Author: Jon Brodkin

(credit: Getty Images | aledettaale)

Google Fiber started examining Nashville, Tennessee, for a possible deployment more than two and a half years ago, it confirmed plans to build in January 2015, and it started serving a few apartment and condominium buildings in the city in April of this year. But further progress is being slowed in part by difficulties obtaining access to utility poles, and legislation designed to solve the problem is being resisted by incumbents AT&T and Comcast.

Nashville Scene has a thorough article on the controversy, with quotes from the major players. Google Fiber needs access to thousands of telephone poles and must cooperate with the area's other Internet providers to install their wires. Most of the poles are owned by Nashville Electric Service, the local utility, while AT&T is the second biggest owner of utility poles in the city.

When Google notifies the owner that it needs access to a pole, the owner "will then notify each telecom company that it needs to send a crew to the pole—one after another—to move their equipment and accommodate the new party," Nashville Scene wrote. "The process can take months, even if contractually mandated time frames are followed. Google Fiber officials and operatives working on their behalf suggest that’s not always the case."

Data cap cash. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

AT&T is raising the data caps for U-verse Internet customers to 1TB a month and providing unlimited data "at no additional charge" to customers who subscribe to the company's 1Gbps service.

But DSL users on AT&T's network aren't getting any extra data, and those users must continue to make do with a 150GB monthly limit.

AT&T has been enforcing data caps on DSL users for years but only began enforcement of caps on its faster U-verse service in May this year. Data caps were set at 300GB, 600GB, or 1TB based on the speed tier. But the changes announced today—which take effect August 21—give all U-verse customers a monthly data cap of 1TB or no cap at all. Previously, a 1TB cap was only for customers with speeds from 100Mbps to 1Gbps.

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Six weeks after federal judges preserved net neutrality rules for the broadband industry, ISPs are seeking a full court review of the decision.

ISPs' attempt to overturn the Federal Communications Commission rules were rejected when a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit voted 2-1 in favor of the FCC. Now the broadband industry's trade groups are seeking an "en banc" review in front of all of the DC Circuit court's judges instead of just a three-judge panel. If this fails, ISPs can appeal to the Supreme Court, but the odds against them winning appear to be long.

One en banc petition submitted this morning before the case's deadline came from the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) and the American Cable Association (ACA), the two biggest cable lobby groups. En banc petitions were also filed by CTIA—The Wireless Association, the mobile broadband industry's primary lobby group; the United States Telecom Association (USTelecom) and CenturyLink (representing DSL and fiber providers); and a small Texas ISP named Alamo Broadband.

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AT&T overcharged two Florida school districts for phone service and should have to pay about $170,000 to the US government to settle the allegations, the Federal Communications Commission said yesterday. AT&T disputes the charges and will contest the decision.

The FCC issued a Notice of Apparently Liability (NAL) to AT&T, an initial step toward enforcing the proposed punishment. The alleged overcharges relate to the FCC's E-Rate program, which funds telecommunications for schools and libraries and is paid for by Americans through surcharges on phone bills. The FCC said AT&T should have to repay $63,760 it improperly received from the FCC in subsidies for phone service provided to Orange and Dixie Counties and pay an additional fine of $106,425. AT&T prices charged to the districts were almost 400 percent higher than they should have been, according to the FCC.

AT&T violated the FCC's "lowest corresponding price rule" designed to ensure that schools and libraries "get the best rates available by prohibiting E-Rate service providers from charging them more than the lowest price paid by other similarly situated customers for similar telecommunications services," the FCC said. Instead of charging the lowest available price, "AT&T charged the school districts prices for telephone service that were magnitudes higher than many other customers in Florida," the FCC said. Between 2012 and 2015, the school districts paid "some of the highest prices in the state... for basic telephone services."

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As Verizon plans a fiber expansion in Boston, CEO Lowell McAdam yesterday said the company is talking to other cities about potentially building fiber networks.

Verizon stopped expanding its FiOS fiber-to-the-home Internet, TV, and phone service several years ago, making it a surprise when in April the telco announced plans to replace its copper network in Boston with fiber. In an earnings call yesterday (see transcript), McAdam said, "We are talking to other cities about similar partnerships."

Verizon's fiber expansion plans are as much about improving backhaul to its more profitable mobile network as they are about bringing wired Internet to people's homes. "We will create a single fiber-optic network platform capable of supporting wireless and wireline technologies and multiple products," McAdam said.

Sales of the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus haven't been as stellar as the 6 and 6 Plus. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple's quarterly profit fell 27 percent in Q3 2016, to $7.80 billion from $10.68 billion a year ago, but the company's shares rose today as the earnings beat analysts' expectations. Quarterly revenue was $42.36 billion, down from $49.60 billion in the year-ago quarter, a drop of 14.6 percent.

The third quarter results "reflect stronger customer demand and business performance than we anticipated at the start of the quarter," CEO Tim Cook said. When Apple announced its previous results three months ago, the company said it expected to make between $41 and $43 billion in revenue in the third quarter of fiscal 2016, with profit margins between 37.5 and 38 percent. Actual results were near the top end of the estimates; gross margin was 38 percent.

"Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters estimated that Apple would post earnings of $1.38 a share on revenue of $42.1 billion," The Wall Street Journal reported. Actual earnings per share were $1.42.

It seems Ars readers are not ready to welcome our new IoT overlords. (credit: peyri)

AT&T has agreed to lead an "industry strike force" to limit robocalls, just a couple of months after its CEO claimed there's just about nothing it can do to block unwanted calls.

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said in May that his company doesn't have "permission" or "the appropriate authority" to block robocalls, even though the Federal Communications Commission clearly stated last year that carriers have the "green light" to offer robocall-blocking services to cell phone users. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler last week urged carriers to "offer call-blocking services to their customers now—at no cost to [consumers]," and AT&T has dropped its previous reluctance in response.

In a post titled "Answering the call on robocalling," AT&T Senior VP Bob Quinn yesterday said that Stephenson will chair the new "Robocalling Strike Force, the mission of which will be to accelerate the development and adoption of new tools and solutions to abate the proliferation of robocalls and to make recommendations to the FCC on the role government can play in this battle."

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Netflix and Comcast will be available on the same cable box later this year, but Netflix video will still count against Comcast data caps.

Netflix's deal to get its online video on Comcast's X1 set-top boxes alongside traditional cable TV channels was reported earlier this month by Recode, with the companies saying they "have much work to do before the service will be available to consumers later this year." The deal raised questions about whether Netflix would be exempt from Comcast data caps, but it has already been decided. A Comcast spokesperson answered "yes" when asked if Netflix will continue counting against data caps after being integrated into Comcast cable boxes.

"All data that flows over the public Internet (which includes Netflix) counts toward a customer’s monthly data usage," Comcast told Ars today.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer at the Fortune Global Forum on November 3, 2015 in San Francisco. (credit: Getty Images | Justin Sullivan)

Despite a rocky tenure as Yahoo chief executive that is likely to end in a sale to Verizon, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer today said the company has been transformed under her leadership and that she "couldn't be more proud of the achievements to date."

In a call with investors describing the $4.8 billion (£3.7 billion) acquisition of Yahoo's operating business that Verizon announced this morning, Mayer praised the Yahoo staff for "the tremendous accomplishments made over the past few years in our transformation." Without mentioning missteps like the Tumblr acquisition, Mayer said, "we invested in and built our mobile, video, native, and social businesses from nothing in 2011 to $1.6 billion in GAAP revenue in 2015. We tripled our mobile base to over 600 million monthly active users and generated over $1 billion of mobile advertising revenue last year."

Yahoo, Mayer said, has also "streamlined and modernized every aspect of our consumer products and dramatically improved our advertiser products. We've laid incredibly solid groundwork and the sale gives us the opportunity to build on that momentum."

A Samsung TV with apps from Comcast and other companies. (credit: Jon Brodkin)

The cable industry's primary lobby group has provided more details on its counter-proposal to the Federal Communications Commission's set-top box plan, and there's at least one thing cable TV customers won't like.

A 33-page filing from the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) responds to questions sent by the FCC. Among other things, the FCC asked whether the cable industry will pledge to make DVR (digital video recording), fast forwarding, and rewinding available on third-party devices, but the NCTA did not propose that cable companies meet this standard.

The NCTA said customers won't have to pay extra for using third-party apps and boxes but left the door open for other methods of jacking up customers' prices.