A fiber to the home project in San Bernardino County is back on track, sorta. California Public Utilities Commission staff cut $900,000 from a proposed $29 million grant to Race Telecommunications for the Gigafy Phelan project, and sent it all back into a 30 day comment, reply and commission consideration cycle.
Gigafy Phelan is an ambitious attempt to extend FTTH service to 8,400 homes in California’s high desert region, in and around the town of Phelan. Or maybe it’s 7,600 homes. It depends on how homes is defined, and in this case it’s more than academic. It makes a $900,000 difference.
The federal census bureau tracks housing units and households. A housing unit is a discrete structure where people might live: “a house, an apartment, a mobile home or trailer, a group of rooms, or a single room that is occupied, or, if vacant, is intended for occupancy as separate living quarters", as the census bureau, as quoted by CPUC staff, puts it. A household is an occupied housing unit, regardless of the number of occupants or the relationships between them.
The California Advanced Service Fund – the broadband subsidy program that would pick up the tab – uses households as its primary metric. Housing units is a better measure, since a home that’s unoccupied today is as likely to be occupied tomorrow as any other, and everyone needs broadband service. But it’s just a way of keeping score and, so long as it’s done consistently, one way works pretty much as well as another.
It’s also a poor excuse for whittling down an FTTH project at the 11th hour, particularly one that delivers a gigabit for $60 a month and is the second "highest-scoring pending project application on the CASF’s project evaluation scoring matrix".
The revisions open up a window for another round of protests, and you can expect Frontier Communications will continue to object, claiming that its substandard, 10 Mbps down/1 Mbps up, federally subsidised service – at no particular price point – is enough for people who live in Phelan. The A in CASF stands for Advanced services. It’s time to get on with it.