Shifting spectrum from TV to mobile broadband still looks expensive

14 October 2016 by Steve Blum
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Broadcasters have reduced their selling price by $32 billion in the second round of the Federal Communications Commission’s incentive auction, which ended yesterday. Even so, there’s still a big gap between that and what mobile broadband carriers were willing to pay in the first round.

The auction is aimed at moving legacy TV stations off of prime UHF real estate so mobile broadband companies can use the bandwidth instead.

The second, reverse round of the auction began last month, with 90 MHz of prime mobile broadband spectrum on the line (and another 24 MHz for unlicensed uses and guard band duty).… More

Broadband projects queued up for Monterey startups


Click for the presentation.

Independent projects are driving broadband infrastructure upgrades on California’s central coast. Maybe not as universally or as quickly as local entrepreneurs would like, but it’s happening. That was my message on Tuesday evening to the the Startup Monterey Bay Tech Meetup in Seaside.

I was asked to give an update on broadband development in the region. Those efforts center on the Central Coast Broadband Consortium (CCBC), an ad hoc group of local companies, agencies and other organisations in Monterey, San Benito and Santa Cruz counties that essentially have one thing in common: an interest in getting better, cheaper and more reliable broadband service in the region.… More

Mobile carriers losing the data upgrade race to Californian demand

12 October 2016 by Steve Blum
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Click for the full picture.

You can get more bits per second from mobile broadband carriers in California, but your odds of getting those faster speeds at any given moment are dropping. That’s what the California Public Utilities Commission’s mobile field testing result are showing. You can read the excellent blog post by commission staffer Rob Osborne here. He shows that mobile broadband speeds are increasing, but sums it up diplomatically: “it’s hard to say, but it appears the likelihood of getting the average speed at a particular location is lower than before”.… More

FCC set to cut legacy wholesale broadband prices, oversee faster services

11 October 2016 by Steve Blum
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Competitive split.

There’s a 45 Mbps divide in the wholesale bandwidth business, and the Federal Communications Commission is preparing new and separate regulations to address both sides. It’s one of the three key issues that chairman Tom Wheeler promised the cell phone industry he would address to clear the path for deployment of 5G technology, the other two being spectrum and local restrictions on wireless sites.

In a summary – Wheeler doesn’t release drafts of new rules to the public, preferring instead to limit his conversations to industry stakeholders – he described prices for (mostly) legacy broadband services at 45 Mbps and below as “artificially high” and outlined a plan to first cap current rates and then chop them over time, by as much as 20% in the next the three years alone.… More

Reboot for dueling San Bernardino FTTH projects

10 October 2016 by Steve Blum
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Frontier’s federal CAF2 subsidised census blocks.
Two competing proposals to build a fiber to the home system in the San Bernardino County town of Phelan and surrounding communities are now a lot closer to meeting in the middle.

More than a year ago, in August 2015, Race Telecommunications submitted a proposal asking the California Public Utilities Commission for a $48 million grant from the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) for its Gigafy Phelan project – that’s 60% of the then-estimated construction cost to reach about 10,000 homes with fiber.… More

Cable franchise audit finds underpayment, misuse of fees

9 October 2016 by Steve Blum
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Click for the full story.

California cities and counties don’t have much to say about the service cable companies provide and the prices they charge for it. When the state took control of cable franchises with the 2006 Digital Infrastructure and Video Competition Act (DIVCA), local governments were largely pushed out of the regulatory picture.

But not completely. Cities can still collect a franchise fee of up to 5% of gross video revenue and another 1% to pay capital equipment costs for public access channels.… More

Humans follow California rules, robot cars answer to Washington

8 October 2016 by Steve Blum
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Guess which one is a federal case?

If a self driving car still needs a human to be ready to take over operation at any time, then that human needs to be a licensed and fully capable driver. But once autonomous vehicles reach a sufficiently advanced level, then no driver’s licence – no human license – is needed in California. That’s the gist of new draft rules floated by the California department of motor vehicles ahead of a public workshop later this month.… More

Privacy is absolute, security is relative. Or so FCC hints

7 October 2016 by Steve Blum
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Sûreté, non pas tant.

Internet service providers – mobile, wireline and fixed wireless – will finally have well defined privacy protection standard to meet if the Federal Communications Commission approves new rules proposed yesterday by chairman Tom Wheeler. Naturally, he only released his own summary; the actual draft rules weren’t released. The FCC keeps details of decisions secret from the public until after they vote. And until after they’ve discussed those details with deep pocketed lobbyists stakeholders.… More

The copper GigaWeasel lurks under AT&T's fiber umbrella

6 October 2016 by Steve Blum
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You can see the fiber from here.

AT&T is casting a new shadow on its faster-than-average tiers of service. Instead of calling 300 Mbps copper service Gigapower, it’ll now lounge under the AT&T Fiber umbrella. At least that’s how an AT&T press release reads, when you connect all the dots.

The release says…

Under the AT&T Fiber umbrella brand we will use a variety of network technologies to connect more homes, apartments and business customer locations to ultra-fast and low-latency internet speeds.

… More

Cable, telcos use monopoly muscle to block access to California poles

5 October 2016 by Steve Blum
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Barrier to competition.

Google still can’t get access to utility poles in the Bay Area. Whether or not it still wants it is an open question – Google closed its purchase of the wireless Internet service provider side of Webpass this week – but even if it doesn’t, the blocking action by incumbents anxious to protect monopoly markets has caught the attention of California regulators.

The California Public Utilities Commission was told last week that the club that controls pole access – the Northern California Joint Pole Association – has again rejected Google’s requests for membership and permission to use poles.… More