sb649

Big telecom will see familiar, friendly faces at California capitol in 2019

28 December 2018 by Steve Blum
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California capitol horses 625

California broadband policy will be in the same legislative hands in 2019. Senate and assembly leaders announced committee assignments for the new term, and the chairs of the committees that dealt with major telecoms issues over the past couple of years remain the same.

Miguel Santiago (D – Los Angeles) retained his seat as chair of the assembly communications and conveyances committee. He didn’t make it into the top ranks – no leadership post or a seat on the powerful rules, appropriations or budget committees.… More

Whether net neutrality friend or foe, California lawmakers win landslide election victories

8 November 2018 by Steve Blum
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The major broadband players in the California legislature will be back in Sacramento when the new session begins in December.

The one exception is senator Kevin de Leon (D – Los Angeles). He ran out of time on California term limits and challenged U.S. senator Diane Feinstein. He’ll be unemployed at the end of the month, having lost to Feinstein, 46% to 54%. De Leon introduced one of two network neutrality bills that moved through the legislature this year, senate bill 460.… More

Market competition pushes down San Jose light pole lease rates

7 May 2018 by Steve Blum
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The City of San Jose will finalise a light pole lease agreement with AT&T. The San Jose city council approved a set of deal points on a nine to one vote last week. AT&T will pay $1,500 per year each to attach small cell equipment to city-owned light poles, plus pay $1,850,000 toward fees and a permit streamlining program.

That’s less than half of what San Jose was trying to charge.

“We have a fast changing landscape”, San Jose mayor Sam Liccardo said.… More

San Jose cuts $1,500-plus light pole lease deal with AT&T

30 April 2018 by Steve Blum
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The City of San Jose and AT&T have a new agreement to put “small cells on city-owned assets in the public right of way”. A formal contract is still to be negotiated, but assuming the San Jose city council signs off on the deal points, AT&T will install “approximately” 170 small cell sites to upgrade mobile broadband coverage on city-owned light poles and other vertical infrastructure.

AT&T will pay the city an annual lease rate of $1,500 per small cell site, plus $1,850,000 to process the immediately necessary paper work and streamline future requests.… More

Cities get better deals from wireless companies in a free market

27 April 2018 by Steve Blum
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One of the working groups spun off by the Federal Communications Commission’s broadband deployment advisory committee (BDAC) – an industry dominated body – looked at how much it costs telecoms companies to attach wires and wireless gear to poles. The results of that study are here. It was based on information that participants voluntarily submitted – the study kindly describes it as a “convenience sample” – so there’s a limit to its reliability. Even so it paints an interesting picture.… More

Streetlight gifts to mobile carriers spread to other states

15 April 2018 by Steve Blum
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California is not the only state where lobbyists for mobile carriers and other big, incumbent cable and telephone companies are giving stacks of cash offering somber advice to state legislators and getting huge gifts of public property in return. According to a couple of articles by Timothy Clark in Route Fifty, several other states are preempting local ownership of vertical infrastructure and municipal control of public right of ways.

In some states, the giveaway is even more generous than the California’s gift to telecoms lobbyists last year, senate bill 649.… More

Truth is the first casualty of small cell deployments

5 March 2018 by Steve Blum
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Mobile broadband companies are increasingly getting it when it comes to aesthetics, but pledges made on the front end aren’t always fulfilled by construction and operations staff or backed up by management. Wireless lobbyists and public relations people understand that they need to speak the right words to massage away concerns about how small cell installations will look as they proliferate along urban and suburban streets. But those oh-so-sincere promises, accompanied by beautifully rendered conceptual drawings, don’t always survive the descent into contract language, let alone appear on poles.… More

Internet, telecoms legislation introduced in Sacramento, but not all cards are on the table

19 February 2018 by Steve Blum
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A handful of substantive telecoms and Internet services bills and a stack of placeholders were introduced in the California legislature by last Friday. That was deadline for new bills, although it’s largely a formality – any of the placeholders (or the substantive bills) can get gutted, amended and turned into anything at all, right up to the end of the session in August.

Assemblyman Ed Chau (D – Monterey Park) is taking another run at Internet privacy, although in a more limited way than last year.… More

Cash for 2018 campaigns drives broadband decisions in Sacramento

1 January 2018 by Steve Blum
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California lawmakers will tackle broadband issues in the coming year, but not ones that directly address the needs of businesses and consumers, or economic development goals of unserved communities. The hottest items will be reboots of two failed bills near and dear to the hearts of big telecoms companies.

Senate bill 649 was vetoed by governor Jerry Brown last October. It would have given mobile carriers, as well as telephone and cable companies, unlimited access to city and county-owned light poles, traffic signals and other vertical infrastructure at a token rental rate, far below market value.… More

Verizon's Sacramento 5G deal is about R&D and politics now, mobile service later

28 December 2017 by Steve Blum
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The City of Sacramento’s 5G deployment deal with Verizon will expand the broadband service choices consumers have by a little bit, and pave the way for faster mobile service in the future.

The deal allows Verizon to use city assets to install what will initially be an experimental 5G network that’ll provide fixed service, presumably into homes and businesses, in competition with AT&T and Comcast. But it’s immediate value is as a development project, with technical and political benefits.… More