Topic: Fiber
Verizon Makes Near-Gigabit Broadband Available to 8 Million Homes (Apr 24, 2017)
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1 million NYC homes can’t get Verizon FiOS, so the city just sued Verizon – Ars Technica (Mar 14, 2017)
This is a long-running dispute between Verizon and the city of New York over whether or not Verizon has lived up to a 2008 agreement that required it to “pass” all the households in NYC by 2014. Verizon says it has done so, because the definition of passing a building is to run fiber close enough that it could be hooked up to homes if building owners give permission, while the city is arguing that passing means actually hooking up the homes. The disconnect here is that most of New York is made up of apartment buildings where landlords and not tenants get to determine whether or not a telco or cable company can run fiber into the building to connect individual apartments. In many cases, landlords have existing exclusive agreements with another provider or simply don’t want the disruption of a new fiber build, so they resist. Verizon says it can’t be held responsible for not providing fiber in those situations and has asked the city to help persuade landlords to open up their buildings. The reality is likely somewhere in the middle – yes, Verizon has struggled to get landlords to agree to Fios installations, but it probably also hasn’t tried as hard as it might and likely also has some other buildings where it could hook up service but hasn’t. This is the flip side of the AT&T story I covered the other day – either cities don’t require any specific commitment to connect households and then there are complaints about favoring wealthier neighborhoods, or they do extract those commitments and then end up fighting over whether they’ve been met.
via Ars Technica
Alphabet Taps McCray to Lead Access Unit, Including Fiber – Bloomberg (Feb 15, 2017)
Google Fiber and Alphabet’s broader Access unit within which it sits has been somewhat in limbo since late last year, when it lost its leader and canceled all its expansion plans. The story the company told then – and still seems to be telling today – is that it intends to pursue the same goals in new ways, principally through wireless. The fact that a new head has actually been appointed means that it’s at least somewhat serious about that goal, and isn’t just going to sell off or shut down the whole business, but it’s still possible that it might sell its fiber assets even if it pursues wireless technologies in future. Meanwhile, I still don’t think there’s a good reason for Google to be in the access business at all at this point.
via Bloomberg