Race to 5G is ready to go, but don’t be distracted by false starts

11 November 2018 by Steve Blum
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The easiest way to win the race to 5G is to simply declare victory. It’s what mobile carriers did a decade ago with 4G, and what they’re doing now. That’s causing confusion, as an editorial by FierceWireless’ Monica Alleven describes…

One of the problems with defining 5G is, practically speaking, there’s no single judge currently determining what is or isn’t 5G. Is it ITU’s job, or 3GPP’s? Mostly, it’s the individual marketing departments at carriers and vendors, or “all of the above"…

Verizon is probably the most justified to date to actually call its 5G Home service a 5G service.

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Californians must choose between tragedy and inconvenience. It’s not hard

10 November 2018 by Steve Blum
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Three massive wildfires continue to burn this morning in California; one in Butte County, two in Ventura and Los Angeles counties. The cost in human life is immeasurable, with nine people confirmed dead in northern California and many more missing. There’s no way to gauge the damage to property and the disruption to lives: what is the price of a town burned to the ground?

The town is, or was, Paradise, a community of 26,000 people in the northern Sierra Nevada foothills.… More

California’s next governor talks the broadband talk, but will he walk the walk?

9 November 2018 by Steve Blum
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California governor-elect Gavin Newsom has a broadband development track record of sorts. Whether that will translate into sound telecoms infrastructure policy remains to be seen.

When he was mayor of San Francisco, Newsom made a big splash with a deal with Google and Earthlink to blanket the city with WiFi, with free service playing a prominent role in a difficult to understand business plan. That was back during the great municipal WiFi bubble of the mid–2000s.… More

Whether net neutrality friend or foe, California lawmakers win landslide election victories

8 November 2018 by Steve Blum
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The major broadband players in the California legislature will be back in Sacramento when the new session begins in December.

The one exception is senator Kevin de Leon (D – Los Angeles). He ran out of time on California term limits and challenged U.S. senator Diane Feinstein. He’ll be unemployed at the end of the month, having lost to Feinstein, 46% to 54%. De Leon introduced one of two network neutrality bills that moved through the legislature this year, senate bill 460.… More

CPUC tells Frontier to answer charge it’s not meeting Verizon purchase obligations

7 November 2018 by Steve Blum
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Frontier Communications’ delivery on promises made when it received permission to buy Verizon’s Californian telephone systems in 2015 will be investigated by the California Public Utilities Commission. Earlier this year, the California Emerging Technology Fund (CETF) asked the commission to unilaterally change some of the conditions they imposed on Frontier when they approved the deal, claiming that the goals of the decision were not met.

According to the CPUC administrative law judge handling the case, last month CETF and six of its non-profit clients sent a letter to commissioners accusing Frontier of “attempting to abandon their obligations and escape their public benefit commitments”.… More

Denver court will hear appeals of FCC decision to preempt local control over poles, wireless permits

6 November 2018 by Steve Blum
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A federal judicial panel decided on Friday to consolidate at least six of the seven appeals filed by local governments and wireless carriers against an FCC ruling that attempts to set sweeping new small cell permit and leasing rules for local and state governments. Yesterday, the court given the job – the tenth circuit of the U.S. court of appeals, based in Denver – issued instructions to the challengers, essentially telling them to get their paperwork in order and stand by for further instructions.… More

Supreme court won’t review old net neutrality rules, but doesn’t kill them off either

5 November 2018 by Steve Blum
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The federal supreme court will let network neutrality rules stand. Sorta. In a ruling made on Friday and released this morning, the supreme court said it wouldn’t review the 2015 decision by the then-democratic majority on the Federal Communications Commission to impose net neutrality rules.

The court’s ruling has no practical effect at the moment. Those rules were repealed by the new republican-majority FCC last year. But a federal appeals court did hear the challenge launched by telecommunications companies and said the FCC acted within its authority in 2015.… More

Will California earthquakes move faster than mobile networks?

4 November 2018 by Steve Blum
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Earthquakes happen quickly, but not instantly. The shaking can last anywhere from a few seconds to more than a minute for a major quake. The shock waves spread out from the epicenter at something like the speed of sound, so it can be a few minutes before everything stops moving everywhere. The initial underground movement can also be detected by instruments before it’s felt on the surface.

Data networks, on the other hand, run at nearly the speed of light.… More

Video downloads and all kinds of uploads driving Internet bandwidth demand

3 November 2018 by Steve Blum
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Video accounts for 58% of Internet traffic worldwide, according to a new report by Sandvine, an Internet technology and research company based in Waterloo, Ontario.

Netflix accounts for nearly one-fifth of all the user download traffic in the Americas – more than any other company or protocol category – and five percent of all user upstream traffic. That makes it the number one bandwidth demand driver in this hemisphere. Netflix is in third place on the user upload side, behind raw video – surveillance cameras, for example – and bit torrent.… More

Waymo gets permission to run cars without drivers in Silicon Valley

2 November 2018 by Steve Blum
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True driverless cars – not just autonomous cars with “safety drivers” on stand-by – will be roaming through five Santa Clara County cities. On Tuesday, the California department of motor vehicles gave Waymo a permit to ”test driverless vehicles on public roads, including freeways, highways and streets within the cities of Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills and Sunnyvale".

Waymo is the Google spin-off that began stealth testing self-driving cars in Silicon Valley in 2009.… More