Telecom Analysts, Auditors and Lawyers from the IRREGULATORS, Use Cutting Edge AI Tools to Defend the Public Interest.

How Many Material Facts are Missing from the Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania 5- year Broadband Plans?

FACT: NOT ONE STATE HAS DETAILED HOW THE DIGITAL DIVIDE WAS CREATED IN THEIR STATE OR WHO IS RESPONSIBLE. OR WHAT WERE THE PREVIOUS FIBER OPTIC PLANS, OR HOW MUCH MONEY WAS CHARGED TO CUSTOMERS OR IS BEING CHARGED IN 2024.

Background

During the pandemic, America woke up and realized our country still had a dirt road instead of a fiber optic future –and the harms were in the more rural and low income areas. Instead of investigating the basic facts– the government decided to have the NTIA give out over $42 billion in state broadband grants — and each state has prepared the initial proposal to get the state funding.

There is now a form of ‘institutional amnesia’; America was supposed to have a fiber optic future, and instead, in each of these states — there are massive holes in deployment and worse, prices are out of control. Over the last 2 decades we’ve been filing comments, complaints and even helped bring fiber optic networks to towns in New Jersey and New York.

4 State Model: MA, NY, NJ and PA

====BELOW ARE LINKS TO THE COMMENTS, AI-COMPARES, AND OUR PREVIOUS WORK IN THE STATES====

Over the last few months, the IRREGULATORS have filed comments in 4 states covering a large swath of the East Coast from Massachusetts and New York, to New Jersey and Pennsylvania, all controlled by Verizon. These are the largest state-based telecommunications public utilities in the state.

All of these states had plans for replacing the existing copper wires with fiber optics starting in 1992 and to be completed by 2010–2015 depending on the state. And in 2004, Verizon announced FiOS, and it. too, was never fully deployed.

However, like a broken record, state laws were changed multiple times to give these companies more ‘investments’, which was to continuously raise rates, but the companies were able to continuously get out of the requirements or worse, moved the construction budgets to build wireless instead of fiber to the home. This left most of their state territories with deteriorating copper networks — which we documented.

This is the underbelly of the Digital Divide. And yet, no one appears to remember or wants to include the facts of how the Divide was created in their state.

Who We Are: The IRREGULATORS is an independent consortium of senior telecom experts, analysts, forensic auditors, and lawyers who are former senior staffers from the FCC, state advocate and Attorneys General Office experts and lawyers, as well as former telco consultants.

FREE BOOK DOWNLOAD: “DISS-CONNECTED” was written to explain to even Aunt Ethel about how the companies have not been held accountable and created the Digital Divide.

MA PLAN DOES NOT MENTION VERIZON; NJ PLAN ONLY ONCE.

• QUESTION: How many times is Verizon MA mentioned?
• AI-IRREG: I have searched the document and found that Verizon Massachusetts is not mentioned in the Massachusetts Broadband BEAD Initial Proposal Volume I & II.
• QUESTION: How many times is Verizon NJ mentioned?
• AI-IRREG: Verizon New Jersey is mentioned once in the provided document in this PDF file.

Our Conclusion — Our filings are based on decades of research and our group (in different configurations) has had an active role in attempting to bring fiber optic broadband to America’s states and cities. In this case, our filings detail how All of these states’ broadband offices have created 5 Year Plans that are supposed to solve the Digital Divide but left out basic, material facts, creating distorted and even harmful public policies.

AI-IRREGULATORS AI Program. These Comments were created using the state plan and the IRREGULATORS research. We specifically took our previous filings and comments submitted and had the AI-IRREG program summarize them, then compared that with the State plan.

NOTE: Bruce Kushnick was a graduate student at MIT and he attended and worked at the MIT AI Labs, circa 1977–78, as well as the DSRE, Division for the Study and Research in Education, (which merged and was part of the MIT Media Lab).

IRREGULATORS 5 YEAR BROADBAND PLAN COMMENTS; AI-COMPARE

For each state, here is a link to the previous work, our current 5 year filing and a comparison of our research and the AI analysis of the state plans filed with the NTIA.

• Massachusetts Massachusetts Broadband and Accounting Scandal
• Cover Letter Complete filing
• AI- IRREGULATORS COMPARE
• New Jersey Verizon New Jersey broadband resources
• COMPLETE FILING
• AI-IRREGULATORS COMPARE
• New York Verizon New York Accounting and Broadband
• COMPLETE FILING
• AI-IRREGULATORS COMPARE
• Pennsylvania Pennsylvania Fiber Optic Failure Resources
• COMPLETE FILING
• AI-IRREGULATORS COMPARE