PG&E’s
vast 70,000 square mile northern and central California electric service
territory overlaps regions of the Golden State where telecom infrastructure
deficiencies are most prevalent: 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. In addition to AT&T, PG&E’s electric service
territory encompasses the telecom service territories of Frontier, Consolidated
Communications and Citizens Telecommunications Company of California. All of
these telcos could be customers of PG&E’s planned wholesale fiber as well
as mobile wireless operators seeking backhaul bandwidth.
If approved by regulators, PG&E’s application could also
attract new players who would like to provide fiber-based premise telecommunications
service in areas lacking robust landline connections but can’t make the numbers
work due to the high cost of building new fiber infrastructure. Having PG&E build it and lease it to them as competitive local
exchange carriers (CLECs) would solve that problem. PG&E would also be
spared considerable deployment expense and delay since it owns utility poles that
would provide the backbone for aerial fiber plant, the optimal infrastructure
architecture to serve such a large and geographically diverse area, much of it with
rugged terrain.
PG&E’s move holds the potential promise of universal service for northern
and central California, which for many years has been a crazy quilt
checkerboard of served, underserved and unserved areas, leaving many consumers to struggle with substandard, poor value dialup, legacy DSL, fixed
and mobile wireless and satellite service.
For more background on PG&E’s application, Steve Blum’s
Blog has more details
here
and
here.