The Suffolk piece

Detail analysis

            The Suffolk piece tries to frighten Concord voters – their phrase, quoting them, is "Caveat civitas – let the townsperson beware!"  To do so they cite a "sixty percent chance of losing money," really meaning that for the voter the town effort will in effect fail.

1.         Most fundamentally, Suffolk proceeds through a lengthy, detailed analysis, including a Monte Carlo simulation, using numbers it takes from the report of the town’s consultant.  The heart of its claim rests on this their laborious work.  That claim purports to show that the town plan will "lose money," the basis to scare voters.

            In fact there is no town plan.  Dan, as I understand it, is busily investigating all sorts of possibilities.  I myself have said countless times there is no plan until we go out and do the serious work of putting together key parts, which I then regularly delineate.  Some person or group working cooperatively with the town, to try genuinely to help, would have known this.  They would not make the error of devoting many hours and days and pages to numbers that have no relevance to the town network going forward.

            (Not to mention that our consultant left us with a Monte Carlo model much more sophisticated than is available otherwise.  We already have it and have done it, and will use it going forward – once again something that would have been known by those who had made a genuine effort to help.

            (In oral testimony telecast in town – available for review on the website – Suffolk accused the town of ‘failing to consider contingencies.’  Our use of a Monte Carlo simulation a good bit more sophisticated than theirs makes clear the charge simply is false.  Not to mention further that ‘contingent’ evolutionary upgrades have been a part of the financial planning throughout.)

            Sadly, the core of the Suffolk piece is boxing at a phantom – its premise simply does not exist, so its conclusions are without any meaning.

            And as already noted, everyone seriously involved with this has long ago agreed that we move forward only when the numbers make clear that financial success is comfortably in hand.  The basis for the Suffolk attack has, in fact, been dismissed long ago.

            Most tellingly:  Comcast has spent way out of proportion in its campaign to stop this one little town in New England, Concord MA.  They have funded a ‘study,’ they have paid several people to make repeated presentations locally, they have launched three expensive mailings to Concord citizens, two of them slickly produced, they posted a fancy website, they bought a full page ad in the Concord Journal the issue before Town Meeting, and they bombarded the town with telephone marketers illegitimately claiming to represent the Town but then lambasting its Light Plant.  Ask yourself why Comcast has spent so much money disproportionately, on a small town:  They know we will probably succeed, if we do proceed.

            Suffolk conveniently fails to address the historical record for insight on the question of viability – see the next section.

2.         The Suffolk report discusses three cases outside Concord, each with some purported difficulty.  Pre the recent FTTH additions, there were about 100 muni nets across the land, not three.  The number of those that have failed is very small, if at all.  This context is glaringly absent from the Suffolk piece.

            Most obviously there is no mention anywhere of the Kutztown success, which is just the case they are supposing to address – nor any of the other recent almost hundred new FTTH cases.  (Not to mention that the supposed difficulty for the one Massachussetts case presented, BELD in Braintree, is that BELD’s favorable prices against the incumbent have become just a little less favorable – in fact BELD's prices remain almost 20 percent below the commercial provider.  Bravo to our brothers in Braintree would seem to be more in order ...)

            There is no support in the actual history for a more than fifty percent failure probability, or even a five percent likelihood of failure.  Instead there is exactly the reverse.  The real historical record bears overwhelming comfort for excellent prospects and success in a Concord net:

            If Comcast's report of one failure among 100 municipal systems is true (Comcast's credibility has evaporated, though here they will tell us the worst they think they can get away with ...), then this is an industry with 99 percent probability of success for towns like Concord, in fact. That makes it one of the most stable capital expenditures possible - a deep and abiding comfort when we require conservative town finances.

            This Suffolk ‘research’ cannot hope to garner respect when it pointedly omits the cases most relevant to its question.

3.         Suffolk also tries to scare off Concord by arguing ‘the industry is increasingly competitive.’  Mainly it cites the inroads by direct satellite; it also points at numerous ISPs; finally in oral testimony it alluded to Comcast’s deep competitive pockets.  In each case Suffolk fails in its argument – in reverse order, that is in the order of importance:

            We always aimed to compete with Comcast – and win, as indeed Comcast’s actions indicate they too expect we will do.  An important element is that Comcast’s hybrid fiber coax, HFC, cannot offer services possible with FTTH – the (services) competition Suffolk imagines simply does not exist.

            Many ISPs, eager to ride on our fiber, may convert to be our customers.  In other words we turn a competitor into a customer.

            Competition from direct satellite for Comcast’s HFC is irrelevant to a Concord FTTH – a red herring.  Neither can direct satellite offer the services uniquely possible with FTTH.  Again, Suffolk’s ‘competition’ simply does not exist.

            Satellite is unlikely to duplicate what even Comcast can do with its old-school HFC.  The prominent, current example is Comcast's new offering, on-demand movies, a library of a thousand plus movies to be played at the viewer's discretion.  Satellite is a good bit more constrained on capacity.

            But it is two-way Internet traffic – interactive exchanges, particularly voice and video – where satellite is simply out of the game.  With an ‘antenna’ 22,300 miles in the sky, the round-trip for the signal puts any sort of serious real time bandwidth-intensive exchanges out of competitive reach for satellite.  Thus even today's Internet-over-satellite is always the distant choice ‘only of last resort’ – for the future when bandwidth demands intensify, satellite does not have a serious option.

            One way to think about it:  No time soon is satellite going to offer Gigabit Ethernet access to a mass user base.  Another way:  We are going to send our video exchanges internally at the high school up to a satellite first ...? 

            Here Suffolk confuses the technology, and much more troublingly, the logic.  Both these problems, unfortunately, pervade the Suffolk piece and warrant individual attention each, below.

4.          Suffolk’s treatment of technology, in a piece with technology necessarily as one center, repeatedly muddles it.

            What is most inexplicable, nowhere does Suffolk seem to understand the fundamental difference that Concord’s going to FTTH will make.  They try to threaten that changing technology will increase capital outlays.  Precisely to avoid that, the recent Committee chose the ‘future proofing’ of fiber.  This does not register with or appear in the Suffolk piece.  (At one point they even describe us as installing cable modems, here the opposite of FTTH ...  Not to mention that interim outlays have been integral to our concerns and will be in any real plan, as already noted.)

            They try to say the upgrade has already been done – but that is only to HFC.  They try to say services are now available – but of course none of the services requiring fiber are or can be there, again as said, nor will they with a Comcast for some many years.

            Suffolk tries to promote broadband powerline.  BPL has yet to work itself out fully.  But some things are already clear.  This is a technology well over a hundred years old, one that most likely is ill-suited in the long haul for these new comms requirements.  It looks surely to be limited severely on top-end bandwidth.  There are also reports of consequential EMF interference problems where deployed.

            But the main point is:  The industry would love to divert us into BPL.  The BPL siren call of low capital up front is deceptive.  A Concord BPL would allow the cableco to always stay one step ahead of us, with what fiber they do have.  No matter how hard we would try then, they always have us where they want us, under their thumb – fatally for us in the end.  No thank you.

            Suffolk also elides WiFi together with BPL without adequate distinction.

            The most generous thing that can be said about the Suffolk piece on technology, though the main point just above does not augur for generous interpretations ...:  At best it is confused about the realities which it supposes to analyze.  In a piece where technology is one key, this leaves it no basis to proceed.

5.         The amount and degree to which the Suffolk document fails to present supportable logic removes any possibility to consider it seriously.

            In one of the more obvious cases, the Suffolk piece tries to use economies of scale in favor of its argument (page 10).  In the very next paragraph it says in effect, forget economies of scale.  The logic of the whole thing is in fact thoroughly muddled around ‘economy of scale – or not?’

            In another prominent case at the end of the piece, Suffolk tries to whip up a scare about loss of not-for-profit status.  The threat is profit making in telecommunications against private sector actors – while the piece conveniently forgets that electricity distribution also makes what amount to profits in an industry that also has seen the introduction of private sector competitors.  (Never mind it later has in effect to acknowledge the electricity profits, just not where it is inconvenient to raising the scare.)  And never mind that no such loss of not-for-profit status has ever happened, over many years, which the piece eventually has to admit.

            The best that can be said:  The equivocation around scale economies probably unearths a driving force in this cable industry effort as authored at Suffolk.  If we do it right, the scale economies favor us, and they lose their monopoly – that is searing motivation to try to stop us.  And the hobbled logic in the Suffolk piece – the two above are samples – sweeps away any basis to take their piece seriously.

6.         Suffolk is concerned about ‘being fair.’  They do not consider that cable industry customer rates consistently rise far faster than the consumer price index.  Each cable company is its own little wire-based monopoly, geographically.  One vision of the pricing for Concord’s own net defangs the monopolist’s monthly bite.  Fairness has several dimensions – pricing is paramount in Concord as elsewhere.  Suffolk does not consider it.

7.         Suffolk overlooks the dramatically different legislative landscape in Massachusetts, compared with some of the other cases cited.  Their rhetoric simply ignores the legislative realities in Mass – too inconvenient for their view.

David Allen

to go back and finish up the story on Concord, go here

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