Steve Blum's Blog
A $16 million fiber to the home grant from the California Advanced Services Fund was approved this morning by the California Public Utilities Commission. It was a 4 to 1 vote with CPUC president Michael Picker voting no. The Bright Fiber Nevada County Connected project still needs to pass environmental reviews. About $11 million in private financing also needs to be secured. Full disclosure: I worked on the Bright Fiber grant application.
Verizon’s wireline future is fiber, not copper. That’s the takeaway from yesterday’s quarterly earnings call, where Fran Shammo, Verizon’s chief financial officer, talked up the company’s wireless plans, and said that selling its mostly copper systems in California (and Florida and Texas) was a good move strategically, because the company’s wireline investments are focused on fiber…
… MoreMost of that property was copper, not fiber. So when we look at the East Coast, it’s a much different footprint.
After years of blowing off customers, sandbagging local governments and stonewalling regulators, Comcast has finally upgraded its Santa Cruz County service area to what appears to be the same broadband speeds enjoyed to the north in Silicon Valley and to the south in Monterey County. All it took was a single word: competition.
Comcast hasn’t said so, but it’s no coincidence that the upgrade came barely six weeks after the Santa Cruz City Council voted to move ahead with building a city-wide fiber-to-the-home (and business) system in a public/private partnership with Cruzio, a local Internet service provider.… More
AT&T’s GigaWeasel is slithering to more cities in the eastern half of the U.S., but it’s ignoring nearly all of the states in the Pacific and Mountain time zones (h/t to Fred Pilot at the Eldo Telecom blog for the pointer). A company blog post hypes the addition of “parts of…Jacksonville, St. Louis and San Antonio” to the list of markets where its so-called GigaPower service is available, but also adds the standard disclaimer that it’s up to 1 gigabit per second.… More
Irvine and San Diego join San Jose (and surrounding Silicon Valley communities) as possible expansion targets for Google Fiber. The announcement, which was made in a blog post, also included Louisville, Kentucky.
All three are now “potential fiber cities”, which means that Google Fiber intends to talk with local officials about what’s needed to move it up the classification list to “upcoming fiber city”…
… MoreOur next step is to begin a joint planning process with city leaders, just as we did when we began working with nine metro areas last year.
The City of Los Angeles took the next step toward creating a city-wide, gigabit capable broadband system by issuing a request for proposal, aimed at attracting bids from companies or, presumably, other types of organisations that want to build and operate it.
Earlier this year, Steve Reneker, the city’s general manager of information technology, asked “are we creating a unicorn here?” The answer is unequivocally yes.
The RFP can be summed up as pay us for permission to build a city-wide gigabit network and then give service away for free.… More
One of the fastest and cheapest ways to get gigabit service to your home is to move to Boron, California. Race Telecommunications finished building out fiber-to-the-home infrastructure there last month, and is selling a gig of Internet access for $60 per month, and unlimited voice service for $10 a month.
The community’s response was quick and enthusiastic. So far, about a third of the 900 homes and businesses in town have ordered service, with about 200 already connected and crews working to hook up the rest at the rate of about 30 per week.… More
San Antonio has officially gone from being a “potential” Google Fiber city to an “upcoming” one. Google made the announcement yesterday in its blog…
… MoreFast growing cities need Internet speeds that can keep up with their progress. For the 1.4 million residents of San Antonio, one of the biggest and fastest growing cities in the country, this is truer than ever. Which is why, today, we’re proud to announce that Google Fiber is coming to San Antonio—the largest Fiber city to date…
Soon, we’ll enter the design phase of building our fiber network in San Antonio.
Google continues to lay the groundwork for expanding its fiber to the home project into more metro areas. According to a story by Darren DaRonco and Parker Leavitt in the Arizona Republic, Google is negotiating agreements with cities in the Phoenix area to get access to public right of ways. The first city to approve a deal is Tempe…
… MoreThe agreement “gives us approval to build a network in the city of Tempe,” said Angie Welling, Google’s public policy and government affairs manager.
Frontier Communications will get $203,000 from the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) to build a microwave middle mile connection to the Humboldt County town of Petrolia and upgrade DSL service to 25 Mbps down and 1.5 Mbps up. The California Public Utilities Commission voted unanimously on Thursday to award the grant. Petrolia was initially identified as a candidate for a CASF subsidy by the Redwood Coast Broadband Consortium and is the first on a long list of high priority communities – as determined by the CPUC – to get actual project approval.… More
