broadband

CPUC approves first subsidy for Internet via TV white space

19 January 2016 by Steve Blum
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White space below the tree line.

Besides allowing a wireless claim jumper to ace two towns out of fiber to the home service last Thursday, the California Public Utilities Commission approved a $1.1 million grant from the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) for wireless Internet service in northern Eldorado County. Cal.net’s deployment is the first CASF project to lean heavily on newly available television white space spectrum.

The plan is to use a combination of three bands: unlicensed 5 GHz, LTE in semi-licensed 3.65 GHz spectrum and coordinated TV white space, with three usage cases, i.e.… More

Forget gigabits, Bell Labs says petabits are coming

16 January 2016 by Steve Blum
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What’s a petabit for, if not more grumpy cats?

The theoretical fiber speed limit continues to increase. Bell Labs says it’s successfully tested technology that has the potential for moving data through an optical fiber at the speed of 1 petabit per second. A petabit is 1,000 terabits, which in turn is 1,000 gigabits. Currently, the top speed for optical fiber is in the 10 terabit to 20 terabit range, according to Bell Labs. The technique involves multiplexing six separate transmissions on a single fiber…

Using the MIMO-SDM technique, Bell Labs aims to overcome the non-linear Shannon limit of currently deployed optical fiber.

… More

Thousands of broadband projects in California highways every year, but no one's keeping track

13 January 2016 by Steve Blum
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A push to get Caltrans – the California department of transportation – to play nice with broadband companies and publish information about where it has conduit available is moving forward in Sacramento. The assembly transportation committee voted unanimously on Monday to send assembly bill 1549, authored by assemblyman Jim Wood (D – Healdsburg), onward toward a full floor vote. That has to happen by the end of the month, in order to make legislative deadlines.… More

New effort to unlock Caltrans' trove of broadband assets

11 January 2016 by Steve Blum
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Don’t even think of it.

There’s a huge difference in time and cost between building a fiber optic network from scratch – digging trenches and installing new conduit – and creating one using existing resources. That’s how Lit San Leandro and the City of Watsonville’s municipal dark fiber network came to be. It’s doable when cities like San Leandro or Watsonville track conduit, and make that information available to the public.

Get outside of a city, though, and it’s a completely different world.… More

Chinese policy builds parallel demand for tech, broadband

5 January 2016 by Steve Blum
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4K televisions and home automation, two product categories that are particularly tied to broadband demand, grew significantly in 2015 and the trend is expected to continue into 2016, according to market research presented yesterday at CES in Las Vegas, by the show’s organiser, the newly rechristened Consumer Technology Association.

Home automation accounted for about 9 million units. The $1.2 billion in revenue that generated is an 18% bump over 2014.

On the other hand, CTA researcher Steve Koenig said it looks like 13 million 4K sets sold world wide – outside of China – in 2015.… More

Telco broadband service is slow, cable is fast says FCC

4 January 2016 by Steve Blum
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The Federal Communications Commission issued its annual fixed broadband service measurement report just as it slid into the New Year’s holiday. I’m still slogging through the technical data, but the top line conclusions are…

  • Overall, the FCC says, residential broadband speeds and other performance metrics continue to improve.
  • Cable modem service is fast with maximum advertised speeds in the 100 megabit range, faster in real world circumstances than fiber, although only Verizon’s and Frontier’s fiber service were measured.
… More

Broadband staff report examples posted to policy bank

31 December 2015 by Steve Blum
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For people who aren’t scared of dull.

It’s one thing to craft good policy, it’s another to get it all the way through the approval process. Which means getting it past, in succession, department heads, city managers and city council members. Which means making it possible for them to not only understand it, but also explain and justify it to members of the public who often have competing interests and deep attachments to their own ideas and priorities.… More

Five turning points for broadband policy battles in 2016

31 December 2015 by Steve Blum
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Five policy decisions will drive broadband service in California, for good or ill, in 2016. Two will come at the federal level, two from the California Public Utilities Commission and one from the state legislature. There are more of course – encryption, privacy and implementation of California’s new wireless site shot clock are examples – but these are the ones I’ll be closely following as the new year begins:

  • Assembly bill 238. Introduced by Santa Cruz assemblyman Mark Stone early in 2015, it attempts to raise the minimum Californian broadband standard to 25 Mbps down/3 Mbps up for subsidy purposes.
… More

California broadband grant proposed for FTTH in Nicasio

24 December 2015 by Steve Blum
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Click for a bigger picture.

The western Marin County town of Nicasio is in the hunt for for a $1.7 million grant from the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) to build a fiber to the home broadband system. The application was submitted by Inyo Networks, which is involved in several pending CASF project proposals as well as the already operating Digital 395 system. According to the publicly posted summary…

The area is fully “wireline unserved” by the [incumbent telephone company] and is not served by a cable television service provider alternative either.

… More

Small ISPs get a break from FCC transparency rules

17 December 2015 by Steve Blum
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Small and medium sized Internet service providers are getting a year’s reprieve from the Federal Communications Commission. They won’t have to file reports detailing the prices, fees and data caps that apply to the services they offer to public, nor will they have to provide performance data, such as packet loss or peak usage time throughput, or information about network management policies and practices. At least not for the next year.

The requirements – transparency rule, as it’s called – were included in the FCC’s original decision back in February to impose common carrier regulations, up to a point, on broadband service.… More