A dozen grants to fund installation of broadband facilities in public housing projects in California will be in front of the California Public Utilities Commission next month. The twelve proposals have been stalled, some more than a year, because Charter and Comcast tried to kill the grants in order to protect what little business they have in those low income communities. According to the draft CPUC resolution…
Charter and Comcast have provided documentation that services are available to 100 percent of residents in these challenged properties.
Following a stream of news leaks, the Federal Communications Commission announced on Friday that it has approved Charter Communication’s purchase of Time Warner and Bright House cable systems. No details about conditions or other restrictions were given. According to the FCC press release…
The Commission [on Thursday] approved — with conditions — the Application filed by Charter Communications, Inc., Time Warner Cable Inc., and Advance/Newhouse Partnership approval to transfer control of certain licenses and authorizations from Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks to Charter Communications.
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
The Federal Communications Commission and the federal justice department gave their conditional blessing yesterday to Charter Communications’ proposed purchase of Time Warner and Bright House cable systems. Links to the documents that have been published so far are below. The justice department’s settlement was based on its belief that the merger would reduce competition in the video distribution market. The FCC’s conditions deal with both broadband and television service.
The known highlights are…
No consumer data caps or usage-based pricing allowed for seven years.
It helps to be cute when you’re an endangered species.
The California Public Utilities Commission is one step closer to extinction, at least in its current form. The assembly utilities and commerce commerce overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment yesterday that would strip the CPUC of its special, independent status under the California constitution and give the legislature the job of deciding how utilities of would be regulated, or not.
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”].
A community-based WiFi access initiative that I wrote about three years ago has hit some rough waters, according to a story in the Los Angeles Times. Manchester Community Technologies embarked on a project to get local businesses in economically depressed areas to share Internet connections and power a WiFi network managed by Manchester. Initially, they were serving 1,500 people a month, and running on a grant from the California Public Utilities Commission.… More
