Telecommunication

Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) wrote a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Jessica Rosenworcel regarding the issue of pole attachments. Specifically, Sen Capito stressed that the high costs and long waits imposed by pole owners when poles need to be replaced are hindering the progress of broadband deployment. "There are many reasons for the stubborn lack of broadband access in rural communities, but with recent congressional action, funding is no longer one of them," said Capito.

A cyberattack targeting an underwater cable that could have shut down telephone services, financial transactions, internet and cable connectivity in Hawaii was foiled by federal agents with Homeland Security Investigations. The servers of a private Oahu company responsible for managing a trans-Pacific undersea cable that connects Hawaii and the Pacific region were targeted by an international hacking group, according to HSI, the investigative unit of the US Department of Homeland Security.

For years the industry used the word redundancy when talking about how we protected our networks. The primary aspects of redundancy are having multiple fiber routes in place so that areas don’t become isolated if a fiber is cut or having enough spare electronics to quickly recover from problems. But in recent years, we’ve started to talk about resiliency, which encompasses redundancy but means a whole lot more. Resiliency means taking proactive steps to prepare against reasonably expected problems of all sorts.

I was asked an interesting question recently: will fiber help the big telecom companies turn the corner to success? It’s a good question when looking at telcos like Frontier, Windstream, Lumen, and any others who are late to the game for converting copper to fiber. There are a lot of factors that will come into play, so the answer is likely to be different by company. On the plus side is a general consensus by many households that fiber is the best technology. There is a sizable percentage of homes in any market that will move to fiber given a chance.

The US Department of the Treasury is exempting telecommunications services from ongoing sanctions against Russia. The move, confirmed April 7, follows requests from advocacy groups who feared a disruption would cut off Russian activists’ access to the outside world. It may not, however, cause companies that voluntarily cut off access to restore it.

AT&T and Verizon – two of the nation's biggest 5G mobile network operators – own extensive fiber holdings around the country, and both argue that such ownership is critical to their long-term success. T-Mobile and Dish Network, on the other hand, are building extensive 5G mobile networks (though Dish hasn't yet switched on commercial services) without owning any fiber whatsoever. And, according to both Dish and T-Mobile, that's just fine. So, which side is right?

Altice USA isn’t afraid to march to the beat of its own drum and actually thinks it’s going about network upgrades the smart way by jumping straight to fiber rather than following other cable incumbents in pursuing DOCSIS 4.0. The operator recently laid out a plan to overbuild its hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) network to blanket 6.5 million locations with fiber by 2025.

The Federal Communications Commission recently issued a Second Notice of Proposed Rulemaking concerning the allocation of costs when replacing poles to accommodate adding fiber or other communications wires communications devices to poles. The traditional rule has been that the new attacher must pay for 100 percent of the cost of make-ready, including the cost of pole replacement if there is not sufficient room to add a new wire or device (like a small cell).

The Federal Communications Commission’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau added equipment and services from three entities – AO Kaspersky Lab, China Telecom (Americas) Corp, and China Mobile International USA Inc. – to its list of communications equipment and services that have been deemed a threat to national security, consistent with requirements in the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act of 2019.

Total global revenue for the broadband access equipment market went up to $16.3 billion in 2021, according to Dell’Oro Group's Q4 2021 Broadband Access and Home Networking quarterly report. Fiber demand fueled market growth, along with passive optical networking (PON) infrastructure and fixed wireless customer premises equipment (CPE). Cable access concentrator revenue increased by 4 percent in 2021, totaling over $1 billion. Total PON optical network terminal (ONT) shipments reached a record 140 million units.