telecompetitor

Three years after a Tennessee power company kicked off the gigabit network trend with the announcement of a residential gigabit network in Chattanooga, more electric utilities are getting in on the trend.

Missouri electric cooperative Co-Mo Comm said it will launch gigabit service in August. And Habersham EMC, a northeast Georgia electric cooperative, said it is increasing the speed its broadband network will support to a gigabit. Habersham EMC calls the service Trailwave and will charge $99 a month for the service. The company also has a 50 Mbps offering for $49.95.

A Federal Communications Commission workshop was organized with the goal of offering insight on how the FCC should allocate funding for rural broadband trials and ultimately, how a broadband Connect America Fund for rate of return carriers would be structured.

The workshop drew on a wide range of stakeholders and offered a lot of food for thought, but also illustrated that considerable more work will need to be done before the FCC can answer those questions. The total number of entities that have expressed interest in participating in the rural broadband trials has now reached 997, FCC officials said.

A workshop panel on rural broadband build-out strategies included representatives from several types of entities that have expressed interest in participating in the rural broadband trials, including:

• a municipality (Greenlight Community Broadband of Wilson (NC))
• a rural incumbent telco (Golden West Telecommunications)
• a utility co-operative (Co-Mo Comm)
• a wireless Internet service provider (Highspeedlink.net)
• a satellite broadband service provider (Hughes Network Systems)
• a rural cable company (Troy Cablevision)
• a large price cap carrier (AT&T)
• a cellular carrier that has moved into fiber-to-the-home (C Spire)

New York City-based startup company ASA Networks sees great potential for TV white spaces technology.

The wireless Internet service provider is currently trialing the technology in Gallatin, a rural area in upstate New York, and plans to expand service to other communities in the future.

“We have it working and it works for non-line of sight,” said Joe Plotkin, director of marketing for ASA Networks. When Plotkin and colleagues made a presentation about TV white spaces equipment at an upstate event prior to making their white spaces plans “we were swamped by town supervisors and county executives saying ‘help us,’” said Plotkin.

In communities like Gallatin the only way of accessing the Internet until now has been via spotty DSL and cellular service, Plotkin said. Plotkin was apparently talking about the upcoming voluntary TV broadcast spectrum auction which will enable broadcasters to relinquish spectrum in exchange for sharing in the auction proceeds. The band plan for that spectrum band has not yet been determined -- and a key issue is how much of the spectrum will be available for unlicensed use.

[Commentary] The latest research from Leichtman Research Group reveals that the pay-TV industry lost a whopping 0.1% of subscribers to video cord cutting in 2013. That equates to 105K subscribers from a total multichannel pay-TV universe of 94.6 million subscribers.

Hardly the crisis of video cord cutting that gets much of the headlines these days, at least according to LRG’s analysis. The news is somewhat sobering for the traditional cable MSO industry according to LRG. Collectively, the largest cable MSOs lost 1.7 million video subscribers in 2013. But telecommunications television gains of 1.46 million and DBS net adds of 170K offset the cord cutting trend.

The real impact probably won’t come for some time though. From my vantage point, the issue to be concerned about is not cord cutting, it’s ‘cord nevering.’ That is, younger people who are now in their teens and twenties who lost interest in pay-TV a while ago, and are unlikely to subscribe to a pay-TV service as they move into head-of-household status. At least not subscribe to a multichannel video package as we define it today. For them, a hefty broadband pipe into the home and on the go may fuel their video appetite through a broadband TV type package, the business and revenue details of which are still being worked out.

AT&T launched a promotion that many of its competitors will have difficulty matching. The company said it will offer up to one year of free U-verse High-Speed Internet service in parts of several states for small business customers that meet certain criteria.

The offer leverages the company’s landline and wireless networks, making it difficult for cable or wireless competitors other than Verizon to match. The move comes just a week after Verizon also launched a promotion that relies on its landline and wireless assets, suggesting that both companies may be feeling competitive pricing pressure. AT&T’s new free offer is on U-verse broadband speeds of up to 6 Mbps. Business customers will get one year of free service if they meet any of three conditions:

• They are new AT&T wireless business customers adding Mobile Share Value 10GB or higher plans
• They are existing AT&T mobility business customers migrating to AT&T Mobile Share Value 10 GB or higher plans
• They are existing business customers on Mobile Share Value 10 GB or higher plans

Sen Tim Johnson (D-SD) introduced the Public Safety and Economic Security Communications Act which aims to help prevent long-distance carriers from blocking or disrupting calls to rural areas.

Some people may not realize what a big deal it is when calls don’t go through to rural areas. But the ultimate result is that peoples’ lives are put in danger and companies lose business. That’s a big deal -- and the bill’s name better conveys what a big deal it is.

In a statement included in the Congressional Record, Sen Johnson noted that the rural call completion problem “poses a serious public safety threat, such as when a police dispatcher cannot reach law enforcement or when a doctor cannot call a patient.”

Sen Johnson’s bill would require companies that transport voice calls to register with the Federal Communications Commission and comply with basic service quality standards, which would be established by the commission within 180 days of enactment.

The latest gigabit network announcement comes from competitive carrier RST Global Communications. And there is a major difference between it and the other dozen or two gigabit network announcements that we’ve seen in the US to date.

While most gigabit offerings are based on fiber-to-the-home, RST hopes to serve the entire state of North Carolina by using gigabit Wi-Fi based on the 802.11ac standard for the final hop to residential customers, said company CEO Dan Limerick in an interview. That standard supports extended range as far as 3,000 meters, as well as symmetrical gigabit speeds, Limerick said.

Additionally RST plans to use a mesh network approach so that “the network perpetuates itself,” Limerick said. “We will put radios all across North Carolina, including rural areas,” said Limerick. RST has completed construction on a 3,100-mile 100 Gbps fiber backbone network across North Carolina and will be adding fiber laterals into individual communities that will provide backhaul connectivity for the gigabit offering. Additionally the company plans to offer service at speeds as high as 100 Gbps over landline infrastructure to business customers.

Pay-TV providers are missing the mark when it comes to the features and functionality current digital video network technology offers, according to the latest quarterly report on media and entertainment industry trends from TiVo’s Digitalsmiths.

Over one in ten respondents (10.8%) to Digitalsmiths’ latest quarterly consumer survey could potentially leave their current cable or satellite pay-TV service provider over the next six months, researchers found. 6.7% said they plan to change providers over this period, while 4.2% said they plan to cut their service altogether or switch to a third-party app, according to Digitalsmiths’, “Q4 2013 Video Trends Report.” Added to this, another 32.1% can be considered “on-the-fence,” indicating “maybe” when asked if they intended to change or switch providers or cut their current pay-TV service, which brings to 43% the percentage who “could be considered ‘at-risk’ subscribers,” Digitalsmiths notes. Other key takeaways from Digitalsmiths’ latest quarterly report include:

• Almost one-third (30.9 percent) of consumers surveyed are overwhelmed by the number of channels offered to them
• 88.2 percent watch the same channels over and over again
• 72.8% do not order movies from their Pay-TV providers’ VOD offerings. However, 45.3% of respondents are using subscription OTT services such as Netflix and Hulu
• 53.2% of respondents would like to see recommendations of video content within their channel guide

[March 11]

[Commentary] Over the top (OTT) video delivers video content over the open and unmanaged Internet directly to a consumer’s home. With broadband TV, service providers are delivering video over their closed and managed broadband network to that same home.

Many content owners continue to demand a closed facilities based broadband network to distribute their content. In some regards, broadband TV is the new IPTV, albeit with some very distinct differences, namely it requires a dramatically less expensive video headend. But traditional IPTV still delivers robust channel line-ups with access to all the content that most consumers still demand -- a channel line-up that broadband TV does not. Then again, that’s exactly the point.

For now, broadband TV is setting itself up as an alternative to cable and IPTV for consumers who do not want or need a traditional channel line-up. That may change over time. The broadband TV momentum is also shaped by a very interesting announcement from DISH. The traditional DBS provider has been spreading its wings for some time now, including stocking up on considerable wireless spectrum assets, and recently announced a distribution deal with Disney that they claim gives them Internet distribution rights for Disney owned content, including ABC and ESPN. DISH may be on a path to offer some form of a virtual cable MSO type offering, where they can offer a channel line-up delivered via the Internet to any broadband home. I would characterize this as a broadband TV/OTT hybrid. In my opinion, this type of offer still needs local broadcast to be compelling enough.

People in the millennial generation (age 16 to 34) are more likely than those in older generations to abandon an entertainment source if the quality of the experience is poor, according to new research from Verizon Digital Media. And that’s an important issue considering that the research also found that millennials were considerably more likely than older people to consume media on non-traditional devices. Millennials are three times more likely than non- millennials to watch television online, the survey of 800 millennials and 200 non- millennials found. Yet despite their propensity to watch shows online, 46% of millennials said they will give up on watching a show online if the video continues but they can’t hear the audio. Forty-five percent and 44% of millennials, respectively, said they would give up if the audio continues but they can’t see video or if the video screen freezes at times. The Verizon research appears aimed at wooing media company customers for Verizon Digital Media Services -- a unit focused on enhancing content delivery.