verizon

Verizon threatens to end NYC FiOS service over lawsuit

17 March 2017 by Steve Blum
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New York City is suing Verizon for failing to build out fiber to the home service to all residences as promised and Verizon might retaliate by yanking out television service citywide. And stroppy landlords are making it a three-cornered fight.

Like any legal dispute that’s measured in billions of dollars, it’s a complicated affair. But one of the central issues is Verizon’s problems with getting access to apartment buildings and condos – multi-dwelling units (MDUs).… More

Verizon could close a big competitive gap with Charter's fiber

17 February 2017 by Steve Blum
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Verizon needs to build more than 100,000 new cell sites and add more fiber connectivity to close a capacity gap with its U.S. competitors, according to a report from New Street Research. And, the report concludes, buying Charter Communications – as rumors say it might – could help solve some of Verizon’s problems. It wouldn’t be much benefit to Charter, though.

The report estimates that when the number of cell sites and the amount of spectrum used is taken into consideration, Verizon has a bit more than half of the capacity per subscriber that AT&T and T-Mobile have.… More

5G for fixed service is so ordinary says T-Mobile

28 January 2017 by Steve Blum
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It’s like I said, their view never changes.

There’s a war of words between T-Mobile and its larger competitors, AT&T and Verizon, over using advanced mobile technologies – 5G is the undefined buzz word – as a DSL replacement to provide fixed Internet service to homes and businesses. Neville Ray, T-Mobile’s chief technology officer, says 2017 isn’t the year to get excited about 5G, particularly AT&T’s and Verizon’s version of it…

No one’s more excited about this brilliant technology than I am.

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Haven't seen the facts about AT&T, Time Warner merger, Trump says

19 January 2017 by Steve Blum
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Translation: never mind.

Donald Trump is backing off from his stated opposition to the AT&T – Time Warner transaction. According to the Axios blog, Trump said in an interview…

“I have been on the record in the past of saying it’s too big and we have to keep competition. So, but other than that, I haven’t, you know, I haven’t seen any of the facts, yet. I’m sure that will be presented to me and to the people within government.”

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Yuge telecoms companies expect to get yuger

19 January 2017 by Steve Blum
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Big money is leaning in the direction of a permissive, rather than populist, Trump presidency, at least when it comes to big telecoms mergers. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson met with Trump last week. Although both AT&T and Trump’s team insist that the pending acquisition of Time Warner wasn’t discussed, Stephenson continues to project optimism that federal regulators – the justice department’s anti-trust unit and, possibly, the Federal Communications Commission – will allow it to go forward.… More

Mobile carriers losing the data upgrade race to Californian demand

12 October 2016 by Steve Blum
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Click for the full picture.

You can get more bits per second from mobile broadband carriers in California, but your odds of getting those faster speeds at any given moment are dropping. That’s what the California Public Utilities Commission’s mobile field testing result are showing. You can read the excellent blog post by commission staffer Rob Osborne here. He shows that mobile broadband speeds are increasing, but sums it up diplomatically: “it’s hard to say, but it appears the likelihood of getting the average speed at a particular location is lower than before”.… More

Advertising group sides with Verizon, slaps Comcast Internet claims

25 September 2016 by Steve Blum
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When elephants mud wrestle.

Comcast’s advertising claims that it “delivers America’s fastest Internet” and “the fastest, most reliable in-home WiFi” aren’t supported and should be pulled. That’s the finding of the advertising industry’s self-regulation board, called the National Advertising Division (NAD). Responding to a complaint filed by Verizon, which naturally would prefer you think it has the fastest Internet service, NAD said Comcast used dubious data to back up its pitch…

As support for its claims that XFINITY delivers America’s “fastest Internet,” Comcast relied on crowdsourced data from Ookla’s “Speedtest” application.

… More

New network standards fuel Verizon IoT push

7 September 2016 by Steve Blum
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U.S. mobile carriers will offer specialised Internet of things (IoT) services in a big way next year. Some of the motivation is competitive, the result of pressure from companies using unlicensed spectrum, but it seems to be mostly the result of new technology protocols for the LTE standard that support IoT applications and, critically, business cases.

Verizon announced its plans for full, nationwide deployment of a key IoT standard by April 2017 at the Telit IoT Innovation conference in Las Vegas yesterday.… More

Speed doesn't matter so give us the money, Verizon tells FCC

15 August 2016 by Steve Blum
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Will the cherries blossom in Washington?

Verizon wants the Federal Communications Commission to give it an open and privileged path to do an end run around the statewide service obligations attached to the current round of Connect America Fund (CAF-2) rural broadband subsidies.

In comments it filed regarding the FCC’s proposed bidding rules for the next round of CAF-2 subsidies, Verizon wants extra credit given if it makes minimum service – 10 Mbps down/1 Mbps up – bids for unserved areas it turned down last year, but doesn’t want competing bids to be given greater weight if higher, even gigabit, speeds are offered, because, well, who needs all that bandwidth…

For every location in the gigabit tier that is awarded support because of a large weight, several other eligible locations would be left without any broadband service whatsoever.

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No progress, no paperwork, no grants for California broadband projects

9 August 2016 by Steve Blum
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Five broadband projects are about to lose funding, as the California Public Utilities Commission prepares to cancel $4.5 million worth of grants originally given to pay for construction costs. The companies that would have received the subsidies either decided not to move ahead with the project or just sort of disappeared and failed to file the proper paperwork.

Verizon had two of the projects – one in Pinyon in Riverside County and the other in the Sea Ranch area of Sonoma County.… More