Frontier has been bitten by the same disadvantage many communities face when building their own networks -- little market power means having to overpay for everything. When Frontier bought millions of Verizon rural lines, it bought a few FiOS connections as well. But not enough to gain any bargaining power with channel owners. So Frontier had to raise the costs of its video services up for 46%. Lest anyone feel too sorry for Frontier, they are doing just fine. It is their customers who suffer. But it is a reminder that the issue of scale and market power are barriers to all competition, not just community networks. If we want to have real competition in this country, the Congress and the FCC need to stop ignoring the problems caused by massive players distorting the market. This unregulated market is an invitation for big players to join together and screw everyone else.
Tag: "video"
Jim Baller offers a good national overview of community broadband networks in a 7 minute interview on TelecomTV. In it, Baller reads a list of the claims from private electrical companies when they claimed municipal ownership was a delusion, 100 years ago.
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Michael Crowell, Fibrant's Director of Broadband Services, discusses the motivation behind their community fiber network (Fibrant), as well as some of the technology behind their GPON network. This is one of several similar interviews from TelecomTV.
In this interview, Crowell makes an important point: each community should not be building its own head end and should cooperate with each other to use the existing resources built by Wilson and Salisbury.
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In another TelecomTV segment, Jay Ovittore speaks with Guy Daniels discussing Communities United for Broadband.
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This is a good 5 minute interview discussing what Wilson has done to build the first citywide FTTH network in North Carolina. Greenlight has a business customer taking 1Gbps -- something that would undoubtedly have been totally cost-prohibitive (and possibly just unavailable) if the City had not made its broadband infrastructure investment.
Toward the end, Brian Bowman is asked if he recommends all communities build a similar network. His answer is very wise: all communities should have the right to do it and they should decide for themselves based on their situation. That is our position as well.
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Barbara Van Schewick, author of Internet Architecture and Innovation, describes the important role of openness on the Internet, what that means, and how to preserve it. Thanks to the New York Chapter of Internet Society for hosting her.
Yet another town has decided to take responsibility for their broadband future: a small Florida community has secured financing and is moving forward with their publicly owned FTTH network.
The City Council voted unanimously Monday night to approve the $7.3 million in funding with Regions Bank in Orlando. City Manager Lisa Algiere told the council members the city would be doing most of its business with the local Regions Bank.
The funding will come in the form of three bonds: a series 2010A Bond, which is good for 20 years and has an interest rate of 3.61 percent; the second bond is a Series 2010B Bond and is for five years with an annual interest rate of 3.20 percent; while the third bond is a Series 2010C Bond and is good for one year. The funding secured by the city is a drawdown loan, meaning it will only take what it needs and only repay that portion.
The network has been branded Greenlight (though the website is not yet fully functional). Greenlight is also the name used by the Community Fiber Network in Wilson, North Carolina.
Light Reading interviewed a network employee, shedding more details than have been released elsewhere.
He says they are passing 7,000 premises, but Wikipedia only notes a population of 2,000 in 2004, so there is more than meets the eye at first glance. They financed the network without using general obligation bonds, working with a nearby bank (Regions is a big bank, headquartered out of state).
Local competitors are AT&T and Comcast, though both offer extremely slow services; the fastest downstream speed available from Comcast is 6Mbps. The new network, as do nearly all recent community fiber networks, will offer much faster connections, the slowest being 10Mbps.
This is a good sign that communities in Florida can still move forward despite the many...
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In North Carolina, Salisbury has launched the state's second FTTH network, as communities continue to build the next-generation broadband infrastructure in which their massive incumbent providers decline to invest. We have offered in-depth coverage of Fibrant as they prepared to launch the new services. As of Tuesday, Nov 2, the network softly launched, which is to say they will slowly ramp up the number of paying customers as they gain experience and confidence. Stop the Cap! also covered the launch with extensive coverage as well as both praise and criticism for Fibrant's approach.
Some of the 115 early, free testers of Fibrant became the first paying customers Monday, with the utility scheduling installations for 200 other residents on a waiting list.
A local group has posted a number of videos about Fibrant, including a recent one that compares Fibrant's speeds to the pathetic offering of Time Warner Cable (see bottom of this post). In a totally unrelated development (or so Time Warner Cable would have us believe), TWC has rapidly increased its broadband tiers in the region. In this, TWC has joined Comcast in downplaying the role competition has in forcing incumbent investment. If you believe TWC, competition plays no role in their investment decisions, a fascinating approach to succeeding in an area they constantly claim is a very competitive market.
The cable giant’s new download speed can reach 50 megabits per second, twice as fast as Fibrant’s 25 Mbps. However Time Warner’s fastest upload speed — 5 Mbps — is still slower than Fibrant’s best upload speed of 25 Mbps and standard upload speed of 15 Mbps. Time Warner is more expensive.
Of course, as the video shows, TWC's actual broadband differs significantly from its advertised speeds. I would like to see a speedtest comparing the new TWC offerings -- though I wonder if they have instituted the...
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