for offering slow DSL speeds with a 5GB cap. Communities that want to keep up with the rest of the world should look to themselves to build the networks they need. The private sector is either unable or unwilling to build the necessary networks to compete in the digital economy.