charter

No landfall in Alta California so far.

There’s opposition to Charter Communication’s proposed takeover of Time Warner and Bright House cable systems in California, but it’s nothing like the fierce reaction to last year’s failed deal that would have allowed Comcast to buy Time Warner, effectively do the same with Bright House and swap markets with Charter to gain control of something 80% of California cable homes. Opposition to that plan approached holy war levels, and eventually led to it being scrapped by federal regulators.… More

A plan to upgrade ancient, analog cable systems in the Salinas Valley and elsewhere in California to full digital capability could be on the California Public Utilities Commission’s agenda as soon as next week. A CPUC administrative law judge has recommended approval of Charter Communication’s proposed purchase of Time Warner and Bright House cable systems, with a long list of conditions that include digital upgrades for at least 70,000 analog homes and line extensions to 80,000 more that have no service at all.… More

Middle mile threads last mile gaps; last mile follows.

A project that will bring fast, fiber optic broadband to the Salinas Valley is nearing the halfway mark and could be done by this coming fall. Sunesys LLC (now owned by Crown Castle) won a $10.6 million grant from the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) in 2014 to build a 91-mile open access middle mile fiber line from Santa Cruz to Soledad. It will bring cheap, wholesale bandwidth to towns along the way – Castroville, Chualar and Gonzales, for example – that lack Internet access that meets the California Public Utilities Commission’s minimum standard of 6 Mbps download and 1.5 Mbps upload speeds.… More

Broadband counts.

Charter Communication’s purchase of Time Warner and Bright House cable systems in California should be approved if the company sticks to promises that it has made and to agreements it has reached with parties that previously opposed the deal. That’s the draft decision offered by Karl Bemesderfer, an administrative law judge with the California Public Utilities Commission.

Bemesderfer’s proposed decision will go to a vote of the full commission next month. In it, he says that the deal does have some negatives – greater market concentration, for example – but Charter’s promised upgrades and changes to the way it does business makes up for it…

Weighing Charter’s commitments to increased Internet speeds, increased numbers of wireless access points, less onerous contracts, more effective competition in the enterprise space, unbundling of services, equal treatment of content providers and greater diversity in hiring, contracting and programming, all of which will be made explicit conditions of approval of the Transaction, against the increase in concentration of the market for broadband Internet access without the threat of discrimination against competing content creators, we conclude that the benefits of the Transaction outweigh its drawbacks and the Transaction satisfies [the section of the public utilities code that says that such deals must “be beneficial on an overall basis to state and local economies, and to the communities in areas served by the utility”].