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Content tagged with "cox"
Cox Ditches Cable for Fiber in Upscale Housing Development
John St. Julien covered this story last month, but I couldn't resist amplifying it. Cox Cable, which has undoubtedly told hundreds of communities that they don't need anything better than what it delivers over its cable network, has opted for a full FTTH in a wealthy new development in California's Orange County.
CED has the details, but the key point for us is yet another recognition that cable networks are yesterday's technology, unable to deliver the services that communities need today and will certainly need tomorrow.
Communities are smart to invest in their own fiber networks not only because the technology is superior, but because local, community ownership results in a more accountable network that will continue to meet community needs long into the future. Municipal electric networks have offered less expensive, more reliable services for over 100 years in some cases - a track record that reminds us how powerful this model can be.
Idaho Town Calls for Fiber Investment; Cable and DSL Not Good Enough
This is the third time we have found an occasion to highight the community of Ketchum in Idaho. We previously noted their work on a strategic plan and that Cox cable was booted off the broadband advisory board after trying to sabotage the process with a push poll.
Now the local paper has editorialized on the "Need for Fiber."
While it is tempting to marginalize the need for such services as just a way for Johnny or Sally to download games or movies faster, increasingly the lack of fiber optic capacity is also limiting health care and advanced education options for residents, as well as impacting the growth of telecommuting and home-based businesses for which Ketchum has noticeably been successful in attracting in the past. Now owners of home-based businesses are increasingly saying they can not operate effectively without fiber to the home, and telecommuters contend their employers will be less likely to let them work from home without fast, reliable fiber broadband.This is all true and we wish we saw a hundred editorial boards recognizing it every week. The question is what the community can do about it given the challenge and potential expense. The answer from the Ketchum Keystone is smart:
Overcoming these obstacles will be very heavy lifting for any city government, but there are also remarkable opportunities and common sense strategies available including the use of the existing and soon to be retired water pipe grid, simple changes in building codes to require fiber-optic implementation, and government loan and incentive programs, all of which make the prospects for a sooner rather than later solution.Every community has a somewhat unique mix of challenges and assets. Communities with the asset of smart leadership will seize upon opportunities like maximizing joint projects between the water system, public works, and such. Communities without smart leadership may want to solve that problem first. Ketchum has identified the problem, and that is a good first step. Until a community recognizes that the big cable and telephone corporations will not solve this problem alone and that communities have an essential role in the process, little progress is likely.
Cox Discourages Internet Use That Competes with Core Cable Product
Another story of frustration as cable companies try to discourage Internet use on their last generation networks.
An article earlier this month in StopTheCap! tells the story of the John Heeley family, long time Cox customers and avid Netflix fans. The Heeley's received a letter from Cox warning them about their "excessive Internet usage." They were more than a little annoyed, considering they fork over $2,400 a year to the cable giant provider so called to express their displeasure:
Heeley’s fiancé Shelley was angry after realizing just how much the couple already spends with Cox.
“I called them on the phone and the first thing they want to do is get you to upgrade and spend even more money with them,” she tells Stop the Cap! “They tried to vaguely threaten our service if we continued to ‘overuse the Internet’ and suggested we cut back or cancel Netflix which they think is the reason we went over the limit.”
Shelley says she was born at night, but not last night.
“How convenient they want you to stop using Netflix, Amazon, or other online video services that their cable TV competes with,” Shelley says. “It is unfair competition.”
Shelley requested a Cox supervisor and threatened the company right back, telling Cox if they sent one more letter like that, the Heeley family would take their business elsewhere.
“He told us quietly we could ignore the letter and any future letters and they will add a note on our account,” Shelley tells us. “He confided they have customers going over the limit all the time and the letter is really about educating customers about usage.”
Ketchum, Idaho: No Tolerance for Cox Push Polls
Cox pushed Ketchum one step too far. The community of 2,700 formed a broadband advisory committee in November, 2012, and included a representative from Cox on the committee. Brennan Rego of the Idaho Mountain Express recently reported on happenings in Ketchum.
When residents in Wood River Valley started receiving push poll telephone calls from Cox to poison any possibility of a community owned network, Mayor Randy Hall and city leaders reacted promptly. They booted Cox off the broadband advisory committee.
Consistent with Cox push polls in other places, questions were leading:
“The questions were so outrageous, I didn’t want to continue with the survey,” [Valley resident Sarah Michael] said. “I got offended. They were inappropriate and misleading.”
Michael said that, in essence, one question asked: Would you support Ketchum’s broadband initiative if you knew the city would cut police, fire and other essential services to pay for it?
“Who’s going to answer yes to that?” she said.
Michael and other residents who received the calls contacted surprised city staff and Mayor Hall.
“As the mayor, I can’t stand by and let somebody imply that I’m going to compromise the Police Department and the Fire Department by taking money away from them and putting it toward a broadband initiative,” Hall said. “That’s insane. I would never do that. I think the survey was trying to create fear.”
Cox claimed the questions were designed to "learn more about the public's opinion" but would not divulge the wording of the survey questions.
The city posted a disclaimer on its website to ensure residents knew the survey was not associated with the committee.
“Cox is a very valuable member of our community,” Hall said. “But to imply that the city is willing to compromise the health and safety of its citizens by funding a broadband initiative is false and irresponsible.”
Hall said he considers Cox’s “unilateral action” in deciding to conduct the survey a “breach of trust,” but that the city would welcome a new representative of the company to the committee.
Community Broadband Bits 19 - John St. Julien from Lafayette
Today we invited John St. Julien, of Lafayette Pro Fiber fame, on episode 19 of the Community Broadband [no-glossary]Bits[/no-glossary] podcast. John was an essential piece of the organizing effort in Lafayette's efforts to build its own community fiber network. In many ways, he has worked to ensure the "community" piece is emphasized over the "fiber" piece.
John and I discuss the organizing effort in Lafayette that led to their successful referendum in 2005, including some lessons for others who want to organize their own communities. We also talk about some of the lengths that big cable and telephone companies will go to stop communities. In the course of our discussion, we talk about a push poll that backfired on those trying to scare voters -- we made the full audio available here.
John will be back on a future show to offer more thoughts on how local activists can work within the community to encourage a local, publicly owned solution.
For background on the LUS Fiber network in Lafayette, we strongly recommend our Broadband at the Speed of Light report, which features a case study of the network. Also, four episodes ago, we interviewed Geoff Daily about his work to develop apps on the LUS Fiber network.
Read the transcript from this interview here.
We want your feedback and suggestions for the show - please e-mail us or leave a comment below. Also, feel free to suggest other guests, topics, or questions you want us to address.
This show is 25 minutes long and can be played below on this page or subscribe via iTunes or via the tool of your choice using this feed. Search for us in iTunes and leave a positive comment!
Listen to previous episodes here. You can download the Mp3 file directly from here.
Find more episodes in our podcast index.
Thanks to Fit and the Conniptions for the music, licensed using Creative Commons.
Audio of Dirty Trick Push Poll in Lafayette from 2005
We sometimes fail to communicate the great lengths to which big cable and telecommunications companies will go to intimidate and scare voters into opposing a community broadband projects. They have deployed a variety of dirty tricks and we have done a poor job of cataloging them.
But a recent phone call with John St. Julien in Lafayette, Louisiana, reminded me of a push poll that an alert citizen recorded back when Cox, Bellsouth (now AT&T), and/or other opponents of the municipal broadband project commissioned a "push poll" to scare voters into opposing a referendum on whether the City should build its own network. We tell the full story about this campaign in our Broadband at the Speed of Light report.
But in anticipation of our interview with John St Julien tomorrow, we thought we should make sure our readers/listeners had a chance to hear this 30 minute call. In it, a pollster is asking a series of questions commissioned by opponents to the community broadband network and responding to it. The audio is sometimes hard to make out, but well worth it as the person recording it has some pretty funny responses to some of the questions being posed.
This is just one of the reasons that referenda are a poor tool for measuring community support of a project. While the big companies can dump unlimited funds into their self-interested "vote no" campaigns, the city itself cannot encourage voters to go one way or another. And local groups supporting a community broadband network have far fewer resources.
For instance, when Longmont, Colorado, had its first referendum, Comcast blitzed the community with something like $250,000 in ads and misinformation (setting a local record for expenditures) -- resulting in a pretty significant majority for the "nay" voters. After citizens realized they'd been had, they clamored for another vote. Two years later, Comcast dropped $400,000 on Longmont but the grassroots successfully out-organized the cash-dump.
If you want to know more about how your community can win a fight like this, read more about Lafayette and listen to our conversation with John St. Julien tomorrow (the first of several).
Here is the push poll and response.
Chanute's Gig: Rural Kansas Network Built Without Borrowing
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The Institute for Local Self-Reliance has just released a new case study on community broadband -- this one examines how Chanute, Kansas, built its own broadband network over a period of many years without borrowing.
[no-glossary]Download[/no-glossary] a PDF of Chanute's Gig: One Rural Kansas Community's Tradition of Innovation Led to a Gigabit and Ubiquitous Wireless Coverage here.
Local businesses are strong supporters of the network. From Ash Grove Cement to MagnaTech, business clients have remained satisfied subscribers. The network continues to encourage economic development and provides connectivity options that attract high bandwidth employers. The network generates $600,000 per year for Chanute’s Electric Utility, 5 percent of which goes to the general fund as a franchising fee each year.
Author Christopher Mitchell, Director of the Telecommunications as Commons Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, believes Chanute can offer valuable lessons to other communities across the United States. “This community has demonstrated that communities can meet their own telecommunications needs with smart public investments — they did not wait for national corporations to solve their problems.”
City Manager J.D. Lester refers to municipal broadband as “the great equalizer for Rural America,” saying: “You don’t have to live in Kansas City to work there.”
The City also operates a 4G WiMAX network that connects public safety and is used to feed Wi-Fi hotspots throughout the community.
Local leaders plan to expand the network to offer access to all residents and businesses in the future as extending it become financially feasible. As it expands, it will offer the potential for smart-grid type investments in the gas, water, and electrical utilities — all of which are owned and operated by the local government.
One of the key lessons other communities can take away from this case study is how planning and prioritizing community investments in broadband can greatly benefit the community, especially local businesses. Chanute took advantage of several opportunities to expand what started as a very basic network over the course of many years at low cost.
Harold Feld Examines The Meaning Behind The Verizon/SpectrumCo/Cox Deal
Several months ago, we wrote this post but it got lost in the system. We think it still worthwhile, so here it is.
The word "cartel" drums up many negative annotations - drug cartels, oil cartels. Never anything positive, such as bunny cartels or chocolate cartels. Harold Feld (of Public Knowledge) explains the emergence of another cartel in My Insanely Long Field Guide To The Verizon/SpectrumCo/Cox Deal, on his Tales of the Sausage Factory blog. This is great tutorial on how the deal came about and what it can mean for the future of broadband.
Rather than chocolate, drugs, oil, or bunnies, the product in question is telecommunications services. At the heart of the cartel are the familiar names: Verizon, Cox, and SpectrumCo. The latter being a consortium of Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House. All the big hitters in telecom are involved in a way that is veiled, secretive, and not good for competition.
"It's almost as if your companies got in a room together, and you agreed to throw in the towel and stop competing against each other," Sen. Al Franken to representatives from Verizon and the cable companies at the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights, March 21, 2012.
Feld's investigation begins with the licensing and collecting of spectrum by SpectrumCo but ends with a more practical look at how these big hitters have decided that it is better to join forces than to compete. Side agreements, secretive multi-layered entities, and threaded loopholes keep the FCC at bay. This begins as an article about telecommunications, but quickly expands into an antitrust primer. The most alarming facet of this situation is that the product in question is information.
Joel Kelsey of Free Press testified at that same committee, warning how this deal will compromise access, quality, and affordability to broadband in America and how drive us further behind the rest of the world.
Update:
On August 16, 2012, the Department of Justice announced that it approved the deal with changes. Citing:
Fiber Referendum Fails in Siloam Springs
In an unsurprising result, voters in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, chose not to build their own FTTH network. The margin was 58% against, 42% for. According to that article, the opponents (bankrolled largely by national cable company Cox) outspent proponents by 3:1.
We previously covered this plan and were concerned that the number one reason identified for proposing the network was to diversify revenue for the local government. Quite frankly, that is a poor reason to go head to head against massive companies like Cox and CenturyLink.
The biggest benefits of community networks tend to be the hard to quantify -- aggregate savings to the community from lower prices from all providers in a competitive environment, increased economic development, better customer service from a local provider, etc. These networks are built to be financially self-sufficient, but we caution against expecting them to be a piggy bank for the local government.
Unlike the successful Longmont approach, where those advocating for the community network engaged others who had been through similar fights elsewhere, it seemed like Siloam Springs preferred not to ask for help. Meanwhile, Cox tapped its nationwide resources to oppose the network, with misinformation like this:
Download the full size flyer here.
Communities that want to build community networks should engage the wider community of community broadband supporters and be prepared for flyers like this one. And when seeking local support, make sure you find messages that resonate. Make sure you read about the grassroots movement in Lafayette in our recent report or how Chattanooga had hundreds of community meetings to explain its plan.
These networks face stiff opposition from entrenched opponents that want to be the sole gatekeepers to the Internet -- ensuring a real choice means doing real organizing.
Download the full size flyer here.
Communities that want to build community networks should engage the wider community of community broadband supporters and be prepared for flyers like this one. And when seeking local support, make sure you find messages that resonate. Make sure you read about the grassroots movement in Lafayette in our recent report or how Chattanooga had hundreds of community meetings to explain its plan.
These networks face stiff opposition from entrenched opponents that want to be the sole gatekeepers to the Internet -- ensuring a real choice means doing real organizing.
Arkansas Town Targeted by Cox Prior to Community Broadband Referendum
Siloam Springs, sporting 15,000 people in the northwestern corner of Arkansas, could be the next community to build its own community fiber network. But first they have to pass a referendum in May in the face of stiff opposition from Cox Cable, which would prefer not to face real competition.
For over 100 years, the city has provided its own electricity via its electrical department. Now, it wants to join the more than 150 other communities that have done so. After last year's changes to Arkansas law, Siloam Springs has the authority to move forward if it so chooses.
Pamela Hill at the City Wire has covered the situation with a series of stories, starting with an explanation of why they are moving forward:
David Cameron, city administrator, said the proposal is not so much about dissatisfaction with current providers as it is about finding new revenue for the city. Cameron said revenue from electric services has been a key source of funding for various projects and necessities for the city. That “enterprise” fund is getting smaller, Cameron said, and an alternative funding source is needed. “We have done a good job managing accounts, building a reserve,” Cameron said. “We want to keep building on the programs we have. It takes money and funds to do that.” City officials discussed the issue for the last 18 months and decided to put it to a referendum. Voters will decide the issue May 22.That is a fairly unique reason. Most communities want to build these networks to encourage economic development and other indirect benefits to the community. Given the challenge of building and operating networks, few set a primary goal of boosting city revenue.
If approved by voters, the city plans to spend $8.3 million to install 100 miles of fiber optic cable directly to homes and businesses. The city should be able to repay the debt in 12 years, if things go according to a feasibility study presented to the city’s board of directors in January.