Santa Cruz mayor's keynote surf challenge caps inaugural Civinomicon

18 November 2013 by Steve Blum
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The Santa Cruz style of leadership.

Civinomicon was a weekend of interesting conversation about making Santa Cruz a better place, punctuated by comments from speakers who actually have that goal in their job descriptions.

Santa Cruz County treasurer Fred Keeley, supervisor Zach Friend and Santa Cruz mayor Hilary Bryant keynoted last Friday, Saturday and Sunday respectively.

“We were having a discussion about economic development and the ideas started flying. The conversation was magical,” said Bryant, who also participated in the interest group sessions.… More

Comcast's 300 GB cap spreads to Atlanta, but don't worry, it's just an experiment

17 November 2013 by Steve Blum
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Comcast just wants to make it safe for the rest of us.

As the nation’s largest cable operator, Comcast is in a position to play market leader in moving the industry toward standard monthly broadband usage caps and overage charges. Its latest move is to trial a 300 gigabyte monthly limit in the Atlanta market, with a ten buck charge for every extra 50 GB.

Comcast plans to put helpful pop-ups in subscribers’ browsers, to let them know when the end is near…

You will be provided with in-browser and email notifications as you near the 300 GB per month limit, specifically at 80%, 90% and 100% of usage.

… More

It's enough for now that Tizen is smart enough for dishwashers

16 November 2013 by Steve Blum
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Just load it in when you’re ready.

Smart phones might not be the primary intended target for Tizen, the alternative mobile operating system that’s under development and backed primarily by Samsung and Intel. The expectation – based on Samsung’s words and actions – was that we’d see Tizen smart phones entering the market right about now. But operators, in particular the European carrier Orange, are saying they don’t expect to be offering Tizen handsets until some time later next year.… More

Prospective microtrenching is one more tool in the muni broadband kit


Measuring the benefit.

The idea behind open trench and shadow conduit policies is that you can minimise damage to roads and maximise the future benefit of fiber by doing everything at once, rather than tearing up pavement whenever a project comes along. Even if you don’t need the conduit right away, the small marginal cost of putting conduit into an open trench could be offset just by the money saved on road maintenance.

A rule of thumb is that cutting into a street reduces its remaining lifespan by 10%.… More

Google seeks friends to influence Provo landlords

14 November 2013 by Steve Blum
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By the book.

Google is laying a time honored sales technique on Provo landlords: the presumptive close. As in Kansas City, it’s requiring owners to front the installation charge for all the units in a building before it’ll start wiring it up. The big difference in Provo is that it’s only charging $30 per household, instead of $300. That was part of the deal made with Provo when it took ownership of the city’s fiber optic system earlier this year.… More

CPUC takes more time on broadband subsidy limits


I can explain that…

The California Public Utilities Commission is again bumping a decision on a particularly expensive broadband subsidy request for another two weeks. Commissioner Michel Florio pulled the $1.8 million grant proposal made by the Ponderosa Telephone Company for a Madera County fiber-to-the-home project from tomorrow’s commission agenda. As is customary practice, no reason was given, but it’s the second time this application has been put on hold.

It’s easy to spot what sets this California Advanced Services Fund application apart from the ten others that commissioners have approved without discussion in the past couple months: the amount of money they would be spending on each household in the proposed service area.… More

Free updates power Apple's hunt for market share

12 November 2013 by Steve Blum
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Making waves with Mavericks.

Free is worth a two-thirds bump up in Internet traffic. At least if you’re Apple and you’ve decided to give away a new operating system and major apps to go with it. That’s one of the findings in Sandvine’s Global Internet Phenomena Report for the second half of 2013. The Ontario-based company tracks internet traffic around the world, and reports trends twice a year.

According to the report, when Apple released the Mavericks 10.9 version of OS X, an iOS 7 update and new iLife and iWork packages last month – all for free – traffic to its servers jumped to ten-times the normal level.… More

LA isn't playing with a full broadband deck

11 November 2013 by Steve Blum
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Last week the LA city council endorsed a plan, written by the city’s IT chief, Steve Reneker, and sponsored by freshman councilman Bob Blumenfield to entice private investors into providing ubiquitous broadband coverage to 3.8 million people over nearly 500 square miles.

The city isn’t offering much, though. A ten year deal to handle some of the city’s internal IT and telecoms business is a possibility. So is access to relatively minor city assets – light poles and buildings were mentioned – and maybe a break on permit and approval fees.… More

Golden Bear versus everyone else in Californian broadband subsidy competition

10 November 2013 by Steve Blum
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Pondering options as the game dwindles away.

Counting just the money that’ll be available over the next couple of years, there’s about $107 million left in the CASF grant kitty, give or take. The remaining grant applications total $178 million, making it likely that some will be denied or drastically reduced. One proposal – the Golden Bear middle mile project in the northern end of the state – accounts for $119 million of that, which leads to three possible scenarios…

  • Most or all of the fourteen other pending projects, totalling $59 million, will be funded, likely leaving too little for Golden Bear to be viable.
… More

Solving transportation problems with broadband investment logic

9 November 2013 by Steve Blum
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The meter is running.

There are two fundamentally different choices for financing infrastructure projects in California: public money or private investment. Private ownership predominates in the telecoms and energy sectors. Water is a mix of both, although the big ticket projects are primarily publicly owned. Roads are nearly all taxpayer-funded and managed by government agencies.

An accumulating backlog of deferred maintenance on publicly owned infrastructure – one estimate puts it in the $800 billion range – grabbed the attention of participants at the second annual California Economic Summit, held this week in Los Angeles.… More