Only 58 percent of Hispanic Nevadans subscribe to home broadband service, even though basic broadband service is available to nearly every home in the state, according to a recent study by Connect Nevada, a statewide initiative promoting broadband expansion. About 116,000 adult Hispanics don’t have home broadband services, it said. Hispanics constitute about 26 percent of the state’s population. The study cited cost as the biggest hurdle to broadband adoption in Hispanic communities in the state. Some 55 percent of Hispanic adults use mobile devices to access the Internet. About 78 percent of Hispanic Nevadans own a computer versus 85 percent of non-Hispanic Nevadans, the study said.
WOW agreed to buy Knology for about $1.5 billion, the two cable overbuilders said Wednesday. WOW, formerly Wide Open West, agreed to buy all the outstanding Knology shares for $19.75 a share. They said the price represented a 34 percent premium over Knology’s average stock price during the three months preceding news reports that Knology might be for sale. Knology shares gained 7.5 percent Wednesday to $19.40. “This deal appears to have been struck relatively quickly as it was only on February 28 that Knology’s exploration of a potential sale was reported by the press,” Wells Fargo analyst Marci Ryvicker wrote investors. The transaction seems to have been reached at a higher multiple of estimated earnings than what most pay-TV distributors’ stock trades at now, she said: The deal reinforces the belief “that there is still room for multiple expansion within the cable sector."
The government takes an outdated approach to Internet policymaking, said panelists at an Information Technology & Innovation Foundation event Wednesday. Policymakers should target regulation to areas where consumers are vulnerable and there’s market failure, said Anna-Maria Kovacs, visiting senior policy scholar at the Georgetown Center for Business and Policy. Regulation should focus on “targeted situations” like high-cost rural areas and low-income consumers, she said. Kovacs cited a “tremendous amount of competition at all levels of the broadband ecosystem.” Regulators are still treating the market like 1996 when the Telecom Act was passed and landline was still dominant, she said. Consumers are now “mixing and matching” platforms and technologies rather than choosing one over another, she said. For example, only 45 percent of households today have a landline connection, and many of them mostly use wireless for calls, she said. Internet policymakers should use antitrust enforcement rather than regulation, said Jonathan Sallet, an antitrust attorney at O'Melveny and Meyers. He said antitrust focuses on what’s happening today rather than what happened yesterday, and case-by-case adjudications force government to consider current facts specific to the situation. Along similar lines, all statutes and rules should be time-limited to force government to rethink them periodically, he said. “I don’t think it’s possible to develop rigid prescriptive rules.”
The FCC disclosed the 56 winners of Auction 93, who had a total of $3.83 million in winning bids for 93 FM construction permits (CD April 9 p11). Down payments are due May 1, said an agency public notice Wednesday (http://xrl.us/bm4dnv). Winners include Educational Media Foundation, Good News Media and Post Rock Communications (http://xrl.us/bm4dn5).
As the FCC moves toward a final rulemaking on cramming, it should allow providers sufficient time to implement any new anti-cramming rules, AT&T told Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau officials Tuesday (http://xrl.us/bm4dm6). The telco said it’s concerned that a requirement to notify customers that they may submit complaints directly to the commission “would increase the number of complaints that the FCC would receive as well as cause a delay in resolving the customer’s complaint.” The agency should avoid regulation on the mobile industry and allow carriers to develop best practices, as third-party charges on wireless bills are “quite different from those on wireline bills and cramming is not a significant problem for the wireless industry,” AT&T said. Cramming is the illegal placement of an unauthorized fee onto a consumer’s monthly phone bill.
Home Telephone Co. will seek a waiver of FCC rules limiting reimbursable capital and operating costs, it said Tuesday (http://xrl.us/bm4dkk). The Kansas rate-of-return carrier utilized the same form letter sent by several other carriers on Monday, which spoke of a “flaw” in the quantile regression analysis caps that penalizes rural companies that have invested in advanced telecom services (CD April 18 p6). Home Telephone projects a funding loss of “approximately 357% of our net income in 2013,” it said.
It’s impossible for General Communication to comply with all the rules in the USF/intercarrier compensation order, given the lack of SS7 deployment by rural Alaska ILECs, the use of an “MF-based Demand Assigned Multiple Access” satellite system, and other unique features of the Alaska market, GCI said Tuesday in reply comments regarding its own waiver request (http://xrl.us/bm4dka). A proposal by a group of rural rate-of-return regulated ILECs -- that GCI publish a list of all legacy switch locations that would fall under the waiver, provide terminating carriers with monthly information necessary to audit call records, and give biannual reports detailing GCI’s efforts to upgrade its network -- is “burdensome and unnecessary,” and should be rejected, GCI said.
Media General Q1 TV sales rose 13 percent to $73.4 million from a year earlier, as retransmission consent fees rose 63 percent to $8.7 million and more political ads were sold, the company said (http://xrl.us/bm4dkp). The total operating loss widened to $6.87 million from $4.25 million as companywide revenue was little changed at $149.5 million. Media General stock rose 7.4 percent Wednesday.
Online video could bring consumers “higher quality content at lower rates,” particularly in rural areas, said Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va. The committee scheduled a hearing for Tuesday on the future of video, as expected (CD April 17 p7). “Everything about television is changing,” Rockefeller said Wednesday. “People are watching all sorts of programs on an assortment of platforms, at different times of the day or night and without the traditional boundaries of television channels.” The hearing is 10 a.m. in Room 253, Russell Building.
The FCC Wireless Bureau extended until May 14 the deadline for filing reply comments on a NextG Networks of California petition asking the agency to clarify that the service NextG provides using distributed antenna systems and other small-cell solutions is not CMRS, as defined by the Communications Act. NextG is in a dispute with Scottsdale, Ariz., on how its facilities should be classified. Replies were due May 2. Crown Castle, which is acquiring NextG, asked for the delay, the bureau said (http://xrl.us/bm4dir). “Crown Castle argues that prior to closing the transaction it is not in a position to review the details of NextG’s Distributed Antenna System (DAS) facilities, nor the manner in which they are regulated."