Race targets Sonoma County for FTTH project

2 January 2016 by Steve Blum
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If you head west from Santa Rosa on State Route 12, and take the fork at Occidental Road, about halfway to the Pacific Ocean you’ll come to the town of Occidental. Residents there get broadband service from AT&T and Comcast, but if you go a little further west, the lines end. Race Telecommunications wants to build out a fiber to the home system there, and is asking the California Public Utilities Commission for a $9.1 million grant from the California Advanced Services Fund to do it.… More

The "C" in CES does not stand for complicated

1 January 2016 by Steve Blum

How hard can it be?

The trade show originally named the Consumer Electronics Show, and then rebranded as International CES and now called simply CES, put on by the trade group formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Association, now called the Consumer Technology Association, kicks off in Las Vegas on Monday.

A lot of the pre-show buzz, judging by the press releases and interview invitations I’ve received, is coming from companies that aren’t traditionally associated with consumer electronics, but have figured out that the best way to sex up their quotidian products – garage door openers, stove hoods, cookware – is to include a microprocessor and some kind of RF networking capability.… More

Broadband staff report examples posted to policy bank

31 December 2015 by Steve Blum
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For people who aren’t scared of dull.

It’s one thing to craft good policy, it’s another to get it all the way through the approval process. Which means getting it past, in succession, department heads, city managers and city council members. Which means making it possible for them to not only understand it, but also explain and justify it to members of the public who often have competing interests and deep attachments to their own ideas and priorities.… More

Five turning points for broadband policy battles in 2016

31 December 2015 by Steve Blum
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Five policy decisions will drive broadband service in California, for good or ill, in 2016. Two will come at the federal level, two from the California Public Utilities Commission and one from the state legislature. There are more of course – encryption, privacy and implementation of California’s new wireless site shot clock are examples – but these are the ones I’ll be closely following as the new year begins:

  • Assembly bill 238. Introduced by Santa Cruz assemblyman Mark Stone early in 2015, it attempts to raise the minimum Californian broadband standard to 25 Mbps down/3 Mbps up for subsidy purposes.
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Comcast CEO explains why people think it's the worst company in the U.S.

30 December 2015 by Steve Blum

We don’t suck as bad you think we do.

People hate cable companies because they charge a lot of money, and then the cable guy doesn’t show up on time. That was the essence of Comcast CEO Brian Robert’s response to a question posed by Henry Blodget, a writer for Business Insider. In an interview at an industry conference, Blodget pointed out that Comcast has “been voted the worst company in America for customer service” and that “the general reputation of cable companies is ‘Screw the customer'”.… More

Unlicensed spectrum needs clear rules or no rules, not guesswork in between

29 December 2015 by Steve Blum
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Not just another monkey.

There are no rules against blocking someone else’s WiFi hotspot, according to the two republican members of the Federal Communications Commission. Ajit Pai and Michael O’Rielly posted dissents to a decision to fine M.C. Dean, a concessionaire at the Baltimore convention center, $718,000 for interfering with attendees ability to connect to their own mobile hotspots.

On the surface, it’s a Catch-22 argument: Pai and O’Rielly are saying that since people who use unlicensed spectrum – Part 15 users, in FCC jargon – have to accept any interference they receive, interfering with them isn’t really interference.… More

FTTH project pitched for CASF subsidy in south Santa Clara County

28 December 2015 by Steve Blum
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Click for more.

When you travel south of the Silicon Valley, Internet access begins to degrade. The southern stretch of Santa Clara County – the Coyote Valley – relies on a uneven mix of service from Verizon (soon to be Frontier), AT&T and Charter Communications, plus a handful of independents. LCB Communications and co-owned South Valley Internet, a wireless ISP and DSL reseller in the area, want to get into the fiber to the home business, and is asking the California Public Utilities Commission for a $2.8 million subsidy from the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF).… More

Blocking improvement hurts the environment too

27 December 2015 by Steve Blum
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I don’t know if anyone has ever specifically asked, but if I had to bet I’d guess that most Californians would rate traffic congestion as a bigger problem than Internet speeds. Occasionally waiting a few seconds while Netflix buffers is annoying. Spending an hour in traffic just to travel a handful of miles is soul destroying. It’s no coincidence that three Silicon Valley companies – Google, Apple and Tesla – are at the forefront of self-driving car development.… More

Service level agreements are a calculated risk, so make sure you calculate carefully

26 December 2015 by Steve Blum
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When a power failure at the Hurricane Electric data center took this website down for five hours earlier this year, I looked up the Linode service level agreement (SLA) I accepted, and found that I probably made a good cost/benefit choice, but even so it’s worth revisiting at some point.
Upgrading to a platform with significantly higher reliability could be costly though. It means I have to find a hosting company that uses data centers and other infrastructure with a better SLA than Linode apparently has with Hurricane.… More

EU's net neutrality choices favor networks over innovation

25 December 2015 by Steve Blum
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500 gigabits and nothing to watch.

The European Union will implement network neutrality rules that are significantly friendlier to telecoms companies than the ones adopted earlier this year in the U.S. The European parliament rejected amendments –proposed by pretty much the same high tech companies that successfully pushed for the more stringent U.S. rules – that would have closed gaping loopholes.

According to the BBC…

Part of the problem with the rules in their current form, argued Joe McNamee at the European Digital Rights campaign group, is that they are ambiguous.

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