High-speed Internet choice lacking for many in CT

If we’ve learned anything from the past 10 months of living during a pandemic, it’s just how important high-speed Internet service is to working and learning remotely.

High-speed service is what makes Zoom meetings and remote classrooms run smoothly, without video images freezing. It allows workers to download large files from their employers more quickly, and to stream movies or video games.

But for some Connecticut residents, high-speed Internet access is the stuff of dreams are made of.

The website Broadbandnow.com reports that barely more than 4 percent of state residents have access to fiber-optic Internet networks, which are the gold standard of high-speed offerings.

“The problem you’re describing is not unique,” said Tyler Cooper, editor-in-chief of the BroadbandNow. “We see this de facto duopoly in cities and towns across the nation.”

What is fast?

Cable internet service is slower than what is delivered by fiber optic networks, but it is still available at high speeds. And below that is digital subscriber line service, or DSL, which still is faster than the old, screeching modems Internet veterans may remember, but can be lacking for heavy usage.

Part of the problem for consumers comparison shopping among Internet service providers is that each provider uses different terms to describe speeds of their offerings.

The federal definition of broadband Internet service is 25 megabits per second (Mbps) for download speed — getting information — and 3 Mbps per second for upload speed — sending information — according to Cooper.

“That’s the minimum speed in order to qualify for grants and for other issues,” he said, “Anything else is something the individual companies have tacked on. There’s a level of (competitive) strategy at the provider level, and every provider reports things and treats things differently.”

The federal government several years ago removed funding from a searchable national broadband map that consumers could use to find out who the broadband providers were in their community, Cooper said.

“When we built our site in 2015, it was a response to the government action,” he said.

Officials at BroadbandNow have been advocating for a revamp of the federal definitions regrading Internet speeds to help consumers be able to make informed decisions, he said.

“The last time those definitions were updated was 2015,” Cooper said. “Unfortunately, there’s a pretty big gap between what qualifies for broadband and what is ultra-high speed. It’s really time to revisit changing it.”

“There’s over 100 miles in the state’s Northwest Corner that are unserved,” said Burt Cohen, a staff attorney for the state Office of Consumer Counsel and the state’s broadband policy coordinator.

Cohen noted some of the current service offerings are better than others.

Frontier Communications, he said, is “working at a disadvantage” because it inherited a largely copper wire network when it acquired AT&T’s residential telecommunications, Internet and cable television business.

“They use digital subscriber line (DSL) service and so much of that is inferior,” Cohen said. DSL service is a family of technologies used to transmit digital data over standard telephone lines.

Cox Communications is one of the better ultra-high-speed providers, he said.

Cox provides gigabit speed Internet to residential customers using a hybrid network of fiber optic and coaxial cables, according to company officials. (A gigabit is 1,000 megabits.) As a standalone product, the cost is $99 per month for 12 months, although customers can save by bundling the gigabit service with other products, Jeffrey Lavery, a spokesman for Cox said Friday.

But some consumers complain about the price of the service and Cox’s policy of reducing upload and download speeds when a customer surpasses a certain data usage level, known as throttling. If you use too much, it’ll start to move more slowly.

“I have Frontier, which provides barely decent service with no caps,” Steve Kalb of Cheshire told Hearst Connecticut Media. “You can go broke on Cox. What this town needs is for a company to lay down new fiber to each subscriber’s house.”

But installing fiber optic cable from house-to-house is expensive, so service providers look for densely populated areas to serve.

Connecticut officials in 2015 created the State Broadband Office, a new division of the Office of Consumer Counsel, focused on facilitating efforts to bring widespread ultra-high-speed Internet to Connecticut.

Those efforts had a much higher profile under the administration of former Gov. Dannel Malloy. But Cohen said he is convinced Gov. Ned Lamont is committed to bringing wider availability of high-speed Internet to the state.

“I know the governor’s office is working diligently to get a more robust high-speed Internet network developed,” Cohen said. “My guess is he will say something about this when he unveils his budget plans for the state next month.”

But across social media platforms such as Facebook, complaints about a lack of widespread access to ultra-high or gig-speed service is pervasive.

Choices

While there are multiple providers in the state, many areas are served by only one or two of those companies; in some cases, customers needing high-speed service may have a single option. The idea of a “take it or leave it” scenario for what these days is considered an essential service is something consumers have long complained of.

In Cheshire, for example, the choice currently boils down to Frontier or Cox. A recent post on the Cheshire Community Facebook page regarding the lack of more choices for gigabit-speed service drew 53 comments.

Stamford-based Charter Communications has its Spectrum Internet service, with speeds ranging from 200 Mbps to 940 Mbs. Charter serves three-dozen towns in Connecticut including much of the northwestern part of the state.

Right now, the limited regulation of the Internet rests not at the state level, but with the Federal Communications Commission.

Cohen said he’s optimistic the change in presidential administrations could spur growth in ultrahigh-speed Internet availability. President Joe Biden has just named FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, a Hartford native and Wesleyan University graduate, as the acting chairwoman of the regulatory agency.

“We’re very excited,” Cohen said of he and his colleagues in the Consumer Counsel’s office. “She knows Connecticut and she is a big proponent of expanding highspeed Internet access.”

Philadelphia-based Comcast Corp. on Jan. 7 introduced the fastest Internet speeds over Wi-Fi available across the Northeast including Connecticut and 13 other states from Maine to Virginia and Washington, D.C.: Before the announcement, Comcast’s fastest Internet speed was 1 gigabit; now it is 1.2 gigabits, according to company officials.

Comcast’s residential broadband service is powered by xFi — a digital dashboard for Xfinity customers to control their home Wi-Fi network. In addition to parental control features like pausing Wi-Fi and screen time scheduling, xFi provides content filters that ensure younger children can only access age-appropriate content.

Every 30 months, the company adds as much capacity to the network as was added in all the previous years combined, according to Comcast officials. In Connecticut, the company has spent the past three years expanding its fiber optic network in New London, Waterford and East Lyme.

With the completion of that expansion, the company now provides high-speed service in 86 communities around Connecticut.

In contrast to Comcast, one of the smaller players attempting to compete with Frontier, Comcast and other large high-speed Internet providers is Rochester, N.Y.-based GoNetSpeed. The company entered the Connecticut market three years ago, said Mike D’Angelo, a senior vice president of marketing at GoNetSpeed.

The company has a unique business model: It asks potential customers to indicate their interest in the company serving their community by signing a petition on its website. If enough consumers express an interest in getting GoNetSpeed service, the company’s management team factors that in to where they will deploy their fiber optic cables next, D’Angelo said.

“We absolutely use interest levels to guide us,” he said. “The one thing a lot of folks don’t have a lot of understanding about is that we’re a small, private company using our own capital. There are limitations to what we can do.”

Until now, consumers interested in GoNetSpeed serving their community have had no way of knowing how many others have contacted the company. But next month, the company’s website will show how many people have contacted the company from different communities.

“We’re going to tell them how many more homes we need an expression of interest from before we consider bringing our network there,” D’Angelo said. “That level of detail will get updated at least once a month.”

GoNetSpeed announced in November of last year it will expand to nine new neighborhoods spanning 25,000 households in parts of Southington, West Hartford, Rocky Hill, Hamden, North Haven, Fairfield and Bridgeport during the first six months of this year. Installation of the fiber optic lines got underway in parts of Southington during December 2020.

The company already has fiber optic cable in several New Haven neighborhoods.

GoNetspeed also announced it had completed expansions in Wethersfield, Newington and West Hartford. As a result, GoNetspeed’s high-speed Internet service is now available to approximately 15,000 additional households in those areas.

This year, D’Angelo said GoNetSpeed will expand its fiber optic network 565 miles, building out in 11 neighborhoods spread across several towns in the state. That will give an additional 50,000 homes access to high-speed internet.

The company’s goal in 2022 is to expand the network even further by having it pass another 90,000 homes.

The company does not reveal how many subscribers it has. But D’Angelo said GoNetSpeed is serving 28 neighborhoods, with its fiber optic cable passing about 59,000 homes.

Infrastructure issues

One of the requirements for a neighborhood to be considered for the GoNetSpeed service, D’Angelo said, is that it must have utility poles on which the fiber optic cable can be placed.

“There’s a considerable cost right now placing our cables underground,” Dangelo said. “And there are other factors, as well.”

Lavery, the Cox spokesman, said the company has expanded the fiber optic portion of its network, as well.

“However, our plant configuration and expansion is considered proprietary,” he said.

Cooper, of BroadbandNow, said the problem with building out the ultra-high-speed network across Connecticut and the nation “is not going to go away under the current status quo where the infrastructure is privatized in many locations.”

But he said there are several reasons for optimism for Internet service consumers on the horizon.

“One is the potential for technological disruption,” Cooper said. One example he cited is low earth orbit broadband, which he said has a few differences between traditional high orbit satellites that make it more reliable and affordable.

“We’re talking satellites that operate right at the edge of the atmosphere,” Cooper said. “It creates a potential solution that is very much comparable to a wired connection. There are 600 low earth satellites in orbit right now.”

Another reason for optimism, he said, are the changes at the FCC that are expected during Biden’s administration.

“The Biden administration has indicated it would explore municipally-owned broadband,” Cooper said. “This has been a battleground area for years because 22 states have some kind of roadblock to that.”

As recently as three years ago, Connecticut was one of those states.

State utility regulators issued a ruling in 2018 that prohibited municipalities from reserving space on utility poles. The Office of Consumer Counsel filed a lawsuit in 2019 seeking to overturn the ruling by the state’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority and the ruling ultimately was overturned on appeal.

Municipally-owned broadband would be cheaper for consumers and would give individual communities control of their own destiny.

“These are not silver billets by any means, but they represent a change to the status quo,” Cooper said.

But he said the large providers of high-speed internet service are unlikely to sit on the sidelines if their dominance is challenged.

“It’s fair to say some of the roadblocks that have been put in place (to high-speed Internet) have come from the telephone lobby,” Cooper said. “Going forward, it is certainly going to be a battle.”