February 2016

In a letter to the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice, Senate Judiciary Committee Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman Mike Lee (R-UT) and Ranking Member Amy Klobuchar identify key issues the regulators should look at as they review the Charter/Time Warner Cable deal.

The senators said that if the FCC has issues with a combined company interfering with competing online video services, it should "require conditions that would alleviate the potential competitive harms." They cited HBO specifically as a former exclusively cable supplier now offering an over-the-top version that did not require a cable subscription. HBO parent Time Warner (not to be confused with Time Warner Cable) has raised over-the-top OTT issues with the deal at the FCC. They also said that the FCC should make sure that independent programmers are viable. It advised the FCC to take those into account as it reviews the deal--for public interest harms and benefits. Recognizing that the DOJ's is a strict antitrust review, they said any decision must be fact-specific and any "intervention" must be based on evidence.

Building fiber-to-the-premise is hard, expensive, and time-consuming. Even for a company with vast resources like Google. The challenges multiply when you’re a competitive over-builder and your competition sees you coming. Those competitors don’t exactly stand around and wait for you to cherry pick their customers away. Perhaps these and other realities have led Google to look at faster and less expensive ways to deliver ultra-broadband to the home. Maybe even a Google Fiber fixed wireless approach? A recent filing at the Federal Communications Commission suggests that Google is experimenting with just that. It’s impossible to tell from the filing what Google’s ultimate plans are, but they are definitely snooping around wireless delivery of broadband.

The advent of 5G is likely to bring another splurge of investment, just as orders for 4G equipment are peaking. The goal is to be able to offer users no less than the “perception of infinite capacity”, says Rahim Tafazolli, director of the 5G Innovation Centre at the University of Surrey.

Rare will be the device that is not wirelessly connected, from self-driving cars and drones to the sensors, industrial machines and household appliances that together constitute the “internet of things” (IoT). It is easy to dismiss all this as “a lot of hype”, in the words of Kester Mann of CCS Insight, a research firm. When it comes to 5G, much is still up in the air: not only which band of radio spectrum and which wireless technologies will be used, but what standards makers of network gear and handsets will have to comply with. Telecoms firms have reached consensus only on a set of rough “requirements”. The most important are connection speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second and response times (“latency”) of below 1 millisecond. Yet the momentum is real. South Korea and Japan are front-runners in wired broadband, and Olympic games are an opportunity to show the world that they intend also to stay ahead in wireless, even if that may mean having to upgrade their 5G networks to comply with a global standard once it is agreed. AT&T and Verizon both invested early in 4G, and would like to lead again with 5G. The market for network equipment has peaked, as recent results from Ericsson and Nokia show, so the makers also need a new generation of products and new groups of customers. On the demand side, too, pressure is mounting for better wireless infrastructure.