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Only one regulatory hurdle looms for AT&T-Time Warner deal

24 October 2016 by Steve Blum
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Clearing it is not a given, though.

AT&T’s bid to acquire Time Warner has little direct effect on the broadband industry, but the indirect effects have set off anti-competitive alarm bells. Compared to other recent mega-deals, though, there will be relatively little regulatory review of the transaction.

Time Warner already spun off its cable systems into an independent company, which was snapped up by Charter Communications earlier this year. That followed a similar, unsuccessful attempt by Comcast.… More

Mobile carriers losing the data upgrade race to Californian demand

12 October 2016 by Steve Blum
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Click for the full picture.

You can get more bits per second from mobile broadband carriers in California, but your odds of getting those faster speeds at any given moment are dropping. That’s what the California Public Utilities Commission’s mobile field testing result are showing. You can read the excellent blog post by commission staffer Rob Osborne here. He shows that mobile broadband speeds are increasing, but sums it up diplomatically: “it’s hard to say, but it appears the likelihood of getting the average speed at a particular location is lower than before”.… More

The copper GigaWeasel lurks under AT&T's fiber umbrella

6 October 2016 by Steve Blum
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You can see the fiber from here.

AT&T is casting a new shadow on its faster-than-average tiers of service. Instead of calling 300 Mbps copper service Gigapower, it’ll now lounge under the AT&T Fiber umbrella. At least that’s how an AT&T press release reads, when you connect all the dots.

The release says…

Under the AT&T Fiber umbrella brand we will use a variety of network technologies to connect more homes, apartments and business customer locations to ultra-fast and low-latency internet speeds.

… More

AT&T copper network replacement presentation video posted

15 September 2016 by Steve Blum
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AT&T’s plan to replace rural copper networks in California with a fixed wireless broadband service running at 10 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload speeds was presented to the Eldorado County board of supervisors two days ago, on 13 September 2016. The conversion will be subsidised by the Federal Communications Commission’s Connect America Fund phase 2 program, which will give AT&T $360 million in California alone, and $2.6 billion nationwide.

The video was streamed live, and I’ve posted a recording to YouTube.… More

AT&T confirms plans to replace California copper service with wireless

14 September 2016 by Steve Blum
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Copper sunset.

AT&T will spend $360 million earmarked for broadband service improvements in rural California on fixed wireless broadband service and not on upgrading or maintaining existing wireline networks. That was the message from Alice Perez, an AT&T staff lobbyist, to the Eldorado County board of supervisors yesterday (h/t to Fred Pilot at the Eldo Telecom blog for the heads up). Nationwide, AT&T is getting a total of $2.6 billion in federal Connect America Fund (CAF) subsidies over six years to upgrade broadband speeds in predominantly rural areas.… More

Free access to public streets is a gift with strings, not AT&T's monopoly right

18 July 2016 by Steve Blum
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The streets of San Francisco already take a beating.

AT&T wants to decide where and how competitors install fiber in conduit, manholes and handholes that it owns. That’s the gist of its response to a complaint filed by Webpass with the California Public Utilities Commission.

California law requires any utility – telecoms or electric – that installs poles and conduit in the public right of way to share those facilities with any qualified competitor. Utilities can use this public property for free, but that gift comes with strings attached.… More

AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Comcast, DISH in, Sprint, Charter out of spectrum auction

16 July 2016 by Steve Blum
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Sixty-two companies made down payments and qualified for participation in the first buy round of bidding for up to 100 MHz of UHF spectrum currently held by television stations. The Federal Communications Commission released the list yesterday, along with instructions and a schedule for practice rounds of bidding and the auction itself, which will begin on 16 August 2016. The goal is to clear a total of 126 MHz of spectrum, with 100 MHz going to mobile broadband assignments and the remainder used for unlicensed service and guard bands.… More

Scraping up California legislature's telecoms road kill

12 July 2016 by Steve Blum
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The big impact telecoms legislation proposed so far in Sacramento this year is dead, the victim of opposition and inattention. That’s not to belittle the handful of telecoms bills awaiting action in August, but nothing that’s on the table right now would have the sweeping impact of some of the ones that didn’t make it.

Top of list was assembly bill 2395, a measure custom written by AT&T and carried by Evan Low, an accomodating assemblyman from Silicon Valley.… More

Competitive ISPs need access to conduit, but it has be there in the first place

4 July 2016 by Steve Blum
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The need for open trench notification policies is particularly acute when a local agency restricts future cuts into a given street, after the completion of a trenching or repaving project. But the need to rapidly respond to changes in the broadband industry and market conditions means that a new, or newly expanding, competitive Internet service provider is a disadvantage if, say, a five year moratorium was put into effect on a particular street three years ago, before the company was even founded.… More

Customers love their phones, mobile service not so much

2 July 2016 by Steve Blum
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Click to download the study

Even though U.S. consumers feel jilted by their Internet service providers, they’re still in love with their smartphones. According to the latest American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) telecommunications survey, smartphone makers rate a 79 on a 100 point scale, one point up from last year and only three points behind the most highly rated industry sectors – consumer electronics (at least the television and video player side of the business) and full service restaurants.… More