Uncategorized

Friends and foes give CPUC president a raucous send off

19 December 2014 by Steve Blum
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Mike, half the people are here are here to congratulate you on your retirement…the others are here to make sure you’re retiring. It’s pretty indicative of the dynamics of this agency.
Danny Curtin, California Conference of Carpenters

Those few words summed up a sometimes laudatory, sometimes vitrolic 3 hours as friends, past and present colleagues, anti-wireless activists and others praised and attacked retiring California Public Utilities Commission president Michael Peevey at his final meeting yesterday in San Francisco.… More

Public housing broadband heading for second class status in California

18 December 2014 by Steve Blum
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Lower broadband performance standards for Californians living in public housing are one step away from adoption by the California Public Utilities Commission. As it stands now, later this morning the CPUC will approve subsidy rules for broadband facility upgrades in publicly supported housing that set 1.5 Mbps download speeds as the minimum acceptable level, and no service level requirements at all for upload speeds. The stuff that’s installed has to be capable of supporting higher speeds, but actual performance is optional.… More

You don't have to drive to Silicon Valley if you're already there

17 December 2014 by Steve Blum
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Santa Cruz broadband policy keeps business in town, Silicon Valley leaders say.

Smart application of good broadband development policy helps local economies grow by attracting new businesses and helping existing ones grow. The place to look for it is Santa Cruz County, according to the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. It’s an example that Silicon Valley sorely needs.

The group, which was founded in 1978 by David Packard and represents about 400 of Silicon Valley’s heaviest corporate hitters, announced it was giving its “Turning Red Tape into Red Carpet” award to Santa Cruz County, and supervisor Zach Friend in particular, recognising his effort over the past year and a half to simplify the rules for planting broadband infrastructure in public roads and placing it on county property.… More

Broadband delayed is broadband denied

16 December 2014 by Steve Blum
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FCC commissioner Ajit Pai objected to part of the FCC order approved last week that raised the minimum download speed for subsidised broadband projects to 10 Mbps (the upload standard remains at 1 Mbps). His objection wasn’t to the faster standard, but rather to the slow pace of implementation and what he sees as the commission’s failure to put its money where its mouth is…

Three years ago, the FCC told rural Americans they could stop waiting.

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FCC crushes old limits on rural broadband speeds

15 December 2014 by Steve Blum
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The minimum download speed for FCC-subsidised broadband projects and services in rural areas is now 10 Mbps. The commission raised the standard on Thursday. Required upload speeds haven’t change, though…

The FCC will now require companies receiving Connect America funding for fixed broadband to serve consumers with speeds of at least 10 Mbps for downloads and 1 Mbps for uploads. That is an increase reflecting marketplace and technological changes that have occurred since the FCC set its previous requirement of 4 Mbps/1 Mbps speeds in 2011.

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Big questions for a California broadband subsidy proposal, but worth answering

14 December 2014 by Steve Blum
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All over Helendale.

There’s a business case for resurrecting dead copper broadband systems. At least UIA thinks there is, given a sufficient subsidy from the California Advanced Services Fund. The company has submitted two projects for consideration for CASF grants in the current round. One is in Helendale, a small San Bernardino County community in the desert between Victorville and Barstow, where a cable system built by Falcon Cable – acquired by Charter Communications – was left to rot.… More

FCC blocks ViaSat's end run around rural experiment standards

13 December 2014 by Steve Blum
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You’ve got to hand it to the people at ViaSat. They don’t give up. If FCC tests – correctly – show that satellite Internet service has both advantages and disadvantages, then shout the good news loud enough to shake the rafters and browbeat the FCC into suppressing the bad. If the FCC wants to conduct an experiment to see if there are technologies and business models that can deliver urban-quality broadband service to rural customers, try to duck the quality requirements when no one is looking.… More

G.fast means fiber speeds over copper, up to a point

12 December 2014 by Steve Blum
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The point where the infrastructure collapses.

A short range, high speed technology standard for broadband over copper phone lines has been approved by the International Telecommunications Union. The G.fast standard is intended to make fiber-class speeds possible over legacy lines, with a maximum distance of 400 meters between the customer and the nearest fiber node.

Practical distances, though, are much shorter. “Service rate performance targets” – total bandwidth which can be split between up and down loads – are…

500-1000 Mb/s for FTTB deployments at less than 100m, straight loops
500 Mb/s at 100m
200 Mb/s at 200m
150 Mb/s at 250m

Bell Labs has succeeded in pushing a gigabit over 70 meters of pristine plant and 500 Mbps over 100 meters of lousy copper, using its implementation of an earlier version of the G.fast… More

Subsidising second class broadband is a bad deal for all Californians

11 December 2014 by Steve Blum
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Hotel WiFi service is usually good enough to deal with email, Facebook and airline check-ins. It’ll do the work you have to get done before morning – maybe even a Skype call. But it’s rarely robust enough to reliably watch videos or jam a deadline on virtualised enterprise services or relax with an online game. It’s not a workhorse you can depend on. It’s an amenity, no more able to support day to day business than the tiny pool and token workout room can handle Ironman base training – I know, I tried.… More

California beats the odds in FCC rural broadband experiments

10 December 2014 by Steve Blum
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Sometimes things turn out better than you might expect.

California came out pretty well in the FCC’s provisional rural broadband experiment decisions. Of the 40 bidders that were accepted, 3 proposed a total of 9 projects in California. That’s 11% of the total number of accepted projects. In dollar terms, projects in our state did even better, claiming $16 million of the $99.5 million, 16% of the money tentatively awarded by the FCC.

There wasn’t much information given about the projects or the bidders by the FCC, just names, number of bids selected, total amount of the grant requested and total number of census blocks covered.… More