public policy

CPUC approves broadband priorities developed by Central Coast Broadband Consortium

5 July 2014 by Steve Blum
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Click for the big maps.


Twelve central coast communities have been designated as priority areas for broadband infrastructure development by the California Public Utilities Commission. In a unanimous vote on Thursday, 26 June 2014, commissioners endorsed the list presented in March by the Central Coast Broadband Consortium, following a month-long workshop on Civinomics.com.
The Pleasure Point/Twin Lakes neighborhood down coast from the City of Santa Cruz, the Brookdale area in the mountains and the town of Soquel made the list, along with Aromas, two rural areas outside of Hollister and six Salinas Valley communities: Castroville, Chualar, Gonzales, Soledad, Greenfield and King City.… More

Six Californias for the price of one is worth talking about

4 July 2014 by Steve Blum
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Click to see the big map and silly names.


U.S. Independence Day seems a fitting time to consider Californian independence, of a sort. An initiative to split California into six new states is gathering signatures, aiming for a November vote. It declares California to be “ungovernable” and sets out a process for asking the U.S. congress to chop the state up into more tractable bits.
A considerable sentimental attachment to the Golden State aside, I like living in a state that’s one of the ten largest economies in the world: it’s a useful counterweight to also being a federal unit of the biggest economy.… More

Broadband policy on hold for lawmaker's summer vacation

3 July 2014 by Steve Blum
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Californian legislators are off for the next month, heading out of Sacramento this afternoon just ahead of the July 4th holiday and not scheduled to return until early August. At which point, they’ll have a less than month to act on the stack of bills in front of them, which includes two that carry significant implications for public broadband financing in California.

Assembly bill 2272 would about double the cost of broadband projects subsidised by the California Advanced Services Fund, by imposing union pay and work rules, regardless of who is doing the construction.… More

CPUC endorses long California broadband infrastructure priority list

1 July 2014 by Steve Blum
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Click for the full list.


Included in last week’s reboot of the California Advanced Services Fund’s broadband infrastructure subsidy program was a long priority list of places where broadband infrastructure is considered sub-standard by local communities. It’s the result of several months of work by regional broadband consortia throughout the state, most of whom presented their findings at a statewide broadband summit in Sacramento in March.
By approving the list – along with a new schedule and process for applying for CASF grants and loans – the California Public Utilities Commission put both incumbent cable and telephone companies and would-be competitors on notice that these dark spots on the California broadband map are ready to be filled.… More

Utopia moves ahead on FTTH bailout plan, but the monthly tax bill could go higher

30 June 2014 by Steve Blum
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A flat monthly fee of $18 to $20 – or, now, perhaps more – to rescue the failing Utopia municipal fiber to the home system in Utah got mixed reviews from the city councils involved, but even so the project’s board of directors voted today to move ahead with negotiating a bailout plan put forward by Australia’s Macquarie Capital Group.

The system encompasses 11 cities in the Salt Lake area (but not Provo, where Google rescued an independent muni FTTH system or Salt Lake City itself).… More

Monopoly broadband network problems are common, solutions are not

Better markets attract better supply. Everywhere.

It’s not just best practices for broadband development policy that’s common to countries and communities, regardless of location or circumstance. Lack of competition at the network level is as big a barrier in South Africa as it is in California.

In South Africa the biggest gap in the national broadband infrastructure is currently in the access network illustrated by the fact that 86% of the population is within 10km from a fibre access point.

… More

If new tech looks like old tech, old rules apply says supreme court

28 June 2014 by Steve Blum
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Today’s turn-of-the-knob logic might have made VCRs contraband 30 years ago.

Functionality, not technology, should guide how pre-Internet laws are applied in cyberspace. That’s the essential logic behind a U.S. supreme court ruling on Wednesday, that said that the same copyright rules that apply to cable TV systems also apply to Aereo, an online system for accessing broadcast television signals.

Aereo argued that since viewers were individually activating a tiny receiver and antenna, and selecting which channel to watch, it was more like a VCR than a cable TV system, which streams multiple channels continuously.… More

Higher costs for subsidised broadband projects in California will come out of rural ISP pockets

27 June 2014 by Steve Blum
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Unfinished business.

It seems the only question left to answer about whether union pay scales and work rules will be applied to projects subsidised by the California Advanced Services Fund is where the money will come from. Following Wednesday’s hearing in the senate labor and industrial relations committee, it seems all but certain that the California legislature will approve assembly bill 2272, which would unequivocally impose so-called prevailing wage requirements on CASF infrastructure projects.

On a 4 to 1 party line vote, the committee approved the bill (with some clean up language), but didn’t include an amendment requested by lobbyists representing rural telecoms companies that would give them a statutory basis for asking the California Public Utilities Commission to cover the difference for existing projects.… More

CPUC not bugged by incumbent advantages, approve new broadband subsidy rules

26 June 2014 by Steve Blum
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Whether you like the rules or not – and for what it’s worth I don’t – it’s game on for the next round of broadband infrastructure construction subsidies from the California Advanced Services Fund. In a unanimous vote this morning, the California Public Utilities Commission approved new rules and a timeline for applying for CASF grants and loans.

Existing Internet service providers that offer substandard service (6 Mbps down/1.5 Mbps up, per the CPUC) are first in line: they can block potential competitors from getting CASF funding in their service areas.… More

Californian broadband subsidy rules go from bad to worse

25 June 2014 by Steve Blum
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A revised set of proposed new rules for getting broadband construction subsidies from the California Advanced Services Fund has been posted. It’s great news for incumbent telephone and cable companies, but it makes it harder – maybe impossible – for independent competitors to get in the game.

The first draft was floated last month, and generated a firestorm of comments, followed by counter-arguments, from incumbent service providers, regional broadband consortia and others. The result is a second draft that gives incumbents pretty much everything they wanted…

  • Existing service providers would have until 1 November 2014 (instead of 26 September) to make a “commitment” to upgrade substandard service in a given area.
… More