Uncategorized

Governor Brown vetoes a social media distraction

21 September 2018 by Steve Blum
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No, not that one.

Governor Jerry Brown refused to bite on a bit of legislative sausage yesterday. He vetoed senate bill 1424, which would have set up a social media research group in the California attorney general’s office, dedicated to the study of false information.

As originally envisioned by senator Richard Pan (D – Sacramento), SB 1424 would have required social media platforms to flag any false news posted by users. Exactly how that was supposed to happen was, to say the least, unclear.… More

AT&T and Comcast know Internet content censorship is real and it works

20 September 2018 by Steve Blum
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I’ve seen what a world without network neutrality looks like, and it isn’t pretty. I spent a couple of weeks in China this summer with a Linux laptop and an Android phone. There was 4G mobile broadband available everywhere I went, and WiFi availability is common. But that only gets you so far.

My gmail account was blocked, along with all the other Google services I use. To get around that, I set up an Office 365 account with an alternate domain name.… More

AT&T, Comcast, Charter paying big bucks to California’s anti-net neutrality legislators

19 September 2018 by Steve Blum
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California’s biggest telecoms companies – AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Charter Communications and their lobbying fronts – are being very generous to the members of the assembly’s communications and conveyances committee who ripped the guts out of senate bill 822 back in June. That’s the bill, authored by senator Scott Wiener (D – San Francisco) that would restore network neutrality rules in California. If governor Jerry Brown signs it.

The damage done was reversed, after netizens went feral on the committee’s chair, assemblyman Miguel Santiago (D – Los Angeles) and democratic party leaders leaned on him.… More

“Crony” capitalist FCC chair rips California’s “nanny state legislators”

18 September 2018 by Steve Blum
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Ajit Pai verbally grasped at straws to slam a California bill that would reinstate network neutrality rules. In a speech in Maine, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission snarked “I can understand how they succumbed to the temptation to regulate. After all, I suppose a broadband pipe might look to some like a plastic straw”. He was referring to Californian attempts to send plastic straws the way of the disposable bag.

Pai repeated a common argument used by industry lobbyists – that senate bill 822 would end popular free data plans – and called it “a radical, anti-consumer Internet regulation bill”.… More

CPUC leaves SCE’s fiber business intact, but the beatings will continue

17 September 2018 by Steve Blum
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With barely a mention at its meeting, the California Public Utilities Commission closed the first chapter of a saga that should never have been written. By a unanimous vote, commissioners allowed Southern California Edison to withdraw its request for blanket approval of a dark fiber lease deal with Verizon.

SCE asked to pull the application because the deal was dead, the victim of a mauling by so called consumer advocates and a purblind proposed decision by CPUC commissioner Clifford Rechtschaffen.… More

5G reality still lags 5G hype in U.S.

16 September 2018 by Steve Blum
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Lots of 5G talk, not so much 5G action at the Mobile World Congress Americas conference in Los Angeles this week. No phones, no 5G-specific services, no schedules for 5G mobile deployments, Verizon’s fixed wireless plans and AT&T’s equally limited real soon now announcements notwithstanding.

Although it has a hemispheric mission, this year’s show was nearly all about U.S. carriers, content and services. The question on the minds of equipment and technology vendors – mostly from asian and european companies – was what will U.S.… More

Mobile industry moves ahead, but mobile trade show backslides

15 September 2018 by Steve Blum
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Ten years ago this week, I went to what was then the CTIA MobileCon show in San Francisco for the first time, and began this blog. My first post was about an app that turned a smart phone into a mobile hotspot – an unremarkable standard feature now, but back then it was controversial.

Carriers – particularly AT&T, which had an early lock on the iPhone market – were dead set against it. Networks were a mix of 2G and 3G technology, and capacity was severely constrained, compared to today’s 4G infrastructure.… More

FCC commissioner frames preemption of local streetlight ownership as digital divide issue

14 September 2018 by Steve Blum
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Big cities are blocking 5G deployments in rural communities with high permit fees and expensive aesthetic requirements for new wireless facilities. That’s the argument FCC commissioner Brendan Carr made at the Mobile World Congress Americas show in Los Angeles yesterday. He’s the principal author of new, draft rules that would set federal benchmarks that, he hopes, cities and counties will follow when processing permit applications.

If mobile carriers have to spend more money than they want to when they build out 5G networks in high value, high priority cities, then there won’t be anything left over for rural areas, his reasoning goes…

Despite all of that progress, there still are many communities, especially in rural America, that feel that they may be left behind.

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5g, of a sort, coming to “parts of” two Californian cities in October

13 September 2018 by Steve Blum
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Verizon grabbed what media spotlight was shining yesterday at the opening of the second Mobile World Congress Americas show in Los Angeles. Its announcement that it would be first to market with 5G fixed wireless service wasn’t a surprise – it’s been talking about it for months – but putting a price tag and a launch date on it makes it much more real. Whether it’s really a big deal or not is a matter of how you look at it.… More

As California burns, governor decides whether legislature’s utility liability solution is good enough

12 September 2018 by Steve Blum
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A plan to reduce both the risk of catastrophic wildfires happening and the risk that such fires will bankrupt privately owned electric utilities is on California governor Jerry Brown’s desk. He has to decide if the deal reached by legislative leaders as the clock ran out on this year’s session is good enough.

Senate bill 901 would, among other things, allows the California Public Utilities Commission more flexibility in deciding whether liability costs can be passed on to electric customers.… More