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No, this wasn't with regard to merger approval, as far as I recall. This was a separate negotiation: State level tax breaks and other concessions, in return f

No, this wasn't with regard to merger approval, as far as I recall. This was a separate negotiation: State level tax breaks and other concessions, in return for the commitment to deploy "universal" high-speed Internet access throughout Illinois via their network, where "universal" was something in excess of 95% of the population with exclusions only for exceptional circumstances, e.g. extreme isolation. I seem to recall a percentage deployment they agreed to reach, over 95%, with discussion if not language about what might constitute the demographics of that bit that they would be allowed to fail to cover. "High-speed" was some not-too-aggressive throughput level commensurate with speeds in those days. "Money for nothing" was my quip, regarding the company's apparent attitude. The company agreed to it all, then started lobbying to get out of their commitments under the deal -- while not giving up the tax breaks and other concessions they'd gained by making said commitments. The agreement bound them to do these things; they turned around and lobbied the Illinois legislature to "unbind" them, while leaving the rest in place. Anecdotally, even in Chicagoland, they continued to drag their feet until the cable TV companies starting deploying wholesale. Depending on location, this often was some years later. Then, suddenly. the now-AT&T would get serious about their own deployment. Well, kind of serious: Technically, it often still sucked, by comparison. This is, in my view, analogous to the failures of big ISP's, in various states, until they face competition, for instance by communities finally just rolling their own municipal and/or cooperative broadband. Then, these big ISP's go to the legislature of whatever state and cry (i.e. lobby), "Unfair competition!" One has to keep telling these stories, so that maybe voters will pay enough attention to their state politics to vote out their elected officials who participate in these giveaways, that someone at sometime conveniently nicknamed "corporate welfare". Maybe even vote in and support a state attorney general willing to initiate investigations and, where evidence of corruption can be found, send a few of those officials to jail.

rayiner 8y ago
I don't doubt your recollection, but I'm skeptical of these stories in general. There is a lot of historical revisionism about what happened in the 1990s and early 2000s. Broadly speaking, the whole industry was deregulated in 1996 because Congress thought regulation (price caps, profit caps, etc.) was a bad idea and was hurting investment. There were a lot of projections about where that new investment would go, but they weren't a quid-pro-quo for deregulation. Then in the 2000s, mobile exploded, and a lot of the investment that was going to go into fiber to the home went into mobile instead. A lot also went into backbone and business fiber networks. That resulted in a lot of accusations of broken promises. But when you dig into it the "commitments" turn into "projections" and the "money for nothing" or "tax subsidies" turns into "eliminating the special rules we had for telcos." From a regulatory economics point of view, telecom deregulation was one of the big success stories, along with airlines and trucking. For the most part, Western Europe copied it. But our wireline infrastructure is still better than every big European country, because we have invested massively in it: https://www.akamai.com/fr/fr/multimedia/documents/state-of-the-internet/q1-2017-state-of-the-internet-connectivity-report.pdf https://www.akamai.com/fr/fr/multimedia/documents/state-of-t... (see page 12).
- pasbesoin 8y ago
  One venue of coverage I seem to recall as being arstechnica.com . That would make sense in that they had and still have a strong presence in Chicago. I'll look later for some old articles, if I don't get too distracted. I'll consider what you describe and what you linked. From memory and off the cuff, it reminds me of all the fiber investment around that time that seemed to undergo a value implosion and leave substantial "dark fiber" waiting for new projects/investments to pick it up. MCI and Wordcom (?) come to mind. (And the bath that some investors took.) If I was understanding one of them correctly, a year or two ago, my German friends could get high speed wireless Internet (from T-Mobile) at their newly purchased country home in the middle of the Eifel "Mountains" rural... "farmscape", I'll call it, for I think 40 Euro / month. Fast enough to stream, and no data cap. Meantime, here I was still reduced to just Comcast, as AT&T had over the course of a decade and a half never upgraded my block's line that was so old and poor quality that it wouldn't even reliably support DSL. And I'm in the middle of suburbia in a fairly dense sub-division. Comcast wanted $95/month for their high-speed Internet (with basic cable TV, the way they price their packages; gotta keep their cable TV demographics up). And that was after arm-twisting one of their reps for a discount. In the meantime, that number's up to about $135/month. Whatever the state of our technology, it's not translating here to effective competition and prices that compare to what friends are getting in Europe. Not even close. In my limited experience. P.S. On the other hand, I'd hate to buy an expensive laptop over there.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    But objectively, U.S. internet access is faster than German internet access (or U.K., France, Spain, or Italy, which comprises like 70% of the EU population). According to Akamai, 50% of U.S. connections are over 15 mbps, versus 33% of German, and 18% in France. In states that are as dense as Germany, like Maryland or New Jersey, it's 60-65%. According to the OECD, fiber deployment in the U.S. is 12.6% in 2017 versus just 2.3% in Germany. The U.S. is also better positioned than those countries going forward. More of our infrastructure is hybrid fiber-coax, which can be incrementally upgraded by pushing fiber deeper into the network, and is on the path to symmetric gigabit in the next few years. Countries like France are much more reliant on DSL, which is really hitting its limits. (But the DSL can be "good enough" and cheap.) Which is really remarkable when you think about it. There is no other infrastructure that the U.S. does better than Germany or France. Our trains, subways, and roads are shameful compared to theirs. But our internet access is better. That's a real testament to the success of the 1996 deregulation.

rayiner 8y ago

I don't doubt your recollection, but I'm skeptical of these stories in general. There is a lot of historical revisionism about what happened in the 1990s and early 2000s. Broadly speaking, the whole industry was deregulated in 1996 because Congress thought regulation (price caps, profit caps, etc.) was a bad idea and was hurting investment. There were a lot of projections about where that new investment would go, but they weren't a quid-pro-quo for deregulation. Then in the 2000s, mobile exploded, and a lot of the investment that was going to go into fiber to the home went into mobile instead. A lot also went into backbone and business fiber networks. That resulted in a lot of accusations of broken promises. But when you dig into it the "commitments" turn into "projections" and the "money for nothing" or "tax subsidies" turns into "eliminating the special rules we had for telcos." From a regulatory economics point of view, telecom deregulation was one of the big success stories, along with airlines and trucking. For the most part, Western Europe copied it. But our wireline infrastructure is still better than every big European country, because we have invested massively in it: https://www.akamai.com/fr/fr/multimedia/documents/state-of-the-internet/q1-2017-state-of-the-internet-connectivity-report.pdf https://www.akamai.com/fr/fr/multimedia/documents/state-of-t... (see page 12).

pasbesoin 8y ago
One venue of coverage I seem to recall as being arstechnica.com . That would make sense in that they had and still have a strong presence in Chicago. I'll look later for some old articles, if I don't get too distracted. I'll consider what you describe and what you linked. From memory and off the cuff, it reminds me of all the fiber investment around that time that seemed to undergo a value implosion and leave substantial "dark fiber" waiting for new projects/investments to pick it up. MCI and Wordcom (?) come to mind. (And the bath that some investors took.) If I was understanding one of them correctly, a year or two ago, my German friends could get high speed wireless Internet (from T-Mobile) at their newly purchased country home in the middle of the Eifel "Mountains" rural... "farmscape", I'll call it, for I think 40 Euro / month. Fast enough to stream, and no data cap. Meantime, here I was still reduced to just Comcast, as AT&T had over the course of a decade and a half never upgraded my block's line that was so old and poor quality that it wouldn't even reliably support DSL. And I'm in the middle of suburbia in a fairly dense sub-division. Comcast wanted $95/month for their high-speed Internet (with basic cable TV, the way they price their packages; gotta keep their cable TV demographics up). And that was after arm-twisting one of their reps for a discount. In the meantime, that number's up to about $135/month. Whatever the state of our technology, it's not translating here to effective competition and prices that compare to what friends are getting in Europe. Not even close. In my limited experience. P.S. On the other hand, I'd hate to buy an expensive laptop over there.
- rayiner 8y ago
  But objectively, U.S. internet access is faster than German internet access (or U.K., France, Spain, or Italy, which comprises like 70% of the EU population). According to Akamai, 50% of U.S. connections are over 15 mbps, versus 33% of German, and 18% in France. In states that are as dense as Germany, like Maryland or New Jersey, it's 60-65%. According to the OECD, fiber deployment in the U.S. is 12.6% in 2017 versus just 2.3% in Germany. The U.S. is also better positioned than those countries going forward. More of our infrastructure is hybrid fiber-coax, which can be incrementally upgraded by pushing fiber deeper into the network, and is on the path to symmetric gigabit in the next few years. Countries like France are much more reliant on DSL, which is really hitting its limits. (But the DSL can be "good enough" and cheap.) Which is really remarkable when you think about it. There is no other infrastructure that the U.S. does better than Germany or France. Our trains, subways, and roads are shameful compared to theirs. But our internet access is better. That's a real testament to the success of the 1996 deregulation.