U.S. Telecom Infrastructure Crisis: America’s botched modernization of copper to fiber -- and the path forward

By Frederick L. Pilot

In 2020 as public health restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic suddenly converted millions of American homes into offices, classrooms and medical clinics, the nation's accumulated deficits in advanced telecommunications infrastructure and related challenges of access and affordability that had been in place for years have now reached a crisis point.

The root of the problem is a failure of planning and policy over the past quarter century to ensure decades old copper telephone lines that reach every American doorstep were modernized with fiber optic lines to support Internet delivered digital telecommunications. The nation lacks a comprehensive, coordinated transition plan and relies on various underfunded, piecemeal efforts.

The cause of the failure: public policymakers focused on the wrong thing: incremental gains in "broadband" speed instead of replacing the copper with fiber beginning a generation ago. With the enactment of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, policymakers erred in assuming fiber would be just one of several technologies that would compete with copper rather than pursuing a deliberate policy to ensure the timely replacement of copper with fiber.

Consequently, fiber reaches less than a third of American homes in 2020. That's far short of the goal of the Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan prepared for Congress in 2010 that called for 100 million homes to have affordable fiber-level connections a decade later.

U.S. telecommunications policy primarily serves the needs of for profit companies that lack incentive to rapidly speed construction of fiber to solve America's advanced telecommunications infrastructure deficits. There's an inherent conflict between their investors' focus on short term earnings and the broader public interest of having universally accessible and affordable fiber connections.

This book describes how the crisis is affecting people, the factors that brought it about and prolong it, the outlook for its resolution and a path forward: publicly owned, open access fiber infrastructure passing reaching every home as telephone service did in the mid-20th century.

The audience for this book is public policymakers, telecommunications regulators and the general public. Members of these groups acknowledge the essential nature of advanced telecommunications infrastructure as a utility. That recognition has grown more urgent over time and especially so with the 2020 coronavirus pandemic and sharply increased reliance on home connectivity and working from home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098330415

Book preview

(ATIA)

Introduction

By the mid-20th century, telephone service delivered over twisted pair copper cable reached nearly every American doorstep. By the end of the century, a new digital telecommunications technology delivered over the Internet enabled not just voice calls but also web-based services, social media, text messages and chats and video conferencing and content. As the third decade of the 21st century begins, the same cannot be said about it.

The United States has failed to update a large majority of its decades old copper connections to fiber optic lines capable of fully supporting advanced telecommunications services. Many Americans are left unconnected, forced to rely on aging copper lines that because they were designed to carry analog voice telephone calls lack the carrying capacity to consistently deliver them.

A generation of public policymakers badly botched the modernization of copper to fiber, precipitating a crisis of inadequate infrastructure leaving millions of Americans reliant on outdated, unreliable copper built for bygone era of Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS).

The crisis intensified in 2020 as a global viral pandemic forced people to work, learn, and obtain medical care from their homes using advanced telecommunications. Many Americans found their connections lacking adequate capacity – capacity that would be easily borne by fiber optic connections to the premise or fiber to the premise (FTTP).

The United States lacks an affirmative, unified policy to ensure the timely construction of fiber to reach nearly every home, business and institution just as copper telephone cable does. For millions of Americans, that copper telephone line used to access AOL and CompuServe via dialup modems in the early 1990s and later DSL remains in place as the only connection to their homes.

This book describes how the crisis in deficient advanced telecommunications infrastructure is affecting Americans in Chapter 1. In Chapter 2, the factors that brought about and reinforce the current crisis are discussed. The outlook for resolution of the crisis and the modernization of existing copper telecom infrastructure to universally accessible fiber service is discussed in Chapter 3. Finally, Chapter 4 offers a definitive path forward out of the crisis to bring publicly owned fiber to nearly every American doorstep as quickly as possible.

Chapter 1: How the advanced telecommunications infrastructure crisis is manifesting and affecting Americans

The 1996 Telecommunications Act requirement that advanced telecommunications capability be deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion remains unmet nearly quarter century later. Too many Americans still have access only to dialup Internet that was state of the art when the law was enacted. Their increasingly desperate pleas for service remain unanswered.

A generation into the transition from analog voice phone service delivered over copper wires to advanced telecommunications-based advanced telecommunications, the United States lacks the fiber optic infrastructure to reliably deliver it to all homes, schools, businesses and institutions. Moreover, it has no comprehensive or cohesive national plan in place to achieve universal fiber to the premise (FTTP) service as it did with voice telephone service over copper cable in the 20th century.

This circumstance is producing a crisis throughout the nation. Household demand for digital bandwidth continues to grow rapidly, doubling about every three years.¹

But for homes and small businesses in most of the nation, there are too few fiber optic connections that are needed to reliably support this growth now and in the future.

In less densely populated areas, residents are stuck with 1990s Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) service or worse, no landline service whatsoever other than obsolete dialup service first offered by telephone companies in the early 1990s. Often in desperation with no good landline options, they turn to various suboptimal wireless solutions including mobile networks, fixed terrestrial wireless and satellite services. None offer the ability to accommodate future bandwidth needs that only FTTP can.

The United States is mired in a paradigm of piecemeal and slow progress toward modernizing its telecommunications to FTTP. Investor owned companies that dominate advanced telecommunications lack incentive to rapidly modernize their infrastructure to FTTP within their nominal service areas. Their business models, debt obligations and shareholder expectations for high dividends significantly limit the capital they can invest in FTTP.

Consequently, they focus FTTP investment in cherry picked, densely populated higher income neighborhoods compatible with their business models requiring rapid return on investment. That affects areas of the nation that don’t fit that metric located in all types of neighborhoods: urban, suburban, exurban and rural.

As of 2019, less than a third of U.S. homes had FTTP connections. Even as they increase, only about half of American homes are expected to have fiber connections by 2025. Moreover, the nation has lower fiber deployment rates than other countries with similar density in terms of households per square mile, a study commissioned by the Fiber Broadband Association found. According to the survey, 39.2 million households out of 127.6 million in the US are passed by all-fiber networks.²

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That’s far short of the goal of the U.S. 2010 National Broadband Plan that called for 100 million homes to have affordable connections at FTTP level throughput by 2020.⁴

The plan’s goal that every American have affordable access to robust advanced telecommunications service by 2020—was missed.

FTTP is not a new technology. It’s been available for decades. But it has not replaced legacy twisted pair copper infrastructure put in place in the previous century to deliver analog telephone service. The obstacle is not technological. It is the telephone companies’ business model that prioritizes short term earnings and shareholder dividends over long term capital infrastructure investment. That keeps the obsolete copper network built decades ago for analog voice phone service in place.

Consequently, the United States lacks the FTTP infrastructure it needs to meet the nation’s bandwidth requirements amid rapidly growing demand for digital services including high quality voice, video, graphics and data.

As the 21st century dawned, the vast majority of the country still has legacy copper telecommunications infrastructure – most of it hanging from utility poles. It resembles infrastructure that was in place in the 1970s and 1980s. Had the proper planning and policy been in place to replace with FTTP as the 1980s ended, nearly the entire nation could have had fiber connections by 2010. But as the second decade of the new millennium is about to begin, the nation remains mired in a paradigm of incremental, piecemeal progress with no clear path forward to attain universal FTTP.

Deteriorating Legacy Infrastructure

America’s decades-old copper cable telephone infrastructure designed to carry analog voice telephone calls did that job well for many years. But now as the nation struggles to put in place a fiber-optic infrastructure for a new era of digital, packet-switched advanced telecommunications service in the twenty-first century, the old copper is getting tired and rotting on the poles with no coordinated national plan to replace it.

In much of the nation there exists deteriorating decades old copper telephone company infrastructure—sometimes held together with trash bags and electrical tape – able to deliver only dialup or, if sufficiently close to central telephone offices or field distribution equipment, relatively slow and often unreliable DSL service.

In the nation that created the Internet, it is an embarrassing visible display of the botched transition to FTTP and the lack of a committed, orderly and publicly overseen transition plan that should have been put in place around the time when the advanced telecommunications was moving toward commercial use in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

At that time, it was becoming apparent that an end-to-end fiber-optic telecommunications infrastructure would have to be built to deliver new and emerging advanced telecommunications-based telecommunications services to homes and businesses. Telephone companies recognized that this new communications technology required new infrastructure to support it and began planning to replace their copper networks with fiber by 2010—plans that were largely not executed.⁵

In 2012, then President Barack Obama acknowledged the nation’s advanced telecommunications infrastructure gaps in his State of the Union address, calling for a broad agenda to repair infrastructure. So much of America needs to be rebuilt, he told a joint session of Congress. We’ve got crumbling roads and bridges; a power grid that wastes too much energy; an incomplete high-speed broadband network that prevents a small business owner in rural America from selling her products all over the world.

The picture grimly remains the same in 2020. An example of deteriorating legacy copper infrastructure is Verizon’s planned but unfinished transition of its copper plant to FTTP in Pennsylvania. In 2017, Verizon settled a complaint filed by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) with the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission. The CWA submitted photos with its complaint of dilapidated infrastructure.

The settlement followed complaints in another case of rundown copper lines leading to phone outages and buzzing on the line. Verizon rejected calls from the union to expand FTTP into areas of the state served by its legacy copper plant. In 1993, Verizon predecessor Bell signed an agreement with state regulators promising to bring fiber Internet or comparable technology to its entire service area in Pennsylvania.⁶

Similarly, an investigation of AT&T and Frontier by the California Public Utilities Commission found the quality of the companies’ voice services steadily declined over an eight year period from 2010 to 2017 with the number of outages increasing and the service restoration times getting longer along with persistent disinvestment in network assets.⁷

A generation into the Internet-based telecommunications era, AT&T has no proven durable premise service delivery infrastructure easily scalable throughout its service area as its 1990s DSL delivered over copper outside plant goes obsolete.

Conditions within many Frontier Communications service areas are in a state of dangerous disrepair, with a growing number of disruptions to 911 services