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If we dumb down standards, more people will have advanced broadband, says FCC

11 August 2017 by Steve Blum
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The Federal Communications Commission is floating the idea of treating fixed and mobile broadband service as equivalents when it assesses whether or not people in the U.S. have access to “advanced telecommunications services. It’s an annual enquiry, and in 2015 it produced the useful benchmark of 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload speeds as the minimum threshold for any given broadband service to be reckoned as advanced.

For now, the FCC is just asking for public comments on the concept, although given the weight afforded to lobbyists for AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Charter and other major telecoms companies, don’t be surprised if comments from some members of the public are deemed, um, more equal than others.… More

Big telecoms mergers could test Trump's anti-trust chops

10 August 2017 by Steve Blum
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There’s a lot of sniffing around telecoms companies in these dog days of summer. Softbank, Japanese tech investment giant which owns Sprint, is reported to be sniffing around T-Mobile, with a merger in mind. If it happened – if regulators allow it to happen – it would take the U.S. mobile telecom sector down to three companies, from the current four.

Charter Communications is getting a lot of attention, too. Softbank first tried to engineer a merger, and when that failed began talking about buying the company outright.… More

No express lane offered for CenturyLink, Level 3 review at CPUC

9 August 2017 by Steve Blum
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“I’m hoping there’s something more that the parties can do to prepare for a decision at a later date”, Regina DeAngelis, an administrative law judge with the California Public Utilities Commission, told lawyers for CenturyLink, Level 3 and a handful of organisations that have involved themselves in the regulatory review of the two companies’ plan to combine into one. She presided over yesterday’s pre-hearing conference at the CPUC’s San Francisco headquarters – the opening event of what could be an enquiry lasting several months.… More

CenturyLink will kill telecoms competition if it buys Level 3, VoIP company says

8 August 2017 by Steve Blum
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CenturyLink plans to apply its closed, monopoly-centric business model to wholesale services that Level 3 Communications now sells on the open market, if the two companies are allowed to combine. That’s the gist of an objection filed yesterday to CenturyLink’s planned purchase of Level 3 by a VoIP service provider, Telnyx LLC.

VoIP providers like Telnyx buy wholesale connectivity services that allow subscribers to make calls to the rest of the world via the public switched telephone network (PSTN).… More

CenturyLink puts the joint back into its venture with Level 3

7 August 2017 by Steve Blum
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Someone at CenturyLink – or maybe Level 3 Communications – finally inhaled deeply, exhaled fully and chanted California’s national mantra: go with the flow, go with the flow. In its latest filing with the California Public Utilities Commission, CenturyLink finally admitted that the September deadline for closing its deal to buy Level 3 that it’s been puffing and huffing about, I’m sorry, huffing and puffing about isn’t a deadline at all.

Since the purchase agreement was announced last October, CenturyLink has been trying to jam it through the necessary regulatory reviews by wailing about a phoney, self-imposed deadline and falsely claiming that the deal won’t hurt competition in what passes for a broadband market in California.… More

Bitcoin's disruption is the healthy and rewarding result of a free market

6 August 2017 by Steve Blum
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Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are different from other software and standards-based platforms. There are no governing authorities or dominant players or established industry groups. That’s deliberate. The whole point is to create a way of exchanging value that’s not centrally regulated by governments or private organisations. But that means a super-majority of the millions of individual users have to accept and adopt software updates, or else there’s the risk that Bitcoin will splinter into different versions with different values.… More

Cryptocurrencies' crowd source incentives prevent collapse into one crowd

5 August 2017 by Steve Blum
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The disruption in cryptocurrency markets this week, when Bitcoin sorta split into two, was the result of disagreements between different interests about the technology and crowd-sourced methods used to run it. It was also inevitable and purposeful – cryptocurrencies are intended to rise and fall according to the cumulative decisions of millions – eventually, billions – of sovereign, individual users, who won’t always agree with each other.

Bitcoin’s underlying software can’t keep up with the growing number and speed of transactions between its users.… More

FCC is finally playing with a full deck

4 August 2017 by Steve Blum
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It was bipartisanship, of a sort, when the U.S. senate confirmed Jessica Rosenworcel and Brendan Carr as FCC commissioners yesterday. Senate democrats wanted to score some points and republicans were in a mood to let them do it – never underestimate the motivational power of an imminent summer vacation.

It was the product of complicated – and completely typical – Beltway horse trading. The bottom line, though, is that the Federal Communications Commission is back up to its full strength of five members with three republicans and two democrats – the privilege of the majority goes to the party that has a president in the white house.… More

More wireless broadband spectrum auctions proposed in U.S. senate

3 August 2017 by Steve Blum
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A second bill aimed at freeing up more wireless spectrum for broadband service is floating in the U.S. senate. Tagged the Airwaves act, it would set deadlines for the Federal Communications Commission to auction off several bands and other federal agencies to give up ownership of several more. It would also set aside 10% of the auction proceeds for wireless broadband infrastructure in poorly served rural areas.

It was introduced earlier this week by a bipartisan pair of senators – Maggie Hassan (D – New Hampshire) and Cory Gardner (R – Colorado) – and immediately praised by wireless industry lobbyists and FCC commissioners alike.… More

Federal court says cable and telcos can pay the same rate for pole access

2 August 2017 by Steve Blum
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Federal law does not require telephone companies to be treated differently from cable companies, when it comes to attaching cables to utility poles. That’s the ruling of a federal appeals court (h/t to Omar Masry at the City and County of San Francisco for the pointer). It rejected a challenge from electric utilities to a 2015 decision by the Federal Communications Commission that equalised the standard charge for utility pole access, and trimmed back an irrelevant distinction.… More