Civil Defense - a weblog by Joshua Breitbart

EarthLink’s dump of its municipal wireless business is almost complete. It walked away from Alexandria and Arlington, Virginia, in April; handed its Milipitas and Corpus Christi systems over to the municipalities; and is set to shut down wireless service to New Orleans on May 18. That leaves just Anaheim and Philadelphia.

Tourist-rich Anaheim is an anomaly. EarthLink’s one-page contract with the city can’t be much of a burden. But there is most certainly a resolution in the works for Philadelphia.

As I argued in a previous post, I believe the best option for Philadelphia is for EarthLink to pass the system to a nonprofit organization with network management experience. EarthLink was not able to find an interested buyer for its New Orleans system, so there’s still no reason to think that is an option for Philly. But I don’t think anyone in Philadelphia, even in the Nutter administration, wants to see the system simply dismantled. So I believe nonprofit intervention is also the most likely scenario. I believe it will happen this quarter, in time for the MuniWireless conference in Philadelphia.

EarthLink is highly motivated. The walk-aways, shut-offs, and give-backs with the cities listed above all happened in this quarter. EarthLink wants to close out Philadelphia this quarter, too. Losses from these soured deals will be offset by $50.8 million of incomeEarthLink received in April from the sale of its share of Covad to Platinum Equity.

As it dumps its municipal wireless business, EarthLink has found that its strongest profits are to be found not in broadband service but in dial-up. The dial-up customers, while declining, are relatively stable and highly profitable, while new customers are expensive to acquire and quick to exit. This strategy has allowed the company to cut the cost of marketing for new customers. EarthLink has also laid off more than half its work force, outsourcing all of its tech support, which probably has helped it get rid of costly customers.

This streamlining yielded first quarter profits of $57.8 million, a huge turnaround from the $30 million it lost in the last quarter of 2008.

EarthLink now sees potential profits in our stagnant digital divide. CEO Rolla Huff has his eye on the remaining 8.5 million subscribers to AOL dial-up service, which Time Warner has said it wants to slough off, as well as United Online, which owns Juno and NetZero, and Microsoft’s MSN subscribers. EarthLink is the second largest dial-up service provider with 2.6 million customers. Huff estimates the total number of commercial dial-up subscribers to be 15 million to 18 million. Consolidating all of those customers would generate a lot of cash.

EarthLink still has the same problem that motivated it to dive headlong into wireless deployments, as I explained in The Philadelphia Story: without its own infrastructure, its DSL days are numbered. But now, instead of pushing forward to build new infrastructure, it is retreating to the old phone lines that are still protected by common carriage.

In other words, EarthLink, once the harbinger of digital inclusion, is becoming the enemy of broadband.

Yesterday, Verizon proposed to build a fiber optic network covering all of New York City. The proposal comes just one day after the City’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) published notification of the RFP for cable television providers, which is how you know DoITT’s RFP (request for proposals) and Verizon’s proposal were worked out in tandem over months of closed-door negotiations.

Verizon is offering to finish the installation by midyear 2014, provide a public safety INET (institutional network), pay franchise fees equivalent to five percent of gross revenues on cable TV service, channels for public access. As the precise details emerge and once I’ve had a chance to read the RFP, I’ll give you my assessment on the fine points, but that doesn’t sound like enough off the bat given the scope of the deal.

A hearing from the Franchise and Concession Review Committee is forthcoming. I will keep you posted on that. You should plan to attend.

For background and a discussion of the issues at stake, see the article I just published with Gotham Gazette: Fiber Optics: Bringing the Next Big Thing to New York

This is another example of a phenomenon you may have heard or read me describe before: The general policy and market rules of media simply do not apply to New York City. Other cities are having trouble attracting or holding onto a $20 million investment for a wireless network while New York has a company proposing to invest $5 billion over 6 years to build a fiber optic network and become the second (third or fourth if you count satellite) entrant to the video service. Keep in mind that the incumbents are not citywide: Time Warner and Cablevision currently divide the city between them:

(Click the image to see the map of current franchise areas.)

The scale is hard to fathom. It’s like $100 per person per year or $300 per household, of which there are about $3.1 million – though that’s not counting businesses. It’s around $3 million per year for each of the city’s 322 square miles – as if all those square miles cost the same or were worth the same.

But the rate the money goes into the city is not the most important number. The important number is how fast it goes out. How much will Verizon make off each person, business, or square mile, and over what time frame? Once they put this infrastructure in place, they are going to hold on tight and make as much money as they can off of it. And anyone who wants to compete at the speed levels Verizon will be offering will have to match their massive investment.

We might only get one shot at building a fully fiber optic network for our city. We should try to get it right.