Fierce

Canby Telcom, a regional telecommunications company serving the northern Willamette Valley of Oregon, is the latest service provider to launch a 1 Gbps-based fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) service, providing service to more than 2,500 local residents and businesses.

To deliver the FTTH service, Canby is using Adtran's Gigabit hardware portfolio, including the Total Access 5004 platform.

"This development is a tremendous asset to existing businesses, education and the overall community economic health by retaining local jobs and attracting even more industries and new job opportunities to our town," said Renate Mengelberg, economic-development director with the city of Canby.

Syracuse (NY) is tired of waiting for its two local service providers Verizon and Time Warner Cable to give it better broadband service so Mayor Stephanie Miner (D) is investigating how the city could build its own fiber-based broadband network.

Mayor Miner said that high-speed Internet is "the modern day equivalent of infrastructure," adding: "It's clear that broadband is going to be a foundation of our new economy."

Verizon is reportedly planning to use its 4G LTE mobile wireless network to deliver cable TV programming within a year.

While Verizon maintains it can do video over wireless with its existing network, things will improve noticeably if the carrier gets a big share of broadcast spectrum being put up for auction in late 2014. "To do over-the-top you have to have a rich spectrum portfolio," broadband analyst Scott McClelland said.

Charlotte (NC) Chief Information Officier Jeff Stovall said concerns about sustainability of the city's planned public-safety network ultimately led to a suspension of negotiations that could have enabled Charlotte to lease 700 MHz spectrum from the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet).

Charlotte was one of seven National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) Broadband Technologies Opportunity Program (BTOP) public-safety entities whose funding was halted during spring 2012 by NTIA due to concerns the BTOP projects might be incompatible with the national public-safety broadband network (NPSBN) being planned by FirstNet.

The only way BTOPs could get their programs going again was if they completed a spectrum manager lease agreement (SMLA) with FirstNet to access its 700 MHz spectrum and had their rollout plan approved by NTIA.

Stovall said several changes during the funding freeze period -- including stricter building codes and a lowering of cellular service rate by commercial mobile network operators -- impacted the business plan for the Charlotte public-safety network, potentially leading to funding shortfalls for both deployment and operations.

Dish Network Chairman Charlie Ergen said he remains open to a partnership with T-Mobile US or another wireless carrier.

He also said that Sprint's decision to abandon merger talks with T-Mobile increases Dish's options for entering the wireless market. Ergen also reiterated that it is "relatively unlikely" that Dish will try to build out its spectrum by itself or just sell its spectrum.

T-Mobile US said it added 1.47 million total net new subscribers in the second quarter, including 908,000 branded postpaid net adds.

While T-Mobile didn't report quite as many postpaid net adds in the period as Verizon Wireless, it did have more total new subscriber additions and it showed strong growth in phone subscriber additions.

T-Mobile also said it now expects to add between 3 million and 3.5 million branded postpaid net subscribers in 2014, up from its previous estimate between 2.8 million and 3.3 million. T-Mobile has added 2.23 million branded postpaid customers so far.

T-Mobile CEO John Legere concluded: "The company is not in need of doing something [in terms of a deal] to be successful in the short to medium term."

AT&T has made it official: San Antonio is the next stop on its 1 Gigabit fiber to the home (FTTH) network journey, the latest in a string of locations in Texas where the telecommunications company said it will bring the service.

AT&T will deploy additional fiber and necessary last mile network electronics to its existing network in San Antonio. City leaders lauded the deal as an example of large telecommunications companies and local communities working together to drive new service capabilities.

Neustar, the telecommunications data service provider, is strongly protesting a recommendation that Ericsson's Telcordia unit be named as the winner of a major telephone-numbers management contract.

The contract, which Neustar has had with the US government since 1997, makes up nearly half of Neustar's revenue. At issue is which vendor is going to be the US government's neutral and tested local number portability administrator (LNPA), which helps phone subscribers keep their numbers when switching carriers.

Neustar argued that Ericsson has a vested interest in the success of its US carrier customers and that as a network vendor it cannot be viewed as neutral, and neither can SunGard, Ericsson's subcontractor for data center services, because it has connections to interconnected VoIP and telecom service providers.

Verizon Wireless hit back hard against the Find Me 911 Coalition, arguing to the Federal Communications Commission that the group was spreading "misleading" information about how often Verizon provides the most precise location information needed for dispatchers and first responders to find callers.

Verizon told the FCC that it "does not take lightly such allegations and undertook an internal review of its own performance data in response to the claims."

T-Mobile US said 92 percent of MetroPCS' customers on its legacy code division multiple access (CDMA) network in Boston, Hartford (CT) and Las Vegas moved onto T-Mobile's network after T-Mobile shut off MetroPCS CDMA service in those markets.

The carrier next plans to shut down MetroPCS' CDMA network in Philadelphia by late 2014.