We’ve mentioned a few times that there are more than $42 billion in broadband subsides about to drop in the laps of state leaders thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill. Since the bill gives individual states leeway on how this money is spent, a lot of states (like Pennsylvania) are simply throwing the money in the laps of giant telecom monopolies with long histories of subsidy fraud and abuse.

Some states, like California and New York, are, thankfully, doing things a little differently. Hopefully.

California, for example, is spending $3 billion of its funding on a massive open access “middle mile” network that should drive down access costs and boost competition. There’s been some consternation as to how transparently and inclusively California leaders are doing this, but it’s a strong idea.

New York, meanwhile, is directing a lot of its COVID relief and infrastructure bill funding to community owned and operated broadband networks, which saw a massive surge in popularity during the home education broadband headaches during COVID lockdowns. Said lockdowns illustrated that broadband is an essential utility, and that widespread monopolization has clearly led to market failure.

New York just announced that $70 million of a broader $228 million program will be headed to community-owned broadband networks. Like the one being built in Dryden, New York, which is offering locals previously stuck under a Charter cable broadband monopoly symmetrical 400 Mbps, 700 Mbps, and 1 Gbps connections for $45, $75, and $90 a month, respectively.

According to a New York state announcement, many of these areas will be getting affordable fiber broadband for the first time ever:

“These awards through the Municipal Infrastructure Grant Program will connect tens of thousands of homes and businesses across Upstate New York and deliver reliable high-speed internet service to areas of the state that are unserved and underserved while addressing ConnectALL’s mandate to develop a robust, equitable broadband marketplace across New York State.”

A good chunk of the funding is being spent on “open access” fiber networks, which effectively provide multiple providers — municipally owned or private –the low cost ability to provide service. That boosts competition, and in most places where it’s implemented, results in cheaper, better service (I wrote a report on this phenomenon for the Copia Institute last year in case you missed it).

Contrary to what big telecom and its assorted mouthpieces like to claim, community broadband is an organic, grass roots response to monopoly power and market failure, and sees broad, bipartisan support. Which is why telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast tried to have House Republicans impose a national ban in the middle of a national health emergency that was busy highlighting its importance.

Community broadband isn’t magic. It needs to be implemented and funded intelligently. It can take on many forms, from an extension of your local power utility or a cooperative, to a municipally owned network or a hybrid public-private partnership. These creative, popular, local solutions are again a direct result of decades of apathy by regional telecom monopolies that have lobbied many leaders into apathy.

We’ve mentioned a few times that there are more than $42 billion in broadband subsides about to drop in the laps of state leaders thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill. Since the bill gives individual states leeway on how this money is spent, a lot of states (like Pennsylvania) are simply throwing the money in the laps of giant telecom monopolies with long histories of subsidy fraud and abuse.

Some states, like California and New York, are, thankfully, doing things a little differently. Hopefully.

California, for example, is spending $3 billion of its funding on a massive open access “middle mile” network that should drive down access costs and boost competition. There’s been some consternation as to how transparently and inclusively California leaders are doing this, but it’s a strong idea.

New York, meanwhile, is directing a lot of its COVID relief and infrastructure bill funding to community owned and operated broadband networks, which saw a massive surge in popularity during the home education broadband headaches during COVID lockdowns. Said lockdowns illustrated that broadband is an essential utility, and that widespread monopolization has clearly led to market failure.

New York just announced that $70 million of a broader $228 million program will be headed to community-owned broadband networks. Like the one being built in Dryden, New York, which is offering locals previously stuck under a Charter cable broadband monopoly symmetrical 400 Mbps, 700 Mbps, and 1 Gbps connections for $45, $75, and $90 a month, respectively.

According to a New York state announcement, many of these areas will be getting affordable fiber broadband for the first time ever:

“These awards through the Municipal Infrastructure Grant Program will connect tens of thousands of homes and businesses across Upstate New York and deliver reliable high-speed internet service to areas of the state that are unserved and underserved while addressing ConnectALL’s mandate to develop a robust, equitable broadband marketplace across New York State.”

A good chunk of the funding is being spent on “open access” fiber networks, which effectively provide multiple providers — municipally owned or private –the low cost ability to provide service. That boosts competition, and in most places where it’s implemented, results in cheaper, better service (I wrote a report on this phenomenon for the Copia Institute last year in case you missed it).

Contrary to what big telecom and its assorted mouthpieces like to claim, community broadband is an organic, grass roots response to monopoly power and market failure, and sees broad, bipartisan support. Which is why telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast tried to have House Republicans impose a national ban in the middle of a national health emergency that was busy highlighting its importance.

Community broadband isn’t magic. It needs to be implemented and funded intelligently. It can take on many forms, from an extension of your local power utility or a cooperative, to a municipally owned network or a hybrid public-private partnership. These creative, popular, local solutions are again a direct result of decades of apathy by regional telecom monopolies that have lobbied many leaders into apathy.

Broadband providers poised to receive $42 billion in taxpayer broadband subsidies from the infrastructure bill are ramping up complaints about a small requirement affixed to the massive handout: they have to try to make broadband affordable to poor people.

Earlier this month we noted that the GOP, in lockstep with the telecom industry, had launched an “investigation” into the low-income requirements attached to the Broadband Equity Access And Deployment (BEAD) subsidy program and the agency overseeing it (NTIA).

The requirements are not onerous: the NTIA delegates most authority for how the money is to be spent to the states, which are “strongly encouraged” (according to BEAD program guidelines) to provide a slower, cheaper service tier somewhere between around $30 and $48 per month. And only to families that qualify for existing low-income assistance programs.

But in a new letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo (hat tip, Ars Technica), telecom lobbying organizations (most of them directed by AT&T) vaguely threaten that they’ll take their ball and go home if the requirements for a low-cost option aren’t eliminated:

“Without significant and immediate changes of approach toward its implementation, we are concerned the program will fail to advance our collective goal of connectivity for all in America. We and our members sincerely want this program to work, but we believe that your agency’s administration of the low-cost service option requirement in particular risks putting the overall success of BEAD in jeopardy.”

To be clear I’m not sure that federal or state lawmakers are even able to enforce this requirement with any consistency, given the rank corruption and feckless careerism that abounds in telecom regulatory oversight. But just the faintest hint that they might have to make their product affordable greatly upsets regional monopolies, who’ve spent decades working to undermine competition and oversight in a bid to keep U.S. broadband prices artificially inflated.

Telecom giants like AT&T have grown fat and comfortable ripping off captive local subscribers and effectively telling regulators what to do. They’re so comfortable, in fact, that the barest bone efforts asking them nicely to provide a less expensive option to poor people is being treated like some kind of draconian, radical and illegal effort at unchecked “rate regulation.”

This wouldn’t be quite such a contentious issue if most of these companies didn’t have a 40 year track record of gobbling up taxpayer dollars for broadband deployments they never quite seem to finish. Or if they hadn’t made U.S. broadband so patchy and expensive due to relentless efforts at anti-competitive regional monopolization.

BEAD money is poised to start flowing to the states this fall, but big telecoms, if they wanted, could throw a wrench in the process over these modest requirements (AT&T’s already apparently doing this in Virginia). At which point, telecom giants (and the politicians bribed into a near-mindless fealty to them) will absolutely blame government for the entirely avoidable delay.

Last December I wrote a feature for The Verge exploring the FCC’s long overdue effort to stop race and class discrimination in broadband deployment. For decades, big telecoms have not only refused to evenly upgrade broadband in low income and poor areas (despite billions in subsidies for this exact purpose), they’ve provably charged poor and minority neighborhoods significantly more money for worse service.

To be clear the FCC’s plan doesn’t actually stop such discrimination. Regulators didn’t even have the moral courage to call out big telecoms with a history of such practices (see: AT&T’s “digital redlining” in cities like Cleveland and Detroit). The FCC simply acknowledged that this discrimination clearly exists and imposed some loophole-filled rules stating that big ISPs shouldn’t discriminate moving forward.

As with the FCC’s restored net neutrality rules, I highly suspect the historically feckless and captured FCC ever actually enforces the guidelines with any zeal. But the effort to acknowledge that such discrimination exists (as it has been documented in both electrical utility deployments and highway location selection) was viewed as progress by civil rights groups. And also enough to send the GOP into a multi-month tizzy.

Last February, 65 US House Republications submitted a resolution of disapproval claiming, falsely, that the Biden administration was using the pretense of “equity” to “expand the federal government’s control of all Internet services and infrastructure.” And last week, the Federalist Society hosted a function at which GOP officials (including Trump appointed FCC Commission Nathan Simington) gathered to make up claims the rules were already having a “chilling effect across the broadband industry“:

“Out of fear of running afoul of the rules, companies will certainly avoid otherwise planned investments,” said Erin Boone, chief of staff and wireless advisor for Republican FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington.”

As you might recall, this was the same claim Republicans made about some modest net neutrality rules. For a decade the GOP proclaimed that modest and largely unenforced FCC net neutrality rules would have a devastating impact on broadband investment. But if you looked at earnings reports, public data, and even CEO statements, it was patently obvious the claim was absolute bullshit.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is also positively flummoxed that a telecom regulator acknowledged that digital broadband discrimination exists, penning a lengthy missive falsely stating that the FCC’s half-assed effort would most assuredly harm poor Americans:

“These rules undermine public and private sector efforts to build modern broadband networks—jeopardizing connectivity for all Americans.”

This is the perpetual doom cycle U.S. telecom policy has inhabited for 30 odd years.

Democrats weakly propose long overdue but meekly enforced rules to address a problem they’ve ignored for the better part of thirty years. Republicans pop up to proclaim these bare-minimum efforts are somehow a “radical socialist takeover of the internet” (or some variant), which “both sides” news outlets parrot without much in the way of skepticism, giving the GOP unearned credibility on telecom policy.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s broadband privacy, net neutrality, racial discrimination, or even very basic efforts to stop your cable company from ripping you off with bullshit fees. It doesn’t matter how basic the proposal is or if it ever even sees enforcement.

The pretense is always the same: that the government doing the absolute bare minimum is, in reality, a “radical government running amok” and “chilling all investment in the broadband industry.”

It makes me wonder how the AT&T earlobe-nibbling politicians of today would respond to a Democratic party and regulators with an actual antitrust enforcement backbone. In lock step with GOP whining, major telecom policy and lobbying groups have also sued to block the modest digital discrimination rules in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in St. Louis, claiming falsely it’s akin to “rate regulation.”

The goal of most Republicans (and a not insubstantial number of Democrats) is a market in which regional, highly consolidated monopolies like AT&T and Comcast are allowed to freely run amok, taking bottomless advantage of the one-two punch of feckless oversight and limited competition while being slathered with subsidies. All dressed up as some kind of noble defense of free markets and the little guy.

I’ve been seeing some variation of this for the better part of 25 years of covering the broadband industry, and it’s utterly remarkable how utterly impervious the whole corruption-fueled dynamic is to both reason and meaningful change.

Aging satellite TV provider Dish Network is supposed to be undergoing a major transformation from tired old satellite TV provider to streaming and wireless juggernaut. It was a cornerstone of a Trump administration FCC and DOJ plan to cobble together a new wireless carrier out of twine and vibes as a counter-balance to the competition-eroding T-Mobile and Sprint merger.

It’s… not going well. All of the problems critics of the T-Mobile and Sprint merger predicted (layoffs, price hikes, lest robust competition) have come true. Meanwhile Dish has been bleeding satellite TV, wireless, and streaming TV subscribers for a while (last quarter the company lost another 314,000 TV subscribers, including 249,000 satellite TV subs and 65,000 Sling TV customers).

Dish’s new 5G network has also generally been received as a sort of half-hearted joke. Dish also lost 123,000 prepaid wireless subscribers last quarter; it can’t pay its debt obligations, can’t afford to buy the spectrum it was supposed to acquire as part of the Sprint/T-Mobile merger arrangement; and expanding its half-cooked 5G network looks tenuous at best.

Last year Dish proposed merging with Echostar in a bid to distract everybody from the company’s ongoing mess. They’ve also tried to goose stock valuations by hinting at an equally doomed merger with DirecTV. But those distractions didn’t help either, and there are increasing worries among belatedly aware analysts that this all ends with bankruptcy and a pile of rubble:

“MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett offered a blunt assessment of the company’s future based on Dish’s deteriorating pay-TV and mobile subscriber customer base: “Dish’s business is spiraling towards bankruptcy. Gradually, then all at once, the declines are gathering speed,” he wrote in a research note.”

From 2019 or so I noted that this whole mess was likely a doomed effort, primarily designed to provide cover for an anti-competitive, job-killing wireless merger. It always seemed likely to me that Dish (which had never built a wireless network) would string FCC regulators along for a few years before selling off its valuable spectrum assets and whatever half-assed 5G network it had managed to construct.

Despite this, trade magazines that cover the telecom industry tried desperately to pretend this was all a very serious adult venture, despite zero indication anyone involved had any idea what they were doing. And the deal rubber stamping and circular logic used to justify it ran in very stark contrast to the ongoing pretense that we supposedly care about “antitrust reform.”

Ultimately Dish will make a killing on spectrum, the FCC will fine them a relative pittance for failing to meet the flimsy build requirements affixed to the merger conditions, and Dish CEO Charlie Ergen will trot off into the sunset on a giant pile of money. Some giant player like Verizon will then swoop in to gobble up what’s left of the wreckage, and the industry will consolidate further (the whole point)

The regulatory impact of approving Sprint/T-Mobile, which consolidated the U.S. wireless market from four to three major providers (jacking up prices and killing off thousands of jobs), will be forgotten, and the regulators and officials behind the entire mess will have long ago moved on to other terrible, short-sighted ideas.

Avenir Telecom’s Energizer HardCase P28K smartphone garnered a lot of attention at Mobile World Congress this week due to its standout feature: a massive 28,000 mAh battery. But the power-bank-with-a-smartphone isn’t the only new device the company is showing off at MWC. The Energizer Ultimate U660S is a phone that stands out for another reason: it’s […]

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