How Did America Fail to Go After the “Dark Fiber” Running through Our Towns?
Who Actually Knew About It? Why are Government Subsidies Rewarding the Companies that Created the Digital Divide? Where’s the Investigations?
FREE DOWNLOAD: . ”DISS-CONNECTED” Exposes how the current State Broadband Offices’ Five Year Plans have left out fundamental material facts and fail to answer questions that include: how was Digital Divide created and who should be held accountable?
Ironically, each state has been preparing a 5 year plan to get BEAD funding from the NTIA- over $40 billion dollars to ‘solve tbe Digital Divide’ This is above the $14 billion for the ACP funding that mostly when to these companies or their subsidiaries.
NOTE: Ironically, in 2006, we were featured in Bill Moyer’s PBS “The Net at Risk”, in a segment called “The New Digital Divide”.
America already paid multiple times for a fiber optic future that never showed up and prices are 5–10 times more in America than overseas for the same service. The low income, ACP govermnet subsidy program has stopped, impacting 23 million families. Where are the calls for investigations?
What’s Wrong with this Picture? The snapshot above shows that there are fiber optic wires — with an estimated bundle of 288 strands of fiber terminating at this one pole, and the wires then end up going to the Verizon cell tower (the red box). It is estimated that 250+ strands of fiber are not in use or not lit and thus dark — enough for an entire city. Today, they are going throughout upstate NY, as well as every other state, to a varying degree, and yet they are not using these unlit fiber optic wires. Worse, whole areas of the New York State were never ‘franchised’ for fiber and Verizon’s FiOS TV, but all local telco customers had rate increases, multiple times.
More Detail: There is a state telecommunications public utility, Verizon NY and the copper wires of this utility were supposed to be replaced with more ‘capacity’ — i.e.; broadband, by using a fiber optic wire. The state laws and regulations were changed to pay for these upgrades — by charging local wired customers extra, starting in 2005.
(NOTE: As far as we can tell, this utility has a franchise for about 90% coverage of NY State, some of which started in 1896, and is in perpetuity.)
By 2010, Verizon announced FiOS deployments were over and by 2012, Verizon took the construction budgets and moved most of it to do fiber to the cell sites, not fiber to the home, according to multiple sources, including the NY Attorney General’s Office. We estimate it cost $3,500-$4000 a line extra. This happened in virtually every state in America, — and yet…… And this is not history, as it continues in 2024, but incredibly, this bait and switch is never mentioned or included in the 5-Year Plan history.
IRREGULATORS EXPERTS’ HOME PICTURES FROM SUMMER
Returning to the opening snapshot, then, and staring up at the wires on the pole, we ask our experts to decipher the questions:
- There appears to be 1 bundle of 288 strands of fiber going to the pole.
- How many of the wires are “DARK” and not in use?
- How many miles of fiber are there that are dark, not in use?
- Of the fiber optic wires installed, how much is classified as Title II and was put in as part of Verizon’s ten state telecommunications utilities?
- How much of the fiber actually is in use, but never made it for the intended residential fiber to the home (FTTH) voice video and data services?
- How much is in cities that never received high-speed broadband services but paid for it multiple times as local phone customers?.
- How much of these deployments were paid by wired customers who paid extra for services they never received.
- How many customers paid extra but live in an area without a ‘CableTV franchise’ and will never receive these services’, or was charged for the Title II wires to the cell sites?
- How many areas have been declared served with only 1 provider or a standard speed that has been 25 Mbps down, 3 Mbps upload, and with a ‘cap’ on the usage, when fiber can deliver 1GB in both directions without working up a sweat.
FCC Adopts New Minimum Standards for Broadband Services
“The report sets the speed threshold at 100 megabits per second (Mbps) for downstream traffic and 20 Mbps for upstream traffic for fixed services; 35 Mbps downstream and three Mbps upstream for mobile service; and one gigabit per second (Gbps) downstream per 1,000 students and staff for services provided to schools.” Mar 28, 2024
Note: The speed of broadband in multiple state laws, from New Jersey or Texas in 1993–1995 was 45 Mbps in both directions.
Most Important: Institutional Negligence or Amnesia or Clueless.
Imagine our surprise to see that no State Broadband Office has created a 5-year broadband plan that included basic materials facts.
There has been Zero mention of any of the state utility incumbent phone companies or the requirements to upgrade the state. And we found nothing in any state 5-year broadband plan for MA, PA, MI, CA, or NJ, among others.
PROOF?
Let’s Fast Forward to 2024.
Verizon NY 2023 Annual Report was published on May 23, 2024.
In just NY State, Verizon local service line of business appears to be paying $800 million annually in construction for the intended FTTH upgrade but was instead it appears to be used (based on multiple sources) for their wireless upgrades.
Verizon’s fiber optic wires are part of the state utility and telecommunications: Verizon was able to get the NY State Department of Public Service to claim that the fiber optic wires are part of the state telecommunications utility — “over its existing networks” .
Local service wired customers had price increases to pay for the fiber optic upgrades, which included the cable TV service FiOS and the other competing Voice and data services?
And even though Verizon was paid multiple times to do the fiber upgrades of the state telecommunications public utility, Verizon and AT&T were both able to claim rural areas were unprofitable — and would use wireless instead.
Verizon Execs Told Investors it was Not Upgrading Rural Areas with Fiber in 2012. At the September 2012, J.P. Morgan analyst conference, the Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam said that moving the customers to wireless makes the company more profits:
“And in many areas we’re also taking customers that aren’t performing well on copper and we’re moving them over to the wireless technology. So that improves our cost structure significantly and streamlines all those ongoing maintenance costs.”
The Fiber is Title II: All of the fiber optic wires appears to have been deployed as part of the existing state telecommunications public utility and charged mostly to local phone customers a Title II, common carrier network.
This directly contradicts Verizon’s statements that Title II harmed investments.
And are you sure that:
- These fiber optic networks are Title II, and
- They are actually part of the state telecommunications utility but hidden within the books?
Here are 15 quotes prepared just for these questions.
These are the original “Bell Holding Companies”, and the state telecommunications public utilities, all tied together by one thing — the failure to properly maintain and upgrade America’s critical infrastructure over the last 30+ years.
We note that all of these holding companies have a ‘footprint’, which is never explained — it is the original Bell state telecommunications public utility territories, most of which have 100+ year old franchises and are granted in perpetuity. Thus, the current AT&T controls 21 state telecommunications public utilities, which then also gives them control over the wireless services, especially with Verizon also having the East Coast state telecommunications utilities from Massachusetts to Virginia, (with a part of CT).
To Solve the Digital Divide one must first realize the basic facts of how these companies helped to create this situation and rewrote the history are all distorted or missing; it requires more than a tweet or a TikTok video.
AGAIN, FREE DOWNLOAD: . ”DISS-CONNECTED” Do you quote the faux, (coin-operated, corporate-funded, or clueless) myths or the actual facts.
And as you go down the roads and streets of America, and look at those poles, please as yourself and wonder — where’s my fiber?
We leave you with this conundrum — If every state is supposed to be solving the Digital Divide, how is it no state ever examined or included these seven failed fiber optic state broadband deployments — starting in the 1990’s — but still charging customers in 2024 for networks they will never get the benefit of?
America’s Digital Divide Made Easy: 7 States, 7 Maps & 7 Broadband Failures.
