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Good policy and creative funding drive broadband development

3 September 2016 by Steve Blum
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I gave a presentation on connected cities and broadband planning at the American Planning Association’s California chapter’s conference in Oakland. I was on a panel with Tom Liao from the City of San Leandro, Peter James from the City of Santa Monica and Joanna Jansen, associate principal at Placeworks.

After a quick overview of what broadband really entails – digging and rigging to put it simply – I talked about tools and initiatives that city and county planners can use to promote infrastructure development.… More

California dig once broadband conduit bill heard and held

2 August 2016 by Steve Blum
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Wasn’t Caltrans supposed to tell us about this?

The California legislature returned from its summer break yesterday, and immediately got to work on broadband-related issues. The big one on the table yesterday was assembly bill 1549.

Testifying in front of the senate appropriations committee, the bill’s author, assemblyman Jim Wood (D – Healdsburg) said that Caltrans isn’t following an executive order by then governor Arnold Schwarzenegger directing it to cooperate with broadband development efforts, and was lackadaisical about the one open trench pilot program that it ran…

AB 1549 puts in statute many of the requirements of the executive order from 2006.

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Hard deadline for money beats soft promise of broadband investment

19 July 2016 by Steve Blum
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No. You show yours first.

By a four to one vote, the California Public Utilities Commission approved a $1.5 million grant to build a fiber to the home project in Nicasio, a wealthy community in western Marin County. As has become common, commission president Michael Picker cast the only no vote. The grant from the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) covers 60% of construction costs; the remaining 40% will be raised locally…

The required matching funds plus costs of offering will be obtained by a notes offering, which will be registered with the California Department of Business Oversight under the Securities & Exchange Commission’s standardized process, the Small Company Offering Registration (SCOR) process.

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Free access to public streets is a gift with strings, not AT&T's monopoly right

18 July 2016 by Steve Blum
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The streets of San Francisco already take a beating.

AT&T wants to decide where and how competitors install fiber in conduit, manholes and handholes that it owns. That’s the gist of its response to a complaint filed by Webpass with the California Public Utilities Commission.

California law requires any utility – telecoms or electric – that installs poles and conduit in the public right of way to share those facilities with any qualified competitor. Utilities can use this public property for free, but that gift comes with strings attached.… More

Sprint relying on word games to reengineer its cellular network

15 July 2016 by Steve Blum
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Click for the big, ugly picture.

Mobilitie, a mobile telecoms infrastructure company, was hired by Sprint to install 70,000 new wireless sites as it tries to revamp its network and business. Fair enough. But then Mobilitie got cute when it started filing the necessary permit applications.

First, it adopted legal aliases – California Utility Pole Authority and California Transmission Network, LLC, for example – that have a vaguely official ring to them, and seem confusingly similar to the names of legitimate joint utility pole authority groups and electricity transmission organisations.… More

Scraping up California legislature's telecoms road kill

12 July 2016 by Steve Blum
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The big impact telecoms legislation proposed so far in Sacramento this year is dead, the victim of opposition and inattention. That’s not to belittle the handful of telecoms bills awaiting action in August, but nothing that’s on the table right now would have the sweeping impact of some of the ones that didn’t make it.

Top of list was assembly bill 2395, a measure custom written by AT&T and carried by Evan Low, an accomodating assemblyman from Silicon Valley.… More

Atherton FTTH plan has seed money and a quick timeline

11 July 2016 by Steve Blum
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Click for the big picture.

An Atherton venture capitalist put $500,000 into a fiber to the home project there. According to papers filed with the California Public Utilities Commission, Michael Farmwald made the investment in Atherton Fiber LLC, via his Skymoon Ventures Management Company, to get the ball rolling…

To finance the project, Atherton Fiber plans to raise approximately $3 million via a traditional investment mechanism and other interested Atherton residents. The remaining funds would be raised by selling interested property owners a “set” of bundled fibers to their home that they would own directly.

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California broadband policy bills await action in August

8 July 2016 by Steve Blum
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Right after summer break.

Other than the yet-to-be-defined regulatory reform package aimed at overhauling the California Public Utilities Commission, only a handful of telecoms-related bills will remain on the table when the California legislature returns from its month long summer break in August.

Assembly bill 2570 would make it harder for people receiving lifeline telephone subsidies to switch plans by setting a two month waiting period and would require the CPUC to reimburse phone companies relatively quickly or pay penalties.… More

Effort to shed more light on the CPUC moves into the dark

6 July 2016 by Steve Blum
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Nightfall.

The dust has settled in Sacramento and lawmakers are out of town on their regular summer break. But the details of changes proposed for telecommunications policy are still hazy.

The legislative package that will determine how telecoms companies and services, and other utilities, are regulated (or not) in California is still largely unwritten. That’s the plan agreed with the governor to change the way the California Public Utilities Commission does business. At this point, it looks like it will comprise five bills, although as the process grinds through that number could shift up or down:

  • Senate bill 215, by Mark Leno (D – San Francisco), would tighten restrictions on private conversations and other ex parte communications between CPUC commissioners and interested parties while some proceedings are under way.
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CPUC reforms bump ahead, but details are still lacking

30 June 2016 by Steve Blum
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The assembly utilities and commerce committee has approved two senate bills – SB 215 and SB 512 – that are key elements of a proposed package of California Public Utilities Commission reforms, although the details are yet to be worked out. One of the standard practices of the California legislature is for amendments to bills to be worked out behind closed doors after committee members vote to approve them. And that was the explicit understanding yesterday, which was agreed on largely party line votes – democrats tending to favor, republicans not.… More