Steve Blum's Blog
The Federal Communications Commission agreed with the California Public Utilities Commission today and approved Altice’s purchase of a controlling interest in Suddenlink. Altice is a major European telecoms company and Suddenlink is its first acquisition of a U.S. cable company. Except for provisions regarding law enforcement and spy agency access to Suddenlink’s network, the FCC imposed no conditions on the deal.
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
Network neutrality rules, adopted by the Federal Communications Commission earlier this year, were examined yesterday by a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. Both sides – the FCC and its allies that favor tighter regulation of Internet service providers, and telecommunications companies of all technological flavors that do not – came out of the session with upbeat assessments of whether the three-judge panel would buy their arguments.
According to an article in Ars Technica, the judges seemed amenable to the idea that the FCC can subject residential broadband to common carrier rules but more skeptical about whether those same rules may be applied to mobile services or interconnection agreements between companies…
… More“The argument started off in a way that we took to be quite hopeful,” according to attorney Kevin Russell, who is representing consumer advocacy groups and other interveners who support the FCC’s rules…
Appeals Court Judge David Tatel “ask[ed] the challengers whether the Supreme Court hadn’t already decided most of the case in a prior decision called Brand X, which he suggested was best read to say that the commission gets broad authority to decide how best to classify these kinds of services,” Russell said…
Potential problem areas for net neutrality proponents include the FCC’s assertion of authority over interconnection disputes, the application of net neutrality rules to mobile networks, and questions about whether the FCC provided the public enough notice before enacting its rules.
There’s a big problem with Comcast’s claim that the streaming video service it offers broadband-only customers isn’t an Internet service, but rather cable service that’s moving over its internal, Internet-protocol network. As far as I can tell, its $15 a month Stream service is using the same last mile bandwidth that more distant Internet connections use.
In other words, there’s only a certain amount of Internet protocol bandwidth available to customers, and if Comcast loads its up with a proprietary streaming video service, the speed and service quality of connections to other services, such as Hulu or Netflix, will be significantly degraded.… More
If you want to build your own broadband network, you need to have access to utility pole routes along the way – not only is it cheaper than installing your own, as a practical matter you’re unlikely, to say the least, to get permission to plant a second row of poles.
Nationally, the rates for pole attachments are set by the Federal Communications Commission. Last week, the FCC lowered the price for telecoms companies to the same rate paid by cable operators.… More
When is streaming Internet video not Internet video? When it’s a cable company doing the streaming. At least according to Comcast. Ars Technica has a good article on Comcast’s latest ploy, which is to offer a cut down video package over the Internet connection that broadband-only subscribers can buy, and not count it against the monthly 300 GB cap it’s beginning to impose in some states (but not yet in California).… More
The Federal Communications Commission went beyond the bounds of regulating interstate telecommunications when it issued an order that preempted state restrictions on municipal broadband systems in Tennessee and North Carolina. That’s one of two core arguments that the state of Tennessee made yesterday as it rebutted the FCC’s defence of the order in a federal appeals court case…
… MoreThe Order contains none of the hallmarks of interstate communications policy regulation; it is neither neutral nor generally applicable.
The 3,800 homes in the Anza area of Riverside County are a big step closer to getting fiber to the home broadband service from the local electric cooperative. The California Public Utilities Commission published a draft decision on Friday giving the Anza Electric Cooperative a $2.7 million grant from the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) to pay for 60% of the project.
The project is remarkable for two reasons.… More
Responses from the states of Tennessee and North Carolina to the Federal Communication Commission’s defence of its preemption of their restrictions on municipal broadband are due later this week. My expectation is that they’ll gloss over most of the counter arguments offered by the FCC and several other groups that support the preemption, and reiterate their core point, which is that states have the traditional right to set limits on how, what and where cities may offer service of any sort, and current telecoms law doesn’t say otherwise.… More
I had the opportunity to speak at the California Broadband Workshop in Mountain View yesterday, organised by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Here are the remarks I prepared, which greatly resemble the remarks I delivered…
Good morning. I’d like to make three points.
First, public subsidies provide the greatest benefit to the greatest number when used to leverage private capital and steer it toward public policy goals. Publicly owned assets are a powerful tool for encouraging competitive builds and keeping public policy goals front and center.… More