California says adios to Verizon, bienvenido to Frontier

3 April 2016 by Steve Blum
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Work in progress.

As of Friday, two million Californians have a new telephone company. Frontier Communications wrapped up the paperwork and took title to Verizon’s wireline telephone systems in California, Florida and Texas…

The acquired businesses include approximately 3.3 million voice connections, 2.1 million broadband connections, and 1.2 million FiOS video subscribers, as well as the related incumbent local exchange carrier businesses. New customers will begin receiving monthly bills starting in mid-April.

“This is a transformative acquisition for Frontier that delivers first-rate assets and important new opportunities given our dramatically expanded scale,” said Daniel J.

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Something about broadband is a laughing matter

2 April 2016 by Steve Blum
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The good stuff is no joke.

It was hard to tell which post on the Google Fiber blog yesterday was the April Fool’s joke, and which was the sober look at the world ahead. On the one hand, a Google engineer, Pál Takácsi, reflected on the need to boost broadband speeds by a billion times…

While gigabit speeds are fast, we have come across an application where 1,000 Mbps is actually quite slow. Terribly slow.

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Stormy FCC okays lifeline subsidies for broadband

1 April 2016 by Steve Blum
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Politics.

The Federal Communications Commission approved a lifeline subsidy for broadband service yesterday with high drama and a party line vote. As is common practice at the FCC, no one knows what the program actually is, except commissioners and staff. And maybe not even them.

According to press reports, yesterday’s meeting was delayed for three hours while democrat Mignon Clyburn tried to negotiate a bipartisan agreement with the two republican commissioners, Ajit Pai and Michael O’Rielly.… More

Austin and KC owe Californians a thank you card for paying their Internet bill

31 March 2016 by Steve Blum
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The gift that keeps on giving.

The fiber to the premise analysis done by the City and County of San Francisco summed up the likely competitive response to a municipal build in two words: Google Fiber. Incumbents in the markets Google targeted responded with upgrades and lower prices…

The incumbent providers’ responses to Google Fiber’s expansion in other cities may foreshadow their responses to a municipal network in San Francisco. After Google Fiber came to Kansas City, incumbent providers Comcast and Time Warner upgraded their networks to double residential speeds, which lowered the dollar per megabit cost of bandwidth for their customers.

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Cable subs shave before they cut

30 March 2016 by Steve Blum
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The pay TV subscriber count in the U.S. dropped below the 100 million mark in the fourth quarter of last year, according to Nielsen. That’s the number of households that buy traditional television programming packages from either cable, telephone or satellite companies.

The declining fortunes of traditional linear television are directly linked to the viewing – and buying – habits of young adults, age 18 to 34. These cord cutters are more likely to have broadband connections with enough oomph to handle video streams and pay for subscription video on demand (SVOD) services like Netflix.… More

FCC approval near for Charter's Time Warner takeover

29 March 2016 by Steve Blum
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The clock is just about run out.

All indications are that Charter Communications has cut a deal with the Federal Communications Commission that will allow it to buy out Time Warner’s and Bright House’s cable systems, making it the second biggest U.S. cable company, after Comcast.

Major newspapers and wire services are floating stories that generally all jibe. Which means they’re either banging around in the same speculative echo chamber or the FCC sprung some leaks.… More

AT&T's political troops muscle Tennessee into submission

28 March 2016 by Steve Blum
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Lobbyists, primarily from AT&T, won the day in the Tennessee legislature when they leaned hard enough on a handful of lawmakers and killed a bill that would have allowed municipal broadband utilities to expand beyond city limits. According to a story in the Chattanooga Time Free Press, a “platoon” of AT&T political operatives descended on the Tennessee capitol to convince a bare majority of a key subcommittee to kill a compromise bill that would have allowed one pilot project to move ahead.… More

FCC lifeline plan puts mobile carriers' interests ahead of program goals

27 March 2016 by Steve Blum
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PC World’s 2012 test results, click for the full article.

The Federal Communications Commission is set to vote later this week on a plan to transition its lifeline program from voice-only service to a combination of voice and broadband. The program gives a subsidy to service providers – $9.25 per month – so they can offer discounted packages to low income households.

The FCC won’t let the public know the details of the plan until after its been approved.… More

California broadband improves but still falls short of excellence

26 March 2016 by Steve Blum
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Average Internet speeds continue to rise in California and across the U.S. Akamai’s quarterly State of the Internet report shows the average Internet connection from Californian users to its content distribution network servers at 15.3 Mbps in the fourth quarter of 2015. That’s a 22% increase from a year before, and more than double – 107% – from three years before, when the average California connection clocked in at a mere 7.4%. Other states saw similar improvements…

In the fourth quarter, average connection speeds among the top 10 states continued the momentum from the third quarter with robust increases seen across the board…All 10 states had average connection speeds meeting the 15 Mbps threshold — up from 8 in the previous quarter—but none had average connection speeds reaching the FCC’s new 25 Mbps broadband threshold.

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San Francisco FTTP analysis embraces economic reality

25 March 2016 by Steve Blum
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The fiber-to-the-premise analysis run by the City and County of San Francisco nailed it: providing gigabit capability to every home and business in the City means either treating it like a normal municipal utility and taxing everyone to pay for it – $43 a month, they figure – or taxing everyone less – $26 a month – and making up the rest with subscription fees from people that want to use it.

The everyone pays, everyone gets model means a big initial buildout for something close to a gigabuck, with the $43 monthly fees split between paying that off and running the system as a municipal utility.… More