The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) is poised to include new broadband affordability requirements as part of the state’s looming approval of Verizon’s massive $20 billion merger with Frontier Communications, even as some consumer advocacy groups worry the changes may not go quite far enough to hold Verizon accountable.

The CPUC’s Public Advocates Office has struck a partial settlement with Verizon that the state hopes will take some of the sting out of the telecom industry’s latest consolidation spree.

Verizon’s $20 billion proposed merger with Frontier would merge two of the nation’s top four traditional phone companies, resulting in a telecom giant with assets across 31 states. The merged new company would have more than 9.6 million customers with a fiber network that ultimately passes more than 25 million fiber homes and businesses.

While the two companies don’t directly compete, Verizon’s political influence and market power will still increase. Both companies have long been criticized for lobbying to undermine U.S. broadband competition, then leveraging the resulting regional market failure to jack up consumer costs and neglecting aging DSL network upgrades and repairs.

The CBN team's Associate Director for Communications Sean Gonsalves recently published a piece in ProMarket about the continuing consolidation of telecommunication markets and why municipal broadband is a better option. He writes:

"Last month, AT&T announced it would acquire all of Lumen Technologies’ fiber internet business for $5.75 billion. According to a company statement, the purchase will net AT&T one million fiber customers and significantly expand its fiber footprint in Denver, Las Vegas, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Orlando, Phoenix, Portland, Salt Lake City, and Seattle.

Across AT&T and Lumen’s service areas, where they offer wired or licensed fixed wireless Internet service, more than half of the locations they claim to serve have two or fewer options for high-speed internet service.

Good news for AT&T stockholders. Not so good news for broadband-hungry subscribers who, for years now, have been paying among the highest prices for internet service of any developed nation in the world. Ever wonder why that is? The answer is as painfully obvious as our overpriced monthly internet bills.

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When big telecom giants consolidate—especially in a market where most people have only one or maybe two internet service providers (ISPs) to choose from—the results are predictable: without meaningful competition for something as fundamental as internet connectivity in an internet-connected world, monopolists have no incentive to improve service, invest in network upgrades, or compete on price.

Canada’s biggest telecom giant has acquired Ziply Fiber – and a sizable swath of municipal operation agreements for open access fiber scattered across the Pacific Northwest. Bell Canada and Ziply’s joint announcement indicates that the full deal will be around $5 billion Canadian, plus an additional $2 billion in acquired debt.

The acquisition could help accelerate Ziply’s planned expansion across the Pacific Northwest, where the company’s fiber network currently passes 1.3 million locations across Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington State.

At the same time, Bell Canada’s history of anti-competitive behavior could herald a culture shift at the ascending provider. Ziply and Bell Canada’s rapid-fire acquisition of smaller providers across the Pacific Northwest could also risk undermining the pro-competitive benefits of the kind of open access policies Ziply previously embraced.

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Ziply was formed when WaveDivision Capital purchased Frontier Communications’ Pacific Northwest operations in 2020. It has quickly become a major player across the four states thanks in part to numerous public private partnerships with municipalities, and a 2022 announcement of $450 million in new private sector funding.

Telecom monopolies have hoovered up the lion’s share of $214 million recently doled out by the Pennsylvania state Broadband Infrastructure Program (BIP), with cooperatives, smaller ISPs, and community-owned networks left largely out in the cold.

It’s not a surprising move for a state long considered politically hostile to community-owned and operated broadband networks, though industry experts say this latest round of awards was particularly egregious when it comes to dodgy politics and its total lack of any real transparency.

According to an announcement by the Pennsylvania Broadband Development Authority (PBDA), this $204 million in Broadband Infrastructure Program (BIP) grant awards will help fund 53 projects in 42 counties across Pennsylvania, connecting 40,000 homes and businesses, bringing high-speed Internet to over 100,000 Pennsylvanians.

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The awards were funded with the state’s Capital Projects Fund allocation. After matching funds by winning bidders are included, the total broadband investment is expected to exceed $407 million. A complete breakdown of all grant award winners can be found here.

Verizon was the biggest grant award winner, nabbing $78.3 million. Other big grant award winners were Comcast ($61.7 million), Windstream ($12 million) Frontier ($3.5 million) and Brightspeed ($782,000). A few small private ISPs also won awards including Adams Cable ($387,969) Upward Broadband ($1,476,288) and Alleghenies Broadband ($1,809,524).

A new $4 million project funded by the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) and the U.S. Economic Development Administration will help bring affordable fiber broadband to long underserved parts of West Virginia.

The project primarily targets the rural counties of Randolph and Tucker, long stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide.

The RFP for the open access middle- and last-mile file project was issued last summer, seeking partners to help maintain the network and manage access leases in partnership with the Woodlands Development Group (WDG), which will own the finished network.

“The Route 33 Broadband Deployment Project will deploy backbone fiber from Elkins along Route 33 through Bowden, north to Harman, up to Canaan Valley, and ending in Davis, establishing last-mile broadband access to 40 businesses, and enabling future last-mile projects to serve at minimum 480 households and 25 additional businesses located within 1,000 ft of the backbone fiber,” the RFP states.

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WDG, a 501(c)(3), had already been awarded a $1.7 million grant laying the foundation of the effort courtesy of 2021 COVID relief legislation (courtesy of the American Rescue Plan Act). The remainder of the $4 million project will be funded by the Appalachian Regional Commission and the U.S. Economic Development Administration.

The rocky rural hills of West Virginia are a formidable foe when it comes to building high-speed Internet infrastructure that offers affordable high-quality service.

Nobody knows that better than Hardy Telecommunications (OneNet), a small community-owned cooperative that delivers affordable fiber to frustrated locals deemed too costly and cumbersome to be served by the incumbent telecom giants.

The cooperative serves parts of four counties (Hardy, Pendelton, Grant, and Hampshire). It connected its first fiber customer in 2013, after receiving $31.6 million in federal BTOP funding. Since then, the cooperative tells ILSR they’ve spent $20 million of their own funds to bring fiber to rural corners of the aptly-named Mountain State.

Derek Barr, Assistant General Manager at Hardy Telecommunications, says the cooperative currently delivers broadband service to 5,050 rural subscribers – 4,736 of which are on fiber lines that simply wouldn’t exist without federal funding programs. Hardy Telecommunications also provides 68 customers with fixed wireless access (FWA) broadband service.

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“Our focus is fiber, and we're trying to build out fiber as much as we can,” Barr tells ILSR. “But it's very tough in our serving region. It's all mountains and a lot of trees, and a big chunk of our area is either state park or national forest land. It's also very hard to do fixed wireless because even if it might work in the winter, it's not going to work in the summer” when tree leaves block line of sight, he noted.

So the cooperative slowly and consistently expands fiber as it can, often in partnership with Pendleton County. As a result, locals have the option of a variety of double and triple play phone, cable, and fiber options, starting with a symmetrical 100 Mbps (megabit per second) downstream, 50 Mbps upstream fiber and phone bundle for $79 a month.

Lancaster, Pennsylvania has revitalized the city’s long percolating plan for a municipal broadband network, this time via a public-private partnership (PPP) with Shenandoah Telecommunications Company (Shentel). The city’s quest for more affordable, reliable broadband is a quest that’s taken the better part of a decade to finally come to fruition.

Lancaster city officials recently announced that they’d selected Shentel with an eye on ensuring uniform broadband availability to the city of 57,000.

“In 2022, the City issued an RFP for a partner to achieve stated goals, which received five responses, and led to the selection of Shentel,” the city said. “The contract will result in Shentel installing fiber at its sole cost to provide service to 100% of the city’s residents. Shentel plans to commence design and construction immediately upon execution of the final agreement.”

According to Lancaster officials, the city hired CTC Technology & Energy Engineering & Business Consulting to evaluate the city’s needs. The determination to proceed with a PPP with Shental was driven, in part, by the historic broadband grant opportunities being created thanks to the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), and the American Rescue Plan Act, the latter of which provided $39.5 million to the city.