FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn

Federal Communications Commissioner Mignon Clyburn thinks Time Warner Cable-sponsored legislation to regulate community-owned Internet Service Providers in North Carolina is a barrier to broadband improvement and could create economic harm across the state.

The commissioner, who hails from the Carolinas, today issued a statement expressing serious concerns about H.129, Rep. Marilyn Avila’s (R-Time Warner Cable) bill to hamper community-owned competition for large cable and phone companies in the state.

“I have serious concerns that as the Federal Communications Commission continues to address broadband deployment barriers outlined in the National Broadband Plan, new obstacles are being erected that are directly contrary to the Plan’s recommendations and goals,” Clyburn said.

Clyburn called out the legislation starting with the name of the bill – ‘Level Playing Field/Local Government Competition.’

“[…] Do not let the title fool you. This measure, if enacted, will not only fail to level the playing field; it will discourage municipal governments from addressing deployment in communities where the private sector has failed to meet broadband service needs,” Clyburn said. “In other words, it will be a significant barrier to broadband deployment and may impede local efforts to promote economic development.”

Clyburn noticed such legislation delivers benefits to major telecommunications corporations, but doesn’t deliver any improvement or competition in rural and small sized cities that suffer with low speed DSL, or no broadband service at all.  North Carolina currently ranks 41st out of 50 states in broadband delivery and quality.

Clyburn spent time in North Carolina last year defending community-owned broadband developments, commending them for bringing Internet access to communities either without service, or woefully underserved.

H.129 has passed the House of Representatives in the North Carolina legislature and is now pending in the Senate.

Read the entire statement here.

Each tiny light represents a single strand of optical fiber.

Verizon has achieved speeds of more than 1.5Tbps as part of a joint field trial with NEC Corporation of America.

The two companies conducted the trial across 2,212 miles of fiber in the Dallas area, successfully demonstrating three separate channels of data streams co-existing on just on a single strand of fiber.

“As we look to a future when data rates go beyond 100G, it’s important to begin examining how these technologies perform,” said Glenn Wellbrock, director of optical transport network architecture and design at Verizon. “This trial gives us a good first step toward analyzing the capabilities of future technologies.”

Verizon’s test placed three different high bit-rate data streams on a single strand of fiber.  Each respective “superchannel” ran at different speeds — 100Gbps, 450Gbps, and 1000Gbps — at the same time, with no significant degradation.

To put that in context, Google’s Fiber to the Home project in Kansas City, Kansas will operate at 1Gbps.  It would take more than 1,500 users fully saturating their Google Fiber connection to utilize the same amount of bandwidth Verizon demonstrated on just one fiber strand.  With most fiber projects bundling many strands of fiber into a single cable, near limitless capacity can bring a broadband experience untroubled by high traffic, high bandwidth multimedia applications.

Previously, Verizon had proven its fiber technology for high bit rate applications in a lab environment.  This was the first “in the field” trial over a functioning fiber network concurrently serving customers in Dallas.

Such technology demonstrates that as broadband traffic grows, so does the technology to support it.

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