A skeptical eye finds more broadband opportunities

5 April 2015 by Steve Blum
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Click for the full presentation.

The California Public Utilities Commission collects a mountain of data from Internet service providers, and does a good job of sorting it out and publishing it in a very accessible way. But as a state regulatory agency, the CPUC can’t arbitrarily decide which claims it’ll believe and which it’ll discount. So it runs tests.

Ryan Dulin, the head of the CPUC division that regulates telecoms companies and manages broadband infrastructure subsidies through the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF), demonstrated how that works for mobile broadband, running a speed test on his Verizon service during his presentation at a broadband conference for local government officials.… More

Comcast's monopoly power won't be dulled by weak conditions

4 April 2015 by Steve Blum
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Nope, that’s not Pacman, it’s what Comcast’s market share will look like in California, with or without conditions.

More of the specific objections that led to a long list of proposed conditions for California Public Utilities Commission approval of the Comcast – Time Warner – Charter mega deal were posted yesterday. Although the juicy bits have been blacked out due to confidentiality concerns, the comments filed by a consumer advocacy group – TURN, which stands for Toward Utility Rate Normalisation the Utility Reform Network – back up the claim that the merger and market swap would give Comcast a virtual monopoly on broadband service in California.… More

Alternate ending emerges for California cable game

3 April 2015 by Steve Blum
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Click to see the big picture.

Charter Communications, the fourth largest cable TV company in the U.S., has an agreement to buy Bright House Networks, the sixth largest. The deal sets up a couple of possible futures for broadband in California.

Bright House and Charter are already wrapped up in the proposed Comcast-Time Warner merger. Via a series of market swaps, Comcast would get all of Charter’s systems in the state, except for the one at Lake Tahoe.… More

Judge rules Comcast's Internet video plans are beyond CPUC's reach

2 April 2015 by Steve Blum
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Internet video is a video service, not an Internet service.

Accusations that Comcast intends to begin selling video programming via the Internet won’t be considered by the California Public Utilities Commission administrative law judge reviewing its proposed merger with Time-Warner and market swap with Charter.

The problem, according to a report submitted by the CPUC’s office of ratepayer advocates (ORA), is that if Comcast gets into the Internet video business, it would be directly competing with other cable companies, like Time-Warner.… More

Cal.net seeks $8.1 million grant for Sierra wireless projects

1 April 2015 by Steve Blum
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Click for more info and bigger maps.

Four wireless broadband projects intended to cover 18,000 homes in six Sierra Nevada counties are in the hunt for $8.1 million from the California Advanced Services Fund. Submitted yesterday by Cal.net, the plan is to use several kinds of unlicensed and semi-licensed spectrum – 5 GHz, an LTE-type technology in the 3.65 GHz band, a new but a not yet approved allocation in the 3.55 GHz range and television white space – to cover 1,440 square miles in Alpine, Amador, Calaveras, El Dorado, Mariposa and Tuolumne counties.… More

Muni broadband preemption lands in federal court

31 March 2015 by Steve Blum
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Don’t be abusing your discretion in Tennessee.

Tennessee is taking the FCC to court over its ruling that preempted state-imposed restrictions on municipal broadband systems. It filed a petition asking the federal sixth circuit court of appeals to “hold unlawful, vacate, enjoin, and set aside the Order, and provide such additional relief as may be appropriate” because…

In the Order, the FCC preempts Tennessee law pertaining to the operation of municipal electric plants, including the Electric Power Board of Chattanooga, an instrumentality of the City of Chattanooga, created and controlled by the State of Tennessee.

… More

Frontier says it'll offer Californians better broadband than Verizon

30 March 2015 by Steve Blum
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Click for a bigger version.

Frontier Communications is formally asking the California Public Utilities Commission for permission to buy Verizon’s copper telephone and fiber-to-the-home systems in the state. It’s part of a bigger transaction that includes Verizon’s wireline operations in Florida and Texas.

The California piece is big, involving 2 million subscriber phone lines plus broadband and video accounts. It should also result in better service for people who live in the rural areas where Verizon is letting its copper rot on the poles.… More

We're deciding the future of broadband now

29 March 2015 by Steve Blum
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I was asked to moderate a panel on the future of broadband at the Eastern Sierra Connect Regional Broadband Consortium conference in Ridgecrest in January. You can download the presentation here. To set it up, I put three discussion points on the table:

The future will look a lot like the past, because conduit is forever.

If you drive around southern England, or many parts of Europe, you’ll realise that twenty-first century transportation patterns were, to an amazing degree, determined two thousand years ago by Roman civil engineers.… More

Verizon is all keyed up over common carrier rules

28 March 2015 by Steve Blum
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I gotta give Verizon credit: it posted its slagging reaction to the FCC’s decision to impose common carrier rules on Internet service and infrastructure in Morse code. Sorta. I also gotta make the geek points that 1. the proper code of the “era of the steam locomotive and the telegraph” is American Morse, not the International Morse that Verizon uses, and 2. regardless of flavor, Morse code is a means of audible communication – rendering it via typed out dots and dashes is something only a lid would do.… More

Broadband regulation is beyond California's reach, sorta

27 March 2015 by Steve Blum
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The FCC put sharp restrictions on the role of state utility regulators when it decided to put Internet service and infrastructure under common carrier rules. But it did not write the California Public Utilities Commission completely out of the game.

Helen Mickiewicz, a senior attorney for the CPUC, told commissioners yesterday…

The order affirms the FCC’s longstanding conclusion that broadband Internet access service is a jurisdictionally interstate service for regulatory purposes and therefor beyond the reach of the states…The practical effect of that, actually, is not so different from where we were before.

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