“Crony” capitalist FCC chair rips California’s “nanny state legislators”

18 September 2018 by Steve Blum
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Ajit Pai verbally grasped at straws to slam a California bill that would reinstate network neutrality rules. In a speech in Maine, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission snarked “I can understand how they succumbed to the temptation to regulate. After all, I suppose a broadband pipe might look to some like a plastic straw”. He was referring to Californian attempts to send plastic straws the way of the disposable bag.

Pai repeated a common argument used by industry lobbyists – that senate bill 822 would end popular free data plans – and called it “a radical, anti-consumer Internet regulation bill”.… More

CPUC leaves SCE’s fiber business intact, but the beatings will continue

17 September 2018 by Steve Blum
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With barely a mention at its meeting, the California Public Utilities Commission closed the first chapter of a saga that should never have been written. By a unanimous vote, commissioners allowed Southern California Edison to withdraw its request for blanket approval of a dark fiber lease deal with Verizon.

SCE asked to pull the application because the deal was dead, the victim of a mauling by so called consumer advocates and a purblind proposed decision by CPUC commissioner Clifford Rechtschaffen.… More

5G reality still lags 5G hype in U.S.

16 September 2018 by Steve Blum
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Lots of 5G talk, not so much 5G action at the Mobile World Congress Americas conference in Los Angeles this week. No phones, no 5G-specific services, no schedules for 5G mobile deployments, Verizon’s fixed wireless plans and AT&T’s equally limited real soon now announcements notwithstanding.

Although it has a hemispheric mission, this year’s show was nearly all about U.S. carriers, content and services. The question on the minds of equipment and technology vendors – mostly from asian and european companies – was what will U.S.… More

Mobile industry moves ahead, but mobile trade show backslides

15 September 2018 by Steve Blum
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Ten years ago this week, I went to what was then the CTIA MobileCon show in San Francisco for the first time, and began this blog. My first post was about an app that turned a smart phone into a mobile hotspot – an unremarkable standard feature now, but back then it was controversial.

Carriers – particularly AT&T, which had an early lock on the iPhone market – were dead set against it. Networks were a mix of 2G and 3G technology, and capacity was severely constrained, compared to today’s 4G infrastructure.… More

FCC commissioner frames preemption of local streetlight ownership as digital divide issue

14 September 2018 by Steve Blum
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Big cities are blocking 5G deployments in rural communities with high permit fees and expensive aesthetic requirements for new wireless facilities. That’s the argument FCC commissioner Brendan Carr made at the Mobile World Congress Americas show in Los Angeles yesterday. He’s the principal author of new, draft rules that would set federal benchmarks that, he hopes, cities and counties will follow when processing permit applications.

If mobile carriers have to spend more money than they want to when they build out 5G networks in high value, high priority cities, then there won’t be anything left over for rural areas, his reasoning goes…

Despite all of that progress, there still are many communities, especially in rural America, that feel that they may be left behind.

… More

5g, of a sort, coming to “parts of” two Californian cities in October

13 September 2018 by Steve Blum
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Verizon grabbed what media spotlight was shining yesterday at the opening of the second Mobile World Congress Americas show in Los Angeles. Its announcement that it would be first to market with 5G fixed wireless service wasn’t a surprise – it’s been talking about it for months – but putting a price tag and a launch date on it makes it much more real. Whether it’s really a big deal or not is a matter of how you look at it.… More

As California burns, governor decides whether legislature’s utility liability solution is good enough

12 September 2018 by Steve Blum
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A plan to reduce both the risk of catastrophic wildfires happening and the risk that such fires will bankrupt privately owned electric utilities is on California governor Jerry Brown’s desk. He has to decide if the deal reached by legislative leaders as the clock ran out on this year’s session is good enough.

Senate bill 901 would, among other things, allows the California Public Utilities Commission more flexibility in deciding whether liability costs can be passed on to electric customers.… More

Protect our monopolies, telcos, cable tell CPUC

11 September 2018 by Steve Blum
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AT&T doesn’t want to be bothered with any performance requirements or public disclosures. It just wants the California Public Utilities Commission to write it a monthly check, drawn on the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF). Boiled down, that’s its idea for rebooting CASF, following its success at convincing California lawmakers to turn the program into its own private piggy bank.

In that respect, AT&T is being consistent. But there is one, big whopper in the recommendations it submitted last month: AT&T claims the “communications environment” is “hypercompetitive”.… More

Federal court throws cold water on California net neutrality and the FCC

10 September 2018 by Steve Blum
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A federal appellate court ruling in Minneapolis could, if its reasoning is adopted nationwide, kill any attempt by California to establish our own network neutrality rules. The court’s logic could also spell trouble for the FCC’s 2017 decision to roll back the federal net neutrality regulations it approved in 2015.

The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission wanted to regulate Charter Communications voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) service as if it was old school, plain old telephone service (POTS).… More

AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint guilty of throttling video, study says

9 September 2018 by Steve Blum
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U.S. mobile broadband companies throttle video streams, according to research recently published by Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. After looking at data from 100,000 consumers who voluntarily downloaded a monitoring app – Wehe – the researchers identified tens of thousands of instances where video was delivered at a slower speed than other data traffic.

As related in a Bloomberg article by Olga Kharif, the big online video platforms were hit hard…

Among U.S.

… More