November 2014

Voters in seven cities and counties in Colorado voted to free their local governments to offer Internet service.

The votes marked a defeat for big, traditional Internet service providers such as Comcast that have successfully maneuvered to inject limits on municipal broadband into state regulations over the last decade. Now cities are figuring out ways to push back, including wiggling out from under laws the industry helped put in place.

In Boulder, locals voted on whether the city should be "authorized to provide high-speed Internet services (advanced services), telecommunications services, and/or cable television services to residents, businesses, schools, libraries, nonprofit entities and other users of such services." The city approved the measure with 84 percent of the vote. Similar overrides also passed by large margins in the towns of Yuma, Wray, Cherry Hills Village and Red Cliff and in Rio Blanco and Yuma counties

[Commentary] The key to an open Internet is nondiscrimination and in particular, a prohibition on discrimination or prioritization based on the identity of the user (sender/receiver) or use (application/content). Unfortunately, the rules now being considered by the FCC don’t come close to implementing this simple and important benchmark.

There are many reasons for this, but perhaps the most fundamental is a simple misconception, one that persists in the work of the FCC but also of proponents and opponents of network neutrality. It is the false distinction between what they call “edge providers” (YouTube) and “end users” (people who watch videos on YouTube). Who exactly are the end users that are not edge providers? In other words, who uses the Internet but does not provide any content, application, or service? The answer is no one. All end users provide content as they engage in communications with other end users, individually or collectively.

[Brett Frischmann is the director of the Cardozo Intellectual Property and Information Law Program]

Perhaps unsurprisingly the Communications Workers of America would like to see the Federal Communications Commission raise the target speed for the Connect America Fund to 10 Mbps from its current 4 Mbps – a move the FCC has been considering for several months.

That program aims to make several billion dollars available to the nation’s largest price cap carriers to bring broadband to rural areas of the country where broadband is not available today. “CWA represents the workforce at the largest price-cap carriers,” wrote CWA President Larry Cohen in a letter sent to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. “Carefully balancing the CAF rules to encourage participation by the price cap carriers will support quality, career jobs in rural America and ensure that there is a qualified workforce immediately available to build, maintain and service CAF supported broadband networks.” Building out networks supporting 10 Mbps would be a bigger project than building 4 Mbps networks and, therefore, would create greater job security for carrier employees. Additionally the number of homes that would be considered unserved could increase substantially if the higher speed target were chosen.

An ACG Research study sponsored by Ciena finds that over the top (OTT) video across multiple devices are poised to increase households bandwidth requirements by 31% annually over the next five years.

Peak hour average usage per home will jump from 2.9 Mbps this year to 7.3 Mbps in 2018, holding that such a metric is directly applicable to residential backhaul planning. Ciena and ACG said the forecast will help network planners brace for this coming demand as broadcast video services increasingly get delivered in multicast across the metro network, and distributed as bandwidth-eating unicast streams in the home. The forecast also predicts that OTT unicast video traffic will be 4.6 times greater than multicast traffic by 2018,while usage of Internet video grows from 12% of overall peak average bandwidth this year, to 25% in 2018.