Steve Blum's Blog
It’s time to close the door on the last round of applications for broadband construction subsidies from the California Advanced Services Fund. Of the 32 proposals submitted on 1 February 2013 – nearly a year and a half ago – 17 were funded for total of $48.6 million in grants and $127,000 in loans. The final two were approved by the CPUC in June – an FTTH project in Mono County and a fixed wireless system in Shasta County.… More
The most difficult and costly part of any wireline broadband infrastructure project is getting cable from point A to point B. There are two primary ways of doing it: stringing it on poles or running through buried conduit. Since the chances of getting permission to build a new pole route in California is only slightly better than the odds of getting approval to drill for oil in San Francisco Bay, your only independent alternative is to start digging, at the rate of $30 to $60 a foot or more.… More
Microsoft’s new CEO, Satya Nadella, has gotten it right. His 10 July 2014 email to Microsoft employees set out a clear path forward for the struggling giant and this week’s announced layoffs of 18,000 employees turned that vision from clear into ruthless. Which is the only way the company will survive as a major tech player in the 21st century.
Star legacy businesses – Windows OS, Office productivity software, Xbox – will survive, but primarily as stepping stones to cloud and mobile services, which are intended to reach customers regardless of whether they’re using Microsoft products…
… MoreAll of these apps will be explicitly engineered so anybody can find, try and then buy them in friction-free ways.
The Six Californias campaign had some good news and some bad news for its supporters. The good news is that it gathered 1.3 million signatures in its petition drive – half a million more than the number necessary to get it on the ballot. The bad news is that the proposal to split our state six ways won’t go to a vote in November. Instead, the initiative’s backers intentionally slipped the 26 June deadline for filing the petitions – the advice they gave to circulators was to mail signatures back by 7 July.… More
States would be free to ban municipal broadband projects, under under language inserted into a bill and approved by the U.S. house of representatives (h/t to the Baller-Herbst listserv for the heads up). Since bills that get passed by the republican-controlled house seem to have a rocky time in the democrat-controlled senate (and vice versa), it’s unlikely have any practical effect. But the idea is to pre-empt FCC chairman Tom Wheeler’s (likely empty) talk about stepping in between local governments that want to get into the muni broadband business and states that want to ban it.… More
Fast, focused, low cost and sustainable projects are the answer to the problem of how to extend modern Internet access into publicly supported housing. That’s the conclusion of a report prepared by California Public Utilities Commission staff that lays out recommendations for implementing assembly bill 1299 – approved last year – which spends money from the California Advanced Services Fund on broadband facilities and marketing programs in public housing.
The report carefully draws boundaries. Inside wiring and networking equipment would qualify for CASF subsidies, backhaul fiber installed out in the street gets squat.… More
The City of Benicia is working with Lit San Leandro LLC (LSL) to bring a gigabit-class fiber network to the Benicia Industrial Park and the adjacent Arsenal area. That’s the top line from a status report I gave to the Benicia City Council this evening.
Benicia issued a request for proposals last year, asking interested service providers to submit ideas for delivering industrial and commercial-grade broadband service. Among the resources the City put on the table was $750,000.… More
The FCC today released the full details on the rural broadband experiments approved by the commission on Friday. Of legal necessity, the program is limited to regulated telephone companies, although independent ISPs can either partner with one or go through the process to become one.
Eligibility is pretty much what was expected, with one new twist. The money can only be given to “Eligible Telecommunications Carriers” (ETCs) and projects have to include voice service and meet all the rules that pertain to it.… More
Fierce Online Video ran a great article by Samantha Bookman comparing a cheerleading editorial in the Wall Street Journal by FCC chairman Tom Wheeler with a much more pessimistic view of future that came from a broad canvassing of Internet experts by Pew Research. According to the article, Wheeler, a former lead lobbyist for both the mobile phone and cable television industries, wrote…
… More“In the not-too-distant future, wireless communications will connect not just everyone, but everything.
GE is floating a prototype sensor suite for cookware that will measure the caloric and, eventually, nutritional values of microwave meals. It’s an interesting concept. But it’s still a lab concept. It does point to two things, though.
First, consumer goods manufacturers are looking at ways to combine sensors, connectivity and powerful server-side processing to deliver rapid, granular data to people on a routine basis. Everything around us is measurable, and creating devices that can automatically gather that data and send it on for processing – make it meaningful – is rapidly becoming commonplace.… More