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Telcos ask FCC to kill broadband competition

1 June 2018 by Steve Blum
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Wireline telephone companies, big and small, don’t want to be forced to share their lines with competitors. So last month, their lobbying front in Washington, D.C. – USTelecom – asked the Federal Communications Commission to scrap rules that require them to sell wholesale lines and other services to smaller companies that don’t own infrastructure.

These competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) resell those services to retail customers, usually after adding their own equipment or other resources to the mix.… More

Santa Cruz gets more fiber, more gigabit service

19 May 2018 by Steve Blum
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AT&T’s recent fiber to the home (FTTH) upgrades in Santa Cruz mean that Cruzio isn’t the only Internet service provider bringing gigabit class infrastructure into town (unless you have a sneaking suspicion that it’s a competitive response – in that case you can thank Cruzio for it too). U.C. Santa Cruz’s Jim Warner tracked it down…

AT&T has been working on an FTTH deployment in parts of west Santa Cruz. The work has progressed to the point where some addresses are showing availability of gigabit service in AT&T’s on-line service availability tool.

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If you don’t stop it, fix it, justice department tells AT&T-Time Warner trial judge

12 May 2018 by Steve Blum
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It’s up to a federal judge to decide whether or not AT&T can buy Time Warner, and all the content and video channels that come along with it. The federal justice department tried to make the case that the deal would be anti-competitive and should be blocked. AT&T, naturally enough, claimed it wasn’t.

Some experts who followed the trial closely thought AT&T made the better case. The justice department has to prove that a vertical merger – when a company buys its supplier – would have the same destructive effect on competition as a horizontal one, when a company buys a competitor.… More

Unless it's AT&T or Verizon, telco capital investment is at life support levels

13 April 2018 by Steve Blum
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As with subscriber numbers, there’s a big gap between the two biggest telcos in the U.S. – AT&T and Verizon – and the rest of the field when it comes to capital spending. Both companies are planning multi-billion dollar investments in their networks in 2018, according to a story by Sean Buckley in FierceTelecom, with AT&T planning to spend $25 billion on capital upgrades in 2018, while Verizon is looking at the $17 billion to $18 billion range.… More

Wyoming's legislature bows to telco, cable lobbyists, but not as deeply as California's

9 March 2018 by Steve Blum
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Following California’s lead, Wyoming lawmakers grabbed their ankles and took what cable and telco lobbyists gave them: a law that subsidises broadband infrastructure, but only to the extent that incumbents want. Even so, Wyoming is not buying into the 1990s service levels that lobbyists for Frontier Communications, AT&T, Comcast and Charter Communications bribed convinced Californian assembly members and senators to accept.

As described by Phillip Dampier in Stop the Cap, what started out as an effort to give communities the option of pursuing their own broadband projects turned into an incumbent right of first refusal, secretly rewritten by lobbyists for Charter and CenturyLink.… More

AT&T CEO explains why net neutrality is necessary

14 February 2018 by Steve Blum
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Randall Stephenson, AT&T’s chief executive officer, offered a hell of good example of why he can’t be trusted to do the right thing and refrain from using his position as a dominant, monopoly-centric broadband service provider to benefit his equally hefty video content business.

In an interview with CNBC, Stephenson complained that his online competition is beating him up…

“Reality is, the biggest distributor of content out there is totally vertically integrated. This happens to be something called Netflix.

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AT&T's FirstNet deal means more but slower broadband in rural California

2 January 2018 by Steve Blum
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Governor Brown’s decision to join the federal FirstNet public safety radio system has pluses and minuses for rural broadband development in California. The system is intended to provide data connectivity and interoperable communications for police, fire and other first responder agencies across the U.S. The federal government awarded a $6.5 billion contract to AT&T to build and operate it.

As a part of the deal, AT&T is getting 20 MHz of spectrum in the 700 MHz band.… More

AT&T still fails at FTTH, but slowly figures out how to make it work

30 December 2017 by Steve Blum
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AT&T hasn’t fully embraced fiber to the home service yet. At least not judging by my experience setting it up in a newly built, fully fibered apartment complex. But they are making progress.

Originally, AT&T only offered homes in FTTH islands the same service packages that they offered to surrounding copper customers. That still might be going on in single family home developments or in redlined neighborhoods, but they’ve developed genuine fiber packages of up to a symmetrical gigabit for multi-dwelling units.… More

California joins federal FirstNet public safety radio system, run by AT&T

29 December 2017 by Steve Blum
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Governor Brown announced that the state is opting in to the nationwide FirstNet public safety radio system that’ll be run by AT&T, under a contract from the federal government. Yesterday was the deadline, and California was the last state to decide. All 50 states have now opted in.

In his opt-in letter, Brown said he still has reservations about the 25 year project…

This letter serves as notice…that California has decided to participate in the deployment of the nationwide, interoperable broadband network as proposed in the FirstNet State Plan.

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Wet string delivers faster broadband than AT&T or Frontier for 1 million Californians

20 December 2017 by Steve Blum
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The best broadband that AT&T and Frontier Communications offers to more than one million Californians is advertised at a download speed of 3 Mbps or less, if it’s available at all. That’s slower than the 3.5 Mbps that a British techie achieved using a couple of pieces of wet string and some ADSL gear.

He was sitting around the office one day and decided to give it a go. That earned him serious geek cred with his boss, Adrian Kennard, who runs Andrews and Arnold, an ISP in the U.K.… More