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CenturyLink Takes $3B In Subsidies For Building Out Rural Broadband
New submitter club77er writes with a link to a DSL Reports article outlining some hefty subsidies (about $3 billion, all told) that CenturyLink has signed up to receive, in exchange for expanding its coverage to areas considered underserved: According to the CenturyLink announcement, the telco will take $500 million a year for six years from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)'s Connect America Fund (CAF). In exchange, it will expand broadband to approximately 1.2 million rural households and businesses in 33 states. While the FCC now defines broadband as 25 Mbps down, these subsidies require that the deployed services be able to provide speeds of at least 10 Mbps down.
In January we got Broadband! A whopping 5Mbps. It was amazing. We loved it.
Then the FCC took away our Broadband. They changed the definition to 25Mbps so now we have a paltry 5Mbps! Horrible.
Not.
Promise them anything they want. It is far easier to apologize for lackluster results than it is to admit your business plan is shiat upfront and still get funded.
We enjoy paying for your chosen lifestyle. You're welcome.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
If they take our money to build the line, they are acting as an agent of the state (so, yes we can say the government put in the line) and they must lease it out at reasonable rates.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I've been a victim of Centurylink since they sucked up the Sprint/Embarq empire. As they expanded, their ability to service existing customers dwindled to the point that my dsl service dropped to 56K modem rates for about 2 years. They re-imbursed a couple of months, but they were the only game in our rural area so they eventually put me on ignore. They've managed to improve the speed, but my line still goes down on a regular basis. Unfortunately, I'm in Texas, which is served by an overseas call center...you California folks are so lucky. I accidentally got connected to the California area center on one occasion and things were going beautifully until they figured out that I was in Texas and routed me to my proper call center.
Your region doesn't get math education subsidies, either, does it?
That works out to just over $2,000 per subscriber ($3B/1.2M subscribers)...
Ken
How is this worth posting to slashdot? Rural phone subsidies have been around forever. They recently got expanded to broadband. We're all taxed (technically "fees") on our phone bills (and soon internet I believe) to pay for this stuff. This is all about getting service that our government has deemed as essential to areas that are too sparse to be profitable.
Century link will collect fed funds for shit service that is up to stated speeds.
Silence is a state of mime.
I'm mad because in ten years they still won't have delivered, will have spent the bulk of the money on executive bonuses and won't get punished. Keep the subsidies, make em pay it back with interest if they're so much as a smidge off
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Charlottesville? I have the same options, though Comcast offers 300Mbit for some ridiculous amount, so I subscript to the 25/5 plan.
I hope Ting keeps building out!
Instead of giving Century Link 3 billion dollars to build the infrastructure and then have a monopoly where they can overcharge the customer, let's take that 3 billion and have the government build the infrastructure. Then we let any company who want so use it do so for a small fee. Then not only do we have infrastructure, but we also have competition and at least a small income from the lines, which is better for everyone.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
That works out to just over $2,000 per subscriber ($3B/1.2M subscribers)...
I get $2,500 per subscriber. (dc agrees with me.)
I consider an extra 25% as a bit more than "just over".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Sadly out of mod points... this deserves to be modded up.
It would be nice if we could force the telephone companies to deliver ADSL2+ service of 24 Mbps down to every location where POTS is installed. The telcos got rate increases, tax credits, and tax deductions to do just that, but they have failed to live up to the requirements to do so. The federal and state governments have failed to enforce the requirements.
Why would someone think they could provide service in areas with a much higher cost per customer? The city of Seattle has successfully blocked every attempt they've made to service our block. If they can't successfully fight a single city with nearly four hundred customers at stake on our block, how are they going to successfully navigate a byzantine mess of different rules in a bunch of different rural areas?
You're right - it's 2.5k, which is at least the same order of magnitude (and still pretty absurd). I'm not sure what would have made him/her come up with 5k instead.
I'm guessing it does!
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
I have fiber on the pole next to the house. Haven't meaured it, but going off a rough eye... 30 feet away from the house. When they were working on the line, I walked up to the Verizon lineman and asked him if it was fiber optic. He acknowledged it, then stated he wouldn't be able to tell me what it was for. GE has two facilities nearby, as well as Environmental One and SI's headquarters.
VZ still won't gives us FiOS here. I'm not bitter, really I'm not.
I assure you some company would have agreed to do the build out with full fiber for much less.
Here someone might say "but century link has the franchise last mile contract in that area"... And to those people, I say the very notion of such franchises is why we have such shitty broadband in the first place. You give companies monopolies and shockingly they over charge and under serve. Anyone surprised by that is too ignorant to be involved in civic planning.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
> The city of Seattle...
It's not just the city government, but the people of Seattle are also fighting against good Internet access. The block I live on has over two hundred residential units, but no access to cable, thus no cable Internet. My neighbor even organized a petition against allowing Comcast to provide service, and the COA spent money to hire an expensive lawyer to block them. We have an antenna on the roof and good distribution, so we get the local channels at better than cable quality, but it still sucks to not be able to get ESPN. It also costs us about $20 per month in fees for all of the financed installation and equipment charges. There's a problem a few blocks away with the phone wiring, and CenturyLink has been fighting for years for permission to dig-up the street, but so far they haven't made any progress. We can get DSL, but it isn't much faster than ISDN and is flaky.
If CenturyLink can't successfully fight one city to provide access to hundreds of units, how are they going to win fighting a bunch of different sets of laws in a bunch of different cities/counties? I just don't see how they're going to be successful.
I'm a current Centurylink customer. I'm 18,000 feet from DSLAM. my speeds at best right now are 480Kbs down and about 128Kbs up. My neighbors love me. I'm the last house on this cable run. they cant have it because CenturyLink in this area doesnt go more than 12,000 feet from DSLAM anymore.
I'd really like to get the 780KBps I am paying for but i'm afraid to rock the boat. Maybe this will bring me out of the stone ages.
It depends on how rural they're expected to go. It's not exactly cheap to upgrade infrastructure that's probably PTSN or at most ISDN, and service providers have not done so because it will literally cost them more to do the install than they can guarantee they'll make back out of it. There's still a lot of copper backbone out there, with the associated problems that old copper has with corrosion and other line degredation that can be worked around with voice (anyone remember pair gain?) but will play havoc on any sort of high-speed data.
I don't think that those that live in rural areas don't deserve to have Internet access, but everywhere we live we make trade-offs. I have to put up with high property costs (relatively speaking), pollution in several forms, traffic, restrictions on the kinds of things I'm allowed to do on my property and in the surrounding area, and being forced to interact with others. On the other hand I get inexpensive shopping, relatively short travel distances, numerous entertainment options, and access to infrastructure and utilities that require a certain minimum density to have.
Those that live in rural areas generally have more peace and quiet, less traffic, less pollution, fewer rules on property use and other activities, and lower property costs, but have longer drives, more expensive shopping, more expensive or nonexistent utilities or infrastructure, and less in the way of entertainment choices. Them's the breaks. That's also why we have taxes that pay for infrastructure in rural areas, like roads, power distribution (yes, the electrification of rural America was subsidized), telephone, mail, and depending on the area sanitation and water. Even with those subsidies there will still be a dearth of some services though.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Socialism !!! Those undeserving area should start their own internet company that is how the magic hand works!!!
How is this worth posting to slashdot? Rural phone subsidies have been around forever. They recently got expanded to broadband.
They've been collecting it for decades. They've been giving it to the companies and not getting service to customers.
JUST NOW we have a company agreeing to take the money and use it to ACTUALLY ROLL OUT BROADBAND INTERNET to the rural areas.
That sure as hell is "news for nerds, stuff that matters".
Especially for me:
- A my Nevada place I get dialup that can't make it past 28k most days (and only works if I hotwire my DNS server selection: AT&T has had their routing tables fouled for over a year and won't route packets the dialup POP and the DNS servers specified by the dialup's DHCP server.) DirecTV/Hughes Net satellite has bad latency and a track record of throttling. The local phone company doesn't do DSL there - reselling HughesNet, see above. The local WISP doesn't point in my direction (and would want >$100/month for reasonable speed if they did). The only high-speed I've got there is via the Verizon LTE service (which is big $$$ for the gigs I'd need to work remotely for more than a weekend at a time - and SUPPOSEDLY doesn't have coverage there).
- If I could get decent internet (at a decent price) I could work from the ranch, sell off the California townhouse, and live for a year on less than it costs to live in CA for a month. (Or retire and live comfortably on my savings, investments, and Social Security - which would crap out in a few years on the Soviet Left Coast.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I personally would rather they gave Google that request. A company that has actually proven to be trying to roll out QUALITY service to people and actually compete with the big boys and beat them at their own game.
They would probably stretch that further, give better returns, and actually compete with the others and force them to up their games. Hell, Google might actually throw in money of their own into the venture to make it further.
I live in a town of 750. The nearest big (100,000) town is 60 miles away. We've used CenturyLink for DSL for something like five years, and the service is excellent: at least 10Mbps/768Kbps. Almost never any downtime. I was never so happy to ditch a bad service as the day we dumped cable.
Yes, cville. I have business class 50/10 actually get about 57/14
Silence is a state of mime.
Thieves! Qwest took in how many billions and didn't deliver. Same old game.
If you don't want them to be bible thumping nut jobs you got to give them internet to bring them into the 21st century.
The only thing the hand is good for is to give the finger to everyone worth under a few billion dollars.
Looks like Quest^W Qwest^W CenturyLink is just going for Part Two of the original hit production: Broadband Subsidy Scam.
But don't worry if you're enjoying the show so far -- I have no doubt there will be a Part Three in 10 years or so.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
Didn't the big telecoms already take billions of dollars in subsidies for building out rural broadband back in the 2000's, did nothing, kept all the money and reneged on all contractual obligations?
And what's the monthly data limit?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
to make maps look more Blue. If Xfinity or Verizon had installed those lines then maps would look red and Democrats wouldn't like that.
By simple math this is only $2500 per subscriber. The value of a connected customer (in terms of a company buyout) is typically substantially greater. Note that (depending upon system design) these will likely be captive customers and so substantially more valuable than those in an urban competitive environment.
So you can look at it two ways:
1.) With a relatively small public investment we are getting (circumstantially) disadvantaged households connected to an essential 21st century utility.
2.) With a huge public investment we are helping a favored (for unknown reasons) nut-squeezing telecom into a superior exploitative position to screw disadvantaged households.
So it's actually just a matter of viewpoint (public socialism vs. corporate socialism vs. free market, your guess/viewpoint/opinion as to which).
Centurytel is our ILEC, and I had to go with TimeWarner since CT speed was so poor. While I welcome the chance to have competition, I am not sure that we will get what the government is paying for.
Just 2 miles away, I had AT&T U-Verse, with over 45mbps coming down the pipe for our triple play. If CT was able to come close, I would drop TW in a heartbeat.
The problem is the cost per item. This is more than just a subsidy, it's simply paying for getting the entire job done and if that were the case, why doesn't the government just contract that job out. These companies have gotten the same subsidies over and over again, even avoided taxes since the 90's for that exact promise.
There are a few facts:
- Even in rural areas, people tend to cluster together, you can easily get 100 houses/living spaces in a small area
- There is already fiber in lots of places with inhabitants due to regular phone lines or even DSL/ISDN (which even in rural areas no longer use switchboards or trunks, they are switched onto a packet line, generally fiber) and both lit and dark fiber strung in the past four decades. Even so, existing copper can in most cases easily maintain the speeds being requested.
- Most DSL/ISDN lines can be easily upgraded with software and minor hardware to comply with these requests.
- It is relatively cheap to tap a fiber from a pole even for a (very) long run. I once lived in such place, a 2.5 mile run from the nearest fiber on existing electric/phone poles would've cost me only $15k including installation, hardware and (I assume) profits for the installer and that was for a 1Gbps fiber.
- Single houses in the middle of nowhere will still not get anything because the company will not find them profitable
- These companies often only provide service 'to the pole' (not to the meter/modem/termination point as most people assume). Most/all utilities have this provision, even in a city, you might not notice unless you have to fix something (or if it's already buried) but when you do then you can go and climb the (live) pole yourself or hire someone to do it. The rest (a 20-200ft run depending on property layout) the customer still has to pay for during installation.
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http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_28601196/centurylink-confirms-layoff-plans
Yay!
Holy CRAP!!! That's probably going to include me for a change! *does the snoopy dance* Come to butthead, internet speeds over 6mb/s.
Wait - why are they allowing them to offer at least 10 Mbps when Broadband is now 25? Why not... ya know... force them to at least offer ...uhh 25!!!?????
gives rural states more voting power relative to population. Thus, this could be seen as pandering.
Table-ized A.I.
So what percentage of that money will mysteriously end up becoming bonuses for the executives? =p
I live in a rural subdivision and I can say you're almost spot on about the trade offs. However my Internet service isn't all that far behind thanks to LTE. Our ISP offers 25 MBps with 600GB data limits for nearly the same price I paid for cable Internet in town.
It's no Google Fibre but we are still keeping up. 3 years ago the best wireless Internet I could get was 3 MBps (and generally that topped out at less than 1 MBps). 2 years ago I bumped up to 10 with an 80 GB cap. And this year I'm at 25. And just in time... The kids have discovered Netflix and that old data cap was killing us!
$3 billion dollars can buy enough 48 strand fiber to encircle the world 25 times. If congress would just open the market up, the problem would quickly take care of itself. But no, instead they grant monopolistic jurisdictions and give away huge amounts of tax payer's money, lining the pockets of fat cats, with palsy results in return.
Somebody esplain to me why the FCC doesn't mandate symmetric broadband speeds. I'd rather have that then gigabit.
My rural area does not have subdivisions, though there are some local concentrations of population. It happens that I have a Centurylink switch right next door, and for a few years they were my provider. Because of my living next to the switch, I got 10MHz, the fastest that DSL is capable of, but two to five miles away, the speed drops into the acoustic modem range. Beyond that, no Centurylink at all, even though everyone has its phone company wiring.
Now that a cable provider has come to town, the Centurylink customer base has flocked over to its clean 80MHz service. You have to be on the cable run, but this still a much larger number of customers than can get Centurylink at all.
This actively began with the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
http://transition.fcc.gov/Repo...
Where's the rest of the billions of tax dollars?
The problem is the cost per item. This is more than just a subsidy, it's simply paying for getting the entire job done and if that were the case, why doesn't the government just contract that job out.
No matter what the Federal government does, someone will be dissatisfied with the result...
May as well go with a company that at least has a chance of knowing what they're doing. Century Link is by no means my favorite, but they're not Comcast either.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Looking at land to buy that's about 10 miles from the Redmond home of Microsoft and can't get ANY service.
How about the opposite... what the hell are those dimwit democrats thinking giving taxpayer money to all those subsidized housing dwelling lazy-ass SOBs who are unwilling to take all those "jobs Americans don't want so we have to allow illegal immigrants to swarm the borders." They want food so bad they can take that job they don't want or starve.
Most of those out on the edges where this infrastructure is going are out there so they can grow the food you keep stuffing yourself with. Are you so damn stupid that you think food magically plants and harvests itself?
No its mexicans who do it !