March 2012

Rural residents are finding it increasingly easy to subscribe to broadband Internet services, and receive increasingly faster speeds thanks to the efforts of community-based communications providers, according to survey results released by the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association (NTCA).

NTCA's 2011 Broadband/Internet Availability Study found that 58 percent of those respondents with a fiber-deployment strategy plan to offer fiber to the node (where the final link from the pole to the customer isn't fiber) to more than 75 percent of their customers by the end of 2014. Sixty-six percent plan to offer fiber to the homes of at least half their customers in that same time frame — a 46 percent increase over last year's results. The survey also showed rapidly increasing broadband speeds, with respondents reporting that more than 7 in 10 customers can receive speeds as fast as 6 Mbps. Forty-six percent can receive between 6 and 10 Mbps, and 32 percent can surf faster than 10 Mbps. And 66 percent of respondents' customers are electing to subscribe to broadband, an increase of 11 percent from last year.

T-Mobile USA hired TAP Advisors LLC to help sell wireless towers and raise cash for parent Deutsche Telekom AG, said people familiar with the matter.

Deutsche Telekom appointed the New York boutique bank to renew the search for a buyer after an aborted effort last year, said the people, who declined to be identified because the matter is private. The disposal may raise as much as $3 billion, according to an estimate by Kevin Smithen, an analyst at Macquarie Capital USA. “They lost a lot of time last year and that creates urgency to find a solution for those assets soon,” said Jan Goehmann, an analyst at NordLB in Hanover, Germany, who recommends investors buy Deutsche Telekom shares. “This is the logical next step.”

The Arab Spring has had yet another consequence -- satellite jamming, and the practice is serious enough to threaten the satellite operators' business.

Two operators, Arabsat and Nilesat, complained about the jamming in the Satellite 2012 Conference in Washington (DC) last week, according to an article in Space News. Arabsat is a 21-country consortium that provides broadcasting to over 100 countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. Nilesat is an Egypt-based operator that carries 415 channels to the Middle East and North Africa. The satellites also provide broadband, telephone, and VSAT service. Jamming and rounding up satellite dishes has become a common practice for governments wishing to limit unfavorable coverage in their own (or sometimes other people's) countries. An article in February at BroadcastEngineering.com detailed the decision of the United Nations' International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to condemn satellite jamming in Iran as "contrary to Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights." That decision came after complaints by several broadcasters, including the BBC, Radio Netherlands Worldwide, and Voice of America. Last year Reuters reported that jamming of satellite phones and other services occurred in Libya during the uprising. But the issue may not be limited to Middle East governments. The Islamic Republic of Iran's Broadcasting English website claimed in January that British technicians were jamming Iranian broadcasts on Eutelsat's Hotbird sat network from a site in Bahrain. If that's accurate, it may suggest that European governments think it's acceptable to jam European companies' satellites as long as the broadcasts themselves aren't European.

While Verizon’s blockbuster deal with the cablecos has run into some friction of late, the wireless giant recently closed a much smaller transaction. On March 14, the company announced that it had completed its purchase of the operating assets of Cellular One of Northeast Pennsylvania from US Cellular for an undisclosed sum.

The deal includes US Cellular’s cell block B license KNKN800 along with the associated common carrier point-to-point microwave licenses, and Cellular One’s customers in Pike and Wayne Counties. According to the 2010 census, the two counties are home to a combined population of around 110,197. Cellular One began its operations in the region in 2000, starting with 8 cell sites and an analog cellular network. The company has since added a CDMA digital cellular voice network as an overlay and grown its cell tower count in the area to 23 -- assets Verizon will pick up with the purchase.