cpuc

CPUC considers eventual convergence of rural broadband and phone

23 December 2014 by Steve Blum
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Telecommunications service and infrastructure is subsidised in a couple of different ways in rural California. The California Advanced Services Fund pays the lion’s share of the cost of building broadband infrastructure in under and unserved areas, and the California High Cost Fund supports telephone service as well as infrastructure. The latter is divided between rural areas served by bigger incumbents, like AT&T, Verizon and Frontier, and those served by small rural companies, like Pinnacles Telephone or Ponderosa.… More

CPUC president takes pride in California's policy leadship and leaders as he leaves

22 December 2014 by Steve Blum
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I surrender!.

Michael Peevey gave his final remarks as president of the California Public Utilities Commission on Thursday, following a meeting filled with tributes from friends and colleagues and seasoned with personal invective from perpetually outraged activists.

In summing up his 12 years on the commission, he said…

If I had to point to the one thing, perhaps, that I’m most proudest of at this commission, it’s what I’ve done to drive [General Order] 156 from $1 billion to $8.6 billion in spend on minority owned firms and disabled veteran owned firms…There’s no place in the United States that comes close to this.

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Friends and foes give CPUC president a raucous send off

19 December 2014 by Steve Blum
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Mike, half the people are here are here to congratulate you on your retirement…the others are here to make sure you’re retiring. It’s pretty indicative of the dynamics of this agency.
Danny Curtin, California Conference of Carpenters

Those few words summed up a sometimes laudatory, sometimes vitrolic 3 hours as friends, past and present colleagues, anti-wireless activists and others praised and attacked retiring California Public Utilities Commission president Michael Peevey at his final meeting yesterday in San Francisco.… More

Public housing broadband heading for second class status in California

18 December 2014 by Steve Blum
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Lower broadband performance standards for Californians living in public housing are one step away from adoption by the California Public Utilities Commission. As it stands now, later this morning the CPUC will approve subsidy rules for broadband facility upgrades in publicly supported housing that set 1.5 Mbps download speeds as the minimum acceptable level, and no service level requirements at all for upload speeds. The stuff that’s installed has to be capable of supporting higher speeds, but actual performance is optional.… More

Broadband delayed is broadband denied

16 December 2014 by Steve Blum
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FCC commissioner Ajit Pai objected to part of the FCC order approved last week that raised the minimum download speed for subsidised broadband projects to 10 Mbps (the upload standard remains at 1 Mbps). His objection wasn’t to the faster standard, but rather to the slow pace of implementation and what he sees as the commission’s failure to put its money where its mouth is…

Three years ago, the FCC told rural Americans they could stop waiting.

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FCC crushes old limits on rural broadband speeds

15 December 2014 by Steve Blum
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The minimum download speed for FCC-subsidised broadband projects and services in rural areas is now 10 Mbps. The commission raised the standard on Thursday. Required upload speeds haven’t change, though…

The FCC will now require companies receiving Connect America funding for fixed broadband to serve consumers with speeds of at least 10 Mbps for downloads and 1 Mbps for uploads. That is an increase reflecting marketplace and technological changes that have occurred since the FCC set its previous requirement of 4 Mbps/1 Mbps speeds in 2011.

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Big questions for a California broadband subsidy proposal, but worth answering

14 December 2014 by Steve Blum
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All over Helendale.

There’s a business case for resurrecting dead copper broadband systems. At least UIA thinks there is, given a sufficient subsidy from the California Advanced Services Fund. The company has submitted two projects for consideration for CASF grants in the current round. One is in Helendale, a small San Bernardino County community in the desert between Victorville and Barstow, where a cable system built by Falcon Cable – acquired by Charter Communications – was left to rot.… More

Subsidising second class broadband is a bad deal for all Californians

11 December 2014 by Steve Blum
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Hotel WiFi service is usually good enough to deal with email, Facebook and airline check-ins. It’ll do the work you have to get done before morning – maybe even a Skype call. But it’s rarely robust enough to reliably watch videos or jam a deadline on virtualised enterprise services or relax with an online game. It’s not a workhorse you can depend on. It’s an amenity, no more able to support day to day business than the tiny pool and token workout room can handle Ironman base training – I know, I tried.… More

California beats the odds in FCC rural broadband experiments

10 December 2014 by Steve Blum
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Sometimes things turn out better than you might expect.

California came out pretty well in the FCC’s provisional rural broadband experiment decisions. Of the 40 bidders that were accepted, 3 proposed a total of 9 projects in California. That’s 11% of the total number of accepted projects. In dollar terms, projects in our state did even better, claiming $16 million of the $99.5 million, 16% of the money tentatively awarded by the FCC.

There wasn’t much information given about the projects or the bidders by the FCC, just names, number of bids selected, total amount of the grant requested and total number of census blocks covered.… More

Three broadband subsidy projects proposed in eastern California

9 December 2014 by Steve Blum
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Two companies – Race Telecommunications and Ultimate Internet Access – submitted a combined total of 3 broadband project proposals yesterday for consideration in the new round of California Advanced Services Fund grants and loans. All are in or near the desert areas northeast of Los Angeles.

Race’s application is for the Five Mining Communities project, which takes in Randsburg, Johannesburg, Red Mountain, Searles Valley and Trona, in the high desert where Inyo, Kern and San Bernardino counties meet.… More