This week, in a Public Works Commission meeting that did NOT welcome public commentary, (also known as “the usual” in Bellingham,) a Fiber-Optic Company called Forged Fiber 37 LLC was granted the same rights as CenturyLink to use our public fiber rights of way.

The important part of this scenario is that AT&T and CenturyLink/Lumen, two of the most hated companies in America with the worst reputations, have changed their names to—wait for it— Forged Fiber and Quantum Fiber respectively in the hopes that you won’t find out who they really are.  

What Does This Mean for Bellingham?

Mostly, it means that Forged Fiber (actually AT&T) will be taking over the CenturyLink/Lumen/Quantum resources in Bellingham. 

Another important point is that in CenturyLink’s franchise agreement with the COB about 10 years ago, they were very clear that they DO NOT EVER intend to directly compete with our dominant provider, Comcast. Meaning this is not, and never will be, a city-wide or county-wide solution. This is important to note since the COB will often go to bat for private companies and pretend like we have choice and solutions when the truth is that the telecoms carve out territories and never compete with each other in any meaningful way. Meaning that the only city-wide solution that we still have is the existing publicly owned fiber network that the COB still refuses us access to.  

There is speculation that AT&T will offer some wholesale leasing, but that has yet to be seen. Regardless, it is a moot point because:
  1.) AT&T’s rates are as high as WAVE or CSSNW, which is 13.5X more for fiber leases than they cost on public networks in Chattanooga, TN, and      elsewhere.
  2.) AT&T generally uses WAVE or CSSNW for backhaul. Meaning that Bellingham will still only have two backhaul providers or routes out of the city. In most cases, since neither provider has city-wide coverage, you actually have only one choice.  
  3.) AT&T will encourage obsolete, overpriced, poorly performing wireless services over fiber-to-the-home services.

Meanwhile, our emergency services are still at risk! Sadly, as part of this new AT&T agreement, the city’s Big-Telecom-Loving Network Engineer, John Gaven, is pretending that the city’s vast quantity of underutilized public fiber is not capable of being used for wholesale services. He also admits that the COB has made NO progress on upgrading our existing network; you know, the one that runs our schools, libraries, and emergency communication services. The same network that helps you get help during an emergency. 

Upgrading our network still just isn’t a priority for the COB, in spite of the fact that one of the decisions that the BAG (Broadband Advisory Group) came up with that actually made sense was to upgrade the city’s network to a carrier class network. “Carrier class” is a high-performance network that meets stringent reliability and performance standards required by telecom providers. These networks typically use carrier-grade fiber optic components that ensure low data loss and high availability for critical communication services. Some parts of our network already meet these standards.

But in the end, the COB will once again pretend this new move means they don’t have to upgrade our infrastructure, including our emergency communications systems, because private companies are on the job. But, as we’ve seen many times, the telecoms simply do NOT compete with each other in ANY meaningful ways, a point also made in Susan Crawford’s book, “Captive Audience.” They are, in fact, like mafias, in that they make territorial agreements instead of actually competing.

John Gaven and Public Works see no need to upgrade our critical systems and, as the COB always has, they are providing corporate welfare, at our expense, to AT&T (aka Forged Fiber) by referring everyone to them or some other big telecom entity. Recent flooding has made it clear how little care they have taken of our infrastructure in general. 
 
So the big take away from this is that John Gaven and Public Works are continuing the game of using the city as a way to line the pockets of big telecom even though there is no real advancement in functionality for us. 

Oddly, about 10 years ago, former public works director Ted Carlson admitted he and then-Mayor Kelli Linville preferred AT&T as a provider and wanted a corporate welfare deal with them above all other telecoms. Well, I guess the CenturyLink/Lumen/Quantum incompetence has finally led to that. And so, here we are, over a decade later, with no real progress, a government that still doesn’t care, and overpaid COB staff that get paid to keep it that way.