Service Unavailable: America’s Telecommunications Infrastructure Crisis

By Frederick L. Pilot

The United States has reached a crisis of deficient telecommunications infrastructure while lacking a comprehensive plan to address it as Americans increasingly rely on Internet-based telecommunications services. This book describes the factors that led to the crisis, how the nation is being adversely affected and offers a plan to resolve the crisis and move the nation forward.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483558424

Book preview

© 2015 Frederick L. Pilot

ISBN: 978-1-4835584-2-4

The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.

-- William Ford Gibson

CONTENTS

Chapter 1: U.S. Telecommunications Infrastructure at a Crisis Point

Obama Acknowledges Nation’s Incomplete Internet Infrastructure

Deteriorating Legacy Infrastructure

Internet Bandwidth Demand Growth Emulates Moore’s Law

America Offline

The Great Wall of America’s Telecom Infrastructure Divide

Infrastructure So Near, yet So Far

Regions Suffer Disparate Internet Infrastructure

Telecom Infrastructure at an Inflection Point

Chapter 2: Factors Bringing About America’s Telecommunications Infrastructure Crisis

Market Failure

Selling Bandwidth, Not Telecommunications

Google Fiber: Not the Hoped-For Savior from the Legacy Telephone and Cable Companies

Diminishing Expectations

Policy Failure

The 1996 Communications Act

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009

The National Broadband Plan of 2010

State-Sanctioned Market Failure

Incrementalism

Sloganeering, Political Posturing, and Wishful Thinking

Chapter 3: The Road Ahead: A Solution for America’s Telecommunications Infrastructure Crisis

Millions for Infrastructure That Costs Billions

Internet Is Interstate Infrastructure Like Highways, Telephone, and Electrical Networks

Tipping Point at Hand

Bold New Federal Program Needed

The National Telecommunications Infrastructure Initiative

Conclusion

Foreword

Pilot digs deep in the facts and emerges with a spot-on, realistic assessment of America's stultifying broadband shortfall. He shows how two decades of federal inaction permitted huge telecom incumbents to ration scarcity rather than build bandwidth abundance. And he demonstrates beyond a shadow of doubt that without a true national mission to build this essential infrastructure, we will continue to stifle economic opportunity for millions of citizens and shackle America's global economic performance, too.

Michael Copps

Commissioner, U.S. Federal Communications Commission 2001-2011.

Special adviser, Media and Democracy Reform Initiative, Common Cause

Chapter 1

U.S. Telecommunications Infrastructure at a Crisis Point

Building world-class broadband that connects all Americans is our generation’s great infrastructure challenge.

—Remarks by former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski delivered at National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners Conference, Washington D.C., February 16, 2010.¹

The United States faces a telecommunications infrastructure crisis with no comprehensive strategy to address it. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the Internet emerged from its origins in the 1960s as a Department of Defense project and closed network restricted to the federal government, scientific researchers, and universities. It was opened to commercial use in 1995 when the National Science Foundation Network was decommissioned, removing the last restrictions on the use of the Internet to transport commercial traffic.²

At that time, the Internet made its debut as the world’s newest telecommunications system, connecting the global village—as communications theorist Marshall McLuhan described television’s impact in the 1960s—and making possible the universally connected electronic cottage envisioned by futurist Alvin Toffler in the 1970s.

In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed into law an overhaul of the Communications Act of 1934 that brought Internet telecommunications services under the auspices of federal law. The law treats telecommunications as a common carrier service that must be available to all American homes, businesses, and institutions.

However, two decades after the 1996 amendments to the law were enacted, much of the United States still remains without Internet service or is forced to use technologically inferior, high-cost connectivity options, including dial-up service over legacy copper voice telephone lines that was state-of-the-art when Clinton signed the 1996 bill into law. The nation also lacks a comprehensive plan to fund and construct landline fiber-optic-to-the-premise (FTTP) telecommunications infrastructure that would serve all Americans and deliver the next generation of Internet-based telecommunications.

A decade and a half into the twenty-first century, the United States is more than 20 years behind where it should be in terms of constructing FTTP infrastructure. Caught up short as telecommunications shifts to the Internet, America suffers from a balkanized patchwork of incomplete, disparate landline Internet service in the limited service footprints of the pre-1990s telephone and cable companies and their metallic, wire-based local distribution networks.

Consequently, millions of American homes and small businesses must rely on outmoded dial-up, satellite, DSL (digital subscriber line), and costly metered mobile wireless services for premise Internet service as bandwidth needs increase exponentially, rendering these technologies imminently obsolete. Some living in areas with no landline Internet infrastructure are served by fixed terrestrial wireless connections that operate under severe bandwidth and business constraints.

Operators of these wireless Internet service providers known as wireless Internet service providers or WISPs must pay a premium for bandwidth backhaul to feed their limited networks, making it financially challenging for them to offer value-based pricing that can attract more customers and expand their businesses. Most are grossly undercapitalized mom-and-pop operations that could go out of business quickly, leaving their customers without Internet access options—other than possibly low-value satellite Internet or metered mobile wireless services.

In the early 1990s, the few people who connected to the Internet did so with narrowband dial-up connections using the public switched telephone network (PSTN). By the end of that decade, dial-up evolved from 1200 and 2400 baud connections to 56 Kbps connections, and Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN),³ a souped-up version of dial-up sold by telephone companies, offered Internet connections of up to 128 Kbps. At the same time, premium broadband service began to emerge, with DSL and cable companies offering Internet services to distinguish them from narrowband services like dial-up and ISDN.

DSL—digital subscriber line—technology was deployed by telephone companies starting around 2000 as a successor to dial-up and as an interim technology to bring more robust Internet connectivity to customer premises before fiber-optic connections could be built out to serve them. Now, DSL faces a crisis that dramatically shortens the time it can