Uncategorized

Driverless car insurance offered with vague exclusions

10 July 2016 by Steve Blum
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A British company claims to be the first to offer driverless car insurance. In a commendably plain english document, the Adrian Flux insurance company offers to cover autonomous car owners against hacking, bad software and the operator’s failure to assume manual control, should it become necessary.

The one thing the policy doesn’t do directly is define “driverless car”. It has definitions for all kinds of things, including what “car” means (a passenger vehicle within certain weight limits that’s not designed to carry cargo or hold more than six people).… More

Google, Facebook, Microsoft follow Ford's vertical integration path

9 July 2016 by Steve Blum
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Another big, transpacific fiber cable is now lit. Less than two years after it was announced, the FASTER consortium has completed construction of a link between Bandon, Oregon and two landing sites in Japan, with a further extension to Taiwan. The group’s membership includes Google as well as several Asian telecoms companies, including China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, KDDI and Singtel. NEC built it.

Google is taking one-sixth of the capacity, 10 terabits per second out of a total of 60 Tbps.… More

Mobile lifeline fraud will only get worse

7 July 2016 by Steve Blum
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No carrier left behind.

An FCC commissioner wants Californian regulators, along with their counterparts in Oregon, Vermont and Texas, to answer questions about how eligibility for lifeline telephone service subsidies is managed. All four states have their own process for determining whether a subsidised lifeline customer meets income eligibility standards and verifying that any given household only receives one subsidy.

Republican commissioner Ajit Pai sent largely identical letters to the heads of the four public utilities commissions, including California Public Utilities Commission president Michael Picker, asking, among other things how they “determine whether the one-per-household rule is being enforced?”… More

Innovative bond financing proposed for Marin FTTH project

5 July 2016 by Steve Blum
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A fiber to the home project for 216 residences in the Marin County community of Nicasio will be partially funded by a selling bonds to investors, if everything works out as planned. The first step is up to the California Public Utilities Commission, which will be considering a $1.5 million grant from the California Advanced Services Fund to pay for 60% of the cost. The remaining 40% will be raised via a type of simplified private bond offering to financially qualified individuals and organisations that’s allowed by California law.… More

Competitive ISPs need access to conduit, but it has be there in the first place

4 July 2016 by Steve Blum
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The need for open trench notification policies is particularly acute when a local agency restricts future cuts into a given street, after the completion of a trenching or repaving project. But the need to rapidly respond to changes in the broadband industry and market conditions means that a new, or newly expanding, competitive Internet service provider is a disadvantage if, say, a five year moratorium was put into effect on a particular street three years ago, before the company was even founded.… More

If carmakers haven't figured out wireless in 20 years, they never will

3 July 2016 by Steve Blum
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More unlicensed spectrum for WiFi and other uses will add value to the U.S. economy. That’s the argument FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel is making to congress as a matter of general policy and to colleagues as opportunities to reallocate frequency assignments are evaluated.

One immediate thing the Federal Communications Commission can do – and democrat Rosenworcel as well as republicans Michael O’Rielly and Ajit Pai want to do – is to shift 75 MHz of spectrum around 5.9 GHz (5.850 GHz to 5.925 GHz, to be exact) from an unlicensed but otherwise restricted short range, transportation-related allocation to general use.… More

Customers love their phones, mobile service not so much

2 July 2016 by Steve Blum
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Click to download the study

Even though U.S. consumers feel jilted by their Internet service providers, they’re still in love with their smartphones. According to the latest American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) telecommunications survey, smartphone makers rate a 79 on a 100 point scale, one point up from last year and only three points behind the most highly rated industry sectors – consumer electronics (at least the television and video player side of the business) and full service restaurants.… More

High, perhaps unrealistically high, price asked for TV spectrum

1 July 2016 by Steve Blum
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Golden.

It’ll cost $86 billion to free up 100 MHz of broadcast television spectrum for licensed mobile broadband use and another 26 MHz for guard bands and unlicensed users. That’s the result from the reverse auction run by the Federal Communications Commission for television station owners, who were supposed to progressively bid down the price they were willing to accept in exchange for giving up their assigned channels.

That figure is more than twice as much as originally expected.… More

LA assemblyman steps up to bat for big telecom

27 June 2016 by Steve Blum
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You’d think he’d be a Dodger fan.

Los Angeles assemblyman Mike Gatto is doubling down on his role as the California legislature’s key player on telecoms policy this season, and he appears to have decided he’s playing on the telephone and cable company team.

As chair of the assembly’s utilities and commerce committee, Gatto blocked a proposal to put more state money into broadband infrastructure – opposed by incumbents because it also empowers competitors – and greased the skids for an AT&T-written bill that would have allowed rural and inner city copper-line networks to be replaced by wireless service.… More

Broadband gaps to fill, but willingness to do so in northeastern California

26 June 2016 by Steve Blum
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A different way of looking at it.

Many homes will still be without broadband service in northeastern California, even after upgrades paid by the federal Connect America Fund (CAF-2) program are complete. That’s mostly because the census blocks deemed eligible for the subsidies by the Federal Communications Commission are limited – many thousands of unserved homes are outside of those areas – but also because the FCC doesn’t necessarily require that all homes in a given census block be served.… More