Central Coast Broadband Consortium a big step closer to funding 3 November 2011
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California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) staff have finished their initial review of the 15 regional consortia grant applications that were filed in August. Seven consortia, including the Central Coast Broadband Consortium (CCBC), have been conditionally approved and the full commission will vote on a formal funding resolution on 1 December.
The CCBC includes government agencies, educational institutions, private companies and non-profits from Santa Cruz, Monterey and San Benito Counties. Our grant application was focused on developing a database of broadband assets in the three county area and on formulating model policies that encourage construction of new and better networks.
Legislation approved last year and implemented by the CPUC this year sets aside $10 million from the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) to support regional groups that promote broadband deployment and adoption in rural and urban areas.
Applications from rural groups tended to be more focused on finding ways to encourage broadband build-outs in their areas, while urban applications were more focused on encouraging more people to use broadband in more ways, particularly in underserved communities.
Generally, the CPUC is only allowing one consortia for any given geographical region and limiting grants to $150,000 per year for three years. Most of the requests were for the $150,000 maximum, or thereabouts. The one exception is Los Angeles County. Because of its size and complexity, multiple consortia and sub-consortia are being considered for funding. Two applications were received from LA County. A large one with several sub-consortia is included in the first seven, with $448,843 earmarked for the first year. A second, smaller one is still under review.
The seven that will go before the commission next month are:
- Central Coast Broadband Consortium: Monterey, Santa Cruz, San Benito.
- East Bay Broadband Consortium: Alameda, Contra Costa, Solano.
- Los Angeles County Regional Broadband Consortia: Los Angeles County – 5 distinct sub-regions under the LACRBC umbrella.
- Northeastern California Connect Consortium: Butte, Lassen, Modoc, Plumas, Shasta, Siskiyou, Tehama.
- Redwood Coast Connect: Humboldt, Del Norte, Mendocino, Trinity.
- San Joaquin Valley Regional Broadband Consortium (California State University, Fresno): San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Merced, Madera, Fresno, Kings, Tulare, Kern.
- Upstate California Connect Consortium: Colusa, Glenn, Lake, Sonoma.
A second group of seven is also moving ahead in the process, but have some additional work to do. Those seven are:
- California’s One Million NIU (New Internet Users) Coalition: Various “hubs” in Los Angeles area.
- Central Sierra Connect Consortia: Amador, Calaveras, Tuolumne, Mariposa, Western Alpine.
- Connected Capital Area Broadband Consortium: Sacramento, Sutter, Yolo, Yuba.
- Eastern Sierra Connect: Mono, Inyo, Eastern Kern.
- Gold Country Broadband Consortium: Sierra, Nevada, Placer, El Dorado, Eastern Alpine.
- Inland Empire Regional Broadband Consortium: San Bernardino, Riverside.
- San Diego Imperial Regional Broadband Consortium: San Diego, Imperial.
Only one application was rejected completely. It was from a small group in Eldorado County that wanted to use the money to start building a FTTH project. Since the consortia grants can’t be used for network construction and because a larger, more inclusive consortium application also covers El Dorado County, Camino Fiber Network Cooperative ended up the sole loser.
CPUC staff have moved quickly to process these lengthy and, in many cases, intricate applications. The first group of seven still have work to do before any money arrives. The draft resolution gives them 15 days from the adoption of the resolution to address concerns that staff have raised. Remaining questions include defining deliverables and work plans and schedules. Assuming that happens, start-up money (10% of the first year’s budget) could arrive in January.
Grants for the second group of seven will go before the commission at a later meeting. They’ve been given 30 days to solve a longer list of issues identified by staff. But most, if not all, are expected to be approved early in the new year.
Most California Counties Represented in Broadband Consortia Grant Applications 6 September 2011
Posted by Steve Blum in Tellus Venture Associates.Tags: california advanced services fund, california public utilities commission, casf, CPUC, regional broadband consortia
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The California Public Utilities Commission has released some information about the regional broadband consortia that filed applications in the initial round of funding from the California Advanced Services Fund. Fifteen consortia made the 22 August 2011 filing deadline, and are in line to be considered for planning and organizational grants totaling $150,000 per year for up to three years.
Santa Cruz is represented in the Central Coast Broadband Consortium, which also takes in Monterey and San Benito Counties. The City of Watsonville is the lead applicant for a group that includes city and county governments as well as educational institutions, non-profits and private businesses.
The applications come from all over the state. Of the 58 counties in California, only nine – Napa, Marina, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Ventura and Orange – have been left out completely.
On the other hand, there are relatively few overlaps. The community broadband cooperative based in the small town of Camino filed an application for an area in eldorado County that the five-county Gold Country Broadband Consortium also has its eyes on. The CPUC has said that it will only make one grant in any given geographic region. The Gold Country group is also aiming to cover Sierra, Nevada, Placer and eastern Alpine Counties.
Eastern Sierra Connect has filed for eastern Kern County (along with Mono and Inyo Counties), while the San Joaquin Regional Broadband Consortium has filed for a swath of the Central Valley stretching from San Joaquin County to Kern. It’s very possible those two groups will be able to work out a way to split Kern County, if they haven’t already done so.
It also looks as if Los Angeles County has two competing groups. The CPUC is treating Los Angeles County differently from the rest, allowing applications for sub-regions. The Los Angeles County Regional Broadband Consortium has filed an application on behalf of five sub-regions, while a group calling itself California’s One Million New Internet User’s Coalition is applying to fund what the CPUC describes as “various hubs in [the] Los Angeles area.”
The remaining applications come from:
- Northeastern California Connect Consortium: Butte, Lassen, Modoc, Plumas, Shasta, Siskiyou, Tehama.
- Upstate California Connect Consortium: Colusa, Glenn, Lake, Sonoma.
- Redwood Coast Connect: Humboldt, Del Norte, Mendocino, Trinity.
- Connected Capital Area Broadband Consortium: Sacramento, Sutter, Yolo, Yuba.
- Central Sierra Connect Consortia: Amador, Calaveras, Tuolumne, Mariposa, Western Alpine.
- East Bay Broadband Consortium: Alameda, Contra Costa, Solano.
- Inland Empire Regional Broadband Consortium: San Bernardino, Riverside.
- San Diego Imperial Regional Broadband Consortium: San Diego, Imperial.
There’s no word on when the CPUC will decide on who gets funding and for how much, but they have promised a rapid review.
Mesh WiFi coverage depends on what you mean by coverage 7 July 2011
Posted by Steve Blum in Tellus Venture Associates.Tags: community broadband, meraki, municipal wireless, WiFi, WISP
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WiFi is great as the last link between the network and the user. It’s high enough bandwidth that it’s not a bottleneck, people know to look for it and the available hardware and clients are well advanced. Consumers will pay for casual access, but in that case they expect performance. They love free WiFi and will put up with a surprising amount of hassle to access it. Companies like Meraki have made it very cheap and easy to get a “drinking fountain”, amenity grade WiFi service up and running, on a paid or free basis.
On the other hand, WiFi is problematic when used as core network technology, even in a small city. Meshing is fine for linking a hotspot to a network gateway, but it falls down when you try to use it for blanket coverage of a metro-sized area. You need to do two things to make a metro scale WiFi system work: get traffic off the WiFi nodes and onto landlines or point to point wireless as quickly as possible, and have some control over the CPE, which should be specialized, relatively high powered units.
Eight years ago, when metro WiFi was just getting started (Cerritos, in Southern California, was the first), manufacturers were saying you needed 16 nodes per square mile to make a mesh network work with laptop-grade equipment. Two years later, after months of re-engineering, we finally got it work in Lompoc with about 40 nodes per square mile and (costly) high-power CPE. Today, the talk is about 70 or more nodes per square mile.
It’s a losing battle, for two reasons. First, as more people use more unlicensed devices, the environmental RF noise floor keeps rising, even with the addition of a new frequency band. Adding nodes is a short term fix but in the end just adds to the problem. Second, customer expectations and demand keep rising. What was good enough five years ago is hopeless today. Expectations and performance trends are heading in opposite directions for metro WiFi.
Amenity grade WiFi service works in stadiums and airports, and for hotspots around cities. In a concentrated location, like a stadium, it’s better not to use mesh for backhaul, except in the most hard to reach spots. You have so many people hitting any given node, that adding traffic from another node to that router slows things down for everybody. When users are more spread out, mesh will work better. But it will never work as well as a 1:1 node to gateway ratio, which is not so difficult to achieve in a controlled environment like a stadium or airport or mall.
CPUC approves regional broadband consortia grant program 23 June 2011
Posted by Steve Blum in Tellus Venture Associates.Tags: casf, ccbc, CPUC, regional broadband consortia
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The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) approved specific grant requirements today for the regional broadband consortia program established last year by Senate Bill 1040. The grants are funded through the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF). Qualifying regional consortia can apply for up to $150,000 in funding for each of three years ($450,000 total). Applications are due on 23 August 2011. The decision authorizing regional consortia grants, establishing eligibility and setting out application requirements and procedures is available here, along with supporting CPUC documents.
Locally, the Central Coast Broadband Consortium is preparing to apply for the funding. The group covers Santa Cruz, Monterey and San Benito Counties.
Just released: fiber market research report for City of Palo Alto 1 June 2011
Posted by Steve Blum in Tellus Venture Associates.Tags: fiber market study, ftth, fttp, palo alto
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Tellus Venture Associates has just completed a market study looking at the City of Palo Alto’s high speed fiber backbone service and can be downloaded here. The report will be presented tonight to the City’s Utilities Advisory Commission. The presentation will be also be available for download afterwards, and a more complete case study will be posted soon.
Sandy Bridge is about fast, integrated graphics, studio-class security, massive processing power and hard coded Windows support 5 January 2011
Posted by Steve Blum in Tellus Venture Associates.Tags: Apple, CES, Intel, microsoft, Sandy Bridge
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Judging from Intel’s press conference, their new Sandy Bridge platform – from now on known as the 2nd Generation Intel Core Processor Family – is about media and entertainment performance, driven by deep integration between hardware, operating systems, applications, content and networking.
Mooly Eden shows his fast chips,
funny hat and cute accentThe headline features are the on-board graphic and media processing capabilities, the 32 nanometer architecture delivering 1.16 billion transistors on a chip and integrated, studio-satisfying content security functionality.
“It’s about the visual experience, the tag line for the product is visually smart”, is how CEO Paul Otellini summed it up.
“People used to communicate with text, today they communicate with images and video,” said Mooly Eden, head of Intel’s PC client group. “It’s all about consumption and creation of digital content”.
The marquee demonstrations involved very fast graphics processing and rendering, and of course intensive gaming applications.
Microsoft is a close member of the new processor family. Windows 7 support is built into the chip, and they are already working on preparing for integrated Windows 8 support in a couple of years. More telling, when Otellini put a very long list of Sandy Bridge partners up on the screen, Apple was nowhere to be found.
It’s an impressive new architecture that will have some far reaching effects, particularly on content distribution. One question is whether the integrated content security system will impact a user’s ability to view pirated videos. It’s one thing to protect what studios distribute themselves, it’s another to try to control what users do otherwise with their computers. But just making content producers happy is a huge step forward, and if it takes off Intel will be positioned to have a controlling position in media distribution.
The new architecture does support a mobile product platform for laptop computers, but mobility was not emphasized. In fact, Otellini opened the press conference by saying that Intel was going to delay any announcements regarding smart phone chips until the Barcelona show next month. Which is an announcement of sorts.
Computer makers are starting to roll out their Sandy Bridge products now, in some cases stepping on top of launches made yesterday before Intel gave the official benediction. These latest announcements are focused on high performance desktops. So far, no tablets or other mobility devices have appeared. But it could come this evening when Micosoft CEO Steve Balmer gives a keynote address.
The chips are about to fall 5 January 2011
Posted by Steve Blum in Tellus Venture Associates.Tags: asus, CES, eee pad, Intel, lg, microsoft, msi, tablet
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So far, the only close-to-really-new announcements have come from ASUS. That might be because the 2011 CES story is about incremental improvement and minor innovations, not radically new products or services. Or it could be a question of chipsets.
Everyone is hinting or outright pimping upcoming tablet computer announcements, but not actually saying what it is. That’s a little unusual for press days at CES, but it could be because Intel has what it thinks is a huge announcement to make in a few minutes, and they’ve turned the screws on their customers with the idea of managing some kind of coordinated roll out.
ASUS could talk because its Eee Pad family is powered by Snapdragon and Nvidia silicon, plus an older Intel chip. The rest – LG, MSI, Microsoft and more – could be hiding under an embargo agreement for now.
We’ll soon know.
If A is for Apple, why not for ASUS? 4 January 2011
Posted by Steve Blum in Tellus Venture Associates.Tags: Apple, asus, CES, eee pad, eee pc, Intel, iPad, msi
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Jonney rocks it like SteveAll he needed was the black turtleneck. OK, Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field would have helped too.
ASUS chairman Jonney Shih borrowed the Apple chairman’s presentation style, falling only a little short on the mojo. Shih introduced four different implementations of the new eee Pad family of touchscreen tablets.
First up was the Eee Pad MeMo, a 7-inch tablet device that looks a lot like a big iPod Touch and runs Android on a Snapdragon processor. Two of the other new devices are also Android-based, running an Nvidia Tegra 2 CPU/GPU combo chip set and sporting a 10-inch touchscreen.
The Eee Pad Transformer is a tablet computer with an integrated docking station that looks like a conventional laptop when it’s all snapped together. The docking station provides a keyboard, extra power and familiar ergonomics. The Eee Pad Slider does a similar trick with a slide-out keyboard.
Slate does Windows
The powerhouse new product, and the first one to market, is the 12-inch Eee Pad Slate, which runs Windows Home 7 on a more a traditional Intel Core i5 CPU. The product demo emphasized the eee Slate’s raw computing power. It appears to be a fully functional PC with a iPad-like form factor, albeit bigger.
The Eee Pad family is not vapor ware. The products were demonstrated live on stage, and Shih gave specifics about market launch dates and price points:
- Eee Pad Slate, available January, US$999 to $1,099.
- Eee Pad Transformer, available April, US$399 to $699
- Eee Pad Slider, available May, US$499 to $799
- Eee Pad Memo, available June, US$499 to $699
Shih continually benchmarked the new products against the iPad and its iOS cousins. And he pushed the idea that ASUS is Apple’s equal when it comes to innovation, a claim that leaned heavily on the hazy concept products and services he threw out at the end.
He talked about personal cloud computing devices, something called Waveface seamless mobility, DIY 2.0 which is supposed to be the new Web 2.0, and IRIS, which stands for “inspirational research for immersive space.”
People love sliders
Waveface and DIY 2.0 are still half-formed concepts, as Shih pointed out, while IRIS is the catch-all for futuristic concept products. Shih was clearly trying to show that he and ASUS have Apple-like vision, and compared to run-of-the-mill computer makers they do. But they also need to remember that Apple’s mystique rests on the company’s practice of only taking about real, shippable products.
Reality distortion field or not, when Jobs introduces a truly new product it comes with a high degree of confidence that Apple will shortly be selling it. Shih still has to deliver on his conceptual promises.
MSI, on the other hand, was taking on Intel’s “Only the Paranoid Survive” persona. We had to sign a news embargo agreement to enter, only to be told ten minutes later that the embargo has been lifted. Which turned out to be OK with Intel because MSI’s US head sales guy, Andy Tung, said they weren’t going to talk about interesting products like tablets until Thursday. Because of Intel.
MSI’s sexy thingIntel’s Dan Snyder spoke briefly about the embargoed Sandy Bridge chip, and did say that it’ll be great for transcoding video to iPhones. Unfortunately, MSI doesn’t make the iPhone.
MSI talked about three conventional computer lines: the G series for gaming and high performance audio and video, the F series for everyday business and the C series for long battery life and, presumably, mobility.
ASUS easily won the Tuesday pre-Press Day derby at CES. They recognize that success in the consumer electronics business is not about clock speed or motherboards, but about the customer experience. Apple transformed itself from a computer company into a premium consumer brand. ASUS isn’t there yet, but they know which road they need to take.
The mobile phone is the set top box 3 January 2011
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Long-odds prediction for the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show: the mobile phone will be the set top box. Expect a prototype that tethers a large screen display to a media-rich smart phone. You walk in the room and your stuff appears on the screen. You will only have one channel and it will be whatever you want to watch, where ever you happen to be.
If someone doesn’t roll it out here in Las Vegas this week, you’ll see it shortly from Apple (which is too hip to hang at CES these days) or at a mobile phone event in someplace like Barcelona or Orlando or San Diego, at the latest.
CES starts rolling with press conferences, briefings and product previews. Tuesday is actually pre-Press day – the big boys strut their stuff on Wednesday – but it’s turning into the most interesting day of the show. ASUS began holding its press event on Tuesday a couple of years ago, and MSI joined in. CES Unveiled, which is the official small company press group-grope, also happens Tuesday. By the end of the day, it’ll be pretty clear what the high tech buzz will be for the coming week.
ASUS seems to be trying to position itself as another Apple, talking more about design than technology. It’s not quite in Apple’s league yet, but fresh designs do set it apart from the mainline CE companies. Even Sony looks grey-suit by comparison. MSI seems to be following ASUS’s lead, promising a media extravaganza.
My bet is that ASUS will introduce nicely designed computers and an iPad knock-off that misses on functionality but comes in a couple hundred bucks under Apple. It will then immediately suck the air out of its real product announcements by hyping photoshopped pictures of concept designs that look rad but will never make it to the prototype stage, let alone a production line. MSI will then throw a big party, show off some solid but not bleeding edge products and wonder why ASUS gets better coverage.
More predictions for the coming days…
- Everyone will promise an iPad clone of one kind or another. None will come close to the integrated elegance of Apple’s product, but buried deep underneath the me-too crowd will be one or two innovations from unknown players with star potential.
- At least one company will set itself up for iPad-like success or PlasticLogic-like embarrassment by showing a tablet that combines a next-gen e-reader’s thin, light form factor and low power consumption with a touch-screen and basic productivity apps.
- Cisco will once again offer the show’s most autistic press non-conference and walk away patting itself on its corporate back.
- The big, old school CE players will showcase the usual upgrades of existing product lines, but won’t have anything truly new to offer.
- The wild card will be the CE company that finally figures out a usable user interface for IPTV. Thomson’s Joe Clayton was right fifteen years ago when he called video navigation the coming killer app of the 21st Century. We’re still waiting.
- Look for bigger, brighter displays and fewer boxes. All the electronics for everything worth shipping to a store can pretty much fit onto a couple of circuit boards and into the case of any consumer-grade display.
- Expect less emphasis on company app stores and more on turn-it-on-and-use-it functionality. Last year, CE companies flogged dozens of partnerships with high profile consumer brands. Not because consumers wanted it, but because they couldn’t think of anything else to say. This year they’ll have a better idea of the customer experience they’re actually trying to sell.
- Last year, the cool new thing was bleeding edge input devices that responded to waving fingers and heavy breathing. Good stuff and there will be more of it this year, in productized form.
We’ll know soon enough. The fun is about to begin.
Keynote tweets from CTIA Enterprise & Applications conference 6 October 2010
Posted by Steve Blum in Tellus Venture Associates.Tags: CTIA, ctia enterprise and applications, department of energy, sybase, verizon
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I came in while John Chen, CEO of Sybase was speaking. He talked about how wireless is enabling mobile banking, commerce and philanthropy. Interesting stuff. But the best part was when he set the stage (perhaps unwitting, perhaps not) for the second speaker, Dr. Kristina Johnson, an undersecretary at the U.S. Department of Energy. Chen starting talking about various federal agencies, FCC, FTC etc., and called them the F-words.
When Johnson came up on stage, she didn’t exactly return the compliment, but she didn’t have much to say about wireless telecommunications or the mobile phone industry either. She spent her time hitting the Obama administration’s talking points on the Obama administration, and on energy. That’s when my real time tweets started…
CTIA keynote, Kristina Johnson, under secty US Dept of Energy, canned speech, need to save energy, glaciers disappearing, I’m melting! #ctia
Fortunately, at a mobile phone conference,
people know how to entertain themselves
So far, Johnson could be talking to a bulldozer convention #ctia
Johnson talking about need to modernize electrical grid, smart electrical load shifting, manages to mention wireless a couple of times #ctia
Johnson congratulates wireless industry for creating jobs #ctia
Talking about consumer privacy as major issue for modernizing grid #ctia
Johnson wraps up, modern grid, jobs, saving energy important, zip about wireless, good speech for attitude assessment, bad for info #ctia
Lowell McAdam, president Verizon Communication, coming up now, but first the obligatory corporate image wallpaper video #ctia
McAdam has good sense of humor, pokes fun at the dull video, proves he’s smarter than his marketing people #ctia
McAdam talking about increasing connections, history of decision to go with LTE, warming up for his LTE announcement #ctia
LTE is about speed & latency, speed goes up 10x, latency cut in half #ctia
700 MHz better at penetrating bldgs, with lower latency allows more real time m2m control functions, enables smart buildings & homes #ctia
McAdam shows map of 2010 4G LTE launch markets, the big announcement, 38 markets, says will cover 70% of pops on average in each #ctia
McAdam says one-third of US population covered by LTE/4G this year, two-thirds in 18 months, complete buildout in 2013 #ctia
McAdam sez Verizon will partner with rural operators to bring broadband service to unwired homes #ctia
McAdam: 4G world needs openess, Verizon is poster child for walled gardens, will change, sez now working with third party developers #ctia
4G future needs standards and openess sez McAdam, “time to turn on the afterburners and get ready for the next generation of wireless” #ctia
#ctia show floor now open, keynotes over
