Four wireless broadband projects intended to cover 18,000 homes in six Sierra Nevada counties are in the hunt for $8.1 million from the California Advanced Services Fund. Submitted yesterday by Cal.net, the plan is to use several kinds of unlicensed and semi-licensed spectrum – 5 GHz, an LTE-type technology in the 3.65 GHz band, a new but a not yet approved allocation in the 3.55 GHz range and television white space – to cover 1,440 square miles in Alpine, Amador, Calaveras, El Dorado, Mariposa and Tuolumne counties.… More
The California piece is big, involving 2 million subscriber phone lines plus broadband and video accounts. It should also result in better service for people who live in the rural areas where Verizon is letting its copper rot on the poles.… More
Helen Mickiewicz, a senior attorney for the CPUC, told commissioners yesterday…
The order affirms the FCC’s longstanding conclusion that broadband Internet access service is a jurisdictionally interstate service for regulatory purposes and therefor beyond the reach of the states…The practical effect of that, actually, is not so different from where we were before.
At a series of meetings over two days with advisors to three CPUC commissioners – Florio, Randolph and president Picker – a full poker hand’s worth of Comcast lobbyists and lawyers tried to chivvy the process along…
[Michael Brady, Vice-President of Regulatory Affairs of Comcast Cable] provided an overview of the status of the Federal Communications Commission’s (“FCC”) and other states’ approval of the transaction.
Comcast and its presumed partners want the transactions to be rubber-stamped with no conditions, consumer advocacy groups – including the CPUC’s office of ratepayer advocates – say it should be killed outright, and two other groups – the California Emerging Technology Fund (CETF) and Caltel, a lobbying organisation for competitive phone companies – want the conditions, at least those that benefit their respective interests.… More
Blue indicate likely communities redlined by Charter, although analysis is still in progress. Yellow is where Charter offers broadband. Click for a bigger – 8.5 MB – version.
One condition could make all the difference for the proposed decision in front of the California Public Utilities Commission that would formally approve the pending mega merger and market swap between Comcast, Time-Warner and Charter. The way the decision reads now, it would impose 25 different conditions on the deal, ranging from rates that can be charged for particular telephone and broadband services, to budgets for marketing to low income households, to requirements for battery backups.… More
Comcast continues to loudly claim that its proposed merger with Time-Warner Cable and market swap with Charter Communications would not be anti-competitive because it doesn’t compete with either company. Cable operators are geographically separated and overbuilding each other is not economically feasible, Comcast says, so mixing and merging would have no effect on competition.
That’s false, according to a motion filed with the California Public Utilities Commission by its own office of ratepayer advocates (ORA). In the process of going through millions of documents that Comcast and its cohorts have given to the CPUC and the FCC for confidential review, ORA has found, it says, three items that prove that Comcast plans to sell television service via the Internet – over the top (OTT) – that, by its very nature, is not geographically limited…
The significance of these documents cannot be underestimated as they show that competitive entry into the OTT services market can now be accomplished without overbuilding, and therefore, the economic barrier to an OTT service provider entering into an incumbent provider’s operating area, such as Comcast competing head to head against TWC and vice versa, disappears…
The bottom line is that OTT is another example of Comcast using its control of telecommunications facilities to leverage ancillary markets.
Carla Peterman is the commissioner assigned to manage the merger review process. She said she’s following the commission’s ex parte rules which strictly limit one-on-one discussions…
Someone expressed some concern that some parties might have unique access through the ex parte process to kind of negotiate or influence decisions and particularly there was a mention of the Comcast Time-Warner proceeding.
The [CPUC] Proposed Decision directly conflicts with this new federal policy by imposing a host of requirements pertaining to rates, service terms, and wholesale offerings, as well as burdensome reporting obligations…These are necessarily interstate offerings, and as such, the [CPUC] is preempted under long-established principles of federal law from regulating broadband services in the ways suggested in the Proposed Decision.
