Fierce
Comcast-TWC would control 29% of the US pay TV market, nearly 36% of broadband: report
Culling through all the various due diligence and Securities and Exchange Commission filings, SNL Kagan released what is perhaps the clearest numerical snapshot yet of what a combined Comcast-Time Warner Cable would look like, post-merger.
The newly merged giant would control nearly 29.1 million US residential video subscribers, after Comcast divests 3.9 million pay TV customers in the joint venture with Charter Communications known as SpinCo. The wedded Comcast-TWC would house about 29 percent of the US pay TV market, just under the Federal Communications Commission's unofficial 30 percent limit.
The combined company would also control 27.9 million residential fixed broadband customers, accounting for nearly 36 percent of the market, and 13.4 million residential voice customers. In terms of business customers, the behemoth would have around 900,000 video customers, 1.7 million fixed broadband clients and 1 million voice subscribers.
Time Warner Cable anxious to exploit expanded 5 GHz access for 'community Wi-Fi'
Two Federal Communications Commission waivers being sought by Time Warner Cable reveal the cable operator is chomping at the bit to make use of the 100 MHz of 5 GHz U-NII-1 band spectrum that the commission voted in March to open up for broad, unlicensed Wi-Fi use.
The March order eliminated a rule that had prohibited outdoor Wi-Fi operations in the U-NII-1 band and also increased allowable power levels in the band. The commission's order allows the use, under certain conditions, of existing Wi-Fi equipment designed to operate in the commonly used U-NII-3 band (5.725-5.825 MHz) in the newly opened U-NII-1 band (5150-5250 MHz.)
The FCC's decision was heralded as a significant shot in the arm for service providers, cable MSOs in particular, looking to push more data traffic to Wi-Fi. And Time Warner has wasted little time jumping on the opportunity.
The company filed two waiver requests on July 1. One seeks authority to operate 20,000 existing, non-compliant U-NII-3 access points in the U-NII-1 band as allowed by the FCC's order. A second, supplemental waiver request seeks permission to operate up to 10,000 new, non-compliant U-NII-3 devices in the U-NII-1 band as well.
Labor costs, capacity demands challenge middle mile growth
Although the growth in the middle mile has created opportunities for incumbent carriers, incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) and upstarts, it also has some inherent challenges -- such as labor costs and citing issues.
Not surprisingly, much of the demand for middle mile capacity is coming from wireless providers that are trying to keep up with escalating mobile broadband growth.
"We have confounding bandwidth challenges," said Scott Mispagel, vice president, network planning and engineering at Frontier Communications. "Everyone is using more bandwidth and we are adding quite a few new customers because of the markets we acquired from Verizon that were underpenetrated and underserved. This makes modeling difficult."
Frontier isn't the only carrier feeling pressure on the middle mile. According to Curt Frankenfeld, director, access strategy and development at CenturyLink, mobile broadband growth is forcing CenturyLink to upgrade its network to accommodate the demand.
"It forces us to modernize our network and gives us capital to do that." However, he noted that it's difficult for companies like CenturyLink to predict growth. "It creates stress on the middle mile. Cell providers don't necessarily want to go in that middle mile. It's a challenge because it almost becomes a custom middle mile for the cell providers."
The demand from mobile is so great that some are predicting that the middle mile fiber networks may soon be handling a lot of the mobile broadband traffic. Frankenfeld said that CenturyLink is seeing a big push for getting the traffic from mobile devices to the fixed network.
"In the next few years, we might see half of the mobile broadband traffic switched to our network. That means a rapid increase in bandwidth," Frankenfeld said.
Analysts: 30% of Android phones in 2015 won't access Google services
According to a new report from CCS Insight, the dramatic and continued growth of the Android smartphone operating system may not be the boon to Android developer Google that some may have expected.
According to the firm, fully one in four Android phones don't currently access Google services like Maps, Gmail and the Google Play app store -- and that number will likely grow in the future.
"Android's dominance will increasingly fail to translate to Google dominance," the firm wrote in a wide-ranging report on the smartphone market. "The proliferation of forked variants of Android and the Chinese government's blocking of Google search in China is producing a growing proportion of Android devices that pose a challenge for Google's open-source Android model. Such devices provide Google with little or no revenue or data and provide a platform for services from Google's competitors. We estimate this could increase to over 30 percent in 2015. It also raises a question about how Google will control Android in the future as policing the platform through access to Google services will prove increasingly ineffective."
CTIA's Baker calls for spectrum 'report card' to assess how government agencies use airwaves
CTIA President Meredith Attwell Baker wants to create a spectrum "report card" that would assess how efficiently government agencies are using their spectrum.
That's one piece of a broader agenda she has for getting more airwaves for mobile broadband use beyond this fall's coming auction of AWS-3 spectrum and the 2015 incentive auction of 600 MHz broadcast TV spectrum.
Baker, who became the head of the wireless industry's trade association and lobbying arm in early June, said a report card would "keep people's feet to the fire to make sure we're utilizing the spectrum, [and that] we're not warehousing it." She said that CTIA is going to continue to work towards the goal President Barack Obama laid out in 2010 to free up 500 MHz of spectrum for mobile and fixed wireless broadband use by 2020.
Baker said CTIA might push to go beyond that but wants to hit that milestone. Baker added that CTIA is also focused on sharing spectrum with federal agencies. "I want us to be at the forefront of sharing, and I want us to be able to test it and see how we can collaborate more successfully than we have in the past," she said.
Google Fiber gets green light to operate network in Portland, Ore.
Google Fiber overcame a major hurdle in bringing its service to Portland (OR) as the City Council voted 5-0 to approve a franchise agreement, reports the Portland Business Journal.
Under the terms of the 10-year agreement, which extends until 2024, the city will allow Google to begin plotting out where it would place huts that would house electronics to deliver services to residents and "fiberhoods."
One of the key pieces of getting the agreement done was that Portland city commissioners had to agree to tone down some of their restrictions on the placement of utility cabinets along rights of way. Although the franchise agreement was approved, there's no promise that Google Fiber will actually deploy service in Portland.
"This franchise agreement is an important step along the path to Fiber, so it's great that it's been approved," Google spokeswoman Jenna Wandres told the Portland Business Journal in an email. "There's still a lot of work to do beyond this one agreement, but we hope to provide an update about whether we can bring Fiber here later this year."
Report: US grabbed one-third of LTE smartphone market in Q1
One out of every three LTE smartphones shipped globally in the first quarter came to the United States, according to a new research report, another indication of the country's continued leadership in the LTE market.
According to Counterpoint's Market Monitor, the US led in the LTE smartphone market, which grew 91 percent year-over-year in the first quarter. According to Counterpoint's Neil Shah, LTE smartphones reached their highest ever first-quarter shipments, contributing to more than a fourth of the total smartphones shipments globally in the period.
FirstNet vexed by shifts in public-safety LTE standards-setting
A brewing controversy over technical standards and hiring issues are some of the latest bugaboos haunting the First Responders Network Authority (FirstNet) as it crafts plans for the national public-safety broadband network (NPSBN).
During board committee meetings here, held June 2 prior to the annual PSCR Public Safety Broadband Stakeholder meeting, FirstNet board member Kevin McGinnis noted that the mission of enabling mission-critical voice communications over LTE is progressing, as the 3GPP standards body moves ahead on technological specifications for the service as part of the group's work on Releases 12 and 13.
However, McGinnis expressed displeasure at the fact that "certain vendors" are attempting to shift LTE public-safety standardization out of 3GPP and into the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA). McGinnis said he did not know which vendors are behind the move, but he has been told that they aim to move proceedings "to a standards body where those vendors presumably have more influence." He called the move "distracting," and said it detracts from the progress that has been made within 3GPP.
Sprint's role as technology outlier may keep it on a road less traveled
Sprint will soon jump into LTE Advanced carrier aggregation as part of its Sprint Spark initiative, and the operator is also taking hard looks at numerous other cutting-edge technologies, such as SON and even Cloud RAN, for inclusion in its long-term roadmap, said a top executive.
"Historically we've looked to technologies a bit differently than everyone else. We're the only ones deploying TD-LTE. We're the only ones deploying 8T8R," observed Ron Marquardt, vice president of technology for Sprint technology innovation and architecture. That willingness to stand out from the crowd means technologies that other US operators may not consider could find a home at Sprint.
"We're evaluating everything from CoMP (coordinated multipoint) to even Cloud RAN on the more speculative end, just because of the backhaul requirements for that," said Marquardt.
Advanced self-organizing network (SON) technologies, enhanced inter-cell interference coordination (EICIC), high-order MIMO options and other advanced antenna systems "are all under consideration," Marquardt added. "We're actively investigating all sorts of SON options--architectures as well as specific implementations," he noted, though cautioning that "we're not even close to making any decisions, much less any announcements."
Sprint's Hesse says there is no plan to attack wired broadband market in near-term
Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said he does not see the carrier going head-to-head in the near-term with the likes of Comcast, Verizon Communications and AT&T in the market for wired home broadband Internet access.
Hesse's comments, made during a Sprint meeting with industry analysts and relayed by an analyst, stand in contrast to the long-term vision of Sprint Chairman and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, who has said Sprint could eventually compete in and shake up the wired broadband market in the US. According to Jackdaw Research analyst Jan Dawson, Hesse said that Sprint isn't planning to go after the home broadband market actively, and that it would be difficult to make money in that market, especially given how much video wired broadband customers tend to use.
AT&T, for instance has said its average, non-U-verse broadband customers use around 21 GB of data per month; overall average monthly usage on North American fixed access networks was 51.4 GB, according to a May study from network vendor Sandvine. Those numbers are much bigger than the average monthly data consumption by wireless phone users.
Dawson said that Sprint is simply focused on other business priorities right now and does not plan to aggressively compete in the home broadband market. He said that such a plan is "not on the roadmap" right now but could be somewhere down the line as the carrier expands its Spark service and increases speeds. For now though, Dawson said, Hesse was acknowledging that Sprint's spectrum position and the realities of deploying Spark make it infeasible to actually enact Son's vision.
"The difference is between the strategic vision Masa Son is laying and the operational reality of running the Sprint business today with the spectrum holdings they have," he said.