Google may be considering renewing expansion of its fiber to the home networks with a new technology that can extend network distances and cut costs.

Telecompetitor reports Google’s “SuperPON” architecture can support up to 1,024 customers over a distance of as much as 50 kilometers, dramatically reducing the costs to lay fiber and build central switching offices to manage connections across a metro area.

Current passive optical networks (PON) can support only 64 customers over a distance of up to 20 kilometers, which means companies have to lay cables with a larger bundle of optical fibers and construct as many as 16 central offices in each metro area to support its operations. If Google can manage to reduce the size of the cable, as it can using SuperPON technology, the company can bury fiber cables using microtrenching, which costs much less than traditional buried conduit.

As a result of improved amplification technology, Google can reach many more customers over a much larger distance using a            single strand of fiber, and offer each customer as much as 10 Gbps broadband. The SuperPON technology appears to be based on Google’s Go-Long network concept, introduced in 2017.

Claudio DeSanti, an architect for Google, told an audience at the Adtran Connect conference that Google has already deployed its SuperPON technology in one unspecified Google Fiber market, and the cost savings achieved could allow Google to return to fiber broadband buildouts. Google effectively paused its fiber expansion effort in late 2016 after examining the costs and the competitive impact of cable and phone company incumbents upgrading their own services to compete with Google. To be economically feasible, a new entrant must capture a certain percentage of market share to pay off network construction costs and be seen as economically viable. Google can either grow market share or reduce the costs of network construction to keep Google Fiber tenable.

DeSanti claims reducing cable size is not only less costly, it also results in higher reliability and an easier ability to repair damaged cables. Construction and labor expenses would also be slashed because Google’s SuperPON technology only needs an average of three central offices in a metro area, down from 16 or more using traditional PON technology. DeSanti hopes the SuperPON architecture will become an industry standard, which would reduce costs further through mass production of cables and construction equipment.

After Google pulled back from its fiber expansion project, the company turned towards fixed wireless services in urban areas and multi-dwelling units, which is ongoing.

Criminals are supposedly having a field day robbing cell phone stores in Canada after regulators ordered all cell phones to be sold unlocked, allowing customers to bring their devices to other carriers.

“There have been multiple instances of armed robberies at our stores targeting unlocked, new devices,” Bell Canada complained in a letter to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). “We believe this trend is attributable to the availability of unlocked devices [that are] more desirable to fraudsters and thieves.”

Because Canada’s three major carrier-cell phone marketplace is seen as less competitive and more expensive than the United States, the CRTC has tried to keep wireless service costs under control by regulating some of the practices of the barely competitive Canadian market. One such initiative is the ban on charging unlock fees on devices, which carriers used to deter customers from changing providers. As of last December, carriers could no longer collect an average of $50 to unlock each device, and new devices had to be sold to customers in an unlocked state, allowing them to be used on any compatible wireless provider’s network.

Rogers, which runs Canada’s largest cable operator and has a major market share of Canada’s wireless market, claims the unintended consequence of the CRTC’s unlock policy is a 100% increase in cell phone thievery during the last six months the policy has been in effect. Rogers reports thieves are stealing brand new cell phones in the mail or off a customer’s front step after the shipper drops the package off. Brazen armed robberies of cell phone stores have been more common in the United States, but providers claim criminal gangs are now taking their business north of the border, holding up stores and running off with dozens of valuable phones.

Both Bell and Rogers warned the CRTC last year thievery would be the likely result of providing unlocked phones. Consumer groups claim both providers have a vested interest complaining about the new unlock policies. In 2016, Canadian telecom companies made $37.7 million from fees related to unlocking smartphones. That was a 75 percent increase in fee revenue since 2014.

Canadian consumers called unlock charges “ransom fees,” and were particularly upset paying fees after they paid off the device.

“You should be able to unlock it [for free] at the very least once you’ve paid off the device. You own it,” John Lawford, executive director with the Public Interest Advocacy Centre in Ottawa told the CBC.

Lawford calls unlock fees an intended consequence of the industry’s own policies. Cell phone companies sell devices manufacturers have to lock at the behest of carriers, and then consumers face fees paid to the same carriers to undo the lock.

Canada’s providers often point to examples of armed robberies and truck hijacking south of the Canadian border as a reason to be concerned about employee and customer safety. In the view of some, an unlocked smartphone worth more than $500 is an invitation to steal.

Bell told regulators things are certain to get worse in Canada.

“It appears that illegal activity may have shifted from the U.S. to Canada as some [American] carriers have begun to lock devices,” Bell officials told the CRTC.

Bell was referring to Verizon’s unilateral announcement it began relocking smartphones in February, despite its agreement not to as part of an acquisition of 700 MHz spectrum in 2008. That prime spectrum came with strings attached, including a requirement not to disable or restrict devices that use the spectrum, something locked phones do. Verizon previously tested the waters on reintroducing locked cell phones during the second term of the Obama Administration, but the idea met immediate resistance from FCC Chairman Thomas Wheeler.

In 2018, Verizon found a much more receptive audience from the Republican-dominated FCC under Chairman Ajit Pai, and has gradually returned to locking down devices on Verizon’s network. Last spring, Verizon began locking all smartphones sent to stores, to be unlocked after purchase. Verizon argued this would deter armed gangs from hijacking deliveries or raiding stores to steal phones by the dozens, to be resold to the eager black market.

After meeting little resistance, Verizon announced it would start locking phones for an arbitrary amount of time after purchase, defined in terms of “months, not years.”

If thieves obtain a stolen, locked phone, it cannot generally be activated by the customer unless taken to an authorized retailer. This theoretically leaves thieves stuck with worthless phones, which is why Canadian carriers claim the country’s unlocked phone policy will draw American thieves north. But critics suspect financial motives hold more sway. In addition to charging lucrative fees for unlocking phones, customers unable to take their device with them to a new carrier can effectively deter a provider change, especially for family accounts where multiple devices would need to be moved.

Others claim locking phones is not the best way to deter thieves, because an unscrupulous Verizon employee or reseller can still unlock them for thieves.

The wireless industry already claims to have a voluntary, industry-led initiative to dramatically reduce theft — a national database of stolen/lost phones. Under this system, a would-be customer is denied activation if their device’s unique ID appears on a list of stolen or lost phones.

CBC Calgary reports Canadians no longer face unlock fees on their smartphones and other wireless devices. (3:55)

Goei

While Wall Street and the tech media seems excited about the prospect of 5G and other fixed wireless home broadband services, Altice, which owns Cablevision and Suddenlink, dismissed wireless broadband as inadequate to meet rapidly growing broadband usage.

“In terms of usage patterns, our customers are taking an average download speed of 162 Mbps as of the second quarter of 2018, which is up 74% year-over-year,” Dexter Goei, CEO of Altice USA told investors on a recent conference call. “[Our customers now use] over 220 GB of data per month, which is up 20% year-over-year, with 10 in-home connected devices, on average. If you take the top 10% of our highest data consuming customers as a leading indicator, they are using, on average, almost 1 terabyte of data per month with 26 in-home connected devices. To support these usage patterns, which are mainly driven by video streaming and the proliferation of new over-the-top [streaming] services, it requires a high quality fixed network like ours. There is no substitute.”

Goei argued America’s wireless carriers are not positioned to offer a credible, serious home broadband alternative.

“For example, so-called unlimited data plans from the U.S. mobile operators start capping or significantly throttling customers at 20 GB of usage per month,” Goei said. “Over 60% of our customers are now using over 100 GB of data per month right now, which the mobile operators do not and will not have the capacity to match on a scaled basis unless they overbuild with a new dense fiber network.”

Altice just so happens to be building a dense fiber network, scrapping Cablevision’s remaining coaxial cable in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut in favor of a fiber-to-the-home network that will eventually reach all of its customers.

Phone companies can beat their cable competitors, but only if they invest in fiber upgrades that can deliver as-advertised broadband service and speed.

TDS Telecom, an independent phone company based in Chicago, has reported good results from the $60 million in fiber upgrades it has committed to complete in 2018.

TDS has been overbuilding beyond its existing telephone service areas to deliver broadband, phone, and television service to communities evaluated as:

• Having a good demographic mix of upper middle class residents;
• Experiencing population growth;
• Underserved by incumbent phone/cable companies;
• Offers good population density where homes and business are close enough to each other to warrant the expense of wiring each for fiber service.

TDS chief financial officer Vicki Villacrez made her case with investors to think positively about investments in fiber, reporting one TDS market garnered a 54% market share in broadband and took 33% of the market share for video after fiber service arrived.

TDS, unlike many other independent phone companies, is not avoiding investments in delivering faster broadband speed to customers. TDS typically reinvests 75% of its revenue in network upgrades and returns the other 25% to shareholders. Outside of its landline service areas, TDS has also acquired cable companies to provide service to customers, offering gigabit speeds in many areas.

In rural areas, the company is combining federal Connect America Funds with its own money to deploy bonded DSL service in areas too unprofitable to serve with fiber. This typically delivers faster internet service than rural broadband rollouts from other phone companies like Windstream and Frontier.

TDS is often the third provider in its overbuilt markets, a fact that is usually not well-received by investors because it can constrain market share and potential profits. TDS chooses its overbuild markets where incumbents have chronically underinvested in their networks, and the result is “pent-up demand” by customers, according to Villacrez. TDS’ market share is typically higher in their markets than other overbuilders.

Villacrez routinely tells investors the company’s success largely depends on fiber upgrades. About 24 percent of TDS Telecom’s local landline service area now has fiber to the home service, and the company is aggressively cutting the number of customers still served by slow traditional ADSL service.

Tribune Media walked away from its $3.9 billion dollar merger agreement with Sinclair Broadcast Group this morning, and announced it would sue Sinclair for $1 billion for its conduct trying to get the deal approved, including withholding information and deceiving regulators.

The merger deal was controversial from the moment it was announced, pairing up Sinclair’s 192 stations with Tribune’s 42 TV stations in 33 markets, including well-known stations like WGN in Chicago and WPIX in New York. Sinclair was already the nation’s top TV station owner, and to acquire more stations, Sinclair would have to get TV ownership limits eased, something coincidentally provided by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, who suddenly announced an interest in bringing back a “discount” on ownership caps for stations broadcasting on the UHF band. That policy was dropped after the country moved to digital over-the-air broadcasting, which negated the perception that UHF channels were less desirable and held lower value than lower VHF channels because of reception quality.

Sinclair’s Long History of Partisan Politics

Sinclair, unlike other TV station owners, also has a long history of being active in partisan politics, airing programming in favor of conservatives and openly advocating for the agendas of the Bush and Trump Administrations. Its long-standing policy to require its stations to air corporate-produced news segments and commentaries during local newscasts has irritated local newsrooms for years, but as the number of Sinclair-owned stations has grown, the practice was eventually exposed with a viral video depicting an uncomfortable collection of anchors from dozens of Sinclair stations decrying “fake news.”

In 2016, Sinclair aired 1,723 stories about the Huntsman Cancer Institute in Utah on 64 of its stations. Most were designed to look like one or two minute news stories, although Sinclair also produced a 30-minute show about the facility. What viewers were never told is that the stories were paid for by the Huntsman Cancer Foundation. In December, the FCC fined Sinclair a record-breaking $13.3 million for failing to disclose the story’s sponsor. The Democratic minority on the Commission called that a slap on the wrist and wanted the maximum fine of $82 million levied on Sinclair for its egregious and flagrant violation of FCC rules.

Sinclair’s past run-ins and controversies guaranteed its merger deal with Tribune would receive special scrutiny. The documents attached to the lawsuit filed this morning reveal Tribune got quickly upset with Sinclair’s hardball lobbying, accusing Sinclair of brazenly flouting the FCC’s rules and setting up the merger for failure.

In the end, even Sinclair’s apparent ally Ajit Pai distanced himself from the TV station owner in July, suddenly advocating the merger deal be forwarded to an administrative law judge for review, a sure sign the merger was in serious trouble with regulators.

How America’s largest local TV owner turned its news anchors into soldiers in Trump’s war on the media: https://t.co/iLVtKRQycL pic.twitter.com/dMdSGellH3

— Deadspin (@Deadspin) March 31, 2018

Tribune Takes Sinclair to Court

This morning, Tribune officially pulled the plug on the merger.

“Our merger cannot be completed within an acceptable time frame, if ever,” Tribune Media chief executive Peter Kern said in a statement. “This uncertainty and delay would be detrimental to our company and our shareholders. Accordingly, we have exercised our right to terminate the merger agreement, and, by way of our lawsuit, intend to hold Sinclair accountable.”

That accountability will come in the form of its lawsuit that includes revealing documents about Sinclair’s behavior during the merger process, which includes allegations Sinclair recklessly withheld information and deceived the FCC and Justice Department about the transaction. If true, that could threaten Sinclair’s fitness to hold FCC licenses for its TV stations.

“From virtually the moment the Merger Agreement was signed, Sinclair repeatedly and willfully breached its contractual obligations in spectacular fashion,” Tribune said in its lawsuit. “In an effort to maintain control over stations it was obligated to sell if advisable to obtain regulatory clearance, Sinclair engaged in belligerent and unnecessarily protracted negotiations with DOJ and the FCC over regulatory requirements, refused to sell stations in the ten specified markets required to obtain approval, and proposed aggressive divestment structures and related-party sales that were either rejected outright or posed a high risk of rejection and delay – all in the service of Sinclair’s self-interest and in derogation of its contractual obligations.”

Tribune claims Sinclair only favored its own financial interests, not the obligations it had to Tribune to get the merger deal approved as quickly as possible. Tribune also accused Sinclair of threatening, insulting, and misleading regulators to keep control over stations it was obligated to sell.

The Sinclair Broadcast Group has come under fire following the spread of a video showing anchors at its stations across the United States reading a script criticizing “fake” news stories. (8:03)

“Sue me.”

Tribune’s executives gradually became more alarmed the more Sinclair negotiated with regulators, claiming Sinclair antagonized officials at the Justice Department. Tribune notes the assistant attorney general of the antitrust division got an earful from Sinclair, lecturing the official that he “completely misunderstand[ood]” the broadcast industry and was “more regulatory” than any recent predecessor.

When Sinclair was cornered by the Department of Justice over demands for station divestitures, the company summarized its position in two words: “sue me.”

Tribune pointed out the Justice Department was prepared to accept the merger with the appropriate stations being sold to new owners, but Sinclair balked. After a series of schemes were suggested to partly divest the stations, Tribune saw the protracted negotiations as unnecessary and imprudent. The agendas of both companies were radically different. Tribune wanted Sinclair to do whatever the FCC and Justice Department insisted be done, to get the deal done quickly. Sinclair wanted the deal and a way to maintain control, even indirectly, over almost every station involved in the deal. Tribune began threatening to sue Sinclair if it did not agree to the Justice Department’s terms.

Tribune’s growing unease with Sinclair’s behavior culminated in this email exchange between Tribune and Sinclair executives in late December, 2017.

Sinclair finally relented in February, 2018, but only partially. Exasperated Tribune executives were stunned as Sinclair now proposed to sell stations to third parties that maintained “significant ties to Sinclair’s executive chairman,” David Smith, or his family.

“Sinclair would effectively control all aspects of station operations, including advertising sales and negotiation of retransmission agreements with cable and satellite operators,” Tribune said in its lawsuit. “Under these proposed arrangements, Sinclair would continue to reap the lion’s share of the economic benefits of the stations it was purportedly ‘divesting’ and would have an option to repurchase the stations in the future.”

“Sinclair fought, threatened, insulted, and misled regulators in a misguided and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to retain control over stations that it was obligated to sell,” the lawsuit concludes.

The country’s largest owner of local TV stations, the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which reaches over a third of homes across the nation, wanted to get even bigger by merging with the Tribune Media Company. Sinclair is raising concerns among media watchers because of its practice of combining news with partisan political opinion. William Brangham reports for PBS Newshour. (8:58)