The reboot of the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) broadband infrastructure subsidy program continues, with a new round of comments and suggestions landing at the California Public Utilities Commission.
I drafted the Central Coast Broadband Consortium’s filing. One issue that the CPUC should consider very carefully is what qualifies as a bona fide service offer.
When the California legislature allowed lobbyists for AT&T, Frontier Communications, Comcast and Charter Communications to rewrite the law and turn CASF into their own, private piggy bank, the minimum broadband standard was lowered to 6 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload speeds. If an incumbent “offers” such service, then the area in question isn’t eligible for an infrastructure grant.
The point we made is that…
In order for such an offer to be valid, an incumbent provider must be capable of actually delivering service at 6 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload speeds (hereinafter, “6/1 service”) consistently to any household that subscribes to it. Although it is common industry practice to advertise service at a certain level and then condition it with a long and difficult to parse list of exceptions, there are no such exceptions in the statute. An incumbent is either capable of delivering 6/1 service to every household that subscribes to at least that level of service at all times, or it is not. If an incumbent is not capable of fulfilling an offer of 6/1 service, or better, at all times in any given census block or to any given household, then that census block or household is unserved.
An offer that can’t be fulfilled is not a offer at all. Incumbents should not be allowed to block independent projects on the basis of marketing claims or service that meets the minimum standard only some of the time. The 6/1 standard is ridiculously low to begin with. The least the CPUC can do is require incumbents to actually meet it.