Resources and analysis for community broadband
Around this time last year, we were worried about credit and debit card details being stolen from Target stores. Bad, but not bad enough it would seem to drive retailers into doing a thorough security overhaul. The past year has seen similar breaches at Home Depot — even bigger than Target — Staples and Bebe, to name just 3.
Wouldn’t it be nice if that were the worst of it? But no such luck.… More
A huge thank you to everyone who has clicked, complained, complimented or commented on this blog over the past year. I’ve enjoyed all the interactions and suggestions received. As I wrote last Christmas, the true reward for a writer is to be read, and this has been a rewarding year indeed.
It’s been two years of daily blogging, at least one post a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year.… More
Michael Picker is the new president of the California Public Utilities Commission, assuming the California senate endorses the promotion announced this afternoon by governor Jerry Brown.
Picker first took a seat on the commission in February. He was working for Brown as an energy policy aide and chosen to fill the position left vacant when Mark Ferron resigned for health reasons. With a background in the environmental arena, he’s worked for the mayor of Sacramento, in the state treasurer’s office and as a political consultant.… More
Telecommunications service and infrastructure is subsidised in a couple of different ways in rural California. The California Advanced Services Fund pays the lion’s share of the cost of building broadband infrastructure in under and unserved areas, and the California High Cost Fund supports telephone service as well as infrastructure. The latter is divided between rural areas served by bigger incumbents, like AT&T, Verizon and Frontier, and those served by small rural companies, like Pinnacles Telephone or Ponderosa.… More
Michael Peevey gave his final remarks as president of the California Public Utilities Commission on Thursday, following a meeting filled with tributes from friends and colleagues and seasoned with personal invective from perpetually outraged activists.
In summing up his 12 years on the commission, he said…
… MoreIf I had to point to the one thing, perhaps, that I’m most proudest of at this commission, it’s what I’ve done to drive [General Order] 156 from $1 billion to $8.6 billion in spend on minority owned firms and disabled veteran owned firms…There’s no place in the United States that comes close to this.
The hot, new innovation from Blackberry last week is a small phone with a small, physical keyboard. Sound familiar? If not, Blackberry is helpfully calling it the Classic.
There is no shortage of people – Barack Obama and Arianna Huffington included – who like the 1990s Blackberry look. It offers unique functionality and the company’s new management is happy to provide it.
When I look at new products that catch on quickly, there’s a question I always ask myself: is the success due to designers offering consumers a genuinely new benefit, a way of meeting either a preexisting or completely new need?… More
As terabytes of emails and other data bounce around the web, the bad guy in the latest mega-crack story is beginning look less like North Korea and more like Sony and its corporate brethren. First, Sony hires one of the more notorious members of the predatory bar to threaten news outlets if they dare to use any of that information. Then it caves to pressure and threats – apparently originating in North Korea – and cancels the release of The Interview.… More
Mike, half the people are here are here to congratulate you on your retirement…the others are here to make sure you’re retiring. It’s pretty indicative of the dynamics of this agency.
Danny Curtin, California Conference of Carpenters
Those few words summed up a sometimes laudatory, sometimes vitrolic 3 hours as friends, past and present colleagues, anti-wireless activists and others praised and attacked retiring California Public Utilities Commission president Michael Peevey at his final meeting yesterday in San Francisco.… More
Lower broadband performance standards for Californians living in public housing are one step away from adoption by the California Public Utilities Commission. As it stands now, later this morning the CPUC will approve subsidy rules for broadband facility upgrades in publicly supported housing that set 1.5 Mbps download speeds as the minimum acceptable level, and no service level requirements at all for upload speeds. The stuff that’s installed has to be capable of supporting higher speeds, but actual performance is optional.… More
Smart application of good broadband development policy helps local economies grow by attracting new businesses and helping existing ones grow. The place to look for it is Santa Cruz County, according to the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. It’s an example that Silicon Valley sorely needs.
The group, which was founded in 1978 by David Packard and represents about 400 of Silicon Valley’s heaviest corporate hitters, announced it was giving its “Turning Red Tape into Red Carpet” award to Santa Cruz County, and supervisor Zach Friend in particular, recognising his effort over the past year and a half to simplify the rules for planting broadband infrastructure in public roads and placing it on county property.… More