Month: May 2014

Broadcasters descending into madness, says CEA president

23 May 2014 by Steve Blum
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Gary Shapiro, the president of the Consumer Electronics Association, has published a blistering attack on U.S. broadcasters, characterising their rear-guard opposition to new technology as the madness and nonsense of Alice’s Wonderland and urging congress to yank the licenses of television stations that act against the public interest. Not just in what they put on the air, but also their business practices. Shapiro points to a decision by CBS executives to suppress a news story that didn’t fall in line with their business goals…

Last year, CBS leadership reversed a decision by 40 CNET editors who voted the DISH Hopper Sling the best innovation at the 2013 International CES®.

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Major ISPs are a major consumer fail

22 May 2014 by Steve Blum
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Outside of arms reach of desire.

Big Internet service providers have the worst customer satisfaction rating of any of the 43 industries rated by American Customer Satisfaction Index in the past year, and Time-Warner is rock bottom of the bunch. Comcast and Charter aren’t much better.

A three-way merger of the bottom feeders is likely to lead to less customer satisfaction, not more…

“Comcast and Time Warner assert their proposed merger will not reduce competition because there is little overlap in their service territories,” says David VanAmburg, ACSI Director.

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Silicon Valley cities offer few concessions for Google Fiber

21 May 2014 by Steve Blum
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Five Silicon Valley cities made Google’s list of 34 fiber candidates, the only cities in California to do so. The deadline to complete the Google Fiber checklist was 1 May 2014. Each city responded, or not, in its own way.

Mountain View: Google’s home town likes the idea of fiber, but says it doesn’t review proposed construction plans as quickly or comprehensively as the company wants. Its solution is to hire more staff at Google’s expense.… More

Smart decision 15 years ago brings $40 FTTH to Brentwood now

20 May 2014 by Steve Blum
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The biggest independent Internet service provider in northern California is building a fiber-to-the-home (and business) system in Brentwood. The eastern Contra Costa County city gave Sonic.net permission to use more than a hundred miles of conduit…

In 1999 the City implemented a requirement that all new development in the City be constructed with conduit to the home/business via the joint trench. The conduits were then dedicated to the City for future use. The City now has approximately 120–150 miles of City owned conduit reaching over 8,000 homes in addition to all commercial areas constructed over the past 15 years.

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DirecTv's installer network is hidden gem in AT&T deal

19 May 2014 by Steve Blum
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AT&T intends to expand its high speed broadband footprint with wireless service, a goal that’ll be much easier to achieve if its acquisition of DirecTv goes through. There’s a lot of talk about the television side of the deal – and rightly so – but wireless broadband is a core element too, according to AT&T’s announcement…

AT&T will use the merger synergies to expand its plans to build and enhance high-speed broadband service to 15 million customer locations, mostly in rural areas where AT&T does not provide high-speed broadband service today, utilizing a combination of technologies including fiber to the premises and fixed wireless local loop capabilities.

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Bay Area Council expert roundtable finds common ground on broadband challenges

18 May 2014 by Steve Blum
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A wide ranging conversation on Californian broadband development policy last week amongst a diverse collection of policy makers, academics, consultants and Internet businesses ended with broad, if not unconditional, agreement that making progress requires meeting four major challenges.

The first is extending the diversity and capacity of network connections that are clustered in the San Francisco Bay Area, coastal Los Angeles and, to a lesser extent, San Diego and Sacramento into smaller inland metro areas and rural communities.… More

Locking down home automation means locking out success

The best thing to do if you’re developing a home automation product is to allow it to be controlled by someone else, Ryo Koyama, CEO of Weaved, told Parks Associates’ San Francisco Connections conference this week. Hardware designers need to harness the brain power of app developers. “Let them define the killer app that sells your product”, he said.

Koyama was speaking on behalf of Qualcomm and its AllJoyn platform, which is an attempt to create a common interoperability protocol for the Internet of Things.… More

FCC chair offers guaranteed income to lobbyists and lawyers

16 May 2014 by Steve Blum
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The 99 page dissertation on Internet regulation released by the FCC yesterday only contains 2 pages of actual draft rules, which rely almost entirely on what the FCC considers reasonable on any given day. For example…

A person engaged in the provision of fixed broadband Internet access service…shall not engage in commercially unreasonable practices. Reasonable network management shall not constitute a commercially unreasonable practice.

Actually, that’s not an example. That’s the sum total of chairman Tom Wheeler’s proposed net neutrality rule.… More

FCC opens public debate on a vague draft of Internet rules

15 May 2014 by Steve Blum
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Wheeler lays out his position.

The FCC voted 3–2 along party lines today to start the formal debate on whether and how Internet access and traffic should be regulated. Looked at another way, though, the deck is pre-stacked in so far as the discussion starts with a proposed set of poorly defined regulations that would have the FCC managing the Internet on a day to day basis.

That doesn’t mean the outcome is predetermined. The broad range of questions the FCC is asking – including whether consumer Internet access or interconnection and traffic handling for content providers should be regulated as a traditional common carrier utility – leaves the door open to substantial changes before anything is finalised.… More

Comcast keeps pay-per-byte consumer metering option open

14 May 2014 by Steve Blum
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Pay on the way in and pay on the way out.

Comcast’s chief staff lobbyist – executive vice president David Cohen – spoke at an investment conference today, covering a wide range of topics, including an update on usage-based pricing experiments in a handful of markets. He said that Comcast is looking for a way to bill subscribers for monthly downloads over a certain amount, without making them mad or driving them to competitors.… More