telecompetitor

An Federal Communications Commission order denies petitions from three entities that were provisionally awarded funding in the FCC Rural Broadband Experiment program because the awardees were unable to obtain satisfactory letters of credit — a decision that does not bode well for other provisional awardees that have experienced difficulties obtaining letters of credit meeting the FCC’s strict requirements. T

he Rural Broadband Experiments program had a one-time budget of $100 million to cover some of the costs of bringing broadband to rural areas where broadband is not available today or is available only at low speeds. The program was crafted to gain information to help the FCC establish rules for the Connect America Fund reverse auction, which will award a considerably larger amount of funding to help cover the cost of bringing broadband to more unserved areas.

Fatbeam E-Rate plans will help the competitive access provider build out wide-area fiber network infrastructure in Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington.

The broadband access provider won 11 FCC E-rate contracts, which will help fund the construction of an additional 200 miles of fiber. Once completed, Fatbeam will be able to offer high capacity gigabit fiber Internet connectivity to communities across the four-state area, including in Idaho, where it has signed an agreement with Lake Pend Oreille School District in Sandpoint to build a 49-mile fiber optic network capable of delivering 2-gigabit lit fiber services to the school district’s 13 facilities. Fatbeam is very active in the E-rate and uses it as a tool to further its business model. Key to the project development process for Fatbeam is signing agreements with school districts that serve as anchor tenants. Once these networks are built, Fatbeam leverages additional broadband capacity to expand network access and traffic to other local organizations and facilities, such as hospitals, banks and local government offices, as well as other broadband carriers and ISPs.

On August 11, the Federal Communications Commission released a preliminary list of census blocks eligible for the Connect America Fund auction. That auction will award funding to help cover the cost of bringing service to areas that cannot get broadband today or can only get low-speed broadband. The list also includes an estimate of the maximum amount of funding that will be available for each census block based on an FCC-developed cost model.

The Connect America Fund auction will use a competitive bidding process to award funding, with funding for a group of census blocks or census tracts going to the service provider that offers to provide service for the lowest level of support. The preliminary list is based on the most recent data collected from Form 477 as of June 30, 2015. All broadband service providers are required to file Form 477, which collects data about where service is available at various speeds. Service providers have until the end of this month to advise the commission if they have deployed broadband at speeds of 10 Mbps downstream/ 1 Mbps upstream in any of the target census blocks since the Form 477 data was collected. Based on this data, the FCC will eliminate some locations from the Connect America Fund auction target list. In order to be eliminated, the newly served locations also must have a minimum usage allowance of 150 gigabytes at a price meeting the commission’s current reasonable comparability benchmark and must have a latency not exceeding 100 ms.

CenturyLink has set a goal of bringing broadband service supporting speeds of at least 40 Mbps to 50% of its base by the end of 2018, said Tony Davis, head of investor relations for CenturyLink. Although CenturyLink has done some fiber-to-the-home deployments to support speeds as high as 1 Gbps, CenturyLink broadband plans will rely largely on upgrading existing copper loops using a mixture of bonding and vectoring, depending on a customer’s distance from a fiber connection. The company also expects to use G.fast technology to serve multi-dwelling units. Meeting its goals will require CenturyLink to spend a higher percentage of its budget on the network than in the past. To free up the funding, the company expects to take a “capital-light” approach toward investment in the cloud, IT services and managed hosting, Davis said. The company also is looking at selling some of its data centers – an increasingly common move among the larger telcos – but if it were to do so, it would lease space from the new owner to support its existing hosting business, according to Davis.

AT&T plans to deploy fixed wireless technology to meet Connect America Fund broadband deployment requirements, said AT&T President of Technology Operations Bill Smith.

The company will use the technology in areas where it is “uneconomical to build wireline” said Smith of AT&T fixed wireless plans in a question and answer session at Pacific Crest Global Technology Leadership Forum. The AT&T fixed wireless deployments apparently will use licensed spectrum, as Smith noted that the company typically buys spectrum covering geographic areas that include rural areas and that in rural areas, the spectrum is “somewhat underutilized.” Smith expects the AT&T fixed wireless service to support speeds of 10 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream. That’s the minimum speed that Connect America Fund dollars will support. There are “few applications that can’t be supported,” at those speeds, Smith said.

If you follow the broadband industry closely, you have probably seen a pay-TV forecast or two that suggests pay-TV’s brightest days are in the past. Cord cutting and over-the-top (OTT) alternatives are now ‘in vogue’ and some say the future of pay-TV is in jeopardy as a result. At least the pay-TV model that we are all used to.

In the midst of this debate, small independent video providers have additional challenges, including rising costs, growing regulatory obligations, and slimmer margins. It would be easy to think the future doesn’t look at all promising. But is it really that bad? Perhaps not, depending on the angle at which you look at the problem. That’s a key take away for me from this week’s NCTC/ACA Independent Show, taking place in Orlando (FL). There was a real vibe at the show among the organizations’ small independent cable/IPTV members that, while challenging, the future can be bright. It’s just a matter of recognizing the business environment and adjusting accordingly.

Although Verizon to date has declined to accept funding through the Connect America Fund (CAF) program to bring broadband to unserved parts of its local service territory, the company may be having a change of heart. Comments filed by Verizon with the Federal Communications Commission suggest the carrier may be interested in bidding in the CAF reverse auction, which will award funding for areas where an incumbent price cap carrier declined funding. Although the FCC is hoping to fund some CAF deployments at gigabit speeds, Verizon cites some sobering data suggesting that should be a relatively limited option. Verizon notes that as many as 750,000 locations could be eligible for the CAF reverse auction. Of those, about 450,000 are in high-cost areas of price cap territories where the incumbent declined funding. The other 300,000 are “extremely high cost” locations scattered across all price cap territories.

According to Verizon, the FCC cost model shows that subsidies of well over $600 million per year would be required to bring broadband to all 750,000 locations, but the budget for the CAF reverse auction is only $215 million annually. With this in mind, Verizon CAF auction ideas include prioritizing bids for baseline service above those for above-baseline and gigabit service in order to “maximize the number of homes and businesses that obtain at least the baseline level of broadband from the auction.” In some cases, high-latency options such as satellite broadband may be less costly to deliver than lower-latency terrestrial wired or wireless options. But Verizon stops short of asking the FCC to stretch funding by prioritizing high-latency services. Instead, the carrier argues that all terrestrial options should be prioritized over high-latency options. “End users in competitive bidding-supported areas should not be relegated to lesser services,” Verizon argues.

On the long-debated question of whether or not it’s OK for communications service providers to operate as “dumb pipes,” Verizon clearly believes the answer is “no.”

Verizon sees great value in the ability of its wireless network to gain knowledge about customers, including location-based information, and to use that information to customize advertising and content offerings, with customer consent. In the last two years or so the company has made a range of moves to support this strategy. Some industry observers see substantial challenges for Verizon as it pursues a mobile strategy, however. And Verizon’s mobile content strategy has drawn criticism from those who believe the company’s investment in company’s such as AOL and Yahoo detracts from its ability to invest in its network infrastructure, particularly on the landline side of its business. Those critics tend to believe that it’s fine for service providers to pursue a dumb pipe strategy – as long as they deliver the highest quality and highest capacity pipes possible. It could be years before we know whether Verizon has made the right choices on the dumb-versus- smart-pipe question.

A bi-partisan group of 26 senators is asking the Federal Communications Commission to establish new parameters for a Universal Service Fund mobility fund that would target broadband availability in croplands “or some other geographic measurement.” The goal would be to better support precision agriculture technology aimed at enhancing productivity and environmental sustainability. “These technologies are transforming US agriculture as American farmers and ranchers seek to feed, fuel and clothe an ever-increasing global population using limited land, water and other resources,” wrote the senators in a letter to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler

. The cropland or other geographic measurement would be in addition to another metric that has been used in targeting Universal Service Fund support for mobile services — road miles. The letter, spearheaded by Sens Roger Wicker (R-MI) and Joe Manchin (D-WV), notes that cropland coverage can be assessed using US Department of Agriculture data for crop operations, the US Geological Survey’s Land Use classification or other databases.

Verizon’s announcement that the company has completed a specification for ultra-high-bandwidth 5G wireless is the latest example of the company’s increasingly wireless focus. The Verizon 5G spec was completed in advance of industry fifth-generation wireless standards efforts, raising the question of what is driving Verizon to push this technology so aggressively and so soon. It’s important to remember that in its initial incarnation, 5G will be a fixed wireless technology. And as Verizon’s announcement indicates, the company has been testing the technology for fixed deployments.

“Propagation and penetration testing across residential single and multi-dwelling units built in field locations has validated the feasibility of millimeter wave systems,” the company said. It would appear that Verizon sees 5G as the fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) alternative it has been missing for boosting residential broadband bandwidth. In late May, Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam said that using 5G for fixed wireless may offer enough of a business case alone to justify the carrier’s investment in 5G and that any profits from 5G mobile would be “gravy.”In the announcement, Verizon notes that the Verizon 5G spec “provides guidelines to test and validate crucial 5G technical components” and that it “allows industry partners such as chipset vendors, network vendors and mobile operators to develop interoperable solutions and contribute to pre-standard testing and fabrication.”