Jon Brodkin

Google Fiber's new wireless Internet division is apparently ready to expand. The company's Webpass subsidiary says in a job listing that it is "searching for a General Manager to launch our Seattle market." The new GM will be "directly responsible for the growth of our local telecom network and revenue" and will oversee construction and installation schedules. Webpass, which offers up to 1Gbps upload and download speeds for $60 a month and without data caps, was purchased by Google Fiber in October 2016 and already sells wireless home Internet service in Boston, Chicago, Miami, San Diego, Oakland, and San Francisco. (Advertised speeds are anywhere from 100Mbps to 1Gbps, depending on location.) The plan would bring Google’s wireless option to Seattle’s dense urban center where creating a new physical fiber network can be expensive and impractical.

Republican Sens are reportedly preparing a legislative move to overturn privacy rules that require Internet service providers to protect their customers' online data. Sen Jeff Flake (R-AZ) confirmed that he plans to introduce a resolution that would roll back the Federal Communications Commission’s broadband privacy rules via the Congressional Review Act (CRA), which allows Congress to eliminate agency rules with a simple majority vote. Sen Flake had a dozen co-sponsors on board as of last week, but he hasn't said when exactly he'll submit the resolution.

In the House, Communications Subcommittee Chairman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) said last week she was speaking with colleagues in the Senate "daily" about how to best utilize the CRA to undo broadband privacy. The flurry of action comes shortly after industry lobby groups asked Congress to use the CRA to undo the privacy rules. The rules passed in October require home and mobile ISPs to get opt-in consent from consumers before sharing Web browsing data and other private information with advertisers and other third parties.

AT&T is bringing fiber-to-the-home Internet to five new metro areas this month, boosting its fiber total to 51 metro areas in the US. Milwaukee (WI) has AT&T Fiber now, and later in Feb the service will arrive in Columbia (SC), Jackson (MI), Knoxville (TN), and Shreveport (LA). AT&T Fiber is available to nearly four million homes and businesses (up from three million in November 2016), but there's still a lot of work left to put fiber in additional cities and expand deployment in those where it's already available. "By mid-2019 we plan to reach at least 12.5 million locations across 67 metro areas with our 100 percent fiber network," AT&T said. The company agreed to hit those numbers in exchange for getting its purchase of DirecTV approved in 2015.

The "Virginia Broadband Deployment Act" that would have made it far more difficult for municipalities to offer Internet service has been dramatically watered down after running into heavy opposition. Instead of preventing cities and towns from offering broadband, a new version of the bill passed by the Virginia House this week merely imposes new record-keeping requirements.

The original bill favored by cable lobbyists (and called the "Broadband death star bill" by one opponent) would have prohibited municipal broadband deployments except in very limited circumstances. If it had passed, localities wouldn't have been allowed to offer Internet service if an existing network already provided 10Mbps download and 1Mbps upload speeds to 90 percent of potential customers. The bill also would have made it difficult for localities to offer lower rates than private ISPs. Gov Terry McAuliffe (D-VA) in Jan promised to veto the bill if it was passed by the state legislature. The proposal also drew opposition from local governments, broadband advocacy groups, and companies such as Google and Netflix. The opposition was successful, as House Republicans replaced the bill with another called the "Virginia Wireless Services Act" and approved it Tuesday by a 72-24 vote. It has now gone to the Senate for consideration.

Comcast should stop saying in advertisements that it “delivers the fastest Internet in America” and the “fastest in-home Wi-Fi," according to the advertising industry's self-regulation body. The evidence Comcast uses to substantiate those claims is not sufficient, ruled the National Advertising Review Board (NARB).

Verizon had challenged Comcast's advertising claims, leading to the ruling. Comcast said today that it disagreed with the findings but will comply with the decision. Comcast used crowdsourced speed test data from Ookla to make its claim about Xfinity Internet speeds. "Ookla’s data showed only that Xfinity consumers who took advantage of the free tests offered on the Speedtest.net website subscribed to tiers of service with higher download speeds than Verizon FiOS consumers who took advantage of the tests," today's NARB announcement said. The Ookla data's accuracy wasn't questioned, but it was judged to be "not a good fit for an overall claim that an ISP delivers 'America’s fastest Internet.'"

The Federal Communications Commission's new Republican leadership has decided not to defend FCC inmate calling rules that place a cap on intrastate calling rates. Chairman Ajit Pai and fellow Commissioner Michael O'Rielly repeatedly opposed attempts to cap the phone rates charged to prisoners while Democrats held the FCC's majority.

Republicans argued that the FCC exceeded its authority, and commission attempts to enforce rate caps have been stymied by a series of court decisions. Since the FCC prison rate order was adopted by a 3-2 vote in October 2015, Democrats Jessica Rosenworcel and Chairman Tom Wheeler have left the commission, FCC Deputy General Counsel David Gossett noted. "As a result of these changes in membership, the two Commissioners who dissented from the Order under review—on the grounds that, in specific respects, it exceeds the agency’s lawful authority—now comprise a majority of the Commission," Gossett wrote. Gossett is thus no longer authorized to defend the FCC's previous contention that it "has the authority to cap intrastate rates for inmate calling services" and cannot defend the FCC's assertion that it "lawfully considered industry-wide averages in setting the rate caps contained in the Order," he wrote. Gossett said he will continue to defend other parts of the commission's October 2015 order, which also lowered the price of interstate calls, those that cross state lines. The FCC's decision to stop defending the full order hurts the case for maintaining rate caps on intrastate calls in which both parties are in the same state, but it doesn't completely kill the case. The FCC is ceding 10 minutes of its allotted argument time to attorney Andrew Schwartzman, who is defending the rate caps on behalf of prisoners' rights groups.

In a press conference after the Federal Communications Commission meeting, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai was asked several times about network neutrality. While Chairman Pai has repeatedly made it clear that he opposes the current rules and wants to overturn them, he has not said whether the commission will continue to enforce all of the rules while they are still in place. When asked by a reporter if the agency will continue to enforce the rules, Chairman Pai pointed out that he and fellow Republican Commissioner Michael O'Rielly already said they wouldn't punish small Internet service providers for violations of the net neutrality order's "enhanced transparency" rules.

The FCC is finalizing an order that will exempt ISPs with 250,000 or fewer subscribers from those truth-in-billing rules and will not enforce them against the small ISPs while they're still in place. But for now, Pai is not saying whether the commission will continue to enforce the core net neutrality rules that prohibit Internet providers from blocking or throttling traffic or giving priority to Web services in exchange for payment.

Comcast said it plans to offer a mobile phone service in 2017 with an emphasis on selling bundles of wireless and cable service. Launching the wireless product is a priority in 2017, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said. Comcast will be able to offer wireless service nationwide because of a reselling agreement with Verizon, but the company is expecting particularly good sales with existing customers in its cable territory.

"We plan to include wireless in our multi-product bundles in a way that is designed to add value to our customers, improve retention, and ultimately benefit lifetime customer economics for us," Roberts said. "Our offering will give customers access to a world-class wireless network, benefiting from our Wi-Fi [hotspots], with the best mobile devices and a simple, transparent experience, all for a great value." The Comcast "triple-play" bundle would thus expand to four major products: home Internet service, cable TV, landline phones, and mobile phones.

Google and Netflix joined a handful of advocacy groups and other companies lobbying against a proposed Virginia state law that would make it far more difficult for municipalities to offer Internet service. The "Virginia Broadband Deployment Act" would prohibit municipal broadband deployments except in very limited circumstances. For example, localities wouldn't be allowed to offer Internet service to residents if an existing network already provides 10Mbps download and 1Mbps upload speeds to 90 percent of potential customers. Even if that condition is met, municipalities would have to jump through several legal hoops before being allowed to build a network. "This bill would effectively ban new public broadband networks and public-private partnerships and cripple existing ones, harming both the public and private sectors, retarding economic growth, preventing the creation or retention of jobs around the Commonwealth, particularly in rural areas, hampering work force development, and diminishing the quality of life in Virginia," bill opponents including Google and Netflix wrote in a letter to State House Commerce Committee Chairman Terry Kilgore, a Republican.

Cox is continuing the trend of bringing data caps and overage fees to customers in new cities. Cox, the third largest cable company in the US after Comcast and Charter, has 6 million residential and business customers in 18 states. Much like Comcast, it has instituted a 1TB (1,024GB) monthly data cap and charges $10 for each additional 50GB block of data. Also like Comcast, Cox has been bringing the overage fees to a few cities at a time instead of deploying them to its entire territory all at once.

Cox brought the data caps first to Cleveland (OH) and then to Florida and Georgia in October 2016. This week, Cox expanded the overage fees to Arkansas; Connecticut; Kansas; Omaha, Nebraska; Iowa; and Sun Valley (ID). Customers can get data usage alerts from a browser, e-mail, text message, or automated phone call when they hit 85 percent, 100 percent, and 125 percent of their monthly data plans.