FCC fines Charter, LTD Broadband more than $3M for RDOF defaults | Hacker News Reader

FCC fines Charter, LTD Broadband more than $3M for RDOF defaults

fiercetelecom.com

108 pointsPaulHoule70 comments

shameless plug: https://internetforall.nyc/

There is a coalition of organizations trying to get NYC to start its own public broadband provider. If you live in NY, talk to your friends and reps about it, if you don't, get your city to start one. NYC had to sue Verizon because they didn't fulfill their contracts to provide broadband to low income parts of the city (just like Charter and LTD haven't), but there really is no choice except to keep subsidizing these godawful companies unless we have a publicly owned alternative.

I think the best approach would be publicly owned infrastructure with a mandate to reach all addresses. Run a basic no-frills public ISP service over it at a fair price but the private sector can also operate added value services over the public infrastructure if they want for a nominal maintenance fee.

This is exactly the approach SF[1] was taking but unfortunately our main political champion, the Mayor, passed away unexpectedly. We were estimating $25-30/mo for 1Gb symmetrical as a utility tax for all households (subsidized for low income).

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/07/12/america...

I'm pretty conservatively politically but even I have come to the conclusion that a government owned monopoly on telecoms might be the only solution, especially given the criticality of internet access in the modern world.

To some extent it's a natural extension of the postal service.

I'm not sure why more politicians don't run on this platform.

That's a pretty good point (and argument), actually: "What's the fundamental difference between the post office and internet access?" I don't see one.

> but the private sector can also operate added value services over the public infrastructure if they want for a nominal maintenance fee.

Added services like what? I want internet. Give me internet.

As long as the "no-frills" version is available to consumers, I suppose it's fine to provide options. However, I feel like these public-private partnerships often merely allow rent-seeking corporations to insert themselves as middlemen and skim off the top of public services. Especially once those middlemen also start lobbying to cripple the government-run version.

Exactly. High speed internet is no longer a novelty. It is necessary for most people who use the Internet/stream video. A municipal, “no frills” package that is just a slow DSL connection would be inadequate.

Streaming video is not a necessity.

No-one said slow. I was thinking FTTP. However a public sector initiative would come with limits. It has to come with limits because people demand low taxes. Let's say the public sector does the math and says 500Mbit is what they can guarantee for equitable distribution to all addresses. That should be plenty for most people. But there will always be one person who demands their god given right to 10 gigabit. In which case you direct them to the private sector and tell them to pay for it on their own.

Wouldn't the private ISP offering 10 gigabits have to lay their own pipes anyway, to support that speed?

Not necessarily. If you lay down FTTP for 500Mbit it'll work at 10 gig no problem. You need to change the equipment at either end. In fact it'll work well beyond that speed if someone wants to pay for the equipment. But if the private sector wants to lay down their own cable in parallel to the public sector then who is stopping them?

Definitely not a rent-seeking opportunity. Just to clarify, I'd see the public ISP service as providing a vanilla "wires only" type broadband offering at a reasonable competitive speed at a reasonable price. A value-add service might be e.g. a private sector competitor offers a broadband + sports streaming bundle or something like that which it makes less sense for the public sector to get involved in. The public sector broadband service effectively puts a ceiling on what can be charged for plain broadband, so the private sector offering has to be better in some way and they can't rent-seek.

That's what I have: fiber infra as a public utility, with a choice of ISPs on top of that.

Funny fact, the ISP I chose is $10/month for 1G down/up. Want to add a phone line (which runs digitally over fiber)? That'll be an extra $26/month. It's as if they know the only people who want a phone line are willing to pay a lot for it.

I would love to be able to pay your price for internet and phone for just half of that internet speed.

This is great. The flip side of this is NYC Mesh, which is a group of fed up volunteers building a giant mesh WiFi, along with public access points. It's pretty impressive: https://www.nycmesh.net/map

My city runs fiber infra as a public utility, with about a half dozen options of ISPs to choose from which provide internet connectivity on top of that infra. I pay $26/month total for 1000 Mbps down, 1000 Mbps up. It's a huge benefit to everyone living here. The city is going neighborhood by neighborhood, connecting everyone that wants it.

To me, the best part isn't even the price. It's the satisfaction of not having to deal with Comcast/Cox/Verizon/charter/etc.

missed this comment earlier, but I'm curious if you're in the US?

Yes. Idaho

So these fines represent 0.3% of the original funding...

Does that mean the other 99.7% of the work has been completed to a satisfactory standard?

RDOF buildout mostly hasn't even started and the deadline is 2028. This is a case of ISPs admitting that they can't serve areas they bid on. Around 2030 we'll discover the areas that ISPs still aren't serving even though they got paid to do so.

I hope fining Charter .00002 of their 51.6 billion annual revenue gets them to change their ways.

Measuring the fine as % of revenue doesn't make much sense here. If they got $x in RDOF funding from the census block that they defaulted on, and they got fined $3x, that's a substantial penalty in relation to how much money they got in the first place. Getting a $100 parking ticket (for not paying for parking) isn't affect a bay area software engineer much (as measured by % of income), but it's still going to heavily disincentivize not paying for parking.

So it seems like the FCC has a $20.4B[1] fund across approximately 61,766 CBGs[2], or ~$330,279 per CBG. The fine was for 768 CBGs, which would then represent ~$253M of the fund, i.e., the fine was ~1.6% of the funded amount.

So I don't see how the fine makes any sort of sense.

[1]: https://www.fcc.gov/auction/904

[2]: see [1], see "Census Blocks, Associated Census Block Groups, and Reserve Prices (zip)", the larger of the two CSVs, the number of distinct values in the "cbg_id" column. There's a second CSV in the ZIP, and no documentation whatsoever, so I have no idea what that's about. You can include it in the calculation if you want, but it isn't going to materially affect the outcome here.

but they got fined 0.3% of the subsidy

> Getting a $100 parking ticket (for not paying for parking) isn't affect a bay area software engineer much (as measured by % of income), but it's still going to heavily disincentivize not paying for parking.

It also depends on the risk of getting caught and how averse you are to breaking the law.

Another toothless fine from the government. A measly $3M is nothing for these giant corps. If you want a fine to stick, make it a not small percentage of their gross sales. Otherwise, this just gets rolled into cost of business and not a deterrent for future problems.

A clawback of the full amount initially granted out, as well as punitive fines against the revenue from customers in census blocks they were supposed to upgrade but kept extracting profits from through their ancient existent infrastructure seems like a good start.

I'm pretty sure no money was initially granted out because these ISPs defaulted before it got to that point. In that context I think these fines are fair.

Now I want to know what process the FCC has for re-bidding those defaulted areas.

> I'm pretty sure no money was initially granted out because these ISPs defaulted before it got to that point.

I'm gladdened to hear that, at least.

Is there any mechanism for local, independent ISP's to pop up and take advantage of this funding, or is it all tailored towards big-telco?

Lots of RDOF funding went to local ISPs you've never heard of so I'd say the mechanism is... RDOF.

Nice! I was honestly curious as this program is well outside my field.

Before the RDOF auction began there was a controversy about the FCC not having accurate service coverage data to determine what census tracts should be eligible for the program. The result was that something like $16 billion would be paid out in this first round of auction, and $4 billion was held back for a second auction to fill the gaps once we had more accurate data. Then the bidding actually went low enough that the FCC was able to cover all their first-round goals with just $9 billion, leaving $11 billion for the second round. My understanding is that any areas (and clawed back funds) that weren't serviced during the first round will go back into the pot for the next round.

Some of these rural places they bid on are so rural that in their mind it is cost prohibitive to incur the expenses of bringing them the service. In their life time of being a customer, they will not likely pay enough to cover that initial construction cost. This is why I'm sure the bean counters have said to just ignore them and pay the fines. It'll be cheaper in the long run for the company.

So maybe make the fines the equivelant to all of the construction fees they are trying to avoid by reneging on their bids + a severe penalty. Make it so that it is more financially attractive to do what they promised.

No, fines are not cheaper than simply not bidding on areas they can't serve.

Exactly my thoughts as well— why did they bid in the first place?

Because the team drafting the grant application isn't the same team that's evaluating the feasibility of doing the work.

Honestly - if it's anything at all like some of the companies I've peripherally worked for around government grants, the team seeking grants doesn't actually give a flying fuck if they can do the work. Their job is to secure as much grant funding as possible, any way possible.

Implementation planning only happens after securing the grant. At that point it's far too late.

Also, you may know there are certain areas required by the bid that are less desirable. As long as there is enough desirable in the there to make up whatever punative fines will be levied for failing on the other areas, then it's still a win for the company

you bid on it so someone else can't get it before you do. you then hope that there's going to be a way to make it work, but in the end, you realize it's just not going to happen. so now, you just take the fine and walk away

I wish it was a multiplier against the cost of actually installing broadband in some areas.

So if it costs $1m to install broadband in some community, make the fine 3x @ $3m.

If corporations don't have intent and want to risk it, don't take the money.

Seems a good opportunity for Starlink to get some RDOF funds

Starlink is a god send for my hometown in West Virginia.

Current internet service there is provided by Frontier Communications. They offer "advertised" speeds of 6 Mbps but for years my parents internet came in around 1 or 2 on a good day. Service is abhorrent and they are still using phone lines that will likely never be replaced. They've taken serious advantage of the state of WV and even after a class action lawsuit in 2015 that they settled on I doubt it will ever improve.

My parents finally got starlink setup ~3 months ago, it's around 100 mbps (roughly 100x as fast) and way more reliable even though it's satellite.

The default answer in the cable industry for solving "underserved" communities seems to be run fiber - but that's prohibitively expensive, especially for very rural communities. I believe "underserved" is defined as sub 32 MBps down and sub 6 MBps up. There's HFC which alleviates things somewhat but that still implies noise problems and signal amplitude loss for each home's coax tap.

It's nice to have Starlink as an intermediary solution for rural people while the "fiber everywhere" approach takes slow adoption.

Is fiber really more expensive to run than coax? I'd imagine that most of the cost is the cost of digging a trench or stringing out cables under the power lines. If you take a close look at the outdoor plant for a cable system there are a large number of large powered boxes that also cost money.

Contrast that to a fiber system which has very few active parts.

I'd imagine that coaxial cable still dominates in many places because it was installed in the 1980s and 1990s. When the cable company wants to upgrade the system it is cost-effective to replace the uppermost nodes of the network with fiber and still leave coax for the last half mile.

I know a rural "cable" company that today runs fiber optic plant in communities with favorable economics. Their primary product is an analog cable signal that is exactly what goes over the coax just modulated on a light beam. It's an economical and reliable system now and it is straightforward to upgrade to GPON or more advanced technologies in that future.

It might not be so much that the fiber itself is expensive. It might just be the conduit or other delivery mechanism that can be rather costly to run. But in general, fiber is absolutely a viable option for rural communities, usually if the project/roll out is being handled by some local organization (Co-op or municipality or as you sated a smaller cable company). I wrote my thesis on community owned broadband programs in Ohio and did a fair amount of research on the topic.

The one entity that is not going to invest in new plant is an entity that has an existing plant.

For instance if there is a phone company with a copper plant that can charge $60 a month for DSL it is obviously unaffordable for them to upgrade to fiber so they can charge $70 a month.

Some other entity might find the new plant is worth investing in but it still fights against the old plant. For instance the phone company is making crazy profits on $60 a month DSL and can probably still make profits on $40 a month DSL. This puts a downward pressure on pricing for a fiber service and also means the fiber plant is going to bypass many possible subscribers because there are plenty of people who will put up with a 100x drop in performance to save a few dollars.

This book

https://www.commentary.org/articles/leslie-lenkowsky/the-zer...

works an interesting case study that was fundamental to the Democratic party becoming advocates for free trade. In particular, the steel industry in the US in the 1970s still depended on open hearth furnaces that were obsolete in every way to the basic oxygen furnaces used in Germany and Japan.

From a marxist perspective, capital is the "master class", maybe even the capital itself (as opposed to the capitalist), embodied in those furnaces. Instead of replacing the furnaces, the US steel industry pursued protectionism which was harmful to the competitiveness of other sectors of the economy: inferior and expensive steel is an ingredient for inferior and expensive cars, buildings, etc.

To analogize, however, the problem is that the copper phone network exists. So long as it exists there are strong incentives to keep using it. It might not be a problem of encouraging investment in fiber as much as forcing disinvestment in copper.

The question isn't _new_ runs of fiber vs coax, everyone just runs fiber for that. It's the cost of upgrading existing runs. HFC (hybrid fiber coax) networks have been the norm for a long time. When the original coax was run it was significantly cheaper to run it even accounting for inflation. Like all major construction projects (which is what a coax replacement is) costs in the US are spiraling upwards: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-08/why-build...

Do people even dig trenches anymore? I assume there is already a services pipe that runs along most city roads that has all of the various utilities in it. Am I wrong?

Yes.

Utilities may have been buried 20, 30, 40 or 50 years ago or more. Without regard to future access, changes or modifications.

Of course! Around here each utility generally has its own pipe, and often they take different paths. There’s a mix of underground and above ground. The neighborhood is roughly 80 years old.

I've never been satisfied with Frontier internet.

It's the same in my province for rural areas. I recall fiber optic lines being run in the mid 1990s but then nothing. Politicians promising just basic Internet connectivity at first then "high speed" (the famous up to) for the last 25 years.

Here in south-eastern Canada we were some of the first to be in the Starlink coverage area. From what I hear it's doing well not fantastic but better than up to x speed which always seems to end up being less than 1MBps. Luckily I am in a town with lots of options but still the cost is high $100/month for 350Mbps.

Setting aside Musk's abrasive personality, any typical satellite Internet issues, orbital clutter, escalating costs, it's at least something. Internet access is more than just for entertainment these days.

I have an RV I like to use often, and have been watching this with quite a bit of interest. Additionally, some of the phone companies are starting to have 'real' 5g home connections that compete with cable.

While I live in a suburb now, my last home I moved out of in 2016 was 2M/256k wireless internet, that was $60/month, and only 5-6 miles south of downtown Madison, WI.

Between Starlink and the 5G home connections t-mobile and verizon have been selling lately, its going to be interesting that Rural locations will suddenly see good internet choices. I may be able to finally buy a place in the middle of no-where. Working from home has made that not possible previously.

Frontier is famous in the telecom/ISP network engineering community for having the absolute worst shit tier quality of old copper phone wiring running ADSL2+.

Street side pedestals wrapped in plastic garbage bags and such.

What you've got there is probably dialtone POTS copper phone wiring that was installed in the 1960s to 1980s at a very long loop length from where the DSLAM is installed. And wet, dirty connections, noisy with crosstalk.

Until they come up with a firm financial commitment to overbuild their legacy POTS dialtone copper phone wiring outside plant with singlemode fiber it's only going to get worse.

In Verizon territory (originally NYNEX), we have POTS wiring literally rotting on the poles. They’ve decommissioned many “copper facilities” but never physically removed them. Much of the area has been upgraded to fiber.

Starlink is currently expected to get $900M of RDOF funds. I'm curious about how FCC is going to enforce performance. Starlink's bid promised 20Mbps upload speeds but the reality for users is less than 10. Download speeds aren't reliably at the 100Mbps the RDOF bid specifies, either. https://starlinktrack.com/speedtests/region/us

Sad to say, but 50% of promised performance is spectacular with regard to American telecom companies' rural promises.

Starlink won't get paid until they meet the performance goals, but IIRC they have until 2028 to actually fully meet them. They do have to have a plan of how that would happen, and FCC must accept that plan.

It's public knowledge that they intend to launch a lot more satellites before that, so they are probably counting on that to help them.

>> It's public knowledge that they intend to launch a lot more satellites before that, so they are probably counting on that to help them.

Yeah, but they also want to substantially increase the number of subscribers. It seems a shame to add capacity and not users just to get a cheque from the government for hitting some arbitrary numbers. IIRC they could have bid for a lower speed target that they would probably be hitting today.

The speed categories were set by the FCC, and SpaceX would have gotten nothing if they weren't in the "fast" category.

> It seems a shame to add capacity and not users

... I think they will be doing both. They currently have ~2500 sats in the ~53° constellation. The V2 system that has been approved and is targeting similar latitudes has 3 times the sats, and each sat is claimed to support 9 times the bandwidth of the current ones. So if they need to triple bandwidth per user, they can still increase subscriber count 9-fold and meet it.

Just visited fast.com, got 55 Mbps down on a whim (Starlink in Michigan). Sure, it doesn't hold a candle to in-home fiber, but it definitely beats the pants off HughesNet and our local WISP. I'd say for Monday afternoon traffic, I'm getting really solid performance. Definitely worth the $100/month just for the unmetered connection alone.

I too am curious with how far they can push performance though. I've got a hunch that it has something to do with balancing satellites, users and regional coverage, but only time will tell if they make good on their promise. Even if things stay the same as they are right now though, there's nothing else that comes close in my area.

How does RDOF test that? Speedtest.net? Fast.com? Rarely have I received 100Mbps via http transfer mechanisms, and that's the majority of what people do all day. Websites, streaming video, etc are all small discrete downloads via lots of multiple requests. They don't have time to get "up to speed". What that 100Mbps is allow ~10 people to use ~10Mbps at the same time. That's the testing I'd be interested in seeing proof of their service being met.

If they do any testing it will probably be through SamKnows.

I don't think 10 people has anything to do with a single household but maybe I'm just an out-of-touch liberal coastal elite. But seriously, one person can use around 25 Mbps which is why there's discussion of defining broadband to be 100 Mbps per household.

Historically the FCC relied on self-reported numbers from ISPs to verify performance. Unsurprisingly, ISPs lied. Lately FCC has gotten smarter about verifying performance.

The RDOF performance requirements are much more subtle than just average speeds though, there's details about percentiles and time of day and the like. I'm hopeful someone is being thoughtful at the FCC

I believe HLS chunk downloads reuses same TCP/QUIC connection.

To be honest, that part of how the internet and browsers work is beyond my knowledge. I just know how to create HLS packages, and then see how the browser makes the multiple requests in the network tab. If browsers are smart and keep connections like that open vs renegotiating per request then it makes sense to me. Maybe this will be my today's TIL for me.

And I believe there is great opportunity for Starlink on the RDOF funds they don't win directly and it might/could come in two forms:

- Others will end up shipping rebranded/white-label versions of Starlink

- Starlink will provide backhaul to others in hard to reach places. Then they'll set up their microwave or 5G based off of that connectivity. (but wouldn't the first option just be easier?)

But is it cheaper to ignore your rural obligations, pocket the money and incur the fines than it is to enter into a contract with your competition?

Somewhat reminiscent of how Tesla took advantage of zero-emissions credits from legacy auto manufacturers that didn't want to (or couldn't) produce their own zero-emissions vehicles.

Starlink does sell backhaul. It's a fairly big business all over the globe, and low latency is something that mobile users expect.

Starlink is basically another scam just like Solar City

can we fine fiercetelecom.com for breaking the back button on that linked page?

and if you don't want a broken internet, stop sharing sites that break the internet.

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