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In D.C. they call it "Beltway Blindness" but the affliction is common elsewhere as well. Folks - especially paid advocates - who don't know the facts about networks simply don't recognize their errors and they get repeated by others until they become common wisdom. We all make mistakes, and if honorable correct them when we discover them. So ordinary mistakes don't belong under this heading. This is about continuing errors of fact, not disagreements of opinion.  Please send me examples.

AT&T Wrong About ~Half the Broadband Unserved

"The customers who are easiest to serve already have access to broadband; the remaining unserved customers overwhelmingly live in sparsely populated, high-cost areas that cannot economically be served absent government support", from AT&T seems to make sense and similar is often said in D.C. Actually, it turns out that something like half the remaining unserved do not "live in sparsely populated, high-cost areas that cannot economically be served absent government support."  Getting this right leads to policy that would reach the unserved at billions less than the commonly estimated cost. Combined with using improved satellite for perhaps 1%, the $20B and $35B projections in the September broadband plan can easily be cut in half. So this is important.

• Between 25% & 70% of the "unserved" do not cost prohibitively much because of sparse population but instead are hard to serve because backhaul locally is not competitive and costs 5-20 times what backhaul costs in competitive markets. I can buy transit for $5-15/megabit across several hundred U.S. cities, but some rural carriers are asked to pay $100 and even $200/megabit because there aren't competitive suppliers. This came up time and again at the FCC broadband workshops. This is not because of a shortage of fiber capacity; fiber in place can easily handle any likely increased load at very modest cost. Sometimes, this is monopoly suppliers "charging what the market will bear" when there's no effective market. Other times, the sole fiber supplier is the telco who does not want to make backhaul available to a possible competitor at a fair price.
  This is the whole "middle mile" problem so visible in D.C. these days. There are some places without fiber, but they turn out to be amazingly few. The problem is cost. As I explain elsewhere, overbuilding to create a little competition is rarely the right policy. I believe the FCC will use "special access" to get rid of the worst examples. Bringing reasonable prices for backhaul to a very narrow set of poorly served rurals is the single most important thing Jules can for rural broadband. Really.
• Between 10% and 25% of the unserved are not "high-cost" but are held back by problems at their local carrier. Earlier this year, there were 600K probably "unserved" at Charter alone, which was in bankruptcy. So they couldn't make even ordinary upgrades. That's perhaps 10% right there, an obvious target of opportunity. There are a significant number of similar but smaller cases.
• A substantial number of the "unserved" are on systems held back because the carrier wanted to sell them. That applies to the better part of 1M in the territory Verizon wants to spin off with Frontier, and presumably others.
• AT&T & Verizon refuse to use well-proven modest cost technologies if they only apply to a scattered few percent of homes. They don't want the operational problem. My source on this is former AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre, who told me he was able to serve "100%" with inexpensive DSL repeaters. They now go up to 5 megabits. 82% of the "unserved' are in AT&T, Verizon or Qwest territory, many (perhaps most) of whom can get megabit service at a cost the company recoups in a year or three.
• When 95% are served, the remainder are Black Swans - exceptions that don't fit what seems like the logical pattern. While it true that "normally" a carrier would serveall but the uneconomical, high cost, there will always be some exceptions. Many, perhaps the majority, of the unserved fit one of those exceptions.