Joan Engebretson

Readers have grown accustomed to seeing Tier 2 and Tier 3 landline service providers focusing more closely on the business market to compensate for the erosion of their traditional voice service -- and now at least one Tier 2 wireless service provider also is getting aggressive on the business services front, albeit with somewhat different motivation.

C Spire announced that it plans to acquire MegaGate Broadband, a facilities-based competitive local exchange carrier focused on small- and medium-sized businesses throughout Mississippi. In the announcement, C Spire said the move was part of “continuing efforts to expand its portfolio of services and diversify its core telecommunications and technology services portfolio.”

Geographically MegaGate would appear to be an excellent match for C Spire, which is also focused largely on the state of Mississippi.

AT&T has finalized one of the deals it had pending to deploy gigabit service in the Triangle and Piedmont Triad regions of North Carolina, announcing that the city of Winston-Salem has ratified a gigabit agreement with AT&T.

Winston-Salem is one of six North Carolina university communities that put out requests for proposal (RFPs) for gigabit networks through the North Carolina Next Generation Network. Back in April, AT&T said it was in “advanced discussions” with the NCNGN about those networks. The carrier said that ratification is currently pending with the other five North Carolina cities -- including Carrboro, Cary, Chapel Hill, Durham and Raleigh.

Winston-Salem is a big win for AT&T because the company reportedly beaten out several other network operators including Google Fiber, which was one of the first companies to deploy gigabit service.

“A lot of people don’t know how healthy these companies are,” commented Jeff Kohler, co-founder and chief development officer for JAB Broadband. Kohler was referring to the 101 wireless Internet service providers that JAB Broadband has acquired since its founding in 2006.

Kohler has 20 years of experience in telecom with an emphasis on the wireless and financial aspects of the business, and he became attracted to broadband wireless because, with few exceptions, he found that companies in this business were “all good solid businesses,” he said.

JAB now has 170,000 subscribers in 14 states in the Midwest, the Rocky Mountain and the Southwest. Kohlerbelieves that makes JAB the largest wireless Internet service provider (WISP) in the US by a wide margin. In total he estimates there are about 2,500 WISPs nationwide, serving about 3 million subscribers. JAB serves primarily rural areas and suburbs that are distant from core metro areas.

Using the doughnut-and-hole analogy, Kohler said JAB serves the doughnut, but stays out of the hole. About 70% of the locations in JAB’s coverage area can get DSL and about 40% have a cable competitor. JAB mostly uses unlicensed spectrum, but it does have some 2.5 GHz licenses.

C Spire Wireless’s new promotion for Wireless Priority Service (WPS) calls attention to an important emergency service with which some of us may not have been familiar.

“Wireless Priority Service was developed for carriers to allow first responders . . . during a terrorist attack or disaster to have access to priority calling,” explained Terrell Knight, vice president of government and economic development for C Spire.

Wireless networks typically get very heavy traffic during major emergencies as wireless users attempt to get in touch with friends and family. Sometimes networks become so congested that people are unable to place voice calls. When that occurs, WPS puts emergency responders first in line to place a call whenever capacity is freed up because calls have been completed. WPS doesn’t interrupt calls in progress, Knight explained.

Rural telecommunications providers continue to see gains in broadband availability, average broadband speeds and take rates, according to a survey of rural telecommunications members of NTCA-The Rural Broadband Association.

The vast majority of the nation’s small rural telecommunications companies are NTCA members, and 27% of those members participated in the survey conducted in late 2013. Nearly two-thirds (65.5%) of respondents’ customers can receive broadband at speeds exceeding 10 Mbps, indicating that providers have made substantial progress in installing fiber to the home or to a neighborhood node to improve on the relatively slower rates that can be delivered over copper loops connecting the central office to the customer.

Currently only about 8.5% of customers subscribe to service at rates above 10 Mbps, and the most popular category -- chosen by 34% of subscribers -- is between 3 and 4 Mbps. But as the NTCA notes in the report, “This gap should shrink as customers begin to realize all that can be accomplished online, and as new applications are developed which will require increased bandwidth.”

One of the more impressive data points from NTCA’s survey is that respondents are seeing average broadband take rates of 72%, up from 69% in a similar survey conducted in 2013. Whenever one of the publicly held regional or Tier 2 telecommunications companies sees broadband take rates above 40% or so, some industry observers generally begin to question the remaining upside potential. But such concerns don’t seem to be merited yet in the rural telecom market, despite the high take rates.

Judging by three separate announcements recently, gigabit broadband certainly seems to be catching on in smaller markets. TDS Telecom said that it has made gigabit Internet service available in Hollis (NH). And Comporium, which earlier announced plans for gigabit service in Rock Hill (SC) released additional details about those plans.

Comporium said its gigabit service will be available in a re-development zone planned for the former textile town. And in a pre-briefing about the announcement, Comporium public relations director Paul Kutz told Telecompetitor that the company expects to turn up its first gigabit customers around June 1.

The TDS and Comporium small market gigabit announcements come on the heels of an announcement from Bolt Fiber Optic Services, which said it plans to offer gigabit Internet service in northeastern Oklahoma.

Until now gigabit broadband projects in metro markets have garnered the most attention. But Bolt Fiber Optic Services, a unit of Northeast Oklahoma Electric Cooperative, said it plans to offer gigabit broadband service in its rural Oklahoma serving area.

Bolt Fiber Optic Services plans to offer high-definition video services as well as high-speed Internet over the gigabit passive optical network (GPON) that it plans to build using equipment from Alcatel-Lucent. Customers also will be able to use third-party voice-over-Internet protocol offerings, the company noted in the announcement.

The company plans to begin offering service in the fourth quarter of 2014 and to complete the deployment by April 2017.

As a utility company, Northeast Oklahoma Electric Cooperative is not entitled to Universal Service funding. And some readers may be surprised that the company is able to make a business case for ultra-high-speed broadband deployment without that funding.

People in any part of the country covered by AT&T’s wireless network can now get a wireless-based home phone and Internet offering from the company, said an AT&T executive.

As the executive explained, customers signing on for the service, dubbed AT&T Wireless Home Phone & Internet, get a device that acts as a Wi-Fi hotspot using AT&T’s cellular network for connectivity to the Internet -- and customers also can plug a traditional landline phone into the same device, enabling the phone to also work over the cellular network.

The nationwide launch of AT&T Wireless Home Phone & Internet comes at a time when the company is gearing up for trials in which all landline voice customers in an area will have their service replaced with a cellular alternative or, where available, with a voice offering running over the company’s fiber-fed U-verse infrastructure.

The company’s ultimate goal is to phase out traditional landline voice service – and when it does that, it may want to also phase-out lower-speed DSL service, which runs over the same copper connection as the voice service. Eliminating DSL as well as landline voice in areas not targeted for U-verse upgrades would let AT&T abandon the copper connection between the customer and the central office, thereby eliminating the cost of maintaining that infrastructure.

Lincoln, Nebraska has joined the ranks of cities offering free Wi-Fi access. In an announcement the City of Lincoln said Wi-Fi is available in public areas in and around the Haymarket and Railyard areas of the city.

Longer term the city has considerably more ambitious plans.

“Our long-term goal is to make Lincoln one of the most connected cities in the nation,” said Lincoln mayor Chris Beutler in the announcement, which noted that the rollout will occur in multiple phases. Lincoln’s deployment uses a cloud-based approach that moves some of the infrastructure underlying the Wi-Fi network to a data center operated by Ruckus Wireless.

Cox Communications provided details about the plans for deploying gigabit broadband service that Cox CEO Pat Esser initially revealed in late April -- and although Cox isn’t the first cable operator to announce gigabit broadband plans, it is inarguably the most ambitious.

According to the announcement, Cox plans to roll out gigabit Internet speeds across all of its markets nationwide, beginning with new residential construction projects and new and existing neighborhoods in Phoenix, Las Vegas and Omaha. The announcement says Cox “will begin market-wide deployment of gigabit speeds by the end of 2016.”

Cox also said it plans to double the speeds on its most popular Internet tiers for all customers. This includes customers that currently receive 25 Mbps and 50 Mbps service -- and according to Cox, those two service tiers represent more than 70% of the company’s high-speed Internet customers.