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Tennessee says FCC can't step on states' authority over cities

24 September 2015 by Steve Blum
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Rock solid sovereignty.

The State of Tennessee has offered its basis for challenging the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to preempt state restrictions on local broadband initiatives, making its case in a brief filed with a federal appeals court in Cincinnati.

Tennessee’s top line argument is that congress has no authority under the U.S. constitution to tell states how to manage or delegate authority to subordinate units such as cities and counties. On its own, that probably won’t fly – states have broad but not unlimited discretion.… More

Frontier's middle mile will solve some of Verizon's last mile woes, says CFO

23 September 2015 by Steve Blum
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It looked like this in 2011. Click for a bigger view.

Connecting Frontier Communication’s existing national fiber backbone to the Californian telephone systems it plans to buy from Verizon might be enough to greatly improve speeds. That’s what John Jureller, Frontier’s chief financial officer, told an investment conference last week. According to a story by Sean Buckley in FierceTelecom, Jureller said…

“What we have found as we have gotten deeper and deeper into our integration, it has got a well enabled network backbone that might have been built out with DSL at one point with technology that might have been two generations ago,” Jureller said.

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Broadband projects should compete for more federal money, report recommends

22 September 2015 by Steve Blum
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Broadband gets a swing at it too.

There’s not a lot new in the recommendations released yesterday by the federal Broadband Opportunity Council, an interagency talking shop launched earlier this year as part of U.S. president Barack Obama’s community broadband initiative. But it is useful source for information about existing federal broadband programs and it at least gets some commitments, and even a few deadlines, down on paper.

The big question, of course, is where’s the money?… More

Suddenlink buyout could mean more fiber, less service

21 September 2015 by Steve Blum
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Would you like pommes frites with that?

Keep prices U.S. high and expenses European low. That’s the plan that Altice has for Suddenlink and Cablevision, if its allowed to buy the two broadband companies. At a New York conference last week, Altice chairman Patrick Drahi said he likes Cablevision’s average monthly revenue per subscriber – $159 – but not its cost structure, which includes hundreds of executives making more than $300,000 a year and ageing infrastructure that’s costly to maintain.… More

Comcast buys process error plea bargain for $33 million

20 September 2015 by Steve Blum
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A customer care associate will be right with you.

About 75,000 telephone service customers who paid Comcast extra to keep their phone numbers unlisted and out of the hands of telemarketers and fraudsters did so in vain between 2010 and 2012. Via a convoluted process that involved third party licensing and directory companies, as well as its own in-house listing service, Comcast sold their information and published it online. According to a set of stipulated facts agreed by Comcast, the California Public Utilities Commission and the California Attorney General’s office…

Comcast has explained that, in connection with a system-wide account number change in California that occurred in October and December 2009, a significant portion of those California customers who elected non-published status prior to December 2009 were mistakenly not flagged as “non-published” and thus were made available for publishing in July 2010 via Neustar.

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Mega-banks prepare to take bitcoin tech mainstream

19 September 2015 by Steve Blum
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The basic blockchain technology that underpins bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies could find its way into the basic infrastructure of the global financial system. A group of nine of the world’s biggest banks is taking the first steps towards adopting the blockchain concept, initially as a way of recording transactions. According to a story on Reuters, the group has engaged a financial technology company, R3, to develop a common blockchain-based platform…

[R3’s CEO David ] Rutter said the initial focus would be to agree on an underlying architecture, but it had not yet been decided whether that would be underpinned by bitcoin’s blockchain or another one, such as one being built by Ethereum, which offers more features than the original bitcoin technology.

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U.S. cable industry's rush to consolidate continues

18 September 2015 by Steve Blum
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How the game is played.

Altice SA announced an agreement to buy Cablevision for $17.7 billion and assumption of existing debt yesterday. That follows Altice’s ongoing bid to buy a controlling stake in Suddenlink. If both deals are approved and Charter is allowed to take over Time Warner and Bright House, then Altice would become the fourth largest cable company in the U.S., and the seventh largest pay TV company overall, with about 4 million subscribers.… More

AT&T won't even explore most of California and the West

17 September 2015 by Steve Blum
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Hooray, hooray, hooray!

AT&T’s GigaWeasel is slithering to more cities in the eastern half of the U.S., but it’s ignoring nearly all of the states in the Pacific and Mountain time zones (h/t to Fred Pilot at the Eldo Telecom blog for the pointer). A company blog post hypes the addition of “parts of…Jacksonville, St. Louis and San Antonio” to the list of markets where its so-called GigaPower service is available, but also adds the standard disclaimer that it’s up to 1 gigabit per second.… More

Legislators vote for fewer chats between CPUC and utilities

16 September 2015 by Steve Blum
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One drink too many.

Several changes to the way the California Public Utilities Commission operates are on Governor Brown’s desk. The California legislature passed several bills that would tighten the rules for who commissioners can talk to while proceedings are underway – formally known as ex parte communications – require more public disclosure and make other administrative changes.

The major changes are in senate bill 660, authored by Ben Hueso (D – Chula Vista) and Mark Leno (D – San Francisco).… More

Feds and Texas say yes to Frontier purchase of Verizon system

15 September 2015 by Steve Blum
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Fiber and copper, but no strings.

Frontier Communications’ purchase of Verizon’s wireline telephone systems – copper and fiber – in California, Texas and Florida can go ahead, with no particular conditions attached, according to the Federal Communications Commission. On the whole, the public will benefit from the purchase because Frontier will improve landline broadband service and Verizon won’t, according to the FCC’s order approving the deal…

We conclude that Frontier is more likely to accelerate broadband service in the transaction market areas than Verizon would be absent the transaction, and that this potential for acceleration represents a tangible public interest benefit.

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