Jeff Baumgartner

AT&T likes the results it’s getting with its initial fiber-to-the-premises “U-verse with GigaPower” deployment in Austin so much that it is preparing to unleash the 1-Gig-capable platform in Dallas later in 2014. Like Google Fiber’s build-out approach, AT&T GigaPower is offering access on a demand-driven basis, asking residents to influence the fiber upgrade locations by voting on the Web. AT&T has not disclosed how many customers are on GigaPower, but has said it’s currently available in “tens of thousands” of homes.

[March 7]

Charter Communications has kicked off its all-digital shift in Southern California, teeing up an upgrade that will clear the way for a total of 200 HD channels, faster broadband speeds, and a video on demand library stocked with about 10,000 “options.”

Charter said it will begin the process in the market in late March, and wrap it up in early September. Communities targeted in this round up upgrades includes Monterey Park, West Covina, Azusa, Norwalk, Pasadena, Cerritos, Ventura, Malibu, Whittier, Riverside, Victorville, Hesperia, Big Bear, Lake Arrowhead, Rancho Cucamonga, San Bernardino, Atascadero, Paso Robles, Grover Beach, Morro Bay, San Luis Obispo, Turlock, Escalon, Gilroy, Watsonville, California City and Porterville. Once the upgrade is complete, Charter will double residential Internet speeds (downstream) from 30 Mbps to 60 Mbps at no additional cost.

[March 7]

Comcast said it is closing in on 1 million quasi-public hotspots deployed after standing up about 50,000 access points in Illinois, northwest Indiana and southwest Michigan.

Comcast said it plans to deploy “hundreds of thousands” more in the region over the next several months. Currently, only Comcast customers have access to the new home-as-a-hotspot signals, which the MSO began to light up last June. The MSOs behind the CableWiFi initiative have deployed more than 200,000 hotspots. Comcast is only disclosing its total Wi-Fi hotspot deployments, and is not breaking out how many are being applied to the cross-MSO roaming initiative and how many are coming way of its neighborhood hotspot project.

Based on analyst predictions that telecommunications equipment manufacturing company Arris is the supplier with the most to gain in the wake of the proposed Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger, one might think that the vendor is jumping for joy. Think again. Both of its feet are firmly on the ground, careful not to exude overconfidence about those future prospects.

Arris, said company chairman and CEO Bob Stanzione, is “holding our breath” to see how the deal might affect spending later in 2014, wary that TWC might decide to pull the purse strings tighter during this coming period of uncertainty. “Vendors are doing a wait and see on what’s going to happen here,” Stanzione said. The ink is barely dry on the mega-merger, but so far it’s been “business as usual,” Stanzione said in his first public comments about the proposed deal since it was announced on February 13. Stanzione said he was not surprised to see a new deal for TWC emerge after Charter Communications made its initial bid and rumors follows that Comcast was somehow getting involved.

[Commentary] As cable operators such as Comcast push ahead with policies that turn home gateways into quasi-public hotspots, it’s becoming clear that a big challenge ahead will be centered on educating consumers and allaying their fears, and less so on the technology that's driving it.

When Comcast announced in 2013 that it was starting to broadcast a separate, public “XfinityWifi” in a growing number of home-side Wi-Fi-capable gateways in select markets, I figured it wouldn’t be long before stories in local markets started to surface detailing consumer concerns about this budding home-as-a-hotspot idea, which has already taken firm root in markets such as Europe.

While some consumers clearly understood the network-expanding benefits of an approach, many others were upset that it was an opt-out program, or were fearful that a gateway emitting this separate network ID was somehow siphoning some of the bandwidth they were paying good money for. Still others had security concerns or flat out didn't trust Comcast and were sure that company was in some way up to no good. And many of those are valid concerns, of course. But they are also concerns that Comcast has tried to address in its communications to customers when this capability got turned on.

It’s clear that Comcast is trying to get the message out and to get out ahead of these concerns. But it’s similarly clear that not everyone bothers to read them the first time through, meaning it will take a prolonged effort to educate consumers, hammer home these messages, and (maybe) put these worries at ease.