Over the past 10 or so years there has been a flood of stories regarding the fighting between the FCC, the telephone companies and other related competitors. Telephone companies have protected "their" physical networks even though the networks were built with rate payer funds. Directives from the FCC to the telephone companies to open their networks have been largely ignored. In my view, this has led to immense damage to the economic and educational development of the U.S. particularly in rural areas. By realistic measure, the U.S. is now somewhere between 15th and 20th in world ranking of broadband adoption and use.

An obvious first step to any solution, in my view, is to do a realistic and honest cross check between individual legacy telephone company organizations and others providing broadband services. I don't see where it would be a big deal to compare operating costs between providers including providers in other countries. There also needs to be a careful assessment of local community economic gain vs. company profits. "Corporate profits before people" simply doesn't work in this area as it does not work in other utility areas. Generating data from telephone company internally created statistics, as the FCC has done, also doesn't work. There needs to be an honest and independent source free of obvious bias. Using the claim of "proprietary data" in refusing to reveal information should simply be outlawed. The overall community public good should be top priority over everything else including corporate profits.

Over the past many years, legacy telephone companies have maintained a death grip on the ownership and control of their outside telephone cable resources. They know that if they can maintain control if this resource, they can maintain a monopoly position in the market. In my view, the fact that in rural areas, existing metallic cable is often in badly deteriorated condition, provides an opportunity for public ownership and control of replacement fiber cable. Fiber optic cable has immense circuit transport capabilities. Because of cost, it should not be installed everywhere. Such a vast resource, however, should not be controlled by one company in my view. Ownership and control of fiber cable belongs in the public domain with usage leased to service providers. Using different colored (frequency) light, many providers (potentially nearly 100) can supply services over a common cable structure. I support the use of public funds to install optical cable, where appropriate, with usage and operation competitively bid to service providers.

The Japanese story perfectly illustrates the short comings of metallic telephone cable. It's well known that triple play services (phone, data, TV) can be delivered short distances (several thousands of feet) over metallic telephone cable but for longer distances only fiber optic cable will meet the challenge. Distribution of triple play services via fiber optics generally reach in the neighbor of 12 miles from the multiplexers. Straight fiber transmission circuits (not triple play) are now pushing 100 miles between repeaters or regenerators. Slower data rates on the order of 1-2 Mbit can be distributed via radio systems but these systems are generally not used by telephone companies.

As a recent failure of Qwest services illustrates, redundant equipment & circuit routing (and providers?) can be critical to communities. The installation of fiber optic cable can be quite costly. It's certainly no secret, though, that gas companies have installed fiber cable along their rights of way. The same is true of railroads, electric power companies etc. In a utility environment, shared use of right of way resources is an important concept. The installation cost of fiber optic cable, in concert with other utility services, is almost always less (often times much less) than when the cable alone is installed. The huge benefits that fiber optic cable brings to a community should be motivation for utility companies to cooperate on the installation of utility resources, including fiber, into a community. Using UTOPIA and an example, here is a typical and simple "Request For Bids" to install conduit for fiber cable. The bid includes specifications for the installation of "Handhole Devices". The bid process uses forms and methods common to the government's Rural Utility Services (RUS) practices.

The only reason legacy telephone companies get away with what they do is because the public allows them to. In my view it sure doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that a few changes at the legislative level will make a huge difference in getting Broadband services available where they are badly needed.

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• Stolen Future
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• Net At Risk!
• Astro Turf - Skunk Works
• Game Over
• When Elephants Dance
• US Broadband
• Baloney = Robert
• Save The Internet
• Internet2 Statement - Page 152
• Colorado OCC
• Colorado OCC Telephone
• Colorado CCR's
• PUC 4-CCR-723 Index
• Utopia Conduit Bid?
• Utopia Handhole Spec No.1
• Utopia Handhole Spec No.2
• Utopia Handhole Spec No.3
• Rural Utility Services - Telecom