Category Archives: Jeers

Bad news.

Is CenturyLink doing fiber-to-the-home or fiber-to-the-press release?

  By Jesse | May 6, 2013 - 10:00 am | ,
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Before I could publish this, Chris Mitchell at MuniNetworks.org did a much more in-depth version of what I wrote here. I highly recommend reading his article for the nitty gritty details. Unsurprisingly, we both reached the same conclusion.

When Google announced they would be building a gigabit network in Austin, AT&T wasted no time trying to jump on that bandwagon for damage control. Of course, nobody believed it. How could a company who has shown no interest in network investment suddenly decide that they might want to get on that? I find myself in the same position with CenturyLink’s announcement of an FTTH testbed in Omaha. Moreso, they’re not even equipped to do it.

Bear in mind that this is going to be a very small deployment, just 48,000 homes. It’s focused on an area where CenturyLink provides TV service, a product they haven’t even put into trial in most markets after shutting it down and starting it back up again. This makes some sense as most fiber networks need multiple product offerings to make the network achieve the desired revenue goals. That also means that areas without TV trials are probably not likely to see the service anytime soon.

Then there’s the matter of money. CenturyLink is a cash-poor, debt-heavy behemoth that’s been shedding voice customers to cell carriers and broadband customers to anything that isn’t them. When was the last time they did a new ADSL2+ footprint anywhere in Utah? It’s been several years now with not a red cent of network improvement. Omaha is a testbed not because they don’t sorely need to upgrade their entire network, but because that’s likely all the money they can afford to spend. Without a highly profitable wireless business or a lead against their cable competitors, it doesn’t look like the picture is going to improve anytime soon either. Investors don’t seem to think so.

I’m sure CenturyLink will build out their “testbed” in Omaha. Heck, they’ll probably even expand it to the surrounding suburbs. But will they pick up enough steam to push it nationwide? I wouldn’t put money on it.

The Alternate Reality of the Standard-Examiner

  By Jesse | June 22, 2012 - 6:59 pm | ,
4 Comments

The Standard-Examiner published an anti-UTOPIA editorial yesterday that, quite frankly, makes me wonder if some sort of illicit substances are in use by their editorial board. Granted, these kinds of opinion pieces are not uncommon, but this one sets a new “standard” in incoherence and inaccuracy. Allow me to “examine” the various ways in which their editorial could only make sense in a conveniently parallel dimension.

Fife wondered why suggested prices quoted by Beehive Broadband are so pricey…

Actually, $45 per month for service is actually not too shabby. The only plan that Comcast offers near that price is both a temporary 6-month introductory offer and significantly less speed. It also undercuts Beehive’s own pricing on their own FTTH network ($60/mo and up to a $895 install) for what I can assume is less speed (20Mbps both ways). On UTOPIA, they charge either $45 per month (half of which disappears in about 20 years) or $22 per month with a $2750 install cost. In a pure apples-to-apples comparison, UTOPIA is offering a very competitive price, especially when you compare like speeds (or as like as you can get) from Comcast and CenturyLink. But they deny this reality as well:

If the Beehive Broadband deal is approved, customers will still have to pay Internet prices that frankly, are not very much different from prices that can be found in the private sector.

Oh really? Comcast charges around $60/mo for 25Mbps down, 4Mbps up. CenturyLink will do 40Mbps down, 5Mbps up for the same price. XMission and InfoWest are happy to sell you a 50Mbps bi-directional connection for that much, and $23 of that monthly cost vanishes when you’ve paid off the connection.

The fact-free piece doesn’t end there, though. Consider this gem:

While elected officials in UTOPIA-yoked cities are for the most part, too stubborn to admit they made a mistake hooking up with the public/private group…

Wait, what? Cities didn’t join UTOPIA, cities created UTOPIA. It’s their baby. As much as choice elected officials like to disown it for cheap political points, that’s about as asinine as insisting that the fire department is a separate entity.

While it’s pretty obvious that the editorial board is already failing math and civics, they decide to flunk out on history as well.

And again, as mentioned, while UTOPIA may provide quality services, the prices are still similar to what could have been garnered without cities having shelled out millions in dollars.

That’s another thing that just isn’t so. Brigham City tried for years to get Comcast and Qwest to deploy more broadband with no success. Lindon even offered to pay them for it and was declined. Tremonton residents could barely get 1.5Mbps DSL, a connection that would have been top-notch more than a decade ago. Once they decided to join UTOPIA, higher-end services magically became feasible in their town and the incumbents got busy digging. Had they not joined, what would they have right now?

I don’t necessarily have an issue with someone opposing UTOPIA. I do, however, have a problem with people who have zero grasp of the facts and try to do so. It appears that the editorial board of the Standard-Examiner is such an uninformed group, although to such a degree as to have me question if they are perhaps in the wrong line of work. We expect our journalists to dig in a find facts, a task to which they appear to be ill-suited.

UTOPIA Proving a Popular Scapegoat for City Revenue Issues

  By Jesse | May 29, 2012 - 1:30 pm | , ,
12 Comments

A lot of cities have been talking property tax hikes lately, and the most certain thing about all of the proposals is that elected officials are going to look for someone or something to blame. In UTOPIA member cities, blaming the fiber network has become the easy go-to solution, especially since so many mayors and city council members weren’t involved in the original decision. The problem, however, is that this blame is completely paving over a deeper problem of city tax structure that’s boring, doesn’t fit the anti-UTOPIA narrative, and is a much larger problem for city budgets. Let’s take the examples of West Valley City, Orem, and Taylorsville, the latter of which is not a UTOPIA member city. In all three cases, they’ve called for large (as a percentage) property tax increases to make up for lagging sales tax revenues. So if UTOPIA is the cause of property tax increases, why would a non-member city need to more-or-less do the same thing?

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Has American Fork fixed its broadband network woes? Hardly

  By Jesse | April 9, 2012 - 8:30 am | ,
4 Comments

Back on March 15, I filed a GRAMA request to get some more details on American Fork’s sale of AFCNet, their municipal broadband network, to a private party. The request was dutifully filled exactly 10 business days later on March 29. The documents revealed the terms of the sale, what was sold, and the payment history on the network. The following day, after years of silence about American Fork’s broadband, the Daily Herald publishes an article asserting that the city has managed to turn their city-owned broadband fortunes around. This, however, is an obvious snow job.

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Zombie Bill: SB112 Substitute Sails Through the Senate

  By Jesse | February 16, 2012 - 10:13 am | ,
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As many bills up on capitol hill do, SB112 came back from the dead after some tweaking and passed the Senate on a 20-8-1 vote. It’s now with the House, though it’s not yet on the reading calendar for a vote. While the tax break for cable operators isn’t as large as before, the premise of the bill is still fundamentally flawed as it does not consider a franchise fee to be payment for right-of-way. Make sure you call your member of the House and tell them to oppose this bill!

Oppose SB112

  By Jesse | February 6, 2012 - 12:50 pm | ,
3 Comments

For the most part, the Utah Legislature has spent very little time focusing on telecommunications issues. From my stance, that’s usually a good thing as when they focus on the sector, it is almost always to promote an anti-municipal telecom bill. This year, however, brings a bill worth opposing. SB112, sponsored by my own Senator, Wayne Neiderhauser, seeks to cut the state excise tax rate for cable television without making any adjustments for satellite providers.

Sen. Neiderhauser explains the rationale behind the bill: cable subscribers pay more taxes because of franchise fees, so the excise tax needs to be reduced so that the total of excise tax and franchise fees is equal between the two platforms. This, however, is an entirely illogical basis for providing the discount. Franchise fees are paid to a municipal government as compensation for accessing right-of-way. This includes being able to tear up city streets and erect poles in order to deploy this infrastructure. It has no relationship or bearing upon the state excise tax.

The end effect of this bill is to give cable television providers an unfair advantage in the tax system, enjoying a much higher benefit for the same level of taxation. If you want to cut taxes, that’s fine, but doing so in such a manner as to create a greater inequity in the tax structure is absurd. I encourage you to write your legislator to ask them to oppose SB112 as currently written.

Utah County Association of Realtors Planning Anti-UTOPIA Meeting in Orem

  By Jesse | October 20, 2011 - 5:19 pm | , ,
7 Comments

See below for update.  It appears that astroturfing isn’t just for the Utah Taxpayers Association anymore. The Utah County Association of Realtors, a very powerful lobbying group, has been organizing a “public forum” entitled “What does UTOPIA mean for your home?” and has been using robocalls to promote attendance at it. The call says that UTOPIA will be in attendance, but they never extended an invitation to them. They did, however, extend an invitation to the Utah Taxpayers Association and two anti-UTOPIA candidates for city council. Unsurprisingly, the low-scruples ousted Utah County GOP Chairman Taylor Oldroyd is the prime organizer.

I’d advise UTOPIA supporters in or around Orem to show up to the meeting at 1031 W. Center St. Orem on Tuesday October 25 at 2PM. There will no doubt be disinformation by the truckload that will have to be countered.

UPDATE: Per Chris Nichols, the president of the Utah County Association of Realtors, the Utah Taxpayers Association has been un-invited from the event. He stated that his goal is strictly to discuss the implications of transfer of title when a homebuyer has chosen to finance the installation including how it appears when doing a search on the property. He also made it clear that any attempts to derail the discussion beyond that would be thoroughly unwelcome.

Chris also stated that UTOPIA was invited, but the person whom he named as “someone who has done work for UTOPIA” was not a name I’m familiar with. Granted, I don’t know everyone on their payroll, but if the PR department doesn’t know anything about it, it kind of maybe didn’t exactly go to the right person. Sounds like they both had their wires crossed on that one.

For the record, he was pretty mad at me and spent over 10 minutes chewing me out on the phone. I tried to explain why I formed the opinion I did, but he had no interest in hearing it. The website for the event links straight to the light-on-facts UTA website and lists a smattering of candidates for city council in Orem, both of whom are anti-UTOPIA (though one of them is being a realist about the situation). These combined with questions that appear to imply that the UTOPIA contract causes significant real estate sale issues created a very bad public face. The website itself also has no contact information as to who the responsible party would be.

My take? He wasn’t holding a tight enough leash on his employee Oldroyd who then worked with the UTA to try and sneakily co-opt the event for his own political purposes. My publicizing of it was very embarassing (and understandably so) and he needed to take it out on someone right then and there. Hey Chris? No hard feelings this time, but maybe try to be a bit more understanding of where someone else is coming from next time around. A lot of bloggers wouldn’t be as gracious as I am to heavily update an article to show both sides.

UPDATE 2: For those who are interested, I have a copy of the robocall used to publicize the event. Link is below.

UCAR UTOPIA Robocall

Comcast’s $10 Service is Smoke and Mirrors

  By Jesse | September 25, 2011 - 1:18 pm | ,
3 Comments

One of the conditions placed upon Comcast’s purchase of NBC Universal was to start offering a cost-conscious Internet plan for low-income households. This also includes a plan to offer cheap PCs to those families so that they can actually use the service. As with any deal, though, the devil is in the details. Upon closer examination, it would appear that Comcast has simply found a way to create a new revenue stream with some great PR. Combined with the stringent terms of use, it’s obvious that the entire thing is puffed up well beyond what it actually is.

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Re-writing Reality: Utah Taxpayers Association Spins on iProvo

  By Jesse | August 4, 2011 - 11:14 pm | , ,
10 Comments

It’s almost become too easy to pick on the Utah Taxpayers Association when they get a story so very, very wrong. The latest work of fiction is their tortured stance on iProvo, one in which they perform twists of logic to support how things have unfolded with iProvo and yet continue to vilify what UTOPIA does. As usual, this requires a point-by-point breakdown of where they lack any kind of consistency and twist or invent facts to support their weak sauce arguments.

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Comcast Can’t Shake the Anti-P2P Legacy

  By Jesse | May 13, 2011 - 9:00 am | ,
2 Comments

Yesterday morning, the Internet went into a total tizzy when Comcast users found themselves unable to access the infamous torrent site ThePirateBay. Almost immediately, the accusations of intentional blocking spread like wildfire despite Comcast’s insistence that they aren’t doing anything. This reveals a pretty telling truth: Comcast’s foray into filtering traffic has done permanent and incalculable damage to the brand, even years after admitting to the blocking and putting an end to it.

Is Comcast blocking anything? I doubt it. They took such a big PR black eye the first time that they’re unlikely to be dumb enough to try it again. That the stain persists years later, however, shows what a bad move it is to manipulate user traffic. Let that be a warning to all service providers of the lasting consequences of abusing users.