Re: Fiber-Optic Illusion

traditional arguement by entrenched monopolists against public-owned fiber 
projects.

joelja

On Fri, 15 Oct 2004, Art McGee wrote:

> [Comments?--Art]
>
> http://www.sfweekly.com/issues/2004-10-13/news/smith.html
>
> SF Weekly
>
> October 13, 2004
>
> Fiber-Optic Illusion
>
> Why Tom Ammiano's plans to create a city-owned broadband
> network are a boondoggle-in-the-making
>
> By Matt Smith <[email protected]>
>
> When I first ran across the proposal by Supervisors Tom
> Ammiano and Chris Daly to fund a $300,000 study on whether
> the city should go into the business of providing Internet,
> cable TV, and telephone services to San Franciscans, it
> seemed like a champion idea. The measure, passed unanimously
> by the Board of Supervisors last week, will pay analysts to
> investigate whether the city should embark on a
> multimillion-dollar program of laying fiber-optic cable in
> trenches to be dug during an upcoming sewer-system overhaul.
>
> I imagined the new public fiber-optic network functioning
> somewhat like the streets above, which enable things such as
> cheap, fresh grocery produce because the government
> maintains a public way to get from farm to store. With a
> city-owned broadband network, I imagined, monopoly telephone
> and cable TV companies wouldn't control electronic
> communication. Internet-based services such as voice
> telephone calls and home-delivered groceries would become
> cheap and convenient, like grocery produce is now. Commerce,
> education, and communication, I imagined, would flourish,
> and the city's two main suppliers of broadband Internet
> access, Comcast and SBC Communications, would no longer be
> able to extract unfair profits from the exchange of digital
> information.
>
> But I was wrong. Ammiano's measure is a
> boondoggle-in-the-making. Laying fiber-optic cable in the
> sewers would be a mammoth and duplicative waste of money
> that would not really advance the cause of creating a public
> communications network. And that's not just me saying it.
>
> "We have plenty of fiber already in the metro area," says
> San Francisco Telecommunications Commission Vice President
> Sunil Daluvoy -- to whom an Ammiano staffer referred me as
> the foremost expert on the issue of creating a
> government-owned broadband network. "The city already has a
> lot of fiber of its own that's not being utilized. There are
> also a number of companies that offer [access to] it at
> dirt-cheap prices."
>
> Yale Braunstein, a professor in the School of Information
> Management and Systems at the University of California at
> Berkeley and one of America's most outspoken critics of
> private monopoly control of electronic networks, says the
> proposed San Francisco venture would be doomed to fail.
> Other public telecom and cable systems, such as a recently
> privatized one in Palo Alto, have bet on their status as the
> monopoly provider for success. After struggling with steep
> losses for years, the Palo Alto co-op sold out to a private
> operator.
>
> If San Francisco built its own municipal fiber-optic system,
> the city would become just one of several broadband
> providers. The economics for public cable or
> telecommunications networks pencil out only when the public
> entity is stepping in as a sole provider, and even then,
> such projects have a history of failure, Braunstein says.
>
> "San Francisco has the most improbable likelihood of success
> of doing this that I could imagine. You've got to wonder how
> this makes any sense on several levels," Braunstein says.
> "I've been an adviser to cable cooperatives, and I've been a
> big supporter of this basic concept. But I don't think you
> could do this in greater metropolitan San Francisco."
>
> As San Francisco boondoggles go, this $300,000 study -- and
> who-knows-how-many-million-dollar fiber-laying project -- is
> a mere whisper in the wind. Yet it becomes more of a
> screaming fit in the library when one considers that Ammiano
> and his fellow supervisors are proposing we throw a tax
> fortune at the idea of providing better local telecom
> options for consumers, when for the past six years they've
> advocated policies that ensure the grip of local monopolists
> SBC and Comcast on our digital information systems.
>
> For reasons I'll explain, Ammiano's advocacy on behalf of
> small groups of neighborhood activists who believe, without
> evidence, that new cell-phone antennae harm their children's
> brains may have helped preserve SBC and Comcast control over
> San Francisco data and voice networks. Widespread
> substitution of cell phones for local home lines represents
> one of the greatest threats to SBC's monopoly. New wireless
> broadband technology being implemented this year could
> threaten the dominance of Comcast and SBC over fast Internet
> access.
>
> Yet Ammiano's anti-antenna campaign has made San Francisco
> cell service some of the worst in the world.
>
> "If they would spend the same energy on encouraging new
> entrants into the local telecom market" as they have on city
> fiber optics, notes Daluvoy, the city Telecommunications
> Commission VP, "the economic benefit to the city would be
> tenfold."
>
> Ammiano and all the other candidates participating in the
> horrible experiment called district-by-district Board of
> Supervisors elections in November simply cannot seem to
> consider economic or social benefits to the city at large.
> They're not hired to do this, nor are they allowed to do so
> once in office.
>
> Take, for example, the bizarre policy situation surrounding
> San Francisco telecommunications. Politicians have
> vigorously pursued policies encouraging monopoly
> stranglehold over electronic services -- then proposed
> dumping a mountain of city money on the problem of a
> monopoly stranglehold over electronic services -- in one of
> many instances in which our city legislators are not
> rewarded for looking at the big picture, because the big
> picture doesn't much interest their most vocal local
> constituents.
>
> "Why is San Francisco the most difficult city in which to
> get these things built? The time to get a permit in San
> Francisco is more difficult than anywhere else. If you let
> these local but organized groups impact everyone else,
> you're never going to accomplish anything. I can tell you,
> the people affected aren't at those hearings," says Daluvoy,
> who could be talking about difficulties involved in erecting
> new apartment buildings or homeless shelters in San
> Francisco.
>
> But he's talking about cell phone towers.
>
> An inquisitive foreigner arriving in San Francisco and
> wanting to understand how city government works would need
> to arm herself with only this fact: A tiny band of paranoid
> people who hold the unsubstantiated belief that corporations
> are altering their children's brains with radio signals from
> the sky have frightened legislators into worsening San
> Francisco's digital future.
>
> A typical example of such noxious "activism" is Noe Valley
> Families, a group of self-appointed medical theorists formed
> six years ago to overturn an agreement between a church, Noe
> Valley Ministry, and a couple of cell phone companies to
> install antennae in the church's steeple.
>
> There have been studies, all inconclusive, examining
> possible effects that radio-frequency radiation emitting
> from cell phones may have on people's brains. But these
> studies look at the theoretical harm that may or may not be
> caused by putting a cell phone receiver next to your ear.
> The amount of radiation reaching people's bodies from cell
> phone broadcast antennae is far less significant. It's less
> than the amount one would encounter while walking by a house
> with an operating garage door opener.
>
> Nonetheless, Tom Ammiano -- like his colleagues, loath to
> let a local constituent group go unpandered to -- took up
> the cause of Noe Valley Families, and the church and the
> cell phone companies canceled their antenna plan.
>
> Given that cell phones barely work in the city -- mine drops
> calls 100 yards from Sutro Tower, the massive antenna
> sprouting from the saddle between Mount Sutro and Twin Peaks
> -- cell phone companies have continued to seek permits for
> additional antennae. Ever ready to please vociferous
> individual constituents, no matter how unreasonable, Ammiano
> proposed a resolution that would have imposed a citywide
> moratorium on such antennae.
>
> Fortunately, in drafting the Telecommunications Act of 1996,
> federal legislators envisioned the political threat of quack
> theories about the effects of cell phone radiation and made
> it illegal for communities to ban antennae based on
> perceptions about health threats. Undaunted, the Board of
> Supervisors ordered the city legislative analyst's office to
> study how San Francisco government might get around this
> law.
>
> With the help of advice from the City Attorney's Office and
> other relevant bureaucracies, city analyst Adam Van de Water
> a year ago submitted a lengthy report showing ways this
> wasn't practical. As it happens, thwarting cell phone
> antennae can be done easily enough on a case-by-case basis.
> Step 1: The Planning Commission approves an antenna, based
> on a 30-page book of guidelines. Next: A neighborhood group
> appeals the decision to the Board of Supervisors. Third: The
> supes vote the antenna down.
>
> "And seven out of the last seven times this has happened,
> the board has sided with the neighbors," Van de Water says.
>
> Although there's scarcely a politician in the city who'll
> say it, the only real way to repair San Francisco's zany,
> ineffective process for addressing problems -- a process
> that bows before silly localized concerns and ignores
> important citywide needs -- is to get rid of district
> elections.
>
> At a press conference earlier this month, Ammiano and other
> politicians touted a city-owned fiber-optic system as a way
> to close the digital divide between the rich who have
> high-speed Internet access and the poor who often don't even
> have computers.
>
> But in the mind of Telecommunications Commission Vice
> President Daluvoy, who previously worked with the Federal
> Communications Commission formulating policies to promote
> the deployment of broadband networks, the best hope for
> creating citywide Internet access that doesn't rely on SBC
> or Comcast is a technology called fixed wireless. Fixed
> wireless depends on a cell phone receiver stationed
> permanently in the home. Such a receiver would function in
> the same way as the home phone lines that now carry
> high-speed DSL service.
>
> "Look at the transportation analogy, in which you have
> freeways, boulevards, and small streets going to homes. We
> have a tremendous amount of fiber already in what you could
> refer to as the freeways, even in the boulevards. Where you
> don't have capacity is the narrow streets to the home.
> That's where the shortage is," Daluvoy says. "The quickest
> way to fill that capacity to that part of the roads is to go
> wireless."
>
> The cellular telephone industry realizes this. And all major
> national cellular carriers are currently creating wireless
> broadband service, which extends cellular phone networks to
> high-speed Internet access. AT&T Wireless began offering
> such a service two months ago in the South Bay, with plans
> for other cities nationwide.
>
> But thanks to the legacy of Ammiano and his fellow
> supervisors, San Francisco may remain one of the few cities
> where this cellular technology is not a viable option to SBC
> and Comcast.
>
> Because to have increased cellular service, you need more
> cellular antennae, and you can't have more cellular antennae
> if you're going to quaver in fear before small neighborhood
> groups that believe -- but have absolutely no evidence --
> that cell phone radio waves emitted from these antennae harm
> children's brains.
>
> In the area of cable-based broadband, local telephone
> service, and television, a company called RCN Telecom
> Services Inc. has been struggling for three years to provide
> an alternative to Comcast and SBC in some of San Francisco's
> southeastern neighborhoods. Battling giants isn't easy.
> Earlier this year the company filed for Chapter 11
> bankruptcy, from which it hopes to emerge next year.
>
> Supervisor, neighborhood-group panderer, and
> government-fiber-in-the-sewers supporter Jake McGoldrick,
> meanwhile, was recently heard in committee leading the
> charge in trying to squeeze every last possible penny in
> cable license fees out of RCN. In exchange for a new permit,
> the company will pay the city $400,000 per year.
>
> The contract went into effect just as the board decided to
> spend $300,000 studying the issue of providing a city-owned
> alternative to Comcast and SBC.
>
> Copyright (c) 2004 New Times. All Rights Reserved.
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Joel Jaeggli  	       Unix Consulting 	       [email protected] 
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