Frontier, cable lobbyists urge CPUC to cut them in on public housing, broadband adoption decisions

19 March 2018 by Steve Blum
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Big telco and cable interests accounted for two of the fourteen organisations that commented on proposed changes to the California Advanced Services Fund’s (CASF) broadband subsidy program for public housing and the new digital literacy and broadband access grants that’ll be available later this year. Frontier Communications and cable lobbyists submitted their remarks on Friday. AT&T was silent.

The California Cable and Telecommunications Association (CCTA), which is the lobbying front for Comcast, Charter Communications and other cable companies in California, wants the CPUC to better protect its members’ monopoly business model in public housing communities. Changes in the law – pushed by CCTA and cable company lobbyists – make it impossible to use CASF grants to install free WiFi in public housing properties where there’s cable service. Cable companies do offer low cost Internet service to people who qualify, as most, if not all, those who live in public housing do. But they also use those programs as opportunities to up sell residents into expensive, market rate TV (and broadband and phone) bundles.

To make sure that Charter and Comcast and the others can defend those walled gardens, CCTA’s comments recommend that the CPUC allow greater opportunities to challenge public housing grant proposals, even to the extent of knocking applications off the current fast track review process simply by raising “legitimate concerns”. Which can mean pretty much anything. Including digging around to see if applicants are using cable connections to feed WiFi hotspots, which is another of CCTA’s peeves.

Frontier’s comments can summed as give me the money. One recommendation is that adoption programs should be tied to, or at least prioritised for, CASF infrastructure projects. Which is convenient because last year’s legislative changes largely limit those grants to Frontier and AT&T. Other recommendations go sideways from there, asking the CPUC to hurry up and approve Frontier’s infrastructure project subsidies.

Reply comments – rebuttals or otherwise – are due 2 April 2018, and the CPUC is expected to decide how to move forward with the public housing and adoption grant programs sometime in June.