September 2019

Comcast offered customers in Utah a "lifetime" price guarantee in order to compete against Google Fiber, then later violated the lifetime promise by raising those customers' prices, according to a lawsuit pending in a federal court. "In 2016, Comcast was under intense competitive pressure from Google's high speed fiber-optic data service," the lawsuit says. In Salt Lake City, "Comcast engaged extra sales staff to try to effectively beat the Google Fiber sales staff as they made their way up and down the streets of each neighborhood.

Sen Ed Markey (D-MA) and 29 other senators wrote a letter to the Federal Communications Commission requesting that the agency discard any plans for setting an overall cap for the Universal Service Fund (USF) programs. "Such a proposal would harm broadband deployment, rural health care opportunities, classroom learning, and life-long learning through public libraries by forcing them to compete in order to receive necessary funds.

Verizon Chairman and CEO Hans Vestberg said that the company is installing 1400 miles of fiber per month and that it will begin offering multi-access edge computing (MEC) in fourth quarter. Verizon fiber deployments are critical to supporting a mixture of services, Vestberg said. “One part of the whole intelligent edge network was that . . .