Category: BS/ATT

New Orleans’ Wireless Network

Earthlink recently decided to pull out of the municipal wireless market and that decision has caused consternation in cities from San Francisco, which thought it had been promised a network, to Philadelphia, where one has already been built. Not getting the same media play is New Orleans’ wifi network which has been operated by Earthlink for a while.

The Times Picayune story quotes the company’s director of muni wireless indicating that if a free wireless tier exists it means that not enough people will buy the service to make it viable.

But that’s not what his vice-president said not long ago. The blunt explanation then was that “cheap wifi is too slow.” In fact the mesh network technology that promised to make the networks cheap has the side effect of making it slow. And slow, in communications tech is undesirable.

The knock that I heard on the New Orleans network is that it was slow and spotty–at any price. Cheap WiFi was too slow.

Earthlink’s decision to divest itself of its muni division means it will not be investing any more cash in remedying the defects in its design that it readily admits. Any new purchaser that comes in may get the network for cheap–but will have to retool it extensively and expensively to make it a viable solution for the people of the city. My guess is that it won’t happen. Instead, the network will slowly fray, go down bit by bit, and one day, as we saw happen in Baton Rouge, the final parts of a once-proud alternative network will be unceremoniously turned off and the people of the city told that the equipment that is still functioning is not worth salvaging.

That will be a sad ending to a network that was a bright spot in the city’s early recovery. Initially it was cobbled together immediately after Katrina out of a system intended to transmit video surveillance for city police by clever city techs. It was New Orleans’ most useful communications network during the initial chaos and its resilience added to the aura surrounding muni WiFi. Tech-oriented volunteers quickly beefed it up into a community-wide system using donated equipment while Bell-South and Cox slowly tried to get their systems back up. An inspiring story, bu the story from there was predictable: Bell South and Cox objected to the competition as soon as they had anything back up at all. New Orleans couldn’t get the support to change a Louisiana law initially aimed at Lafayette which forced it to provide speeds so slow as to be unusable. The city was forced to hand it over to Earthlink so that the network could offer something like usable speeds and now Earthlink is folding. The slow decline of a hopeful sign has been sad and depressing. I suspect the end is near. I hope I am wrong.

No Broadband Price War….elsewhere

One of the reasons that LUS has relaxed a bit about making its pricing commitments is that it is increasingly obvious that there will be no national price war on broadband. So LUS can confidently see that with its much longer pay-back time and with no need to chase large profits for impatient stockholders and investment firms it can easily undercut the pricing of corporations who have, essentially, decided to milk the customers of their established monopoly cows for the indefinite future. As AT&T and Verizion roll out broadband services that provide no advantage over cable for the same levels of speed it is increasingly obvious that the two industries have decided not to compete on price.

The latest in this “we-are-competeing-vigorously-but-not-on prices” noncompetition competition between the colliding telco and cableco monopolies in the broadband arena was AT&T’s decision to raise prices on its broadband DSL customers…except in former BellSouth areas where its prices were previously higher.

That wasn’t what “competition” between the cablecos and the telecos was supposed to bring. You may recall that when AT&T was trying to transfer local municipal property rights to the state level so it could get around the locals’ insistence that AT&T serve all of a community with their new services in return for using the community’s land they claimed that relieving them of that obligation would yield cheaper prices for the favored few that actually got “competition.” Even that half-a-loaf is NOT the way it is working out…and both the cablecos and the telecos like it that way. Two competitors are simply not enough to establish a competitive market and reality is taking its toll on that tale. A few are even noticing that we’ve been taken:

The announced price hike didn’t sit well with some observers.

Routers, modems and other equipment used to deliver bandwidth are dropping in cost as rapidly as bandwidth demands are rising, said Dave Burstein, who operates DSLprime.com, an industry newsletter. “Total cost to the company for the bandwidth it delivers is about $1 a month per customer,” Burstein said. “AT&T is raising its rates because it can. It has the market power to do so. Increased costs aren’t the reason.”

AT&T still has to pay off the enormous costs of trying to absorb BellSouth, among others, a consolidation that our regulators allowed because it was also supposed to lower prices.

The only real price competition we here in Lafayette can expect to see will come from LUS. BellSouth and Cox exist to serve the interests of their stockholders and that means that we should pay as high a price as the company can extract from us. The industry is learning right now that they don’t have to compete on prices to maintain their margins–and so they won’t. Anything less would be irresponsible. LUS also exists to serve its owners…but their (our) intersts are best served by low prices for high levels of service. Both types of owners will, inevitably, get a company pricing policy based on their interests. But only LUS will actually be motivated to compete on price. (Six month specials like those you’ll see from Cox in both today’s Advocate and Advocate don’t count—that’s marketing, not pricing.)

2009, after the launch of Phase 1, will be an interesting and, I’ll bet, a satisfying year for Lafayette consumers of broadband.

Net Citizenship and You

Food For Thought: Wouldn’t you rather your master be you?

I’m going to have to lay out an unfamiliar thesis: You, fair reader, are almost certainly not on the internet. Not really. You are a second class citizen who is not allowed to make many of the most basic decisions that full members are free to make; you are a dependent of your modem and the wireline owner it is connected to. Generously: you are a client of AT&T or Cox or ____ (your local duopolist here). Less generously: you are a second class citizen of the internet allowed only the access that Big Daddy allows you. And Big Daddy, as in Tennessee Williams’ play, is more interested in wealth and power than he is the welfare of his dependents.

Full citizenship on the web can be defined simply enough: full citizens can use their connection in any way that they want. They are independent actors who are free to make available or view anything.

That’s not you.

Take a look at your TOS (Terms of Service). Cox and AT&T’s, for instance, do meaningfully differ. But they agree about the essentials that concern us here:

1) You are the client, clients of clients are forbidden; you may not distribute service to others,
2) You can’t talk bad about Big Daddy, (e.g.: Customer is prohibited from engaging in any other activity, whether legal or not, that AT&T determines in its sole discretion, to be harmful to its subscribers, operations, network(s). This includes … or which causes AT&T or the AT&T IP Services to be viewed unfavorably by others.)
3) Free speech? No sucha thing. They get to say what you can say. (e.g.: “Cox reserves the right to refuse to post or to remove any information or materials from the Service, in whole or in part, that it, in Cox’s sole discretion, deems to be illegal, offensive, indecent, or otherwise objectionable.“
4) No Free Enterprise. You can’t sell things, for that you need the master’s special permission and a (higher-priced) service, regardless of how much traffic you use,
5) It’s not your connection. “Unlimited, always-on” connections are both limited and subject to an abrupt end. AT&T is bizarrely vague while Cox gives clear limits–which are seldom enforced. It’s not your connection; you need to remember that.
6) Your client status is a privilege, not a right. They can kick you to the curb at any time using whatever rationale seems most useful at the moment. (e.g.: Customer’s failure to observe the guidelines set forth in this AUP may result in AT&T taking actions anywhere from a warning to a suspension of privileges or termination of your Service(s). …AT&T’s decisions with respect to interpretation of the AUP and appropriate remedial actions are final and determined by AT&T in its sole discretion.)

7) Lucky 7 Laigniappe clause: Masters don’t have to follow the rules, only clients. (e.g.: AT&T reserves the right, but does not assume the obligation, to strictly enforce the AUP.)

You are in a master-client relationship with your network provider. You are NOT a full citizen of the internet. Your “location,” your IP address belongs to someone else. They have an assured, static IP. You do not. As long as they own that property you are dependent upon them and they can dictate the terms of that use.

Be aware that this is not the way it was supposed to be. The internet, right down to its IP core was designed around your freedom to connect.

One way of looking at network citizenship is through the lens of internet protocols and the operation of “the end to end principle.” From wikipedia:

The end-to-end principle is one of the central design principles of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) widely used on the Internet as well as in other protocols and distributed systems in general. The principle states that, whenever possible, communications protocol operations should be defined to occur at the end-points of a communications system, or as close as possible to the resource being controlled.

That’s a mouthful. Translated: The internet is designed as a transmission device that is supposed to be controlled by those on ends of a communication. You and the person at the other end. A request from one end is simply passed on to the other end—no single positive, centrally-controlled “circuit” exists. No controller stands in the middle. This is in contrast to the underlying design of the phone network with its centralized circuit switching system that designates a circuit for you and holds it open. (We’re talking about protocols, now….not physical implementation or the practical experience of users.)

Net neutrality battles are raging around the edge of this nascent war. We want to be full citizens of the new order. The incumbents would prefer that we be clients, vassels, and that they be the masters. Right now they are winning. Right now few of us even realize that current order is not necessary or natural—it was arranged for somebody else’s benefit; not for ours.

It really is that simple.

What we need to recognize is the nature of the war. What we need to be fighting for is ownership of our own connection. For full citizenship. To kill the Master-client relationship that constrains our current access to the network.

Ownership of the network is the most complete solution. Any limits we impose on ourselves are limits that we impose; they are not the dictates of the master. We may start out copying what we know in some ways. But that won’t last.

Lafayette, with its community-owned, fiber-based network utility is a good example of how that will work. From the begining things will be different here. We’ll have static IP addresses…and a lot of potential will flow from that. We’ll have full access to the speeds and capacity of our own network–that is what the 100 meg intranet is all about. As it becomes more and more obvious that many of the limits imposed by the current owners are not natural and not in the interests of users we’ll change those aspects as well.

That’s the real value of the battle fought and won here in Lafayette.

Worth thinking about…

LUS Franchise Agreement

Kevin Blanchard over at the Advocate reports that a franchise agreement between LUS and the Lafayette Consolidated Government (LCG) will be introduced at this Tuesday’s City-Parish Council meeting.

While it is 1) technical, 2) presented as an uninteresting “me too” copy of Cox’s, and 3) no doubt a terminally boring read this will be extremely important to Lafayette consumers and citizens—try not to let this slide by you. To understand why the franchise agreement is big deal and what shapes it I’ll have to provide some background from both the state and federal levels. Stick with it: It will have a lot to do with how much you pay for cable and internet—and it will have a huge effect on City-Parish revenues with an indirect effect on how much tax you have to pay for basic local government services. (This document should every bit as important to you as a sales or property tax ordinance–and will probably have a bigger effect on Lafayette’s future than any single tax ordinance ever has.)

As Blanchard points out, the oddity in this agreement is that it will require LUS to pay itself (for attaching to its own poles) and to pay its parent organization (LCG) a fee to access its own customers over the rights of way LCG owns.

That does sound a bit strange doesn’t it? Why bother? Doesn’t this just introduce odd inefficiencies and distort costs?

Yes, it does — and it is intended to. On to the story behind the story.

Some State of Louisiana Background:
Loyal readers will recall (1,2,3) that BellSouth (now AT&T) and Cox pushed a law through the Louisiana legislature back in ’04 shortly after LUS announced its intentions to build a fiber-optic network. That law was intended to stop Lafayette from building a network at all. That story is a long and ugly tale of corporate lobbying and legislative foolishness that LPF covered extensively. Luckily Governor Blanco forced a compromise on the legislature that let Lafayette go forward — but the rewritten-by-committee bill left Lafayette open to legal challenges and imposed a minefield of restrictions and regulations that apply only to municipal telecom utilities. Regulations, that is, that apply only to Lafayette.

Flying the flag of “free enterprise” the two enormously powerful wireline cable and phone monopoly enterprises played the poor-me role of disadvantaged competitors who needed protection from the competition threatened by the city of Lafayette’s local electrical, water, and sewer utility. Lousisiana’s legislature rushed to protect them from this threat. Prior to this law LUS and Lafayette could have simply started up a utility in this area–as it can in electricity or sewerage or natural gas–without any heavy-handed restriction by the state. There would have been no legal basis for a lawsuit to try and prevent it and no way to impose special costs or regulation only on a utility owned by the people of Lafayette. The Louisiana “Fair” Competition Act changed that.

The law provides for a way to drive up the “paper” costs and a regulatory mechanism for ensuring that those higher costs are actually paid by the customers of LUS’ Fiber division. LUS is required to, for instance, pay itself a fee for the use of its own poles and the rights of way that the community owns that is the same as it or the city would charge private companies. (Note that LUS already bears the real cost of building, maintaining, and replacing that property and that those costs are not subtracted from these state-imposed fees. We, and only we, pay twice.) These pay-it-to-yourself “costs” would merely be the silly imposition of a paper shuffle if the state had not required that those costs be passed on to the customer. But that is what the law does.

What is interesting is that the state constitution specifically outlaws using the Public Service Commission (PSC) to regulate publicly owned utilities. (Based on the presumption, I assume, that we as both owners and voters can do that for ourselves.) Since using the PSC to regulate public bodies is illegal, the tortured solution was to place the supposed responsibility in the hands of the state legislative auditor, who has neither the expertise nor the staff to do the job. Recognizing that “problem,” the (un)Fair Competition law directs the PSC to both suggest rules to the auditor and to then enforce those rules. This is pretty transparently an evasion of the state’s basic law but, hey, they write the laws, right?

Even more interesting, the regulations that the PSC are required to enforce are designed to raise the costs to the consumer. If that seems to you like a funny role to ask a PUBLIC Service Commission to play, I’d have to say it seems odd to me too. I had thought the role of the PSC was to protect the public from being overcharged or taken advantage of in other ways. I was not under the impression that it existed to protect large corporations from competition. Silly me. My guess is that the folks over at the PSC aren’t all that happy about it either. It is not the job they signed up for.

The central mechanism that these PSC/Legislative Auditor regulations use to raise your rates is to tote up all the costs to LUS from equipment costs, to billing costs, to interconnection fees, to salaries, to taxes, to pole attachment fees, to franchise fees (the latter two are the elements being considered by the Council Tuesday). The will use a baseline industry cost based in part on what the incumbents say their costs are to establish a “fair price” that must, by law, include the costs to “rent” property they own and fees to use poles that they have already paid to install and maintain. They will then set a minimum price that LUS must charge. Slow down and read that again: they set a minimum price. They will NOT allow LUS to charge you the least that it could…they will force Lafayette’s utility to charge more than it would have to without a set of regulations that force false costs on it.

This is all transparently designed, not to force “a level playing field” or “protect the public” as the incumbent providers claimed in the legislature; it is designed to limit the price competition that LUS will provide AT&T and Cox in Lafayette. Cox and AT&T don’t want to be forced to lower their prices to compete in Lafayette. They most especially don’t want to be forced to lower their prices to compete ONLY in Lafayette. That would make it all too obvious that public utilities like LUS could be a success and provide real value to its citizen-owners. LUS would be a “bad” example for other communities; one that might encourage them to do for themselves what Lafayette has done.

And that would never do.

The Federal Regulatory Issue at hand:
Now all this messy state law and regulation might be preempted by Federal regulation — without the benefit of an enabling law. (I know this is getting convoluted. Stay with me for a while longer; it’s important. 🙂 )

The FCC just this past Wednesday gave “relief” to cable companies on the issue of franchising in a partisan 3-2 vote. This ruling is yet another extension of the FCC’s decision to insert itself into the national franchising issue. The ultimate outcome is pretty disturbing in that the ruling will pretty much will allow a cable company to quit honoring any part of its franchise contract it doesn’t like beyond the monetary fee. Look for support for AOC and governmental networks to vanish. Whether it allows any cable company to immediately quit honoring its contract is in dispute. (Didn’t know the FCC could abrogate contracts? Me neither.) Earlier remarks by the FCC chair had indicated that it wouldn’t void current contracts.

The History:
State and federal franchise issues are also topics that have been covered on these pages, but in synopsis: The incumbent phone companies, lead by AT&T, are determined to get into the cable business. It is easy to see why since estimates I’ve seen show the profit margin at somewhere between 40 and 60% and their own year-to-year reports show that their core business, landline phone service, is declining every year even with margins cut to the bone. But the old Bell phone companies don’t want to have to follow the same rules that cable did in developing this lucrative market: they don’t want to have to go to the public bodies who own the land and negotiate a franchise contract to use the public rights of way. Their first tactic was to go to state governments and get them to take over the localities property rights and establish a state-wide franchise that allowed the state to control the money and disburse it to the localities. Not surprisingly state legislators found shifting this power into their hands an attractive “pro-business,” “pro-competition” policy. This state-level tactic worked in the early rounds but then the municipalities began to unite in opposition and the laws were more and more often either vetoed (as Blanco did here in Louisiana) or defeated in the legislature.

With the preferred state-level alternative failing the phone companies turned to the federal government. They first asked the FCC to establish a federal-level franchising regime. (This is essentially what they have for phone service–the feds reached down and simply “took” state and local rights of way and allowed the phone monopoly to use them for free. This was in an earlier, less ideological, time and for the “good” cause of universal phone service and no one much objected.) The FCC demurred as the Congress was in the midst of gearing up for a major rewrite of telecommunications law. At that point in time no one had any trouble believing that the incumbent providers would mostly get what they wanted. But then AT&T’s CEO went and started the big war over Net Neutrality and the whole bill went down in flames. (Comcast has recently restarted the controversy.) Congress considered but was unable to pass a law that would have redefined franchising.

The FCC then stepped in, and in the face of a obvious lack of Congressional support for the idea, decided to do for the phone companies what they had previously directed the Bells to ask Congress for: they instituted a regime that removed much of the control of rights of way from their local, municipal owners. As you might imagine, lawsuits are underway that argue that the FCC has overstepped its boundaries and is attempting to legislate by regulation. The FCC ruling forbade local governments from requiring cable franchisees to serve the whole community (“buildout” requirements); and basically it forbade municipalities from asking for asking for much of anything beyond money—which was already strictly limited by federal law. As a consequence all sorts of contracts between local governments that cut deals for schools or police or government office, and deals that supported local media like AOC with funds and channel space to provide coverage of city-council events and locally produced programming are all now on the chopping block. Those contracts, by federal fiat, don’t have to be honored. And the city cannot try very hard to negotiate a better deal (not that much is left to “negogitate”) since the FCC imposed a “shot clock:” if the city and the corporation cannot reach an agreement within 90 days the corporation can simply go ahead and provide services without finalizing a contract. (The room for abuse ought to be obvious–localities will have no leverage whatsoever and could easily be reduced to agreeing to whatever the company decided to hand out. Remember, generosity is not a trait of these fellas.) It goes without saying that without any real leverage the local clauses that insure that providers meet service requirements to customers goes out the door.

So does that mean that LUS could decide not to honor its contract too? No, there is no practical way that LUS is not going to meet the obligations it makes with the people of Lafayette…it is a public body and it will not desire to and will not be allowed to simply stiff the city-parish. But Cox, who you will recall, suggested the legislature fine the citizens of Lafayette $900,000 if they had the nerve to vote for fiber, is surely resentful enough to pull back from any contribution to our city that does not look good on a sponsorship form.

Conclusion:
So that, as Paul Harvey might say, is “the rest of the story.”

LUS is going into the Council on Tuesday to discuss a franchise agreement for its fiber-optic based cable system that will be shaped by the requirements of a state law that was initially designed to kill the project. Instead of being a document that we could proudly point to as a one which sets out the unique and forward-looking obligations of LUS to the community and its customer-owners we will likely get a defensive document that promises no more than what the city fathers could extract from Cox in the last contract round. The strange franchise and pole attachment agreements that LUS will sign with itself are by-products of the (un)Fair Competition Act and its resulting, anti-consumer regulations that are designed to drive up the price of LUS’s services and so minimize the competition it can offer its citizens. To add insult to injury, federal intervention may well result in Cox deciding to abandon most of the very franchise agreement that LUS will be imitating while LUS will, regardless of federal “relief,” will be obliged by its ownership and the aforementioned law to fulfill its contractual obligations regardless of the competitive disadvantage at which it is put.

I think that’s all pretty sad and more than a little sick. I hope you do too. We’ve earned better than a me-too franchise with our local communications utility.

Welcome to topsy-turvy world of American Broadband Policy as it plays out in real local communities.

Community Broadband Act moves to the U.S. Senate

Following up on an old story made new again…

The latest Community Broadband bill has been reported favorably out of its Senate Committee and will face a vote on the floor of the Senate. Partisans of Lafayette’s fiber optic network ought to drop a line to Mary Landrieu and David Vitter insisting that they vote to make the bill federal law.

From the MuniWireless short:

It should never have required a proverbial “act of Congress” to insure that local government could make decisions aimed at lowering access rates and promoting economic development in their local communities. And yet, it did.

Or, rather, so it will. This story began back in 05 when Senators Lautenberg (D) and McCain (R) promoted a bipartisan bill that would have guaranteed that no state could forbid local authorities to provide telecommunications services. At that time Lafayette’s high-profile fiber fight was underway and it was said that the behavior of the incumbents helped the bill gain traction. But not enough traction. It was eventually folded into the 06 effort to pass an omnibus telecommunications bill–the bill that went down in flames in the aftermath of AT&T’s net neutrality faux pas. This year it is back as an independent bill.

Over the years it has gathered an influential bevy of seven co-sponsors ranging from McCain and Kerry to Inouye and Stevens (he of “the internet is a series of tubes” fame).

So write to Landrieu and Vitter and suggest that they support the cause.

You might even want to urge them to suggest a simple ammendment prohibiting the cruel and unusal punishment of local communities: add language prohibiting the state from imposing special disabilities not applied to other public projects or private businesses only on public telecom projects. The bill as it stands only forbids a law that bans or has the effect of banning local government participation. That leaves a huge amount of room for mischief of exactly the sort that BellSouth/AT&T and Cox engaged in with the Louisiana (un)Fair Competition Act. That law in its original form would have had the effect of forbidding municipal participation. But th e law that passed “merely” imposes enormous disabilities that on our public utility that would outrage BS/AT&T should anyone even consider imposing such on them ranging from special requirements for public planning to forbidding the use of the system’s financial resources, to shutting down the business automatically if it should have a bad stretch, to a completely unique and possibly unconstitutional regulatory apparatus. I don’t think there is another city in the state that has the cojones for this fight–in effect it is and was intended to be prohibitive. Only Lafayette’s unusual courage and determination allowed it to get this far–and it will continue to be restricted in damaging ways.

But the sad truth it that by perservering against all the odds Lafayette has proven that it can be done. And so the law will not be viewed as prohibitive and will likely become a perverse template for use in other states.

The suggested new language prohibiting “cruel and unusual” punishment of local communities would help us–and would help a lot of communities that might face a law like Louisiana’s.

Go ahead, drop David and Mary a note suggesting that they help ban the cruel and unusual punishment of their local communities by supporting a strengthened Community Broadband Act.

Chortle, Snort: AT&T’s (in)Competence in St. Louis

Since I’ve already shared the basics of this story I thought I’d let you know how it ended up:

AT&T, the ponderous international conglomerate that had the temerity to tell Lafayette that we didn’t really need a modern telecommunications infrastructure and we local yokels we were clearly unable to run one anyhoo, has finally reneged on its contract to build St. Louis a wifi network.

Because they can’t find the plug…Honestly that’s pretty much the story.

They forgot, when they strong-armed the mayor and the city council into awarding them the contract non-competitively, that WiFi isn’t totally wireless: it needs power for its radios to work. And AT&T’s engineers haven’t been able to figure out how to do it yet. So they’ll just do a pilot downtown. The gist:

AT&T had planned to build out the wireless network across the city over two years, under the plan announced in February. It would then provide free Internet service to everyone for 20 hours a month and charge for more time or higher download speeds.

The main problem was that AT&T engineers couldn’t find a cheap way to power the network’s transmitters, which carry the network signal and send it to people’s computers. One estimate required 50 transmitters per square mile.

They initially planned to mount the transmitters on city streetlights, but some of those don’t have power during the day…

Missed that did you? No power eh? Uh, ……Duh.

Ok, now I don’t want to hear any more nonsense about how Lafayette’s engineers couldn’t possibly be competent to run a fiber-optic network. AT&T’s engineers manage it and they literally can’t find the plug in the dark. My guess is that LUS’ engineers would have known they’d need power. And would not have assumed that light poles could be treated like simple light switches.

Comcast joins AT&T: Net Netrality Alert

Executive Summary: Nation’s biggest cableco caught blocking the Bible. Methodology: using its control of network servers to tell users at both ends of the transaction lies about state of the connection. Point: to degrade the service of P2P technology users enough to keep them from using scarce bandwidth. Consequence: The case for public ownership—or at least structural separation—grows.

The ensuing stink is sure to rival AT&T’s original Net Neutrality blunder.

————-
Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company, has joined AT&T, the largest phone company, in giving Net Neutrality advocates a hammer with which to drive home the point that the corporate duopolists want to be able to “shape” the internet to their financial benefit–and that “innovation,” competition, and your freedom to communicate are not part of their plan.

While AT&T merely stated its intent to categorize traffic and relegate companies whose product didn’t pay a special fee to the slow lane they, and other ISPs, have long claimed that this wouldn’t really involve degrading anyone’s service. But in this latest blowup Comcast has been caught doing what the national network providers have long denied: blocking or degrading services that pass over its network in order to make sure its own services run at full speed. That’s the conclusion that the Associated Press came to after an investigating the communications stream. The fuller description of their investigation reveals that they offered a file of the King James version of the bible for upload over BitTorrent and found that when they connected in order to download it at the other end that Comcast blocked their link.

What Comcast is doing was sending “reset packets” to both ends of BitTorrent file exchanges that are forged to indicate that the message comes not from Comcast but from the user on the other end of the exchange–and that the connection has failed. This drops the connection or at least forces a restart. If the program receives too many of these packets it will refuse to deal with the errant node–a tactic which makes sense when the other end really is broken in some way but which is blatantly disruptive when someone standing in the middle is simply lying about a the state of a perfectly capable participant. There’s a semi-formal term for this sort of deceptive practice: it is called a “man in the middle attack.” For a man in the middle attacks to be successful there has to be a trusted intermediary passing the message who decides to lie–to pass false messages to each participant. The idea is to create a situation in which the traitor in the middle gets what he or she wants.

That’s pretty much the situation here. By forging false information about both ends of a BitTorrent exchange (or Gnutella or Lotus Notes (!)) Comast denies users who, in the AP case were exchanging the Bible, the ability to exchange data. Comcast got what it wanted, though: the links failed and Comcast had more bandwidth to use for its own purposes.

Notice please: exchanging data is exactly why customers buy an internet connection, the blocked technology is perfectly legal technology; the content presented for exchange is in no way copyrighted; and internet users that never, ever signed a contract with Comcast are having their access blocked.

It’s profoundly wrong on multiple levels and no amount of handwaving about ensuring quality of service can obscure that.

Just for the record: This “man in the middle, using reset packets” is conceptually the same as one of the tactics that China used to build the infamous “Great Firewall of China.” In that instance the Chinese government used their ownership of the network to forge reset packets that effectively blocked any link between a computer in China that received or sent suspect words or phrases indicating political or social dissent and the computer that sent or received those words. (If you’re gonna be evil you might as well learn from the best, I suppose.)

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A storm of response is building quickly that is sure to rival the ultimate size of the slow-building response to the AT&T gaff that defined the Net Neutrality battles of ’05-’06 is building.

The reinstitution of regulation and a reinstitution of the principle of common carriage is the most obvious solution. —One that has been argued here recently.

But this is the sort of thing shakes peoples’ trust in their provider and that moves people to recognize that, since even more subtle forms of blocking are possible, a better solution might well be structural: remove the incentive to be evil and only the truly twisted will persist in doing the wrong thing. The first structural suggestion is to enforce “structural separation” meaning that no network provider would be allowed to own any part of the content that flows over the wires. Their only interest then would be in developing a better, faster network. We now have well-respected (i.e. no “mere” blogger) players like Susan Crawford and David Isenberg suggesting that is the only solution. Others, like Bob Frankston, want the current networks given to the municipalities to run open municipal systems that mimic the road system.

These are all necessarily national-level suggestions. They require some measure of divestment being forced on the current providers and only the federal legislature could do that. They are not bad ideas. But they suggest a long battle with a doubtful outcome.

Few, yet, are making the structural case that simple municipal or cooperative ownership would also destroy the motivation for a network provider to shape the usage of local users in ways that are not in their interest. We should all own our own local networks. The principle is simple: owners have no motive to abuse themselves. We can, as we in Lafayette have, make the decision to build a network with a big enough pipe that scarce bandwidth is not an issue inside our system. We can decide to price external bandwidth–and the costs associated with P2P an other bandwidth-heavy applications like streaming video as we see fit. (Local caching of popular content would be an obvious first solution in any bandwidth-rich locale. Big files need only come into our community once.) Owning our own network won’t free us from the Comcasts of this world who might still try and keep us from from freely communicating with their customers. But it would give us the control that ensures a network that serves our interests and not the interests of an corporate network provider who is willing to stand in the middle and lie to us and those we are communicating with in order to avoid dealing with the issue at hand honestly.

Right now only a minority wants to force divestiture or expropriation on the network providers. A few more, possibly a majority, already think that municipalities ought to be allowed to build their own networks. Comcast is changing those numbers — and not in a way that it will like.

“U-Verse in BellSouth Territory?”

DSL reports asks whether U-Verse, AT&T’s cable-like video service, is every going to be seen in former BellSouth territory.

AT&T says: Yes…soon…in Atlanta.

The question arises because U-Verse has so far only been seen in former SBC territories–where it has been taken up by 100,000 users–not in any of the areas that were BellSouth territory before the merger. Denizens of the deep south have felt somewhat neglected.

AT&T’s offering is interesting chiefly because it is a pure IPTV play; it uses the language of the internet. Verizon, which is driving Fiber To The Home, is using what is really cable technology on its video side. AT&T had considerable trouble getting the technology off the ground but now appears to have a usable product.

The telephone company insists that its product will be competitive but considerable doubt (aired in the article linked to above) exists that this is true. The concern is bandwidth contrainst will keep it from competing adequately on the broadband side (where its speeds do not match even current cable offerings) or on the video end (where many doubt that it has the bandwidth to offer dual HDTV streams). The basic problem is its last mile twisted copper infrastructure. There’s only so far you can push old copper–and the phone companies are much closer to the practical limit than are the cablecos.

What most folks seem to expect is that bably Bells will follow the same pattern in video that they have with broadband DSL: offer a slightly inferior product for less–and offer it in some places where cable does not go. Unless they launch a really aggressive attempt to win market share by offering a superior product (as Verizon appears poised to do) the cable companies immediate fiscal interests are served by keeping their higher prices while loosing a few marginal potential customers to a low end phone offering. –Such is the nature of duopoly markets; competing on price is avoided where ever possible. Market segmentation is more profitable for both.

That (basically humiliating) strategy might work in most places to keep AT&T and the other phone companies afloat but it won’t work in Lafayette where AT&T will be a third-best, not second-best network. They’ll be trying to stand against a competitor in LUS who is clearly determined to undercut the market price of the incumbents using more capable technology. LUS clearly wants to be a broad-based utility and not a player in a segemented semi-monopoly market. Its market plan to lower prices across the board by 20% leaves no room on the bottom for an also-ran. And, incidentally, that same plan leaves no rich pickings on the premium tiers for Cox to use as a consolation for letting the bottom go.

AT&T makes no bones about the fact that it is NOT planning to deploy even the modest U-Verse to all its customers. Its plans work out to serving only about 50% of its customer base even if it mets its buildout goals. And the customers it will not be serving are its “low-value” ones….you and I can both guess how Louisiana shows up on such a ranking.

So the real question is whether AT&T will ever show up to play in the Lafayette market. Louisiana markets, like Southern ones more generally, are markets with lower per capita incomes and hence are marginal anyway under the AT&T game plan. The added challenge of coming up against a local, fiber-optic utility which starts out with prices low enough to destroy your margin may convince them to simply stay away when contemplating the extra costs of upgrading their local net to support U-Verse.

Cox has made its determination to compete plain. But in Lafayette Cox will play the unfamiliar role of the second-best network against LUS’ fiber. And LUS won’t be interested in taking up Cox’s place in a duopoly market…it will compete for the lower-end customer as determinedly as it is allowed to by Louisiana’s regulatory agency. (Only in Louisiana would a law be enacted that mandates only regulations that limit the cheapest price a utility can charge the consumer—erecting rules that prevent it from ever charging less—without hinting at limits on the most a utility could charge…unhappily that is precisely what the Cox/BellSouth-sponsored (un)Fair Competition Act does. Go figure. (Go figure that the incumbents understand their difficulty well))

LUS, in this one smallish city, is about to break open a cozy market duopoly that elsewhere in this country will surely solidify further as cable and phone networks seek to secure the best return possible out of their differing network capacities and costs.

I do hope the rest of the country posts a quiet watch on Lafayette. What emerges here will be a lesson in what, in a better world, competition in the telecommunications market could look like.

“Slashdot | AT&T Silences Criticism”

On
Why We Need Local, Public, Internet Providers
And
Why We Need Common Carriage

A friend passed this on in an email with the subject line: “This must be illegal.” I hope so…

5.1 Suspension/Termination. Your Service may be suspended or terminated if your payment is past due and such condition continues un-remedied for thirty (30) days. In addition, AT&T may immediately terminate or suspend all or a portion of your Service, any Member ID, electronic mail address, IP address, Universal Resource Locator or domain name used by you, without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes (a) violates the Acceptable Use Policy; (b) constitutes a violation of any law, regulation or tariff (including, without limitation, copyright and intellectual property laws) or a violation of these TOS, or any applicable policies or guidelines, or (c) tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries. Termination or suspension by AT&T of Service also constitutes termination or suspension (as applicable) of your license to use any Software. AT&T may also terminate or suspend your Service if you provide false or inaccurate information that is required for the provision of Service or is necessary to allow AT&T to bill you for Service.

Oh…and by the way:

5.2 Deletion of data after Termination or Cancellation. You agree that if your Service is terminated for any reason, AT&T has the right to immediately delete all data, files, and other information stored in or for your account, including email messages, without further notice to you. (All emphases mine)

Slashdot links to the new AT&T TOS (Terms Of Service) and has an only fair section of commentary—this isn’t in a technical realm in which its readership excels. But it is worth thinking about and talking about…AT&T might well be within its “rights.” We’d only find out through a court battle and the main purpose of the clause might well be less to impose real punishment than to have a chilling effect on any discussion of its failings.

What adds insult to injury, of course, is that AT&T has shown no hesitation to participate in wiretapping of (at best) “questionable” legality. Insults to the company’s dignity are worth draconian posturing. Invasions of your privacy and legal rights are just another thing to be examined in terms of the company’s potential profits. If that seems to be unbalanced to you–well it is. Only a monopoly could think this way.

This would be illegal if it was about phone service. AT&T is clearly a “common carrier” there and this venerable legal tradition both forbids AT&T to deny anyone service on its whim and, in return, absolves AT&T of any legal responsibility for what people talk about on the phone. (AT&T is not on the hook for aiding you if you plot murder.) But that principle is eroding and it is just about gone in the ISP world. Notice that a part of the clause above I didn’t highlight gave AT&T the right to deny you service if something you do could be construed to:

(b) constitutes a violation of any law, regulation or tariff (including, without limitation, copyright and intellectual property laws)

So AT&T reserves the right to not only to nanny you on its own account but to be a nanny-for-hire (enforcement won’t be free, you betcha) for the entertainment industry. (And, oh yeah, the government–but we can’t talk about that….) This is merely carrying through on AT&T’s earlier commitment to Hollywood to enforce it Digital Rights Management schemes. It ties into their hopes to establish a two-tiered internet (fast and notsofast) based on deep packet inspection. If they can get deep packet called a legal necessity to enforce the laws then they can put in place everything they need to route “paid up” packets down the fast lane.

This is serious stuff.

It is also dangerous stuff. Not just for you and me but for AT&T. Does AT&T really want to go down the slippery slope of deciding that it will monitor the taste and legality of action taken over its network? (That is exactly what is promulgated here.) I hope not. And it is dumb, IMHO, to give up the protection of common carriage.

I am IMMENSELY grateful that I will soon be able to cut myself completely loose of such dangerous and foolish petulance. The elephant is dying and I don’t want to be anywhere near its death throes.

That a TOS like this is conceivable and possibly legal is EXACTLY why we need net neutrality and a clear reinstitution of common carriage. And it is a substantial reason to say we need LUS Fiber.

(Just for the record: none of my sites is on an incumbent server, nor is any email account I use. Yours needn’t be either. And soon you should be able to get off their copper.)

AT&T kills BellSouth Plans?

Who knew? David Burnstein, the highly respected telcom pundit with the unbearbly clunky html, says that AT&T’s acquistion of BellSouth frustrated BS’s plans to move to an all IP network and rip out the old phone systems antiquated operational guts.

The best minds in this business think it is now cheaper to replace the old PSTN network with a new all-IP network. British Telecom is essentially throwing out all the existing gear and running broadband to every home by 2011. Phone calls will be all VOIP, and there is no technical reason they can’t turn on data to 95% of the British Isles. New Zealand is thinking similarly, parts of Trinidad and Tobago are moving ahead, and BellSouth planned the same thing until the empire took over and cut everything back. (Has anyone else noticed they’ve decimated BellSouth’s network plans this year? Capital spending plunged.) (My emphasis in bold)

While that’s the first I’ve heard of it, the claim that BS planned an upgrade and that AT&T is keeping that money for its own purposes instead is fairly believable. —One of the most reliable patterns of the reconsolidation of the regional phone monopolies into a few national powers has been that those that phone companies that chose to spend their cash on acquisition swallowed their brethren that were investing instead in network capacity. The acquiring companies invested their current profits not in additional profit-generating capacity but in “buying” debt. That is a substantial part of the reason that the newly merged companies killed earlier promises to build national fiber networks. (Take a look at an overview (and then the massive documentation) of these broken promises—it’ll shake your confidence in our regulatory system.) They used the money to buy out each other and enriched the banking industry instead of their shareholders—and the communities they served.

Our regulatory regime allowed two behaviors that destroyed the US’ chance to stay ahead in the network race by allowing the phone companies to seek profit outside their core wireline networks: it allowed the phone companies to spend their monopoly income on buying up pretty much the entire potentially competitive wireless cellular market. We lost both competition and investment in fiber optics at one blow. 2) it allowed AT&T and the other Bells to further waste their substance by transferring huge amounts of money to the financial sector solely to make their companies prettier on the stock market selling block. Capacity was again sacrificed.

I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat it again: Deregulating monopolies is a recipe for disaster.

This time BellSouth customers (who would have benefited from an upgraded core even if BellSouth did not to have the courage for fiber they of all the baby Bells could have afforded) will be paying the price for our regulators’ fantasy that they could magically create a competitive market by allowing monopolists free rein to purchase their competition and reconsolidate.

What were they thinking?