Today's Top Stories AT&T (NYSE: T) and the Communications Workers of America (CWA) District 6 recently came to a tentative agreement with wireline workers in the telco's Southwest territory. District 6 covers around 22,000 CWA members who work in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas and Missouri. At this point, the CWA and AT&T are providing union members and locals details of the agreement with plans to schedule a ratification vote. The CWA are also negotiating the terms of a new contract with AT&T West, which covers 18,000 CWA members in California and Nevada, and with AT&T East in Connecticut, covering 3,000 members of CWA Local 1298. During the past year, the service provider made continued progress with its union workers, ratifying new contracts with AT&T Midwest, AT&T Legacy and AT&T Southeast. Overall, 2012 was a big year for U.S. telcos and their wireline union workers. Besides AT&T, fellow ILEC Hawaiian Telcom (Nasdaq: HCOM) last week reached a major accord with its union employees, who voted to ratify a five-year collective bargaining agreement. Meanwhile, CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) and Verizon (NYSE: VZ) continued to make progress with their wireline unions. CenturyLink is continuing negotiations with the CWA union, covering 13,000 workers in District 7 of the former Qwest Communications region as well as members of CWA Local 6171, covered by two separate contracts in Arkansas. Verizon in September reached tentative three-year contract agreements with the IBEW and the CWA. For more:
- see the release Related articles:
AT&T, CWA reach tentative 3-year agreement with Southeast wireline workers
AT&T, CWA hammer out tentative wireline labor agreements
AT&T, CWA ratify agreements for Midwest wireline employees
Hawaiian Telcom and union ratify five-year agreement Read more about: Labor Unions, CenturyLink
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BT Openreach (NYSE: BT) on Thursday announced that it will begin a technical trial of its 220/20 Mbps Generic Ethernet Access (GEA) Fiber to the Premises (FTTP) service in four of its telephone exchange areas. Set to run throughout February, the four trial areas include Bradwell Abbey, Chester South, Exeter and York. After it completes the trial, Openreach will conduct a pilot from March till the end of May, expanding the service area for the 220/20 Mbps product to the rest of its GEA-FTTP footprint throughout the UK. Although customers won't have to pay for product rental during the technical trial and pilots, they will have to pay for connection, managed installations, missed appointments and other services. BT will reveal pricing for the 220/20 Mbps product right before it formally launches the product, which will be this summer. It has been a busy time for BT and its FTTx initiative. In December, the telco unveiled plans to reduce wholesale prices for its 330 Mbps FTTP service by 37 percent. Earlier in September, it announced plans to extend its hybrid fiber/copper Fiber to the Cabinet (FTTC) service to an additional 163 telephone exchange areas in 2013 and then hire an additional 250 engineers, particularly "Armed Forces leavers," or those about the leave the military, for its fiber broadband workforce. For more:
- ISPreview has this article Related articles:
BT cuts price of 330 Mbps wholesale FTTP by 37%
BT revenue declines 9% despite strong broadband adoption Read more about: Fttx, Broadband
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Berkshire Partners, a Boston-based investment firm, on Thursday signed an agreement to acquire both Lightower Fiber Networks and Sidera Networks for $2 billion, creating a new service provider with a large on-net and metro fiber footprint. The newly-combined company will be run by Rob Shanahan, Lightower's current CEO. Both Pamlico Capital and ABRY Partners, which are separately major investors in Lightower and Sidera, will continue to hold large stakes in the new company. "Once merged, we will offer customers more services, more routes and more access options with the same high levels of performance, diversity, reliability and support that our customers have come to expect from us," said Shanahan in a release announcing the merger. After getting necessary regulatory approvals, Berkshire said the deal will be completed in Q2 this year. What's significant about this merger is the amount of network assets that Lightower and Sidera bring to the table. In addition to having a strong presence in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Midwest regions, both service providers have connections to critical international submarine cable system landing sites and exchanges. Although Berkshire has not revealed what the new company would be called, current and new customers will be able to get access to over 20,000 route fiber miles and more than 6,000 on-net locations including commercial buildings, data centers, financial exchanges, content hubs and other interconnection facilities. Prior to this merger, both Lightower and Sidera on their own had purchased a number of regional service providers to expand their fiber miles and on-net locations. Complementing its own organic network buildouts, Lightower acquired regional fiber providers including Lexent Metro Connect, Veroxity and Open Access. Likewise, Sidera, which prior to this deal with Berkshire laid out plans for a major network expansion, acquired other providers such as Long Island Fiber Exchange and colocation provider Cross Connect Solutions. This merger is also just one of several deals in which investment firms have taken charge of regional competitive fiber-based service providers. M/C Partners and Pamlico Capital acquired Lightower from electric and gas utility National Grid in August 2007, while ABRY Partners purchased the assets of RCN Corp. for about $1.2 billion in March 2010 and made the competitive cable operator private. Following the RCN acquisition, the company split the consumer and business divisions up and relaunched RCN Metro as Sidera Networks. Given the ongoing consolidation of the competitive service provider market, news of this sale should not be all that surprising. In May 2011, a rumor emerged that both Sidera and FiberLight, another competitive fiber-based provider serving Virginia, Atlanta and Houston, were up for sale. For more:
- see the release Special report: Meet 2012's competitive provider leaders Related articles:
Sidera starts building out Va. statewide network
Sidera to provide low latency services to DuPont Fabros Technology's data center
Lightower establishes low-latency route to New Jersey data center
Lightower raises glass ceiling in Central and Northern New Jersey
Rumor mill: FiberLight, Sidera up for sale Read more about: Lightower, Sidera
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The FCC on Thursday named Michigan State University professor and communications and media expert Steven Wildman as its new chief economist, a move considered controversial due to his support for usage-based billing (UBB). Wildman, who will start this month, served as the as the Acting Chair of the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media (TISM) at Michigan State University. "I'm very pleased that Steve will be joining the Commission," said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, in a release announcing Wildman's appointment. "He has a stellar record as an economist and has conducted important research on broadband adoption and spectrum management, among other topics."
Wildman will take over the chief economist position from Marius Schwartz, who is returning to his prior role as a Professor of Economics at Georgetown University. During his tenure at Michigan State University and in previous roles at Northwestern University's Department of Communications Studies and University of California's Department of Economics, Wildman focused his teaching and research on economics, law and policy on the communications industry, and the impact of information technologies on the organization of economic activities. Specifically, he conducted research on broadband adoption examining infrastructure cost structures and demand in rural and underserved areas and the efficiency properties of alternative spectrum governance regimes and network interconnection policy. However, Wildman's appointment isn't without controversy. A Broadband DSL Reports article points out that he is a supporter of usage-based pricing (UBP). Also referred to as usage-based billing (UBB), UBP puts caps on how much bandwidth a user can access every month and charges additional fees to users that go over their limit. The UBP/UBB concept has been met with constant protest from consumer groups and subscribers alike. In a recent paper he wrote for the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA), Wildman said that UBP plans are positive for consumers. "...The effects of well-designed [usage-based pricing] plans on consumers are likely to be beneficial, as are the effects of UBP on investments in the broadband infrastructure," wrote Wildman in the NCTA paper (.pdf). U.S. cable providers and major telcos are almost all in the process of implementing UBP plans for their respective broadband customers. Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA) and Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC) both implemented UBP plans in 2012, while AT&T (NYSE: T) and Frontier Communications (Nasdaq: FTR) put their UBP plans in place in 2011. Outside of the United States, Canadian telcos Bell Canada (NYSE: BCE) and Telus (Toronto: T.TO) have implemented UBP. For more:
- see the release
- Broadband DSL Reports has this article
- here's the NTCA paper (.pdf) Special report: It's a wrap: Counting down the major trends in 2012 Related articles:
FCC's Lifeline reforms enable it to save $214M on the program
FCC launches special access data collection initiative
FCC opens $300M fund to boost rural broadband access
Consumer groups question whether FCC's Lifeline program reforms go far enough
FCC asks PUCs to help it reduce fraud in Lifeline program Read more about: usage based billing, FCC
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Hawaiian Telcom (Nasdaq: HCOM) on Friday overcame a long battle with its union employees, who voted to ratify a five-year collective bargaining agreement (CBA). The new contract, which will be effect from Jan. 1, 2013 through Dec. 31, 2017, was agreed to by both company and union leadership on Dec. 14. After the new agreement was reached, union leaders said they met with members throughout Hawaii to discuss it, and a ratification vote was conducted by mail over the past two weeks. Included in the new five-year CBA are annual wage increases, a 401(k) matching program and a fixed-percentage employee contribution to health insurance premiums. This agreement brings an end to two years of tense relations between the unions and the telco. Last June, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) dismissed an unfair labor practices charge filed by the International Brotherhood of Electric Workers (IBEW) Local Union 1357 against Hawaiian Telcom. The NLRB's decision came after the IBEW decided in January 2011 to challenge what the telco said was its "last, best, and final offer" for a new labor contract. Earlier, the IBEW rejected Hawaiian Telcom's previously updated collective bargaining agreement and told the telco it would be filing a legal challenge of the bargaining process. Similar to other large telcos, Hawaiian Telcom is trying to offset ongoing revenue declines in its traditional telephone voice business by investing in IP-based consumer and business services such as IPTV and Ethernet. In Q3 2012, the service provider reported that IPTV, broadband Internet and equipment sales were offset by a 5.6 percent decline in traditional access lines. Hawaiian Telcom is not the only telco that's had tense labor agreement negotiations with its union workers. AT&T (NYSE: T), CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) and Verizon (NYSE: VZ) all are in the process of inking new contracts with the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the IBEW. Verizon in September reached tentative three-year contract agreements with both the IBEW and the CWA, while CWA District 6 has reached a tentative agreement with AT&T Southwest. Finally, at CenturyLink, 13,000 CWA members in 13 states in District 7 continue to bargain with management for a new contract. For more:
- see the release Related articles:
Hawaiian Telcom cleared of union's unfair labor charges by the NLRB
Hawaiian Telcom Q3 next-gen revenue gains offset by 5.6% decline in voice access lines
NLRB dismisses IBEW's complaint against Hawaiian Telcom
Hawaiian Telcom lays out new union employment terms, but expects legal challenge Read more about: Hawaiian Telcom
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100G to drive $2B growth in optical transceiver market, says Infonetics
It's a wrap: Counting down the major wireline trends in 2012
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