New Hampshire sorts the broadband haves from the have nots

Last January a consortium of government and nonprofit organizations in the State of New Hampshire launched the The New Hampshire Broadband Mapping and Planning Program, a $1.2 million, five-year project funded by the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act with a mission to map out who has broadband and who does not in the state. No doubt the state agencies stepped in after the telcos declined to act.

Within the last two weeks the NH Broadband Mapping Program received another $4.3 million ARRA grant to continue mapping, as well as to support other actiivies related to broadband expansion and to provide technical assistance to those seeking service, project coordinator Michael Blair said yesterday. The total amount expended adds up to about $11 for every household in the state (based on 2000 Census of 474,606 NH households). An official announcement of the award from the NHBMPP is forthcoming, he said.

So why does the state need to map out broadband penetration? Because, according to Blair, telecommunications companies don't publicize where they do and don't have service. "We don't know where the gaps are," Blair was quoted as saying to  The Keene Sentinel recently.

I other words, the state of New Hampshire needs to do a street-by-street, house-by-house survey of who has broadband because the ISPs - the telephone and cable monopolies - can't provide that information.

So I asked Blair about this. He says the data from the state's 70 ISPs ranges greatly in quality. "What we've seen is along road segments it will show a road in a rural community as having service along an entire road when in fact only a portion of the road can get service." Some folks, he says, may be "an arm's length away," a frustrating experience that my neighbor, Kim Rossey can attest to. After a runaround with the cable provider he ended up having to lease a T-1 line in order to be able to run his freelance programing business from his home.

To overcome this data quality dilemma, the project team is also buying up data from third parties that have ISP-related information, and it is surveying businesses and residences to see if they actually have broadband access.

But the project is looking at more than just who has - and does not have - broadband. They also want to know the actual performance NH residents and businesses are getting, and they've provided a broadband test page on their Web site where residents can log the actual (versus advertised) performance. If my own experience with broadband from Comcast is any indicator, the state of "high speed" broadband in New Hampshire is not great.

My "up to 6 Mbps" broadband connection regularly performs at about 4.5 Mbps on the downlink and a miserable .5 Mbps uplink speed (The advertised maximum is 6 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up). For this Comcast charges $45.95 per month ($59.95 if you don't buy its phone or television services as part of a bundle). An upgraded connection (A maximum of 8 Mbps down/2 Mbps up) is available for an extra $10 per month.

By New Hampshire standards I'm lucky to have broadband at all - the Mapping Project defines broadband as a minimum of 768Kbps downstream and 200Kbps upstream - but by global standards that's not fast - and its certainly not cheap.

Once the data has been gathered, however, it's unclear what the state can do about it. Verizon left New Hampshire after selling a neglected telecom infrastucture to FairPoint Communications at an overinflated price. FairPoint, now in bankruptcy due to its own financial miscaculations on the deal and subsequent mismangement of the transition, has few resources at hand to expand even its poky (3Mbps max), basic DSL service at a robust rate.

Meanwhile, the cable companies have little incentive to expand coverage, nor to provide faster, truly high-speed Internet when doing so would just encourage more customers to bypass their lucrative cable television monopolies to watch television programming. It's just not profitable.

Surveys are a fine way to describe the scope of the problem.However, without either incentives for ISPs to build out rural infrstructures - or regulations that force them to do so - nothing will change.

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