Category: News

News and other note worthy events

Small Town’s Telecom Drama Continues: Municipal Utility Sues Cable Group For Discriminatory Access To Programming

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Sarah Lai Stirland, Assistant Managing Editor, BroadbandBreakfast.com

NEW YORK, June 10, 2010 – A long-running feud between a municipal utility in Lafayette, La. and Cox Communications appears to have revived itself Wednesday when LUS Fiber filed a lawsuit against the National Cable Television Cooperative. LUS Fiber charges that the cable group is unfairly denying it membership, thus depriving the Lafayette utility from millions of dollars in savings when buying television programming.

The dispute’s worth tracking because LUS Fiber is one of a growing number of municipalities around the country that has built a publicly-financed fiber-to-the-home network, the economics of which are still unproven. The project is being watched closely by others in the telecom industry across the country: An executive from Google’s gigabit-per-second fiber-to-the-home project  in April made her only conference trip of the year to visit and inspect LUS Fiber’s 100 megabit-per-second fiber-to-the-home  roll-out.

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Stimulus winner Rural Telephone targets 100 Mb/s to the home

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While some rural telcos protest proposed modifications to the Universal Service fund that would support only 4 Mb/s service to the home, one rural telco is moving ahead with plans to deploy a fiber to the home network supporting speeds up to 100 Mb/s service to sparsely populated areas of western Kansas. The deployment is made possible by $101 million in funding through the Broadband Stimulus Program, which was awarded on a 50/50 grant/loan basis to Rural Telephone, a rural ILEC that also has CLEC operations.

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75% of New Zealanders to get 100Mbps fiber by 2020

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Add New Zealand to the list of countries that understand that the key to broadband penetration is building and open-access infrastructure.  The Kiwis join their neighbors Australia and other Asia-Pacific countries like Singapore in building an independent open-access fiber infrastructure.  Even though the country is small, the federal government recognizes the need to build the infrastructure on a local level through a public/private partnership.  While the FCC is trying to flex its enforcement muscles, other countries are implementing plans to increase their broadband penetration via affordable, open-access networks.  If more U.S. municipalities pursued open-access networks, net neutrality would be less of an issue.

By Nate Anderson | Last updated 33 minutes ago

Taking a page from the Australian broadband playbook, New Zealand has decided not to sit around while incumbent DSL operators milk the withered dugs of their cash cow until it keels over from old age. Instead, the Kiwis have established a government-owned corporation to invest NZ$1.5 billion for open-access fiber to the home. By 2020, 75 percent of residents should have, at a bare minimum, 100Mbps down/50 Mbps up with a choice of providers.

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Brigham City hears from UTOPIA

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The sponsoring cities and UTOPIA have the right concept.  UTOPIA is now being better managed, and the network penetration is increasing.  I know that they can start meeting their objectives and eventually be profitable, but their members need to continue to invest in them.  The $54,000 that the city of Brigham needs to contribute to keep UTOPIA going is a small price to pay for the economic and consumer benefits the network brings.  I’ve seen cities blow that much money on studies that are never implemented and just sit on a shelf.   I hope Brigham residents and the council have the foresight to continue investing in this valuable asset.

By Nancy B. Fuller (Standard-Examiner correspondent)

BRIGHAM CITY — After months of rumors, the Brigham City Council had its first formal meeting with UTOPIA executive directors on options for implementation and long-term commitments for the city to continue with the fiber-optic network.

The meeting was held one hour before the regular city council meeting, which didn’t leave enough time for council members to address their concerns, so the council requested another meeting with UTOPIA.

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FCC Seeks to Reclassify Broadband as Regulated

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This article is a thorough review of the different options to create and enforce net neutrality.  The bottom line is that we need to rewrite this country’s telecommunications laws, but the current Congress is not up to that task.

Owen D. Kurtin | The National Law Journal

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On March 16, the Federal Communications Commission issued its National Broadband Plan, a compendium of lofty goals for extending broadband penetration throughout the United States and targeting specific industries and sectors, such as health care and education. As part of the plan, the FCC explicitly supported the principle of “net neutrality,” that of ensuring that internet backbone providers may not impose premium pricing or discriminatory access upon content and applications providers that use their networks, no matter how heavy their use of the available bandwidth.

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Chattanooga Announces Nation’s Only 150 Mbps Residential Internet Offer

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Chattanooga Area 10 Years Ahead of FCC’s National Broadband Plan

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn., June 3 /PRNewswire/ — EPB Fiber Optics, Chattanooga’s municipally-owned fiber-to-the-home network, announced it will introduce a 150 Mbps symmetrical residential Internet product later this month. EPB Fiber Optics’ product, Fi-Speed Internet 150, will be the only offer of its kind in the U.S.

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Mayor’s panel to consider Baltimore’s fiber options

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By Gus G. Sentementes, The Baltimore Sun

Two months ago, city officials and business leaders were giddy with the notion that Baltimore maybe — just maybe — could lure Google Inc. to build a next-generation fiber-optic network for blazing-fast Internet service.

On Wednesday, a larger group of city boosters wrestled with a more sobering possibility: What if Google doesn’t choose Baltimore? More than 1,100 communities across the United States are vying for Google’s Fiber for Communities pilot project. And Google isn’t expected to announce a winner until the end of the year.

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