U.S. Telecom Infrastructure Crisis (eBook)

America's botched modernization of copper to fiber -- and the path forward

Frederick L. Pilot (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2020 | 1. Auflage
130 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-0983-3041-5 (ISBN)

Infos

In 2020 as public health restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic suddenly converted millions of American homes into offices, classrooms and medical clinics, accumulated deficits in advanced telecommunications infrastructure and related challenges of access and affordability that have existed for years reached a crisis point. This book describes how the crisis is affecting people, the factors that brought it about and prolong it, the outlook for its resolution and a path forward: publicly owned, open access fiber infrastructure passing reaching every home as telephone service did in the mid-20th century.

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In 2020 as public health restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic suddenly converted millions of American homes into offices, classrooms and medical clinics, the nation's accumulated deficits in advanced telecommunications infrastructure and related challenges of access and affordability that had been in place for years have now reached a crisis point. The root of the problem is a failure of planning and policy over the past quarter century to ensure decades old copper telephone lines that reach every American doorstep were modernized with fiber optic lines to support Internet delivered digital telecommunications. The nation lacks a comprehensive, coordinated transition plan and relies on various underfunded, piecemeal efforts. The cause of the failure: public policymakers focused on the wrong thing: incremental gains in "e;broadband"e; speed instead of replacing the copper with fiber beginning a generation ago. With the enactment of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, policymakers erred in assuming fiber would be just one of several technologies that would compete with copper rather than pursuing a deliberate policy to ensure the timely replacement of copper with fiber. Consequently, fiber reaches less than a third of American homes in 2020. That's far short of the goal of the Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan prepared for Congress in 2010 that called for 100 million homes to have affordable fiber-level connections a decade later. U.S. telecommunications policy primarily serves the needs of for profit companies that lack incentive to rapidly speed construction of fiber to solve America's advanced telecommunications infrastructure deficits. There's an inherent conflict between their investors' focus on short term earnings and the broader public interest of having universally accessible and affordable fiber connections. This book describes how the crisis is affecting people, the factors that brought it about and prolong it, the outlook for its resolution and a path forward: publicly owned, open access fiber infrastructure passing reaching every home as telephone service did in the mid-20th century. The audience for this book is public policymakers, telecommunications regulators and the general public. Members of these groups acknowledge the essential nature of advanced telecommunications infrastructure as a utility. That recognition has grown more urgent over time and especially so with the 2020 coronavirus pandemic and sharply increased reliance on home connectivity and working from home.

Textauszug

Chapter 2: Factors bringing about and prolonging America’s Telecommunications Infrastructure Crisis

"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else."

-- Winston Churchill

Factors leading to the crisis

For more than a generation, American telecommunications policy has been focused on the wrong thing: bandwidth (broadband) instead of building fiber infrastructure to replace copper telephone lines that reach nearly every doorstep. Consequently, the United States wasted a quarter century in failing to adopt policies to support an aggressive and timely revamp of its telecommunications infrastructure from metallic cable to support legacy telephone and cable television services to fiber to the premise (FTTP) infrastructure to support Internet protocol services.

The country is also misconceiving advanced telecommunications infrastructure myopically, viewing it as a community level challenge when in fact it's a national one since it occurs all across the nation. Modern digital telecommunications infrastructure is fundamentally interstate, connecting states to each other and the nation to the rest of the world via the Internet. Unless it quickly changes course, the United States is likely to spend the coming years responding to these failures with incremental, local fiddling at the edges leading to more failure and disappointment.

Too many Americans remain embarrassingly served by 1990s DSL over aging copper lines, satellite Internet and even dialup. Most homes lack fiber connections and there's no coordinated national effort to modernize America's aging and outdated legacy metallic telecom infrastructure to fiber.

A national crisis

America’s advanced telecommunications infrastructure gaps are not an inherently local problem. They occur all over the United States – in urban, suburban, exurban and rural areas. It is a nationwide issue requiring a national solution. A major impediment to addressing this issue from a national or regional perspective is telecommunications is typically conceived of as a local service offering rather than infrastructure that links localities to other localities, regions and states and nations – the way long distance telephone service did for decades. The root of this conceptualization has both old and new origins.

The old one is cable TV service. Cable got its start in the 1950s as definitively local service, serving localities that for reasons of distance and terrain could not reliably receive broadcast television signals. Cable providers erected large antennae to pick up and amplify the signals, delivering them over cables to homes. Hence its designation as CATV service -- Community Antenna Television.

Local governments saw CATV – later fed with satellite delivered TV programming – as a local service and issued franchises to cable operators. Cable thus became to be thought of as a local service that varied from locality to locality.

The newer conceptualization of advanced telecommunications as a local service comes courtesy of legacy telephone companies that delivered voice phone service over twisted pair copper for many decades starting early in the last century. Starting in the late 1990s, telephone companies began providing Internet connections via Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) service.

DSL is hyper local because of its limited technological range, able to reliably serve customer premises only within about two and a half miles of phone company central office facilities or field distribution equipment. DSL also requires copper telephone cable that’s in good condition, another limiting factor to DSL’s reach given in much of the county, it as well as the aging utility poles that support it were put in the mid-20th century. (Telephone companies asked regulators to allow them to retire their old copper plant starting around 2010, but have put forward no plan to replace it with FTTP.)

Consequently, localities ended up with some neighborhoods able to get DSL service while others too far from these facilities could not. That further reinforced the conception of advanced telecommunications as a highly localized service.

Then around 2005, cable providers began offering Internet protocol-based voice and data services. Cable companies operate under franchise agreements with local governments. They realized local governments could require them to upgrade and build out their infrastructures to offer these advanced telecommunications services to all customer premises in a given local jurisdiction.

Wanting to avoid the capital expenditures entailed with that and to continue to cherry pick neighborhoods seen as having good profit potential, the cable companies championed state legislation that took franchising authority away from the locals and transferred it to state public utility commissions. Consequently, as with phone company DSL service, some neighborhoods are served while others not in cable companies’ desired service area “footprint” remain unserved

Viewing advanced telecommunications as a local service offering – priced, advertised and sold in service bundles – naturally leads to an unrealistic expectation that it should be a competitive market like other services marketed and sold locally. That leads to expectations like this:

“If Company X won’t serve my home or neighborhood, then shouldn’t I be able to go to Company Y or Company Z to get service? If Provider A doesn’t offer the service bundle at the price I can afford, then I should be able to shop Providers B, C and D for an alternative offer.”

The problem is these service offers aren’t available because the other providers aren’t necessarily in the market, their mass media advertising notwithstanding. The fine print in the ads from the legacy telephone and cable providers notes that service is “not be available in all areas.” That’s because in much of their nominal service areas, it costs too much and is too economically risky to support those other options under the dominant business model where the provider owns the infrastructure connecting customer premises that pay using recurring monthly subscriptions.

The business risk is not enough premises will subscribe or too many that do will close their accounts to justify the investment in high cost infrastructure. Any new providers who might compete with the incumbent providers face that same risk and more since they would have to woo away customers from the incumbents as well as get their own.

That business case risk is unlikely to change if advanced landline telecommunications remains largely unregulated on a de facto basis and left to large, investor-owned legacy telephone and cable companies. They’re not promoting their ability to connect more and more customer premises and there is no regulatory policy that compels them to do so. Lately, their ads promote sports and entertainment content -- for the premises they choose to serve with landline infrastructure -- and for mobile devices.

Public policy failure

In 1996, Congress and the Clinton administration foresaw the shift toward digital Internet protocol-based telecommunications and enacted an update of the 1934 Communications Act. The Internet was emerging as an exciting new digital technology available equally to all Americans via dialup modem over copper phone lines. Trademark American optimism held that technological progress would improve Internet access, uniformly lifting all boats and benefiting all American households like voice telephone service before it. A bold new digital future kicked off the previous decade with the mass market microcomputer beckoned.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 defined "advanced telecommunications capability" as capable of delivering "high-speed, switched, broadband telecommunications capability that enables users to originate and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video telecommunications using any technology."

For the existing legacy telephone companies with existing investment in legacy copper cable designed to support analog voice telephone service, that translated to an optional service upgrade – not a basic service available to all residences like voice telephone service was before it.

No national infrastructure standard, no deployment timeline

Notably, the law’s language of “any technology” did not define an FTTP infrastructure standard. Instead, the 1996 Act’s aspirational “high quality” service standard led to decades of debate over what technology and how much bandwidth could deliver “high quality” service as bandwidth demand grew exponentially.

Nor did the Act set a timeframe for the universal deployment of infrastructure capable of delivering advanced telecommunications. It merely required deployment to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion, leaving it up to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to determine if that level of deployment was occurring based on annual reports filed by telephone companies.

Instead of...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 14.9.2020
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Technik ► Nachrichtentechnik
• ISBN-10: 1-0983-3041-2 / 1098330412
• ISBN-13: 978-1-0983-3041-5 / 9781098330415