Last Updated: by Theodore Pietz.
Aquidneck Island's landline high speed Internet access is served by a sole provider.
- The incumbent provider has no incentive to extend their fiber optic architecture on Aquidneck Island to residential customers.
- Keeping the consumer on a outdated coaxial network is expensive for you, profitable for them.
- The "Triple Play Package" (as well as home security, equipment rental, etc.) business model is very lucrative for them, and would be obsolete the day a fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) network is built.
- The incumbent provider has monetized a steady revenue stream of income from captive consumers for overpriced and technically inferior services.
- The incumbent provider has a clear conflict of interest and potential for abuse has been exacerbated with recent FCC deregulation of Net Neutrality.
- The incumbent provider can silently throttle streaming packages that directly compete with their cable offerings.
- The incumbent provider can impose data caps that will silently raise the price of streaming packages that directly compete with their cable offerings.
- The incumbent provider is privately held and has no transparency and local accountability.
"Out to write the National Broadband Plan in 2009, Levin said, most US households had no more than two options for broadband service — usually a cable company and a local telephone company. The weak competitive pressure inherent in that structure reduces firms’ incentive to invest in better technology, especially because building a new network can cannibalize usage of existing networks."
The incumbent provider is a privately held company (therefore does not need to disclose records as a public company would) headquartered in Atlanta, GA and pulled in $21B in revenue in 2019, and is enjoying its stranglehold on Aquidneck Island as the only "broadband" provider for commercial and residential customers. Per Fiber Pricing Summary, a GigE connection is roughly ~700% greater on Aquidneck Island, and the connection is not symmetric (upload speeds are only 35 Mbps, just 3.5% of a symmetric connection which is considered a standard offering). This makes the cost of doing business in a 21st century economy of cloud-based work increasingly prohibitive on Aquidneck Island!
A strong community-owned Internet fiber network has been demonstrated to provide superior service at a much lower cost. Freed from a "package", consumers gain the freedom and flexibility to choose the package they want from various streaming services, channels, and VOIP services on whatever Internet enabled hardware device they choose (smartphones, tablets, smart TVs/Amazon Fire/Apple TV/Roku, etc.). Additionally, the stakeholders of the network (local community is the consumer) have direct input into the operations of the network, and the transparency in cost (reinvest in capital expenditures vice shareholder profit) is unmatched and will lower the cost of living on Aquidneck Island.
Aquidneck Island is getting ripped off and getting left behind in the 21st century world.
What the incumbent provider does not want us to know is that a municipal fiber based network is a superior and future proof architecture (with customization and comparable services owned by the citizens) and if adopted by all HHs, would pay for itself in less than a year of full utilization!
With a FTTP option, typical household (HH) expenses of:
- Internet at $70/month
- Television (Streaming) at $50/month
- Phone (Internet based VOIP) at $12.99/month
= ~$132.99/month which is less than half the cost of a "comparable" triple play bundle (not to include unreliable Internet speeds and the highest tier of residential plans offers only up to 35 Mpbs upload speeds which is unsatisfactory for a 21st century economy).
Additionally, the incumbent provider is happy to lease Wi-Fi routers (and other systems) for $10.99/month ($131.88/year!) that can be simply bought outright and would pay for itself in about 9 months.
The monthly savings of ($269.47 "Triple Play regular price" - $132.99) = $136.48 for a "typical HH" subscription bundle is equivalent of $1,637.76/year.
At 8K households in Portsmouth, that is $13.1M of towwide savings, every year!