Middle Mile Mapping Promoted as Key to Better Understanding of U.S. Market
Mapping of middle-mile facilities used by carriers, providing backhaul between cell towers and networks is critical to a better understanding of the U.S. broadband market, speakers said at the Wireless Communications Association conference late Tuesday. The FCC is examining its mapping requirements as directed by Congress in the Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. As part of the Recovery Act, NTIA is required to establish a grant program for state-level broadband availability mapping and other broadband related projects, to be available on its website by February 17, 2011. How much of middle mile facilities will be part of these maps remains to be seen.
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“Nobody knows the middle mile situation in the U.S.,” Harold Feld, legal director of Public Knowledge, said Wednesday. “No one has focused on mapping this or otherwise determining what assets are out there. We have no idea what capacity exists at any level, including for any potential middle mile capacity deployed by federal, state or local government or by institutes of higher education.”
Feld said the reason mapping is minimal is simple to understand. “All private carriers consider this information proprietary,” he told us. “It is an entirely unregulated market, so no one has ever had any reason to collect it. Despite numerous federal agencies deploying fiber backbones for various purposes, and the same on a state and local level, no one knows what is actually out there. In the case of government or publicly subsidized projects, there are usually legal provisions, either by statute or contract, that prevent these entities from competing with the private sector.”
Charles McKee, director of governmental affairs at Sprint Nextel, said the FCC must look at middle mile facilities as part of its broadband plan. “There is a certain logic to you've got to have that middle or you wouldn’t be able to provide services in a lot of areas,” McKee said.
Joseph Sandri, senior vice president at FiberTower, said his company has raised the issue in comments on the NTIA and Rural Utilities Service broadband programs. “It does make sense to map where broadband enabled towers are available,” Sandri said. “A tower is a carrier hotel essentially and do they have access points for everybody? … Can first responders plug into backhaul there? Can the commercial mobile wireless side plug in?”
Also during Tuesday’s panel, McKee said backhaul remains a major expense for Sprint with its 60,000 base stations in the U.S., and thus a priority for the carrier in its advocacy before the FCC. “What we are looking for and what we are hoping to find is some serious regulatory scrutiny of those backhaul expenses,” McKee said. “From our perspective the FCC deregulated special access rates on the theory that competition was going to control prices. But we have not seen the entry of that competition. … Take a look at market share. The [incumbent local exchange carriers] still dominate more than 92 percent of the total special access market. It’s hard to say a market is competitive where one set of carriers control more than 90 percent of the market. It’s also difficult for competitors to discount prices in that kind of a market.”
McKee acknowledged that Sprint made only limited progress under the FCC when it was chaired by Kevin Martin. “Over the last few years and under the last FCC there was a reluctance to take this on,” he said. “We're optimistic that we have a new administration and we're going to have a new FCC and they're going to be able to take a fresh look at these issues. Given the administration’s emphasis on broadband deployment we think this is something that’s going to be critical to that issue. It is going to have an effect on the administration’s ability to achieve its objectives.”