News and other note worthy events
WASHINGTON July 22, 2010- Buried within the recent Broadband Deployment Report was the announcement that the Federal Communications Commission will publish a separate report comparing broadband services in the United States to the rest of the world. Section 1303 requires the commission include an international comparison in the annual report to congress but the commission has decided to separate the international section.
I applaud the Commission for actually being bold enough to state that 200 Kbit/s is not broadband, although I contend that 4 Mbit/s is not a substantial definition beyond this year. The point is that the FCC is actually trying to be a bit forward looking minus the two commissioners that seem bent on serving a different master. One of the reasons that consumers opt for lower speed is the cost of higher speed services is out of their budget range. The price per bit for broadband in many areas ranks as some of the most costly transport in the world.
After upgrading its standard definition of broadband to 4 Mbit/s, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) says in its annual broadband deployment report that the prospects for getting high-speed Internet access to 14 to 24 million Americans in poor or rural areas that lack it are “bleak.”
When the FCC began issuing its annual broadband deployment reports in 2004, it set the standard for broadband Internet access at 200 Kbit/s. In the report it issued Wednesday, the commission says that it doesn’t consider a household a broadband-connected home unless it has a high-speed Internet connection with a minimum download speed of 4 Mbit/s and upstream speed of 1 Mbit/s. (See FCC: Up to 24M Lack Broadband Access.)
What would be interesting to know is how St. Gallen funded the effort and whether they hope to break-even or make money. Seven different service providers will certainly keep Swisscom on their toes. It would also be interesting to know how much they are charging for dark-fiber or bandwidth.
ALTDORF, Switzerland — Early this year the town of St Gallen launched its new fibre-optic network. In March the public utility company switched on the first connections in the quarter Im Vogelherd. Thanks to Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH), residents in around 1000 homes and many businesses now have faster, more extensive access to the internet, TV and telephony (Triple Play), and to many additional services offered by seven providers.
Philip Falcone of Harbinger Capital Partners is a step closer to his American dream: a national open access, wholesale-only, net-neutral LTE network. He first unveiled the plans in March and now the venture has a name (LightSquared), a management team (headed by former Orange CEO Sanjiv Ahuja) and a supplier (Nokia Siemens Networks). Falcone brought a number of assets into the company (SkyTerra, Terrestar), giving LightSquared generous spectrum resources of 59 MHz. The assets are valued at USD 2.9 billion, and the company said it has an agreement for another USD 1.75 billion in debt and equity financing.
NSN won the contract to build a network of 40,000 base stations within five years, to cover 92 percent of the US population, with the remaining coverage to be provided by satellite. The project is expected to create around 100,000 direct and indirect jobs. The order is worth USD 7 billion (EUR 5.5 billion) over eight years to NSN. The company’s sales were EUR 12.6 billion in 2009, so the contract adds an average 5.5 percent to sales each year. After acquiring Motorola’s networks business for a nice price, this is another good deal for NSN.
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By Allan Maurer
RALEIGH, NC – North Carolina legislators recently killed a proposed bill by state Senator David Hoyle (D-Gaston) that would have put a moratorium on municipal broadband efforts, but the issue is likely to arise again in January, say community activists in favor of continuing to allow cities to build their own broadband networks.
Hoyle’s bill, S1209 was just the most recent of four attempts backed by incumbent providers (AT&T, Time Warner Cable & others) to stop cities from creating their own broadband networks.
WASHINGTON, July 14, 2010 – Santa Cruz, Monterey and San Benito counties want $43 million from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration fund for high-speed internet.
$12 million in matching or in-kind contributions have already been promised to build about 312 miles of broadband fiber from downtown Santa Cruz into rural parts of Monterey and San Benito County. Continue reading
Google thanked the communities that responded to the Google Fiber for Communities RFI in a wonderful video complete with tear jearking music. Additionally, Minnie Ingersoll released the URL to a new web site for the project that tracks the progress of the project and calls for community action to remove barriers to open-access municipal broadband networks. We anxiously await Google’s announcement of the cities that they select. Their efforts to drive municipal broadband are being felt before the first backhoe starts digging.
In February we announced our plans to build experimental, ultra-high speed broadband networks. Over the past several months, our team’s been hard at work reviewing the nearly 1,100 community responses to our request for information—not to mention the nearly 200,000 responses from individuals across the U.S.
