public policy

California electric company fiber leasing gets a reprieve

11 July 2018 by Steve Blum
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The California Public Utilities Commission won’t kill electric companies’ independent fiber enterprises just yet. The dispute over how to share the money that Southern California Edison earns from leasing out surplus fiber with its electric customers was bumped to next month. The changes in the latest version proposed by commissioner Clifford Rechtschaffen – including making it a 50/50 split of gross revenue instead of the 10% that goes to ratepayers under current rules – were significant enough to trigger a 30 day review period.… More

Frontier tells CPUC give us all the money!

11 July 2018 by Steve Blum
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Frontier Communications isn’t happy with the bonus that California Public Utilities Commission staff wants to bestow on it. Instead, Frontier is demanding the CPUC pay the entire cost of two fiber to the home projects in outlying areas of California.

Frontier applied for two grants from the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF), one for $1.8 million in the San Bernardino County mountain community of Lytle Creek, and the other for $1.5 million in two towns – Desert Shores and Salton Sea Beach – in Imperial County.… More

FCC lowers rural speed standard to 8 Mbps down, 800 Kbps up

10 July 2018 by Steve Blum
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Internet service providers who get Connect America Fund subsidies from the Federal Communications Commission have to use the money to deliver service at a minimum of 10 Mbps download and 1 Mbps up load speeds, in most cases – effectively all cases in California so far. Last week, the FCC defined what that standard really means: subsidised carriers have to run quarterly speed tests that show they’re hitting 80% of the required speed, 80% of the time.… More

SCE says fiber deal with Verizon is dead, and the CPUC killed it

9 July 2018 by Steve Blum
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Southern California Edison and CPUC commissioner Clifford Rechtschaffen exchanged shots on Thursday, as the battle over electric company fiber continues. Rechtschaffen released a new version – an “alternate” – of a draft decision that required SCE to give up 75% of the gross revenue it would have received from a fiber master lease agreement (MLA) it reached with Verizon. He cut that down to 50%, which is still significantly more than the 10% that the existing rules, which have been in effect for almost 20 years, require.… More

California’s net neutrality crusade is back on track

6 July 2018 by Steve Blum
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Senators Scott Wiener (D – San Francisco) and Kevin de Leon (D – Los Angeles), and assemblymen Miguel Santiago (D – Los Angeles) and Rob Bonta (D – Alameda) lined up at a capitol press conference yesterday to announce that all was forgiven: strong net neutrality language would be restored to senate bill 822 and SB 460 would be raised from the dead.

What seemed to unite the four was shared democratic party opposition to the Trump administration and a desire to win federal congressional seats away from republicans in November.… More

FCC looks at shifting satellite spectrum to wireless broadband

4 July 2018 by Steve Blum
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C-band satellite frequencies will be rolled up over time, and turned over to ground-based wireless broadband operators, if the Federal Communications Commission moves ahead with a plan it will consider at its July 2018 meeting.

The satellite industry got it start with C-band back in the 1970s. Those birds sparked a revolution in the television business, allowing the development of cable networks, like HBO and CNN. They also enabled a new wave of satellite TV entrepreneurs, who sold big, back yard dishes to people who lived outside the bounds of cable systems.… More

U.S. senators want cities to act fast on small cell permit applications

3 July 2018 by Steve Blum
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There’s bad news and maybe a little good news for cities in a draft U.S. senate bill that aims to speed up wireless broadband deployments. Senate bill 3157 was introduced last week by senators John Thune (R – South Dakota) and Brian Schatz (D – Hawaii). It’s a bipartisan and significant pairing – Thune chairs the senate’s commerce committee and Schatz is the ranking democrat on its communications subcommittee.

The bad news is that the bill would reduce the amount of time local governments have to process permit applications for wireless facilities.… More

Federal farm bills crank up broadband speed, options

2 July 2018 by Steve Blum
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It’s farm bill time again in Washington, D.C. Every five years or so, congress reauthorises and rewrites rural development and (urban and rural) food stamp programs. The U.S. house of representatives and the senate passed their own bills, and each has good news for broadband infrastructure development. So far.

The version passed by the house specifically allows the federal agriculture department’s Rural Utilities Service, which runs the major rural broadband infrastructure programs, to fund middle mile projects.… More

One net neutrality bill still standing as California legislature preps for summer break

1 July 2018 by Steve Blum
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Senate bill 460 missed a key deadline on Friday and is now technically dead (with the caveat that resurrection is always theoretically possible in the California legislature). It was the weaker of two bills that aimed to restore Internet neutrality rules in California. Its author, senator Kevin de Leon (D – Los Angeles), pulled it from an ugly committee hearing two weeks ago and never put it back in play.

That leaves SB 822 as the only net neutrality measure still in the game.… More

California consumer privacy law, online and off, now on the books

29 June 2018 by Steve Blum
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Californians will have control over the way their personal information is used by businesses, including online platforms. Probably. Governor Jerry Brown signed assembly bill 375 into law, after it was approved by the state senate and assembly in whirlwind fashion yesterday. According to the analysis prepared by staff for the assembly privacy and communications committee – which is chaired by the bill’s author, assemblyman Ed Chau (D – Monterey Park) – consumers will gain…

The right to know what [personal information (PI)] is being collected about them and whether their PI is being sold and to whom; the right to access their PI; the right to delete PI collected from them; the right to opt-out or opt-in to the sale of their PI, depending on age of the consumer; and the right to equal service and price, even if they exercise such right.

… More