cpuc

The main event is finally under way. By yesterday’s deadline, thirteen organisations filed comments regarding how the California Public Utilities Commission should spend $300 million in new California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) money (plus however much more is left in the kitty) on broadband infrastructure subsidies. I haven’t read through them all yet – if you’re interested, I’ve posted them all here – but a top line glance shows that service providers, including the big incumbents who expect to use CASF as a private piggy bank, have a lot to say.… More

In the spirit of no taxpayer dollars left behind, big cable and telephone companies want to help spend grants awarded by the California Public Utilities Commission to groups promoting Internet use and subscriptions, but they don’t want to have do anything in return. Cable companies and AT&T filed rebuttals last week to recommendations made by a variety of broadband and consumer advocacy groups about how a “broadband adoption” grant program, newly funded by a tax on telephone bills, should be structured.… More

When lobbyists for telephone and cable companies convinced biddable lawmakers to turn California’s taxpayer-funded broadband subsidy program – the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) – into their own private, $300 million piggy bank last year, some smaller programs were included. Assembly bill 1665 created a $20 million “broadband adoption” kitty that’s supposed to go toward increasing the number of people who use the Internet. The California Public Utilities Commission is writing new rules to guide how that money is spent, and many organisations, incumbents and non-profit corporations included, have offered recommendations for doing so.… More

The back-and-forth continues over how California’s broadband subsidy programs – grouped under the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) – should be redesigned. Earlier this week, six organisations filed rebuttals to the initial round of comments made last month.

Much of the debate is over how results should be measured and to what degree the organisations that get CASF money should be held accountable for those results. It’s a complicated problem. The answer will largely depend on whether the California Public Utilities Commission reckons “broadband adoption” to be a goal defined by marketing principles – which is where the term comes from and where success is measured by the number of new subscribers – or simply an educational activity.… More

More comments are in about how broadband adoption programs should be funded by the California Public Utilities Commission. Or rather, I’ve found more comments – the filings from the CPUC’s office of ratepayer advocates (ORA) and the Central Sierra Connect regional broadband consortium landed in my spam folder last week.

It’s a chronic bug in the CPUC’s service list system. Anytime you submit something – comments, grant applications, motions, protests, whatever – regarding a formal CPUC proceeding, you have to send copies to anyone who’s signed up to be notified.… More

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.… More

Public housing property owners can get grants from the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) to install broadband facilities and serve residents. Hundreds of communities have taken advantage of it, despite churlish opposition from cable companies, particularly Charter Communications. The California Public Utilities Commission is revising the program, to bring it into line with new rules laid down by assembly bill 1665 last year.

The biggest change is to retroactively enforce restrictions, imposed by an earlier measure, senate bill 745, that require properties receiving grants to be “unserved”, which means that at least one residence lacks service at 6 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload speeds.… More