WCA November 2016

From the Americas After reaching just six metro areas in four years, Google Fiber is considering wireless for its Internet customers “Google parent Alphabet Inc is rethinking its high-speed Internet business after initial rollouts proved more expensive and time consuming than anticipated – a stark contrast to the fanfare that greeted its launch six years ago.” The name Google is more usually associated with overachievement than with miscalculation. But Jack Nicas, of the Wall Street Journal ’s San Francisco bureau, was calling attention to the outlay, by Alphabet’s Internet provider Google Fiber, of hundreds of millions of dollars to lay fibre optic cable in a handful of USA cities to offer connections roughly 30 times faster than the national average. Now, however, a course change is in progress. Alphabet has suspended fibre projects in San Jose, California, and Portland, Oregon, and is trying to cut costs and accelerate its expansion elsewhere by leasing existing fibre or asking cities or power companies to build the networks. People familiar with the company’s plans told the WSJ that Alphabet hopes to use wireless technology, rather than cable, to connect homes in metro areas including Los Angeles, Chicago and Dallas. (“Google’s High-Speed Web Plans Hit Snags,” 15 th August) Mr Nicas supplied context for the turnabout. Google announced its fibre project in 2010, when telephone companies were perceived as moving slowly to roll out faster broadband service. More than a thousand cities signed on, and service was begun in the Kansas City area in November 2012. Expectations ran high. But to this point Google Fiber has reached just six metro areas, providing an example of the challenges facing digital companies seeking to move into more traditional lines of business. “The delays in Alphabet’s fibre plans follow stumbles in other arenas outside the company’s core Internet search and advertising business,” wrote Mr Nicas. Early last year, privacy concerns moved Alphabet (Mountain View, California) to stop selling the first version of its Glass wearable computer. More recently, it dissolved a robotics team it had put together from six separate acquisitions. Google Fiber has begun construction in five new metro areas and announced plans to reach another dozen cities in the next few years. Now, as noted by the WSJ , those dozen cities will be the test bed for a push into wireless technology. Dismissing security concerns, the USA reassigns an important telephone- numbers management contract to an overseas company Over the protests of critics who claim that the selection of a non-USA company poses national security risks, in July the

Federal Communications Commission made its choice of a new clearing house for routing billions of mobile telephone calls and text messages across the United States. The FCC is giving the New Jersey-based Telcordia subsidiary of Ericsson AB, the Swedish technology giant, the very big job of operating a sprawling national system to track and route wireless calls and texts among hundreds of service providers. The routing system was initiated in the 1990s to enable individual and business subscribers to keep their mobile telephone numbers when they switch carriers. But intelligence and law enforcement agencies quickly discovered its usefulness for tracking and tracing phone numbers in investigations. Some current and former intelligence officials expressed concern that awarding the new contract to a foreign-owned company could raise the system’s vulnerability to cyberattack. The contract to operate the system, worth up to $1 billion over seven years, had been held since 1997 by a small Virginia company, Neustar. Over the course of an intense bidding process, with the backing of several large carriers Telcordia apparently convinced the FCC that it could do the work more cheaply than Neustar; this, despite Neustar’s vigorous effort to hold on to the assignment, worth more than $460 million in 2014. Bryan Koenig of the legal news site Law360 (14 th June) supplied background for the tussle over a new Number Portability Administration Centre, or NPAC: “Telcordia is seeking FCC approval for the…contract, approval that Verizon and others want expedited to end the purported tens of millions of dollars [the] industry loses each month from the delay, but which a coalition of smaller carriers and a policy institute say should be slowed to ensure transparency and avoid a rushed transition that could lead to misdirected and dropped calls.” Neustar said last year it would facilitate a transition even as it sought to contest the change in the Circuit Court of Washington DC. The company started pressing the FCC for greater transparency in the bidding process after it was revealed in late April that Telcordia had employed a small number of foreign nationals, including one Chinese citizen, as computer coders for early work on its system. While the FCC did not disqualify Telcordia, it required the company to scrap its extensive work to that point and start over, with outside help only from “vetted USA citizens.”  FCC officials said they had worked to address the national security concerns raised in the course of the bidding process. After the five-member board of commissioners voted in closed session to give the final go-ahead to Telcordia as the new local number portability administrator, or LNPA, FCC spokesman Mark Wigfield said (21 st July), “I can confirm that the plan was voted on and approved.”

Dorothy Fabian Features Editor

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Wire & Cable ASIA – November/December 2016

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