---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message-ID: <20180916024030.GA9011@telecom.csail.mit.edu> Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2018 22:40:30 -0400 From: Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.net> Subject: Unreliable internet impacting Perry County economy NEW BLOOMFIELD, PERRY COUNTY, Pa. - Some CenturyLink customers in Perry County have long complained the service isn't what it should be. After recent storms, some say it's become even worse and the company isn't working to fix it. Some CenturyLink customers in Perry County are fed up with their phone and internet services. https://fox43.com/2018/09/11/unreliable-internet-impacting-perry-county-economy/ -- Bill Horne (Remove QRM from my email address to write to me directly) +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ + The Telecom Digest depends on generous supporters like John Lewandowski + +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ ------------------------------ Message-ID: <20180914005640.GA32563@telecom.csail.mit.edu> Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2018 20:56:40 -0400 From: Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.net> Subject: Frontier Communications 401(k) plan participant sues over Verizon stock fund By Rob Kozlowski Frontier Communications Corp., Norwalk, Conn., is the target of a fiduciary lawsuit by a 401(k) plan representative alleging the telecommunications company violated its fiduciary duty by offering a Verizon Communications Inc. company stock fund. The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in U.S. District Court in New Haven, Conn., by Mary Reidt on behalf of plan participants, alleges the plan has lost $100 million since adding Verizon company stock as an investment option in its 401(k) plan. In July 2010, Frontier "acquired of certain locations" from Verizon in July 2010, and between then and Dec. 30, 2011, the plan "received and retained about $150 million in Verizon stock, representing over 15% of the plan's assets," according to the filing, In April 2016, following another acquisition from Verizon, the lawsuit said Frontier added another $200 million in Verizon stock to the 401(k) plan. http://www.pionline.com/article/20180913/ONLINE/180919920/frontier-communications-401k-plan-participant-sues-over-verizon-stock-fund +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ + The Telecom Digest would not be possible without the generous support + + of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT + +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ -- Bill Horne (Remove QRM from my email address to write to me directly) ------------------------------ Message-ID: <20180916025659.GA9082@telecom.csail.mit.edu> Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2018 22:56:59 -0400 From: Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.net> Subject: Charter negotiating with NY to avoid being kicked out of the state Sides have "productive dialogue" after NY revoked approval of Charter/TWC merger. By Jon Brodkin Now six weeks after New York government officials ordered Charter Communications to leave the state, Charter has received two deadline extensions and is trying to negotiate a deal that would let it keep operating in New York. The New York State Public Service Commission (PSC) voted on July 27 to revoke its approval of Charter's 2016 purchase of Time Warner Cable (TWC) and gave Charter 60 days to file a plan for transferring the network to another provider. New York alleges that Charter hasn't expanded its network enough to meet broadband deployment requirements that it agreed to in order to get the merger approved. Charter claims it has met the requirements, and it vowed to fight the order to leave the state. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/09/charter-negotiating-with-ny-to-avoid-being-kicked-out-of-the-state/ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ + The Telecom Digest would not be possible without the generous support + + of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT + +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ -- Bill Horne (Remove QRM from my email address to write to me directly) ------------------------------ Message-ID: <64aa6fa3-b63b-5f4c-3b3a-f272c589c65a@ionary.com> Date: 14 Sep 2018 10:24:10 -0400 From: Fred Goldstein <invalid@see.sig.telecom-digest.org> Subject: Re: Sham telecoms created to scam AT&T must pay back ill- gotten gains It's not all that simple. One man's sham is another man's entrepreneur. And this story goes back a LONG way. What changes is the politics -- who is in charge at the FCC. What one Commission finds acceptable is another's sham. The three carriers in question all provided conference call and similar incoming-only services. If you use FreeConferenceCall and other such services, you can thank them for making that business possible. In this case they may have overplayed their hands, especially All American Telephone. One of the most colorful characters in the phone business in the late TC (twentieth century) was the late Art Brothers, founder of Beehive Telephone, which served the most remote deserts in Utah and a bit of Nevada too. (Beehive today is under new management.) He also wrote a column for America's Network, a trade mag. He figured out a lot of angles and played them, making a lot of enemies in the process. (He made a lot in his personal life too, but that's another story. I liken him to Wayne Green, who published 73 Amateur Radio magazine and was equally "colorful"; the two were friends.) The controversy in question is now called "access stimulation". The idea is that local telephone companies are (or were) paid minute-of-use fees by long distance companies who deliver calls to them. The fees for a small rural carrier are higher than for Bell or larger carriers. The fees for a competitive carrier (CLEC) are benchmarked against the ILEC they're competing with. Well, in the 1990s, Beehive Tel was charging something like 40c/minute for terminating calls. At one point they opened a new exchange and asked Mountain Bell for a prefix code, and were given 802-234. This was supposed to be for spite, since Mountain Bell hated Beehive (who they had to pay those high rates to). Kids would pick up touch-tone phones and dial 123435678 and ring in to Beehive. Brothers turned this around and put in a machine to answer the number, making the call billable. Then he got really clever and created Joy Communications, who ran GAB (group audio bridging, but mostly sex-chat) lines on his exchange and got a share of the termination payments. This quintupled incoming traffic. Terminating access rates for rural carriers are reset every two years based on the last two years' volumes, so for a short time he got a really high per-minute fee, then the rate fell from around 40c to 8c based on the higher volume (dividing a fixed revenue requirement by minutes of use). This kicked off the whole GAB and conference business. The LD carriers at the time protested but the FCC at the time approved. What seems to have happened here is that the CLECs in question did not actually do anything but GAB. They didn't have switches; they put conference bridges inside Beehive's facilities. And they had common ownership with Joy and close connections to Beehive. They benchmarked their rates against Beehive's, but because they were not Beehive, that didn't average-down Beehive's rates. The FCC found, in the 2013 order, that they were not actually competing with Beehive, and not entitled to their rates. AAT, in fact, in its CLEC authorization, was specifically not allowed to compete in small exchanges of rural carriers (i.e. Beehive) but nonetheless benchmarked its rates against Beehive, rather than against the Bell rate. And their "leasing" switching from Beehive was seen as not bona fide CLEC operation, though switch leasing in general is (or was) totally normal. So while the defendants here did step over some lines, it's not as if they were simply sham carriers submitting bills for nothing. I am familiar, ahem, of cases where carriers did actually bill other carriers for minutes of use that didn't actually happen. (Ah, the wonders of protective orders.) But these minutes of use did happen; it's just a question of who deserved to be paid how much. -- Fred R. Goldstein k1io fred "at" ionary.com +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ + The Telecom Digest depends on generous supporters like John Levine + +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ ------------------------------ ********************************************* End of telecom Digest Sun, 16 Sep 2018