WHAT IS THE PALMER DIVIDE BROADBAND COALITION?

Transcription

1 WHAT IS THE PALMER DIVIDE BROADBAND COALITION? The Palmer Divide Broadband Coalition is a coalition of homeowner's associations and communities on the Palmer Divide who have joined forces to address the lack of broadband access common amongst their respective communities. The one and only objective of this coalition is that every property owner represented by the coalition has reasonable access to a legitimate broadband connection if they want one. Since the individual communities have been unable to accomplish this objective on their own the communities have joined forces to increase their collective influence in getting the problem resolved. Membership in the coalition is currently restricted to communities east of Monument Colorado who fully or partially lack access to broadband for no objectively verifiable reason. Offers of membership are actively being extended to additional communities who meet these criteria. If the current coalition of communities is still unable to achieve the joint objective then the coalition may consider an open membership policy and/or expanding scope to include communities beyond the Palmer Divide. Current coalition members are: Canterbury Estates Wissler Ranch El Dorado Acres Elk Creek Ranches Elk Creek Pines

2 AVERAGE PEAK INTERNET SPEEDS ACCORDING TO AKAMAI'S "STATE OF THE INTERNET" REPORT Q WHERE DOES YOUR INTERNET CONNECTION RANK? South Korea: 75.4 Mbps US Average: 49.4 Mbps Iraq: 34.2 Mbps Antarctica: 31.9 Mbps Maldives Islands: 29.8 Mbps JE* Ethiopia: 26.5 Mbps Falkland Islands: 24.5 Mbps Nigeria: 22.6 Mbps Polio country è North Korea: 21.5 Mbps Somalia: 21.0 Mbps Syria: 19.7 Mbps Afghanistan: 19.5 Mbps Polio country {**_ > * Greenland: 18.0 Mbps * f-fl 1 Ghana: 17.9 Mbps BS?* V' Solomon Islands: 13.7 Mbps I 2a East Timor: 13.6 Mbps Fr. Polynesia Islands: 13.1 Mbps Seychelles Islands: 12.7 Mbps Uganda: 12.2 Mbps Pakistan: 11.7 Mbps Polio country V. Vanuatu Islands: 8.9 Mbps Sierra Leone: 8.6 Mbps Sudan: 7.0 Mbps Cuba: 6.2 Mbps

3 TANGIBLE EFFECTS OF THE BROADBAND EMBARGO These are real scenarios being reported by people in the embargo area -they are not abstract ideas, but tangible effects already being realized. Home sales are being lost - Buyers are cancelling active purchase contracts - Buyers are refusing to even look at homes without access to broadband - Home prices face downward pressure to compensate Jobs are being lost - Employees are being required to work from home, but can't procure the broadband connections required to do so - Professionals who work from home have been going to Starbucks or the Village Inn to get emergency access to the necessary broadband Students are failing school assignments - Schools assume broadband connections are available - Assignments frequently require video or interactive capabilities which only broadband can provide Home-based businesses are either failing or not being started - Adequate access to the internet is an absolute necessity in today's economy, and this need is especially pronounced for the little guys Military families are unable to communicate with deployed family members - One such family flew their child home when their aircraft carrier docked in port to troubleshoot the problem Those with serious medical issues who rely on the internet to fully participate in society are not able to do so

4 WHAT IS THE CURRENT SITUATION? The FCC defines broadband. Their current definition is a minimum of 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload from a low-latency, uncapped, non-satellite connection. Any connection that does not meet these requirements cannot be called a "high speed" or "broadband" connection. Comcast and CenturyUnk are claiming it is too difficult/expensive to provide broadband connections to the coalition communities, yet they are already serving just enough of those communities to suppress the necessary community support for any alternative solution. Broadband infrastructure is absolutely not difficult or prohibitively expensive to deploy. It is also not regulated at any level. Individual homeowners have it well within their means to install their own broadband connections if it comes to that. Gaining legitimate access to utility easements is the only artificial barrier currently blocking homeowners from taking matters into their own hands. Comcast and CenturyUnk use the public rights-of-way and utility easements to run their cables to customers, which ultimately produces profit for their megacorporations. The government - El Paso County, in this case - maintains jurisdiction over these public rights-of-way and utility easements in order to ensure they are used appropriately and for the public benefit. The existing situation has been allowed to exist and propagate because the government has abdicated its oversight role of the public rights-of-way and utility easements where broadband infrastructure is involved. They have explicitly allowed Comcast and CenturyUnk to arbitrarily serve portions of communities while withholding access to broadband from the remainder. The direct result is communities which have been divided, with those portions not having access to broadband left with no viable options. In Comcast's case this is literally arbitrary - in some cases it is every other house which is served, or one side of the street is served but not the other. In CenturyLink's case this is due to a combination of their DSL technology being severely limited along with their refusal to make any investment into improving their inadequate wiring. A DSL customer must be within a few thousand feet of their DSL equipment (large beige cabinets on the side of the road) to receive broadband speeds. As customers get further away from the DSL equipment their speeds drop quickly and dramatically. Many homes in the coalition communities are more than 30,000 feet from the DSL equipment leading to connections which barely exceed dial-up speeds. CenturyUnk has plenty of technology available to them to correct this situation but refuses to use any of it. CenturyUnk claims the entirety of these communities are already "served" by broadband DSL speeds, when in fact only a portion of the community is served.

5 WHAT ATTEMPTS HAVE BEEN MADE? Individual homeowners have been politely asking Comcast/Adelphia and CenturyLink/Qwest for at least 8 years for some form of improvement which has never arrived. All of the following have happened within the last months: Individual owners have tried to negotiate with Comcast and CenturyUnk to help pay for the costs of running new cable to their homes. Comcast has consistently demanded between $16,000 and $19,000 per home to literally run their coax cable from one house to the next. A Comcast representative has been recorded coyly referring to this as a "customer contribution". Groups of homeowners have offered to sign multi-year contracts with Comcast if they would reduce or waive the excessive "customer contributions" being demanded. Comcast initially agreed. More than a dozen homeowners signed multi-year contracts before Comcast reversed field and refused to follow through on the contracts. Comcast's executive VP of engineering (located in Chicago) stated "Comcast will never run new cable in your community. We are under no obligation to anyone and we can do whatever we want." One homeowner offered to pay Comcast's $17,000 "customer contribution" for an individual installation, and Comcast revised the demand to $54,000 to $60,000 to run their coax cable from one house to the next. One homeowner offered to pay Comcast's $60,000 "customer contribution", and Comcast revised the demand to $100,000 to run their coax cable from one house to the next. Comcast demanded that Canterbury's HOA pay them in excess of $1.6 million over 10 years to extend any more cable within the community. Additional discussion led to one Comcast executive openly questioning why his underlings would make such a low offer in the first place. CenturyUnk demanded 30 homeowners pay them $70,000 to move some wires around, with no guarantee of improved service to anyone. OVER ->

6 CenturyUnk demanded $25,000 plus a multi-year contract of $1,000 per month to extend their cable a mere 10 feet while only offering 10 Mbps of service. The FCC definition of broadband is 25 Mbps minimum. CenturyUnk demanded that Canterbury's HOA pay them in excess of $1.6 million over 10 years to extend any more cable within the community. This offer is intentionally the same as Comcast's. CenturyLink's VP of legislative affairs admitted that he knows what Comcast is offering because "all the providers do this" to communities. The same CenturyUnk VP then unequivocally stated that this is the only chance at improvement because they will never invest another dime into improving their own infrastructure. Numerous 2 nd tier providers surveyed the coalition communities and concluded that without support of entire communities (ie: Comcast and CenturyUnk not arbitrarily dividing communities) there is no way they can provide a solution. Canterbury attempted to go against the grain and see if enough people would sign up for a community-based solution. Results confirmed that the community is too divided to support such a solution - too many homeowners already have access to adequate services from Comcast and/or CenturyUnk, while the remainder have no viable options. One homeowner offered to buy 5 miles of fiber optic cable if CenturyLink would run it through their existing conduit to a location where it could be connected to legitimate broadband. CenturyLink refused. One community offered to purchase all of the necessary equipment for CenturyLink to provide services to their community. CenturyLink refused. Many homeowners have requested CenturyLink to bond multiple DSL circuits as an old-school way to boost DSL speeds without requiring new infrastructure. CenturyLink has either refused or demanded excessive payment to do so. Government officials have been fully engaged in discussion of the ongoing broadband embargo and we currently await the decisions, actions, and results that will come from that.

7 WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE? There appear to be only 4 options for ending the broadband embargo. If the government can identity additional options we hope to hear about them at tonight's meeting. 1) Comcast and/or CenturyLink complete their partial infrastructure build-outs to fully serve communities. These providers can be motivated to do this by some combination of stick, carrot, or political lever. 2) One of the 2 nd tier providers can be given the necessary subsidy and/or protection necessary for them to deploy their own infrastructure in the embargo area. Existing 2 nd tier providers are aware of the broadband embargo and would like to help, but cannot risk being the bright fish in the shark tank. Currently the top-tier providers - Comcast and CenturyLink - have so much political favor and so much money that they would easily wipe out any 2 nd tier provider who dared to violate the broadband embargo. 3) Comcast and CenturyLink both pull out entirely of communities only being partially served. It makes no sense for providers to claim the embargo area is too expensive to serve while they continue to arbitrarily serve just enough of the area to keep communities divided. With a cleared slate to work with each community will have the internal support necessary to move forward with their own broadband infrastructure as they best see fit to do so. Numerous sources of funding and support would be available. Other communities and regions which were able to deploy their own broadband infrastructure almost universally report vastly improved service, lower prices, and extremely satisfied "customers". 4) Nothing changes and communities are forced to take matters into their own hands. Broadband infrastructure is neither expensive nor difficult to deploy. Communities and individual homeowners will be found illegitimately running their own cables across streets and along utility easements in order to bust the embargo themselves. The county will be forced to confront the duplicity of constraining homeowners from using the public rights-of-way for their own community benefit while simultaneously allowing the broadband providers to abuse them for corporate profit.