public policy

Frontier makes the case, California's AB 1665 is double disaster

3 May 2017 by Steve Blum
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Frontier’s admittedly “late-filed” attempt to kill grant funding for the Gigafy Phelan fiber to the home proposal in San Bernardino County does a much better job of demonstrating why assembly bill 1665 is a bad idea than it does of effectively arguing against the project.

In addition to reinstating a tax on phone bills and adding $300 million to the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF), AB 1665 would lower California’s minimum broadband service standard to 6 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload speeds.… More

Frontier Communications hates double dipping, unless it's licking the cone


Federal subsidies are in the pink.

As might be expected, Frontier Communications objects to a proposed $29 million California Advanced Services Fund subsidy for a fiber to the home project in its San Bernardino County territory. Its first instinct was to try to a backdoor approach at the California Public Utilities Commission, but that was rebuffed. So yesterday Frontier filed formal comments urging the CPUC to kill the Gigafy Phelan project when it comes up for a vote next week.… More

CPUC will decide if CenturyLink can buy Level 3

1 May 2017 by Steve Blum
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CenturyLink and Level 3 have finally admitted that they need to do more than just throw a note through the window in order to get the California Public Utilities Commission’s approval of their pending transaction. The deal was done last October, but the two companies waited five months to formally apply for permission to transfer Level 3’s California telephone certifications to CenturyLink.

During that time, they tried to convince CPUC staff that it was a purely administrative matter that could be handled with a perfunctory paper shuffle.… More

FCC has bad information about what telecoms is

30 April 2017 by Steve Blum
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The Federal Communications Commission started down the road to roll back its previous decision to regulate broadband as a common carrier service last week. A draft decision to open up a process to reverse its 2015 decision to reclassify Internet access (yes, it’s incredibly bureaucratic) from being an information service to a telecommunications service will be taken up by commissioners next month.

Information services are value added services. Facebook adds value to the your bits by processing that data and connecting it every which way with what your friends send them.… More

Federal broadband development swamp heads south

29 April 2017 by Steve Blum
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The south rises again.

If you were hoping that Donald Trump’s campaign promise to drain the Beltway swamp was going to shake up the agriculture subsidy machine that funnels broadband development money to the south and midwest at California’s expense, then it looks like you’re going to be disappointed.

The U.S. senate confirmed former Georgia governor Sonny Perdue as agriculture secretary this week. He has spent his life in the southern farming industry, as a boy growing up on a farm, as a veterinarian, as governor and as a commodities trader.… More

Bill to end local control of cell sites gets new start in Sacramento

28 April 2017 by Steve Blum
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The California senate’s governance and finance committee did indeed shred senate bill 649 but it sent the pieces on toward a full floor vote anyway. It still severely restricts, if not completely eliminates, the ability of cities and counties to control where cell sites are placed, and requires them to lease street lights and other vertical assets to mobile carriers on demand for a nominal price.

Amendments were negotiated behind closed doors but not publicly released prior to the hearing on Wednesday.… More

California assembly committee digs a deeper digital divide

27 April 2017 by Steve Blum
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Broadband service expectations are low and the appetite for funding independent, competitive broadband infrastructure is vanishingly small in the California assembly. Or at least in the communications and conveyance committee, which took up assembly bill 1665 yesterday.

Carried by assemblyman Eduardo Garcia (D – Coachella), AB 1665 would reinstate a tax on telephone bills and add $300 million to the California Advanced Services Fund’s (CASF) broadband infrastructure subsidy kitty (and $30 million to other programs).

But it would subsidise a dismal broadband landscape.… More

$300 million taxpayer gift to cable, telcos teed up in California assembly

26 April 2017 by Steve Blum
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California’s primary broadband infrastructure program – the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) – is about to get a makeover that’s custom tailored for the state’s two major incumbent telephone companies, with goodies for cable operators, so they don’t feel left out.

Assembly bill 1665, carried by Eduardo Garcia (D – Riverside County), is set to be rewritten by the assembly communications and conveyance committee this afternoon. Up until now it’s just been a placeholder bill, waiting for deals to be cut so the details could be filled in.… More

California cell site free-for-all bill shredded in senate analysis

25 April 2017 by Steve Blum
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By wdwd (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Deconstructing the text.

A much different assessment of senate bill 649 has been posted as it heads toward a hearing tomorrow in the senate’s governance and finance committee. That’s the bill that would largely eliminate local control in California over cell sites in the public right of way and commercial and industrial zones, and give mobile carriers the right to attach their gear to publicly owned light poles and other vertical assets at will for $20 a year.… More

Last surviving California broadband subsidy bill goes wobbly

24 April 2017 by Steve Blum
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Broadband infrastructure subsidies are due for a vote on Wednesday at a California assembly committee hearing, but there’s no final text yet. What started out as four placeholder bills targeting the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) – the state’s primary broadband subsidy program – has dwindled down to one, assembly bill 1665, carried by assemblyman Eduardo Garcia (D – Riverside County).

As of this morning, no updated bill language has been posted. Over the past few months, AB 1665 has been the subject of many meetings between legislators, telephone and cable company lobbyists, and other interests, notably the California Emerging Technology Fund (CETF), which has taken the lead on this bill.… More