Uncategorized

CPUC refuses to reconsider waiving AT&T, Frontier fines for bad rural service

1 November 2018 by Steve Blum
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AT&T, Frontier Communications and other telephone companies can continue to fine themselves and keep the money, if they fail to meet California’s service quality standards. The California Public Utilities Commission rejected an appeal by a group of consumer organisations, which claim that the bizarre 2016 decision allowing telcos to pay their own expenses instead of paying fines was made “without any support whatsoever in the record”.

The decision was rammed through by commission president Michael Picker, who refused to allow a vote on an alternative offered by then-commissioner Catherine Sandoval, contrary to usual procedure.… More

Frontier’s Colusa DSL subsidy request breaks rules, which is OK if everyone can play

31 October 2018 by Steve Blum
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Frontier Communications wants $253,000 from the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) to upgrade its copper DSL facilities in the town of Colusa, in rural Colusa County. Its existing service in and around the community relies on a mix of 1990s vintage DSL and more advanced ADSL2 and VDSL technology. It’s proposing to upgrade its central office to extend its VDSL capabilities, and run fiber to the county fairgrounds in town.

The justification for the project, as described in the public summary Frontier distributed, is 45 homes that either don’t have any broadband access at all, or the service they have delivers less than 6 Mbps download or 1 Mbps upload speeds.… More

Western cities line up against FCC muni property grab

30 October 2018 by Steve Blum
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There must be something in the salt air coming off the Pacific Ocean. Only local agencies on or (relatively) near the west coast asked a federal appeals court to block the Federal Communication Commission’s decision to preempt local ownership of streetlights and other municipal property that’s planted in the public right of way. Contrary to my prediction, the rest of the U.S. is sitting it out. I checked the websites of the federal appeals courts around the country, and didn’t find any new challenges.… More

Cities pile onto appeal of FCC pole preemption decision, AT&T doubles down on greedy

29 October 2018 by Steve Blum
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Cities and counties across the western U.S. are challenging the Federal Communications Commission’s ruling that preempts local ownership of street lights, traffic signals and other assets located in the public right of way.

AT&T and Sprint, on the other hand, appealed the FCC’s decision, claiming it didn’t go far enough. Links to the petitions are below.

League of Cities organisations from Arizona, California and Oregon, along with the cities of Seattle and Tacoma, and King County in Washington filed a challenge in the ninth circuit court, which is the San Francisco-based federal appellate court that handles cases from the west coast and some mountain states.… More

Real people want neutrality, bots not so much Stanford study shows

28 October 2018 by Steve Blum
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The comments submitted to the Federal Communications Commission in 2017 by real people were overwhelmingly in favor of keeping network neutrality rules in place. A study by Ryan Singel at Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society analysed the 22 million comments submitted via the FCC’s online portal – the one that crashed in 2014 after John Oliver explained what it all meant – and found that most filings were robo-comments submitted by online bots, or were otherwise duplicate, boilerplate auto-postings.… More

California’s net neutrality law won’t take effect in January, if it ever does

27 October 2018 by Steve Blum
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It will be a long time before California’s new network neutrality law will be enforced, if it ever is. California attorney general Xavier Becerra cut a deal yesterday with the Trump administration and lobbyists who front for a long list of telecoms companies, including AT&T, Charter Communications, Comcast and Frontier Communications. In return for their pledge not to pursue their court case against the law, Becerra agreed not to enforce the new law until a separate legal challenge to the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to repeal its own net neutrality rules has worked its way through the system and, after that, until the Sacramento court hearing the case against senate bill 822 decides whether or not to block it.… More

Peterman steps down from the CPUC

26 October 2018 by Steve Blum
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The California Public Utilities Commission will have at least one new member next year. At yesterday’s meeting, commissioner Carla Peterman announced she will not be back…

The end of the year marks the end of my term on the CPUC. I wanted to share that I’m not seeking reappointment. This has been – is – an amazing job. It’s been a true privilege to serve as a public utilities commissioner. I will say many nice things about all of you in a future meeting, but I wanted to let you know and to say that me and my team are going to working incredibly hard with all of you to bring forward the decisions for commission to consider by the end of the year.

… More

FCC wants to open 1,200 MHz of spectrum to unlicensed users, and that’s a lot

25 October 2018 by Steve Blum
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The Federal Communications Commission is considering a radical overhaul of the way licensed spectrum is managed, and shared with unlicensed users. Besides upping the stakes for wireless Internet service providers this week, the FCC began considering a plan to open up a massive 1,200 MHz slice of spectrum in the 6 GHz range to WiFi, Internet of things (IoT) and other new and unlicensed uses.

It’s a lot of bandwidth. The 2.4 GHz band originally used for WiFi is only 83 MHz wide, and the newer 5 GHz band is 150 MHz.… More

Small WISPs handed a tougher business case by FCC spectrum decision

24 October 2018 by Steve Blum
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The Federal Communications Commission sided with big, national mobile carriers over small, local wireless Internet service providers (WISPs) yesterday. Whether that’s a good thing or not depends on where you think the market for wireless broadband service is heading.

The issue was use of the 3.5 GHz band (3550 MHz to 3700 MHz), which is frequently used for wireless broadband service – fixed and mobile – internationally, and is particularly sought after for 5G deployments.… More

Big cable, telcos try to block Vermont’s net neutrality purchasing rules

23 October 2018 by Steve Blum
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Charter Communications, Comcast, AT&T and other big, monopoly model broadband providers are taking the State of Vermont to federal court, accusing it of flouting the Federal Communications Commission’s keen desire to remove any limits on their behavior. Vermont legislators passed a law earlier this year that prohibits state and local agencies from buying broadband service from companies that don’t abide by the network neutrality principles adopted by a democratic majority FCC in 2015 and overturned last year as republicans took over control of the agency.… More