public policy

Supreme court won’t review old net neutrality rules, but doesn’t kill them off either

5 November 2018 by Steve Blum
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The federal supreme court will let network neutrality rules stand. Sorta. In a ruling made on Friday and released this morning, the supreme court said it wouldn’t review the 2015 decision by the then-democratic majority on the Federal Communications Commission to impose net neutrality rules.

The court’s ruling has no practical effect at the moment. Those rules were repealed by the new republican-majority FCC last year. But a federal appeals court did hear the challenge launched by telecommunications companies and said the FCC acted within its authority in 2015.… More

Will California earthquakes move faster than mobile networks?

4 November 2018 by Steve Blum
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Earthquakes happen quickly, but not instantly. The shaking can last anywhere from a few seconds to more than a minute for a major quake. The shock waves spread out from the epicenter at something like the speed of sound, so it can be a few minutes before everything stops moving everywhere. The initial underground movement can also be detected by instruments before it’s felt on the surface.

Data networks, on the other hand, run at nearly the speed of light.… More

Waymo gets permission to run cars without drivers in Silicon Valley

2 November 2018 by Steve Blum
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True driverless cars – not just autonomous cars with “safety drivers” on stand-by – will be roaming through five Santa Clara County cities. On Tuesday, the California department of motor vehicles gave Waymo a permit to ”test driverless vehicles on public roads, including freeways, highways and streets within the cities of Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills and Sunnyvale".

Waymo is the Google spin-off that began stealth testing self-driving cars in Silicon Valley in 2009.… More

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

Cities challenge FCC’s wireless big foot, AT&T tells court it isn’t big enough

28 October 2018 by Steve Blum
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Cities and counties in western states, and their lobbying organisations, asked the federal appeals court in San Francisco to block a ruling by the Federal Communications Commission that would take away most local authority over small cells and other wireless facility permits, and preempt ownership of municipal assets, such as streetlight poles, in the public right of way. Links to all the documents filed last week are here. 

AT&T and Sprint also challenged the FCC’s decision, because, they say, it didn’t go far enough.… 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