Good article about the Wireles ISP industry in the US by ChannelVision mag. WISPA just held another record breaking event: “WISPA-palooza event in Las Vegas drew 1,000+ attendees, 93 exhibitors and 135+ speakers—the largest turnout the event has had to date.” WISPs are starting to see a surge in fixed point to point wireless sales – probably due to the lengthy and uncertain fiber builds.

Some info about the E-Rate program.

Posting of an applicant’s FCC Form 470 (Description of Services Requested and Certification Form) opens the required competitive bidding process. The FCC Form 470 must be posted on USAC’s web site for at least 28 days before an applicant can close its competitive bidding process, select a service provider for tariffed or month-to-month services, and/or select a service provider.
Reminder: Technology plans must be approved prior to the service start date reported on the Form 486.

“Participating in its 16th filing window, Funds For Learning, the nation’s largest E-rate compliance firm, has submitted over $1 billion in E-rate funding requests since the program’s inception. [It has] exceeded the $5 billion threshold.” [source]

Funding year deadlines here.

Also, eligible services lists are available. “The ESL, established by the FCC, is organized into five sections and includes a miscellaneous section:”

• Telecommunications Services,
• Telecommunications,
• Internet Access,
• Internal Connections,
• Basic Maintenance, and
• Miscellaneous.

The Rural Healthcare Program is also run by USAC. Are you getting your piece of the $440 million. “Beginning in January 2014, applicants currently receiving support for Internet access can apply for support for those same services through the new Healthcare Connect Fund (HCF) Program. … The HCF Program will provide a 65 percent discount on eligible expenses related to broadband connectivity to both individual rural health care providers (HCPs) and consortia.”

Why does a customer call you to complain?

If a customer complains, it is because they want your attention. In many cases they want you to do better. Seth Godin writes a very short, pithy post about this here.

The complaining customer doesn’t want to leave. They just want to be heard.

It is similar for the Referring Customer. If your referral program is passive and just provides for a free month of service, it will never work. People want to be recognized. They want a prize. (So do employees!).

“Try giving them a chance to be a voice of the concerned, energetic customer, a voice that needs to be heard by people who actually make decisions.”

DSL Reports has some deceent articles.

One about the VDSL2 based 45 Mbps U-Verse service. Here is the VDSL2 chart.

VZ FiOS is now the number 3 terrestrial TV provider with 5.2 million subscribers after Comcast & TWC. It passes 18.3 million homes and businesses and FioS has 35% penetration – not the 50% that was forecast.

The other article is about Google Fiber. The cherry picking, the breakdown of consumer protection, the sweetheart deals – all interesting stuff.

“The entertainment industry’s “Copyright Alert System” (aka “six strikes) was launched back in February with the cooperation of major ISPs including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner Cable.” It costs $2 million annually to run.

Another wi-fi based MVNO service launched, called Scratch. Kind of pay-as-go. It’s mainly about texting like TextNow and wi-fi based like Republic Wireless.

Rutgers teaches a class on the Wireless Revolution. Here is the syllabus. The class talks about Craig McCaw who many call the Wizard of Wireless. His is an interesting biography.

His father bought and sold cable companies. Craig and his 3 brothers were given one cable company in Washington state in trust. That one cable company was expanded and leveraged to make McCaw rich enough to buy lots of spectrum from the FCC. Then in 1986, “MCI sold its cellular and paging operations to McCaw for $122 million and McCaw Cellular emerged as the industry leader.” One more piece to the puzzle was added to the tune of $3.5 billion when McCaw outbid BellSouth for control of LIN Broadcasting in 1989. Now McCaw had a nationwide network that he sold to AT&T for $11.5 billion in 1994.

Wireless technology was first developed by AT&T Labs in 1947 for law enforcement. Cellular was yet one more technology that AT&T Labs pioneered but AT&T failed to bring to market.

In 1998 – four years after selling to AT&T and becoming its largest shareholder – McCaw still had two publicly traded companies: Nextel and NextLink. According to a 1998 Forbes article, “The former is a mobile dispatch company with a checkered investment past, it uses a unique bandwidth and a set of radio phones created by Motorola, which were initially sold to truckers and cab companies.” McCaw owned 30% of Nextel then. It is amazing that he won enough FCC spectrum auctions for Nextel to have a nationwide service footprint – after winning spectrum auctions for a nationwide network that was sold to AT&T.

“The latter is a small, competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) created to install, maintain, manage and sell fiber-optic cable telephony services to businesses. Add one more piece to this collection – CablePlus – a small company that actually installs fiber optic cable networks and connections, and the McCaw telephony strategy comes into view: Telecommunications services anywhere, all provided by McCaw-controlled entities.” Nextlink merged with Concentric to become XO, which after $7 billion in debt, went bankrupt in 2002, when McCaw separated from the company.

McCaw went to prep school with Bill Gates, who he partnered with “in Teledesic (where each started out with 45% ownership, since diluted), a satellite broadband (64 megabits of bandwidth per second–equal to 10 full motion video feeds) service, looks a lot less shaky. The idea is to put 288 satellites into low earth orbit (LEO) at a price tag of about $9 billion.”

Then McCaw founded Clearwire. Here’s that story:

“In 2003, McCaw signed a long-term lease agreement with a U.S.-based Spanish language broadcaster that held the country’s largest 2.5 GHz license. In the next two years, McCaw would acquire nearly 1,000 such leases — roughly 85 percent of the 2.5 spectrum band — at an estimated 30-year cost of $5 billion. In 2005, the Federal Communications Commission deregulated the 2.5 band to permit its use for wireless broadband, and the value of McCaw’s leases skyrocketed. His $5 billion investment was soon worth anywhere from four to ten times that much.” [source]

Serial Entrepreneur indeed – all in telecom.