Fiber-Optic Illusion

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: October 15, 2004 2:18:04 PM GMT+01:00
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Fiber-Optic Illusion
Reply-To: dewayne () warpspeed com

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 <matthew.smith () sfweekly com>
<http://www.sfweekly.com/issues/2004-10-13/news/smith.html>

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.


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