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Most California Counties Represented in Broadband Consortia Grant Applications

6 September 2011 by Steve Blum
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The California Public Utilities Commission has released some information about the regional broadband consortia that filed applications in the initial round of funding from the California Advanced Services Fund. Fifteen consortia made the 22 August 2011 filing deadline, and are in line to be considered for planning and organizational grants totaling $150,000 per year for up to three years. 

The applications come from all over the state. Of the 58 counties in California, only nine – Napa, Marina, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Ventura and Orange – have been left out completely.… More

Mesh WiFi coverage depends on what you mean by coverage

7 July 2011 by Steve Blum
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WiFi is great as the last link between the network and the user. It’s high enough bandwidth that it’s not a bottleneck, people know to look for it and the available hardware and clients are well advanced. Consumers will pay for casual access, but in that case they expect performance. They love free WiFi and will put up with a surprising amount of hassle to access it. Companies like Meraki have made it very cheap and easy to get a “drinking fountain”, amenity grade WiFi service up and running, on a paid or free basis.… More

Final CPUC regional broadband consortia grant documents released

28 June 2011 by Steve Blum
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The California Public Utilities Commission posted the final versions of the application documents for the broadband consortia grant program approved last week. The final documents are posted on the community broadband resources page of my website:

https://www.tellusventure.com/community/resources/

CPUC hasn’t posted a hard deadline for submissions yet, but it’s supposed to be 60 days after the effective date of the decision. That date was 23 June, so adding 60 days to that means a presumed deadline of 22 August 2011.

CPUC approves regional broadband consortia grant program

23 June 2011 by Steve Blum
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The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) approved specific grant requirements today for the regional broadband consortia program established last year by Senate Bill 1040. The grants are funded through the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF). Qualifying regional consortia can apply for up to $150,000 in funding for each of three years ($450,000 total). Applications are due on 23 August 2011. The decision authorizing regional consortia grants, establishing eligibility and setting out application requirements and procedures is available here, along with supporting CPUC documents.

Just released: fiber market research report for City of Palo Alto

1 June 2011 by Steve Blum
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Tellus Venture Associates has just completed a market study looking at the City of Palo Alto’s high speed fiber backbone service and can be downloaded here. The report will be presented tonight to the City’s Utilities Advisory Commission. The presentation will be also be available for download afterwards, and a more complete case study will be posted soon.

Sandy Bridge is about fast, integrated graphics, studio-class security, massive processing power and hard coded Windows support

5 January 2011 by Steve Blum
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Judging from Intel’s press conference, their new Sandy Bridge platform – from now on known as the 2nd Generation Intel Core Processor Family – is focused on media and entertainment performance, driven by deep integration between hardware, operating systems, applications, content and networking.


 Mooly Eden shows his fast chips,
 funny hat and cute accentThe headline features are the on-board graphic and media processing capabilities, the 32 nanometer architecture delivering 1.16 billion transistors on a chip and integrated, studio-satisfying content security functionality.… More

The chips are about to fall

5 January 2011 by Steve Blum
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So far, the only close-to-really-new announcements have come from ASUS. That might be because the 2011 CES story is about incremental improvement and minor innovations, not radically new products or services. Or it could be a question of chipsets.

Everyone is hinting or outright pimping upcoming tablet computer announcements, but not actually saying what it is. That’s a little unusual for press days at CES, but it could be because Intel has what it thinks is a huge announcement to make in a few minutes, and they’ve turned the screws on their customers with the idea of managing some kind of coordinated roll out.… More

If A is for Apple, why not for ASUS?

4 January 2011 by Steve Blum
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 Jonney rocks it like SteveAll he needed was the black turtleneck. OK, Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field would have helped too.

ASUS chairman Jonney Shih borrowed the Apple chairman’s presentation style, falling only a little short on the mojo. Shih introduced four different implementations of the new eee Pad family of touchscreen tablets.

First up was the Eee Pad MeMo, a 7-inch tablet device that looks a lot like a big iPod Touch and runs Android on a Snapdragon processor.… More

The mobile phone is the set top box

Long-odds prediction for the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show: the mobile phone will be the set top box. Expect a prototype that tethers a large screen display to a media-rich smart phone. You walk in the room and your stuff appears on the screen. You will only have one channel and it will be whatever you want to watch, where ever you happen to be.

If someone doesn’t roll it out here in Las Vegas this week, you’ll see it shortly from Apple (which is too hip to hang at CES these days) or at a mobile phone event in someplace like Barcelona or Orlando or San Diego, at the latest.… More

Keynote tweets from CTIA Enterprise & Applications conference

I came in while John Chen, CEO of Sybase was speaking. He talked about how wireless is enabling mobile banking, commerce and philanthropy. Interesting stuff. But the best part was when he set the stage (perhaps unwitting, perhaps not) for the second speaker, Dr. Kristina Johnson, an undersecretary at the U.S. Department of Energy. Chen starting talking about various federal agencies, FCC, FTC etc., and called them the F-words.

When Johnson came up on stage, she didn’t exactly return the compliment, but she didn’t have much to say about wireless telecommunications or the mobile phone industry either.… More