public policy

Thousands of broadband projects in California highways every year, but no one's keeping track

13 January 2016 by Steve Blum
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A push to get Caltrans – the California department of transportation – to play nice with broadband companies and publish information about where it has conduit available is moving forward in Sacramento. The assembly transportation committee voted unanimously on Monday to send assembly bill 1549, authored by assemblyman Jim Wood (D – Healdsburg), onward toward a full floor vote. That has to happen by the end of the month, in order to make legislative deadlines.… More

New York orders Charter to upgrade analog to digital

12 January 2016 by Steve Blum
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The New York state public service commission approved Charter Communications’ purchase of Time Warner cable systems, but added a list of conditions that included digital upgrades and speed increases. According to the decision, Charter…

…must convert their existing New York footprint to an all-digital network (including upgrading the Columbia County Charter cable systems to enable broadband communications) capable of delivering faster broadband speeds. The Petitioners will be required to offer all customers broadband speeds of up to 100 Mbps by the end of 2018 and 300 Mbps by the end of 2019.

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New effort to unlock Caltrans' trove of broadband assets

11 January 2016 by Steve Blum
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Don’t even think of it.

There’s a huge difference in time and cost between building a fiber optic network from scratch – digging trenches and installing new conduit – and creating one using existing resources. That’s how Lit San Leandro and the City of Watsonville’s municipal dark fiber network came to be. It’s doable when cities like San Leandro or Watsonville track conduit, and make that information available to the public.

Get outside of a city, though, and it’s a completely different world.… More

Snowden tells CES crowd fighting encryption is the wrong fight

8 January 2016 by Steve Blum
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“I’ve read the emails of terrorists, I know what they’re doing, I know how they work”, Edward Snowden told a rapt audience in a CES booth yesterday. “Terrorists are already using encryption. Everybody in the world is using encryption”.

He was being interviewed by serial entrepreneur Peter Diamondus – X-Prize, Singularity and, yesterday, Human Longevity, Inc. – via a BeamPro telepresence robot made by Palo Alto-based Suitabletech. It was a promotionally convenient necessity since Snowden is a fugitive, living in exile in Russia after blowing the whistle on the National Security Agency’s massive data trawling operation.… More

Regulators need to accept the new future of work

7 January 2016 by Steve Blum
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Twentieth century government and twenty-first century entrepreneurship do not mix well. That was the top line consensus at a CES panel discussion this afternoon. Moderated by Julie Samuels from Engine, a tech policy advocacy group, it included two company reps – Laurent Crenshaw from Yelp and Marco Zappacosta from Thumbtack – and Arun Sundararajan, a business professor at New York University.

“Taxes are not the issue, small businesses care much more about regulation”, Zappacosta said. As businesses expand, so does the regulatory burden.… More

Cable and telco lobbyists block broadband infrastructure subsidies in California

7 January 2016 by Steve Blum
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Money walks when bullshit talks.

A plan to add more money to the main fund used to subsidise broadband infrastructure in California – the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) – is stalled, likely fatally. Assembly bill 238 would also have raised the minimum speed for acceptable service to 25 Mbps down/3 Mbps up, once areas with service that doesn’t even meet the current 6 Mbps down/1.5 Mbps up have a shot at upgrading and service at that level is available to 98% of Californian homes.… More

Higher speeds and more money for Californian broadband infrastructure subsidies proposed

6 January 2016 by Steve Blum
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Adding money to the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) for broadband infrastructure projects and raising the minimum acceptable speed for Californians to 25 Mbps down/3Mbps up is back on the table in Sacramento.

Assembly bill 238, authored by assemblyman Mark Stone (D – Santa Cruz), would do that. It was introduced last year, but put on hold, largely because of opposition from rural interests. The fear was that raising the minimum speed would take money from rural areas – many of which don’t have broadband service available at the current minimum 6 Mbps down/1.5 Mbps – and give it to urban and suburban communities where available service is merely below average, as opposed to being completely substandard.… More

Chinese policy builds parallel demand for tech, broadband

5 January 2016 by Steve Blum
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4K televisions and home automation, two product categories that are particularly tied to broadband demand, grew significantly in 2015 and the trend is expected to continue into 2016, according to market research presented yesterday at CES in Las Vegas, by the show’s organiser, the newly rechristened Consumer Technology Association.

Home automation accounted for about 9 million units. The $1.2 billion in revenue that generated is an 18% bump over 2014.

On the other hand, CTA researcher Steve Koenig said it looks like 13 million 4K sets sold world wide – outside of China – in 2015.… More

Race targets Sonoma County for FTTH project

2 January 2016 by Steve Blum
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If you head west from Santa Rosa on State Route 12, and take the fork at Occidental Road, about halfway to the Pacific Ocean you’ll come to the town of Occidental. Residents there get broadband service from AT&T and Comcast, but if you go a little further west, the lines end. Race Telecommunications wants to build out a fiber to the home system there, and is asking the California Public Utilities Commission for a $9.1 million grant from the California Advanced Services Fund to do it.… More

Five turning points for broadband policy battles in 2016

31 December 2015 by Steve Blum
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Five policy decisions will drive broadband service in California, for good or ill, in 2016. Two will come at the federal level, two from the California Public Utilities Commission and one from the state legislature. There are more of course – encryption, privacy and implementation of California’s new wireless site shot clock are examples – but these are the ones I’ll be closely following as the new year begins:

  • Assembly bill 238. Introduced by Santa Cruz assemblyman Mark Stone early in 2015, it attempts to raise the minimum Californian broadband standard to 25 Mbps down/3 Mbps up for subsidy purposes.
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