Joan Engebretson

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.

The Federal Communications Commission wants rate-of-return (ROR) telecommunications companies to transition to model-based support as the current voice-focused high-cost Universal Service Fund (USF) is phased out and converted to a broadband-focused Connect America Fund program.

Small rural ROR companies now receive USF support based on how their actual costs compare to nationwide averages, but critics argue that today’s system does not provide an incentive for telecommunications companies to deploy network infrastructure in the most efficient manner. The CAF program for larger price cap carriers is already slated to use a cost model to calculate support levels.

C Spire plans to offer home automation, security and monitoring to customers who purchase the gigabit service that the company is in the process of deploying in parts of Mississippi.

The offering, called C Spire Home, will use Lynx equipment from Honeywell and will be installed by licensed security technicians that C Spire will be hiring, a C Spire spokesman said. Monitoring will be handled by a third-party central station, the spokesman said.

Customers purchasing C Spire Home will have the ability to check in on and control their home system remotely using a smartphone. That capability has had a major impact in the home control and security market, making such systems more attractive to end users and significantly increasing demand.

And that trend has caught the attention of telecommunications and cable companies, many of whom have launched home control and security offerings in recent years.

It appears that the rural-rural broadband gap applies to schools as well as the broader Internet marketplace. That seems the best explanation for two substantially different measurements of average school bandwidth in surveys conducted by NTCA -- The Rural Broadband Association and EducationSuperHighway, an advocacy organization focused on bringing better broadband to the nation’s schools.

The NTCA released the results from a survey of its rural telecom service provider members which found that schools served by those companies, on average, purchase broadband connections delivering 65 Mbps downstream and 13 Mbps upstream. But EducationSuperHighway, which surveyed schools nationwide, found a median bandwidth of 33 Mbps.

These results might seem surprising, considering that broadband is generally available more broadly and at higher speeds in metro areas than in rural areas because it is less costly to deploy broadband in metro areas. That phenomenon is known as the rural-urban gap. But FCC researchers also have noted a rural-rural gap: Rural areas served by small independent telcos generally have better broadband availability and higher speeds than rural areas where the incumbent local carrier is one of the nation’s larger carriers such as AT&T or Verizon.

Level3 Communications wants the Federal Communications Commission to impose interconnection requirements on Internet service providers -- a move the company said is necessary to “fully protect the free and open Internet.”

The company recommends three specific ISP interconnection requirements. Mooney said Level3 already has similar arrangements with several ISPs and “the solution is good for everyone.”

Level3’s proposed ISP interconnection requirements include:

1. If a content provider or a network operator providing connectivity for the content provider delivers content into the ISP’s local market closest to the location of the ISP’s customer requesting the content, the ISP should be required to deliver the traffic to its customer without charging an interconnection fee -- provided that the content provider delivers a certain amount of traffic in the aggregate to the ISP.
2. The ISP would be able to select the interconnection location but selections would have to be “reasonable.” For example, each location would have to serve a minimum number of the ISP’s customers and the location would have to be served by several different metro transport service providers to ensure that the ISP has competitive choices.
3. If interconnection capacity becomes congested at any interconnection location, it would have to be promptly augmented.