Showing posts with label underserved. Show all posts
Showing posts with label underserved. Show all posts

Monday, February 15, 2016

California telecom infrastructure deficiencies concentrated in metro central, north valley counties


The large bulk of California’s deficient access to landline advanced telecommunications infrastructure manifests in the state’s central and north valley regions, concentrated in counties designated by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as urban metro counties.



Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service. http://www.ers.usda.gov/datafiles/Rural_Definitions/StateLevel_Maps/CA.pdf

The below state map produced by the Central Coast Broadband Consortium (h/t to Steve Blum of Tellus Venture Associates) shows areas designated by the California Public Utilities Commission as unserved and underserved for landline advanced telecommunications infrastructure are concentrated in and around the Central Valley municipalities of Modesto and Fresno, in the Sierra Nevada foothills east and northeast of the state capital of Sacramento in Placer and El Dorado counties, and up the Interstate 5 corridor in Sutter, Butte and Yuba counties to the Shasta County seat of Redding in far northern part of the state.

These are not sparsely populated areas as shown by the map’s legend, which indicates a large presence of census blocks with populations of 150 to 300 people per square mile (designated as orange) and more than 300 per square mile (designated as red). By definition, a portion of these census block areas is not even considered rural (population density of less than 250 per square mile) by the California Healthcare Workforce Policy Commission relative to the availability of medical services.


Source: Central Coast Broadband Consortium. http://map.centralcoastbroadbandconsortium.org/
Accessed February 14, 2016
 
The takeaway is America’s telecommunications infrastructure deficits and disparate access cannot be necessarily be described as a “rural broadband” issue, particularly when looking at the nation’s most populous state. The operative "R" word here is these areas have been redlined for telecom infrastructure modernization as have similar areas throughout the United States.

Tuesday, March 06, 2012

Verizon's residential LTE "HomeFusion" likely to serve only fringes of small number of metro areas

Verizon's announcement today of its HomeFusion wireless residential Internet service offering based on its nascent 4G cellular LTE service appears aimed at picking up marginal residential market share in suburban and exurban fringes of U.S metro areas where wireline connectivity from incumbent telcos and cable providers is sketchy. These are also areas where Verizon might otherwise deploy its FiOS fiber to the premise residential wireline product but will not because the company has called a halt to further FiOS expansion.

It's not likely HomeFusion will be broadly deployed in predominantly rural and quasi-rural areas. Like Verizon's mobile wireless offerings, it's bandwidth metered and can't offer the ample headroom for bandwidth demand growth -- much of it driven by video -- that fiber does. In order to improve Internet deployment and access in these areas, these communities will have to build their own fiber to the premises networks constructed by local governments or telecom cooperatives.

AT&T has effectively thrown in the towel in serving these areas. HomeFusion represents Verizon's last ditch effort to pick up some limited revenues in these underserved markets.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Prospective FCC chair on defining underserved areas

A key task assigned to the Federal Communications Commission in the broadband infrastructure buildout subsidies in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is to define what constitutes "unserved" and "underserved" areas of the nation for the purpose of allocating funding.

There tends to be general agreement when it comes to defining unserved: locations stuck in 1993 and still relegated to dial up or at the tender mercies of substandard satellite Internet providers who charge a lot of money for usage capped, high latency connections better described as molasses net.

However, when it comes to underserved, there's less consensus and the debate tends to center on the level of throughput that defines broadband. Last year, the FCC set a low standard of 768 Kbs in one direction that's already too slow and outmoded.

Julius Genachowski, President Barack Obama's nominee to chair the FCC, offered a broader definition of underserved to the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee at his confirmation hearing Tuesday.

Underserved could be defined not only as substandard throughput speed, according to this IDG News Service report at Yahoo!Tech on Genachowski's testimony. It could also mean those areas where broadband adoption is low or where there are pockets of unserved areas in places that generally have broadband, Genachowski told the committee.

Under the latter "pockets" definition, much of the United States would be deemed underserved because of the incomplete, helter skelter deployment of broadband infrastructure over the past decade. In fact, these pockets are so numerous that accurate mapping of broadband availability wouldn't produce a usable map but rather something that looks more like a display of the moon's surface with the countless craters representing various sized broadband black spots. Or a disorganized "hodge podge" as the Communication Workers of America has described the nation's telecommunications infrastructure.

Underpowered DSL signals peter out and can't reliably provide service. Cable company cable runs suddenly and arbitrarily stop. Consequently, one premises may enjoy broadband access -- sometimes from both telco DSL and cable -- while another just down the street or road or even next door does not. For years, visitors to this blog have come to it after performing searches that go along the lines of "My neighbor can get broadband and I can't/why not."

The danger of attempting to define what "underserved" means is that the exercise lends itself to subjective, self serving interpretations that can further delay broadband infrastructure deployment that should have been in place years ago for many more years. Instead of defining the broadband deficits, the goal should be to define and focus on the nation's desired broadband assets. President Obama has done that by calling for ubiquitous broadband access. We should work backward from that goal.