Fierce

Verizon's ongoing copper-to-fiber migration in the District of Columbia is now the subject of a Public Service Commission (PSC) investigation on how it will affect local consumers and businesses.

The PSC plans to hold a two-day evidentiary hearing related to the use of Verizon's existing copper network plant to deliver telecom services and its plans to transition customers' services, including traditional POTS voice, from copper facilities to fiber facilities. In its order, the PSC said it "applauds the introduction of new technologies for telecommunications in both the regulated market and in the competitive unregulated market.

An interactive online map from the Gigabit Libraries Network (GLN) shows prospective TV white space (TVWS) coverage zones for the more than 16,500 US public libraries, which the GLN is using to make a pitch for including such facilities in upcoming rural broadband experiments authorized by the Federal Communications Commission.

It shows how each facility could be used as a TVWS base station hub, providing expanded wireless broadband coverage areas to "satellite" library Wi-Fi hotspots up to 10 miles away, which would be supported via wireless backhaul using TVWS equipment. Using this design, those patrons who rely on public libraries to provide broadband access would no longer be required to be inside or beside the facilities to get service.

GLN hopes its interactive map will "support planning by anyone from the FCC to commercial providers to individual libraries exploring ways to incorporate TVWS capabilities into their overall connectivity strategies," said Don Means, GLN project director. "Libraries, schools and other anchor institutions deploying TVWS seem to offer a perfect fit with the FCC's upcoming rural broadband trials program," he added.

Sprint will work with its rural LTE roaming partners to get them access to LTE devices and network infrastructure for the 2.5 GHz band. Technology alignment is a part of the agreements that Sprint announced with 12 operators in mid-June.

The 12 agreements, which included a previously announced deal with nTelos Wireless, cover about 34 million POPs in 23 states.

Sprint also inked deals with SouthernLINC Wireless, C Spire Wireless, Nex-Tech Wireless, Flat Wireless, SI Wireless, which does business as MobileNation, Inland Cellular, Illinois Valley Cellular, Carolina West Wireless, James Valley Telecommunications, Phoenix Wireless and VTel Wireless.

The Rural Roaming Preferred Program, which Sprint developed in conjunction with the Competitive Carriers Association, is intended to expand LTE roaming and was announced last March. As part of its deal with the CCA, Sprint will use the CCA's data hub and allow CCA members to ink reciprocal roaming agreements with Sprint.

Sprint's deal with VTel provides a window into how the deals will work. VTel is running an LTE-only network using the 700 MHz C Block, AWS and 2.5 GHz spectrum. Sprint's deployment of 2.5 GHz LTE, especially using its new 8T9R radio heads, is a key factor in how it plans to set itself apart from the competition. The radios, combined with carrier aggregation technology, are expected to provide significant speed boosts compared to Sprint's current LTE deployment. If Sprint can get rural LTE partners to deploy such technology, it will extend its LTE network footprint and increase the size of the device and network ecosystem for 2.5 GHz LTE in the US market, which could lower costs.

A Federal Communications Commission proposal to raise the definition of broadband will skew penetration statistics, according to a report from MoffettNathanson.

The FCC is studying whether to raise the bar for broadband from 4 Mbps downstream/1 Mbps up to 10 or as much as 25 Mbps down and effectively disqualifying DSL as broadband.

"Raising the FCC standard will naturally lower the number of people who have 'broadband' (i.e. penetration will fall, at least initially)," wrote Craig Moffett. The change will also have wider implications because "it will reduce the portion of the country for which broadband is deemed 'available,' arguably bolstering the case for FCC authority to do something about the shortfall."

The FCC, in addition to throwing into question what areas are and are not receiving broadband, will also probably reshape the overall market share landscape, Moffett wrote. "Cable's share will, on paper, appear to rise. Importantly, so too will that share of the country where cable is deemed to be the only available option, bolstering arguments for FCC authority to intervene in the absence of effective competition," Moffett wrote.

Culling through all the various due diligence and Securities and Exchange Commission filings, SNL Kagan released what is perhaps the clearest numerical snapshot yet of what a combined Comcast-Time Warner Cable would look like, post-merger.

The newly merged giant would control nearly 29.1 million US residential video subscribers, after Comcast divests 3.9 million pay TV customers in the joint venture with Charter Communications known as SpinCo. The wedded Comcast-TWC would house about 29 percent of the US pay TV market, just under the Federal Communications Commission's unofficial 30 percent limit.

The combined company would also control 27.9 million residential fixed broadband customers, accounting for nearly 36 percent of the market, and 13.4 million residential voice customers. In terms of business customers, the behemoth would have around 900,000 video customers, 1.7 million fixed broadband clients and 1 million voice subscribers.

Two Federal Communications Commission waivers being sought by Time Warner Cable reveal the cable operator is chomping at the bit to make use of the 100 MHz of 5 GHz U-NII-1 band spectrum that the commission voted in March to open up for broad, unlicensed Wi-Fi use.

The March order eliminated a rule that had prohibited outdoor Wi-Fi operations in the U-NII-1 band and also increased allowable power levels in the band. The commission's order allows the use, under certain conditions, of existing Wi-Fi equipment designed to operate in the commonly used U-NII-3 band (5.725-5.825 MHz) in the newly opened U-NII-1 band (5150-5250 MHz.)

The FCC's decision was heralded as a significant shot in the arm for service providers, cable MSOs in particular, looking to push more data traffic to Wi-Fi. And Time Warner has wasted little time jumping on the opportunity.

The company filed two waiver requests on July 1. One seeks authority to operate 20,000 existing, non-compliant U-NII-3 access points in the U-NII-1 band as allowed by the FCC's order. A second, supplemental waiver request seeks permission to operate up to 10,000 new, non-compliant U-NII-3 devices in the U-NII-1 band as well.

Although the growth in the middle mile has created opportunities for incumbent carriers, incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) and upstarts, it also has some inherent challenges -- such as labor costs and citing issues.

Not surprisingly, much of the demand for middle mile capacity is coming from wireless providers that are trying to keep up with escalating mobile broadband growth.

"We have confounding bandwidth challenges," said Scott Mispagel, vice president, network planning and engineering at Frontier Communications. "Everyone is using more bandwidth and we are adding quite a few new customers because of the markets we acquired from Verizon that were underpenetrated and underserved. This makes modeling difficult."

Frontier isn't the only carrier feeling pressure on the middle mile. According to Curt Frankenfeld, director, access strategy and development at CenturyLink, mobile broadband growth is forcing CenturyLink to upgrade its network to accommodate the demand.

"It forces us to modernize our network and gives us capital to do that." However, he noted that it's difficult for companies like CenturyLink to predict growth. "It creates stress on the middle mile. Cell providers don't necessarily want to go in that middle mile. It's a challenge because it almost becomes a custom middle mile for the cell providers."

The demand from mobile is so great that some are predicting that the middle mile fiber networks may soon be handling a lot of the mobile broadband traffic. Frankenfeld said that CenturyLink is seeing a big push for getting the traffic from mobile devices to the fixed network.

"In the next few years, we might see half of the mobile broadband traffic switched to our network. That means a rapid increase in bandwidth," Frankenfeld said.

According to a new report from CCS Insight, the dramatic and continued growth of the Android smartphone operating system may not be the boon to Android developer Google that some may have expected.

According to the firm, fully one in four Android phones don't currently access Google services like Maps, Gmail and the Google Play app store -- and that number will likely grow in the future.

"Android's dominance will increasingly fail to translate to Google dominance," the firm wrote in a wide-ranging report on the smartphone market. "The proliferation of forked variants of Android and the Chinese government's blocking of Google search in China is producing a growing proportion of Android devices that pose a challenge for Google's open-source Android model. Such devices provide Google with little or no revenue or data and provide a platform for services from Google's competitors. We estimate this could increase to over 30 percent in 2015. It also raises a question about how Google will control Android in the future as policing the platform through access to Google services will prove increasingly ineffective."

CTIA President Meredith Attwell Baker wants to create a spectrum "report card" that would assess how efficiently government agencies are using their spectrum.

That's one piece of a broader agenda she has for getting more airwaves for mobile broadband use beyond this fall's coming auction of AWS-3 spectrum and the 2015 incentive auction of 600 MHz broadcast TV spectrum.

Baker, who became the head of the wireless industry's trade association and lobbying arm in early June, said a report card would "keep people's feet to the fire to make sure we're utilizing the spectrum, [and that] we're not warehousing it." She said that CTIA is going to continue to work towards the goal President Barack Obama laid out in 2010 to free up 500 MHz of spectrum for mobile and fixed wireless broadband use by 2020.

Baker said CTIA might push to go beyond that but wants to hit that milestone. Baker added that CTIA is also focused on sharing spectrum with federal agencies. "I want us to be at the forefront of sharing, and I want us to be able to test it and see how we can collaborate more successfully than we have in the past," she said.

Google Fiber overcame a major hurdle in bringing its service to Portland (OR) as the City Council voted 5-0 to approve a franchise agreement, reports the Portland Business Journal.

Under the terms of the 10-year agreement, which extends until 2024, the city will allow Google to begin plotting out where it would place huts that would house electronics to deliver services to residents and "fiberhoods."

One of the key pieces of getting the agreement done was that Portland city commissioners had to agree to tone down some of their restrictions on the placement of utility cabinets along rights of way. Although the franchise agreement was approved, there's no promise that Google Fiber will actually deploy service in Portland.

"This franchise agreement is an important step along the path to Fiber, so it's great that it's been approved," Google spokeswoman Jenna Wandres told the Portland Business Journal in an email. "There's still a lot of work to do beyond this one agreement, but we hope to provide an update about whether we can bring Fiber here later this year."