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Broadband grades depend on copper and glass

Examples of how the grading was done.
The grading system I developed to rate and compare the broadband infrastructure available to communities east of San Francisco – Alameda, Contra Costa and Solano Counties – focuses on primary, consumer wireline networks because those are the base upon which all service is built…

Even wireless systems must connect to wireline networks at some point, usually directly after the first “hop” from a subscriber. Consequently, the level of broadband connectivity in a region is primarily determined by the quality and extent of wireline facilities.

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Don't expect fiber upgrades as telcos transition to IP-based networks


It’s about avoiding the mess.

There’s no cosmic plan to replace copper telephone wires with glass. That’s the clear message coming out of a panel discussion at the Comptel trade show in Las Vegas this week. In an article for Fierce Telecom, Sean Buckley reports that executives from AT&T, CenturyLink and Frontier agreed that there are no plans in the works for wide scale replacement of copper with fiber, but they will look at ending support for plain old telephone networks on a case-by-case basis…

‘Today, we have retired some copper, but where we have done it is very, very rare,’ said Bill Cheek, president of Wholesale Markets Group for CenturyLink.

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AT&T invests in California broadband, but very selectively

12 March 2014 by Steve Blum
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Be grateful for what you have.

AT&T wants you to believe that they’re investing billions of dollars in Calfornia to upgrade your broadband service. And it’s true, if you’re the right sort of customer. Even so, reading between the lines of the latest AT&T press release, the assumption has to be that your wireline service is as good as it’s going to get for the foreseeable future. On the other hand, if you have an AT&T mobile phone account – particularly 4G – and you live in a large metro area or in a nearby medium-sized market, your speeds probably did get faster last year, and you might see more improvements as time goes on.… More

If you don't believe Google Fiber is serious about city cooperation, maybe you'll listen to AT&T

10 March 2014 by Steve Blum
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The odds of attracting FTTH investment depends on a lot more than luck.

AT&T was jolted into finding a fiber-to-the-home business case in Austin after Google Fiber said it was making the Texas capital and surrounding suburbs its next stop after Kansas City. But regardless of how it happened, AT&T is now singing in the FTTH choir. According to Fierce Telecom, CEO Randall Stephenson told an investment conference audience that the initiative, branded “Gigapower” is ready to roll out in Dallas this summer and other cities where it makes sense…

The market adoption and the performance of our U-verse Gigapower technology has been very, very encouraging…in fact, we’re so encouraged that we want to begin taking this to other communities.

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Golden Bear fiber plan not sturdy enough to survive incumbent challenges

5 March 2014 by Steve Blum
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The two thousand mile, $120+ million Golden Bear middle mile fiber network is officially dead. Snaking through the canyons and river valleys of far northern California, the project was touted as a way of bringing fast, inexpensive backbone connectivity to areas far removed from bandwidth-rich regions to the south.

Effectively, backers were asking for 100% grant funding from the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF). Nominally, the limit is somewhere between 60% and 70%, depending on the level of broadband service, if any, that is available.… More

When communications go down, communications companies fail to communicate

28 February 2014 by Steve Blum
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No one picked up the phone until a bullet hit a PG&E transformer.

More than ten months on, the motive and people behind fiber cuts and gun shots south of San Jose last year are still a mystery, according to a briefing given to the California Public Utilities Commission yesterday. The incident happened on 16 April 2013, knocking out Internet service to thousands of AT&T customers. A PG&E substation was also damaged, although no power outages resulted.… More

Google's fiber crusade rolls on in Austin, sorta

24 January 2014 by Steve Blum
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Some were shouting ‘Texas number one!’

AT&T will, it says, expand the reach of its fiber-to-the-home network in Austin, Texas. The company claimed, in a breathless press release, that uptake of its 300 Mbps service has been more energetic than expected…

“Austin’s response to our blazing fast broadband and enhanced TV services has been incredible and validates why we decided to roll this out in Austin first,” said Dahna Hull, vice president and general manager, Austin, AT&T Services Inc.

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Mobile innovation will continue to be the growth engine of consumer electronics

7 January 2014 by Steve Blum
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Left to right: Vestberg, moderately bright moderator Andrew Keen, Jacobs, Donovan.

Qualcomm’s outgoing CEO, Paul Jacobs, Ericsson’s CEO Hans Vestberg and AT&T mobile executive John Donovan sat down on stage at CES this morning, for a conversation about the “global innovation of mobile”.

The longest view ahead came from Jacobs. “One thing that’s cool and scary and at the same time is neuromorphic computing”, he said. Qualcomm is trying to reverse engineer natural brains – starting with insects and working up to humans – to build computers with high cognitive functions that operate on relatively little energy.… More

Cities and carriers won't win new mobile bandwidth by playing under the old rules

12 December 2013 by Steve Blum
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Just the beginning for urban mobile crowding.

If mobile data networks are going to be capable of handing 1,000-times more traffic in the near future – as Qualcomm believes they will – the number of cell sites will have to increase by 100-times, at least in dense urban areas. That was the pictured painted last night by Ronen Vengosh, vice president of marketing and business development for PureWave Networks, at a small cell seminar organised by the Wireless Communications Alliance on Qualcomm’s Santa Clara campus.… More

AT&T wants to buy your privacy for $29 a month

11 December 2013 by Steve Blum
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Let AT&T know what you like, and they’ll send you interesting ads.

AT&T is offering fiber-to-the-home Internet service in Austin at an introductory rate of $70, if subscribers allow AT&T to monitor their web browsing and use the information to target ads…

Receive our U-verse with GigaPower Premier Offer by choosing AT&T Internet Preferences. When you select AT&T Internet Preferences, we can offer you our best pricing on U-verse with GigaPower because you let us use your individual web browsing information, like the search terms you enter and the web pages you visit, to tailor ads and offers to your interests.

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