Joan Engebretson

ViaSat announced it will begin offering what it calls “virtually unlimited” satellite broadband service. The service will be available immediately to new customers in Florida and will also be available in some other limited markets, but the company anticipates expanding service moving forward.

The “virtually unlimited” offering, which will carry the name “Freedom,” gives customers unlimited lower-speed bandwidth and at least 150 gigabytes of data for the higher-bandwidth services, which Farr said should be plenty for most customers. And even customers who exceed that level will not be throttled back immediately -- and possibly not at all.

Cincinnati Bell has joined the roster of network operators who have announced plans to offer broadband at speeds up to 1 Gbps. Service will be available beginning September 8. The gigabit service will be known as Fioptics Gigabit Internet. The existing fiber-to-the-home infrastructure in Cincinnati supports the company’s triple play of high-speed Internet, voice and video service.

With unlicensed Wi-Fi spectrum becoming increasingly crowded, equipment manufacturers and service providers are pushing to make more spectrum available on an unlicensed basis -- and while substantial progress has been made on that front, more work remains, according to investor research firm Bernstein.

Associated partner Paul Margie at DC law firm Harris, Wiltshire & Grannis shed light on several open issues – including how much unlicensed spectrum is likely to be made available through the voluntary TV broadcast spectrum auction in the 600 MHz band, the three-tier plan that the FCC has proposed for unlicensed spectrum in the 3.5 GHz band, and Globalstar’s proposal for a private Wi-Fi network in the 2.4 GHz band. As Margie explained, those are three of the four bands -- including the 5 GHz band -- where additional spectrum could be made available to support Wi-Fi or similar offerings.

An announcement from ADTRAN touts the efforts of C Spire to create a new “Silicon South” economy in Mississippi through gigabit connectivity. The release also notes that ADTRAN is supplying fiber-to-the-home equipment to C Spire to support its gigabit deployment.

AT&T Group President and Chief Strategy Officer John Stankey offered additional details about the fixed wireless broadband offering that the company previously agreed to make available in some rural areas if the company’s plan to purchase DirecTV is approved by regulators.

Stankey revealed AT&T’s plans to deploy the service in areas where the company has fallow licensed spectrum and that the service is expected to support sustained peak data rates of 10-20 Mbps. AT&T envisions its fixed wireless offering being sold as part of a double play that would also include DirecTV video service, thereby helping to minimize churn.

About 25% of the people in the areas that AT&T would target for the service currently have no terrestrial broadband offering, while 30% or less have only low-speed DSL, Stankey said.

There doesn’t seem to be much consensus about what Sprint’s decision to drop its plan to purchase T-Mobile means for the companies and for the industry in general.

While some industry observers expect both companies to focus on internal growth and/or to consider alternative merger-and-acquisition options, others say this is a posturing move and the companies will take another go at merging after the next election, when they hope to find a regulatory environment more open to such a deal.

A startup company known as Rural Broadband Services Corporation has big plans for rural Tahlequah, Oklahoma -- plans that RBSC CEO Roy Choates hopes he will be able to repeat in other rural communities that lack high-speed broadband connectivity.

“We have a philosophy called ‘shared infrastructure,’” said Choates. “In rural America you don’t need two or three different companies building a fiber network.”

For example, he said he expects to supply connectivity to support utility company smart grid deployments, eliminating the need for the utility to deploy its own fiber. He also believes broadband will be key to important rural initiatives such as telemedicine, distance learning and the ConnectED program that aims to bring high-speed Internet to the nation’s schools.

Comcast on July 22 announced that its broadband network is fully deployed to support IPv6 dual stack connectivity. Comcast has surpassed 30 percent IPv6 deployment overall, according to July 2014 launch measurements by the Internet Society.

AT&T has crossed the 20 percent mark and Time Warner Cable the 10 percent IPv6 deployment level. Verizon Wireless’s IPv6 deployment, the Internet Society reported, reached 53.55 percent. Comcast expects its IPv6 penetration to reach nearly 50 percent by the end of 2014.

Time Warner Cable issued touted the gigabit network it proposes to deploy in the city of Los Angeles. The company’s proposal came in the form of a response to a request for information (RFI) issued last year by the City of Los Angeles a network operator to build a gigabit network throughout the city at the operator’s own expense.

TWC’s response includes:

• Detailed information on TWC network upgrades that are already underway that will deliver up to 300 Mbps to all of the company’s customers by the end of 2014
• Details about the company’s transformation to an all-digital network in LA
• A catalog of TWC’s current fiber-based broadband and Ethernet solutions that already serve businesses and anchor institutions in the community with multi-gigabit connections
• Details on TWC’s continuing deployment of public Wi-Fi hotspots that are free to the majority of TWC broadband customers

Verizon said that it successfully tested a 100 Gbps switched Ethernet access link using a network interface device from Canoga Perkins.

Previously the carrier had done “extensive testing in a lab,” but “it was important to validate [this] in the field,” said Vin Alesi, Verizon director of regional Ethernet product technology. Deployments of 100 Gbps Ethernet are becoming increasingly common in carrier backbone networks and even in some metro networks, but 100 Gbps speeds haven’t been widely available as switched access links, if at all.