Frontier’s sins make a longer stay in California bankruptcy purgatory more likely

Purgatory

A lukewarm reply to demands that the California Public Utilities Commission take a hard look at its post-bankruptcy plans makes it a good bet that Frontier Communications won’t get a green light in California until sometime next year. Last month several organisations, including the CPUC’s own public advocates office, protested Frontier’s request for quick and painless permission to hand control of its business in California to a new set of owners. Last week, Frontier responded.

Like the protests, Frontier’s reply runs through the long list of problems that the company has experienced, if not caused, in California.… More

Muni broadband, net neutrality get bland nods in Biden’s peace treaty with Sanders

10 July 2020 by Steve Blum
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Sanders biden

Joe Biden’s campaign agreed to a skeletal broadband policy in what amounts to a peace treaty with Bernie Sanders and his supporters. The “unity task force recommendations” published on Wednesday amount to little more than a declaration that broadband is good, but it’s the first time that Biden has explicitly signed on to any conventional democratic party positions on telecommunications policy.

The document has the usual nice words about broadband being essential to life in the 21st century, with the standard nod to education.… More

Democrats in D.C. and Sacramento in sync on fast fiber for broadband. So far

9 July 2020 by Steve Blum
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Sunesys build freedom blvd 625

If you can’t get high quality broadband service with at least 25 Mbps download and upload speeds, then you’re unserved according to a $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill passed on a partisan vote by democrats in the federal house of representatives. $80 billion of that money is set aside for broadband service upgrades, with symmetrical 100 Mbps service considered the minimum acceptable and preference given to subsidised projects that deliver 1 Gbps down and up.

Unlike California, republicans matter in D.C.… More

Consumer service versus taxpayer costs: CPUC considers opening rural telco territory to competition

8 July 2020 by Steve Blum
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Tesoro viejo construction 25aug2019

Small telephone companies that serve rural Californians will face direct competition from cable operators and other wireline telecoms companies if the California Public Utilities Commission approves a draft decision posted for review on Monday. Authored by commissioner Martha Guzman Aceves, the proposed new rules would allow competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) to provide voice telephone service in territories that are reserved exclusively for heavily subsidised, small local exchange carriers (Small LECs).

Acknowledging that “wireline competition must be allowed in the service territories of the Small LECs as a matter of law”, the draft tries to balance the benefits of competition to consumers with the potential cost to taxpayers if cable companies skim off profitable neighborhoods, leaving Small LECs increasingly dependent on universal service subsidies to serve the rest.… More

Covid-19 was barely a sniffle for the Internet, study finds

7 July 2020 by Steve Blum
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Fixed broadband weighted median download

Broadband networks in the U.S. and around the world held up well as countries locked down and work, school and play moved online in March. Anna-Maria Kovacs, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., took a brief look at worldwide Internet speed test data collected by Ookla and traffic data from Sandvine, and found that the crush of traffic put a temporary downward bend – and only that – on planetary network speeds…

It is not unusual, of course, for internet traffic to grow…What is unusual in the Covid–19 environment is the suddenness of the traffic growth.

… More

Short broadband to-do list for California legislators upon return from summer vacation

6 July 2020 by Steve Blum
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California lawmakers are taking an abbreviated summer break. They usually leave Sacramento for a month around July, but since they were off for so long earlier this year due to covid-19 and because of the uncertain condition of the state budget, their effective vacation was trimmed back to less than two weeks. They’re scheduled to return to the capitol a week from today. When they return, they’ll have just a handful of broadband-related bills to act on.… More

FCC chokes on Digital Path’s map spam, CPUC still chewing on it as broadband subsidy decisions for rural California are made

2 July 2020 by Steve Blum
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Spam

Nearly 426,000 California “locations” – homes, businesses, institutions – are eligible for the Federal Communications Commission’s $16 billion broadband subsidy auction in October. The California Public Utilities Commission has about $145 million for broadband infrastructure grants, primarily in rural communities. Both agencies have to sort out challenges from incumbent Internet service providers that want to block subsidies in order to protect their turf, as well as decide where to spend subsidy dollars.

In theory, the FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) could bring faster, cheaper and more reliable broadband to as many as 8 million rural Californians, because the program’s rules require ISPs to serve everyone in a given area, whether eligible for subsidies or not.… More

Bill to beat down broadband subsidy program drops in California assembly

1 July 2020 by Steve Blum
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Liberty valence 625

It was long expected. On Monday, assemblywoman Cecilia Aguiar-Curry (D – Yolo) gutted an affordable housing bill and substituted text that would, if enacted, reaffirm that California’s broadband standard is stuck in the 1990s at 6 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload speeds, and make it even more difficult to use the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) to bring modern service to rural communities.

Assembly bill 570 is the cable and telephone industry’s response to senate bill 1130, which is carried by senator Lena Gonzalez (D – Los Angeles) and would raise California’s minimum broadband speed to a symmetrical 25 Mbps down and up.… More

Frontier’s “pervasive lack of credibility” drives FCC’s rejection of its service claims; CPUC urged to ignore its “high level rhetoric and promises”

1 July 2020 by Steve Blum
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There’s rapidly increasing skepticism in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. of Frontier Communications’ corporate honesty. Frontier was blasted in two separate agency actions in recent days: the California Public Utilities Commission’s review of its post bankruptcy plans and the Federal Communications Commission’s broadband subsidy auction, as it prepares to distribute the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund.

Challenges filed by incumbent broadband providers, aimed at blocking federal subsidies in their captive rural markets, were largely dismissed by the Federal Communications Commission last week.… More

California tops up federal broadband subsidy bids, as FCC trims RDOF eligibility list

30 June 2020 by Steve Blum
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Pouring wine

Californian communities lost potential broadband subsidy money last week, but might have gained some back yesterday. On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission eliminated 48,000 “locations” – homes, businesses, community facilities – in what appears to be 3,100 census blocks from the preliminary eligibility list for the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), following a review of tens of thousands of challenges from incumbent broadband providers who wanted to freeze out potential competitors. I say “appears to be” because the FCC’s numbers don’t line up with census bureau stats – that discrepancy should be resolved eventually.… More