rural broadband – Page 9 – Steve Blum's Blog

Frontier will walk the same bankruptcy path as PG&E, Bloomberg says

22 January 2020 by Steve Blum
casf, cpuc, frontiercommunications, rural broadband

The end is near for Frontier Communications, as we know it. According to a story in Bloomberg by Allison McNeely, Katherine Doherty and Sridhar Natarajan, California’s second biggest telephone company will file for bankruptcy in March. Frontier is carrying $17.5 billion in debt – its purchase of Verizon’s Californian wireline systems accounts for a significant chunk of that – and continues to lose broadband subscribers.

Despite being initially considered a saviour for rural Californians held hostage by Verizon’s decrepit copper phone lines – many communities lacked even slow 1990s DSL service – Frontier has proven to be unable to improve broadband service, outside of its affluent urban territories.… More

Don’t expect fiber or 5G in rural communities, FCC commissioners say

14 January 2020 by Steve Blum
5G, ces2020, fcc, fttp, rural broadband

Fiber and mobile 5G are fine for cities and suburbs, but rural communities can look forward to satellites and fixed wireless broadband service, according to the Federal Communication Commission’s republican majority. Speaking at CES in Las Vegas this week, FCC chair Ajit Pai, republican commissioners Michael O’Rielly and Brendan Carr, and their democratic colleague Geoffrey Starks were upbeat about 5G, fiber and, as Carr put it, the “new wave of innovation and services”.

But that wave will only break on urban and suburban beaches, at least via conventional broadband service.… More

California broadband subsidy program pumped $35 million into infrastructure in 2019

30 December 2019 by Steve Blum
casf, cpuc, public policy, rural broadband

The California Advanced Services Fund (CASF), the state’s primary broadband infrastructure subsidy program, closes out 2019 with thirteen projects funded – $35 million in grants total – and no backlog of stale applications. That success is a welcome change from past practice, when project proposals sometimes languished for years. Changes made to the program by the California Public Utilities Commission in 2018 paid off, producing a consistent and predictable process.

Congratulations are due both CPUC staff who implemented the changes and managed the program, and to commissioner Martha Guzman Aceves who led the effort to rewrite the rules and procedures.… More

Half a gigabuck offered for federal rural broadband subsidies, but California faces challenges

17 December 2019 by Steve Blum
farm bill, public policy, rural broadband, RUS, usda

Another round of broadband infrastructure subsidies is on the way from the federal agriculture department. A six week application window for the Rural Utilities Service’s (RUS) Reconnect program opens on 31 January 2020, with $512 million on the table.

It appears that the problems with the ReConnect program that shut California out of the first round of grants and loans earlier this year haven’t been fixed. On the face of it, the basic eligibility criteria are pretty simple…

90 percent of the proposed funded service area must not have sufficient access to broadband.

… More

USA Today says the slowest rural broadband is in California. The truth is even worse

2 December 2019 by Steve Blum
att, cpuc, frontiercommunications, rural broadband

USA Today fell for a click bait post about rural broadband speeds, but at least it was click bait that made a useful point about the growing gap between rural and urban service levels.

The top line, of the USA Today article and the post on an Internet-oriented aggregator website, is that Newcastle, along Interstate 80 in Placer County, has the slowest rural broadband service in the U.S., with an average download speed of 3.7 Mbps.… More

“Framework” for telecoms competition in rural telco territories considered by CPUC

14 November 2019 by Steve Blum
comcast, cpuc, ponderosa telephone, public policy, rlec, rural broadband

A rousing and thoroughly disingenuous defence of telecommunications competition doesn’t appear to be enough for Comcast to get permission right now to cherry pick affluent households in Ponderosa Telephone Company’s territory. A pair of California Public Utilities Commission administrative law judges (ALJs) said in a ruling last Friday that even though allowing competitive telecoms companies into the protected service areas of California’s small, rural telcos should be considered on a case by case basis, those decisions should be made within a common framework.… More

Frontier digs a deeper digital divide in rural California with taxpayers’ shovel

13 November 2019 by Steve Blum
casf, cpuc, frontiercommunications, public policy, rural broadband

A handful of rural communities in Lassen, Modoc and Kern counties will get their first taste of wireline broadband service from Frontier Communications if the California Public Utilities Commission approves infrastructure construction grants next month.

Unfortunately, it’s just a taste.

Frontier’s (and AT&T’s) strategy, as identified by a CPUC study earlier this year, of “disinvesting in infrastructure overall”, which is “most pronounced in the more rural and low-income service areas”, continues to be business as usual.… More

Ponderosa Telephone makes its case for blocking Comcast’s bid to cherrypick “high end” households

6 November 2019 by Steve Blum
comcast, cpuc, ponderosa telephone, rlec, rural broadband, voip

Ponderosa Telephone shot back at Comcast’s claims that no harm would come from its proposed cherry picking of affluent households in a new, high end development outside of Fresno. In comments filed with the California Public Utilities Commission last week, Ponderosa made its case for denying Comcast permission to offer telephone service in its territory. The company argued that if the CPUC wants to change its current policy of protecting small rural telcos from competition, it should do so on a top level basis, and not on case by case requests from a major telecoms company.… More

Large scale telco, cable and mobile service outages follow California power cuts

1 November 2019 by Steve Blum
fcc, pole attachment, psps, rural broadband, sb901

Hundreds of thousands of Californians lost their wireline broadband and phone service over the past week, as the state’s major electric utilities cut off power to millions of people in an attempt to prevent wildfires from breaking out. Mobile broadband and telephone subscribers were equally hard hit, with one county – Marin – losing more than half of its cell sites at one point.

The Federal Communications Commission has been tracking wireline and mobile service outages since last Friday, when the power cuts were hitting hard in Pacific Gas and Electric’s northern California territory, and public safety power shutoffs were beginning to bite in the southern California service areas of San Diego Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison.… More

FCC chair Pai makes the case for rural 5G and basic broadband infrastructure subsidies

23 October 2019 by Steve Blum
fcc, mwc2019, pai, public policy, rural broadband

Ajit Pai was at his geeky best yesterday as he played the big room at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Los Angeles. The Federal Communications Commission chair focused on topics he knows well – spectrum, network security, infrastructure deployment, service access – and mostly steered clear of weaknesses that have rightly drawn down a deluge of criticism on him: local government operations, common carrier/net neutrality policy and a taste for industry cheerleading.… More