Subscribers to Hulu’s live-streaming TV service last week discovered live Fox network programming was available on the service whether a local Fox affiliate agreed to stream its programming to viewers or not.

The network quietly launched a new national 24-hour streaming feed of Fox Network shows filled out with programming from other Fox-owned networks in more than 70 markets where its affiliates have yet to sign an agreement to stream local stations.

For now, the national Fox Network feed is only available over Hulu’s live TV service, part-owned by 21st Century Fox. But sources told the Wall Street Journal the network intends to launch it on other streaming platforms in the near future (subscription required to read linked story).

The feed offers the full Fox Network schedule. At times when local stations normally carry syndicated programming, infomercials, or local news, the national Fox feed airs shows from other Fox-owned cable networks including National Geographic, Fox News Channel, Fox Business News, and content from Fox’s enormous library of programming offered by 21st Century Fox Television Studio.

The move has angered Fox’s affiliates, who are angling to strike their own more lucrative carriage deals for streaming services. Fox affiliates complain Fox’s terms for local station participation on Hulu’s streaming platform are inferior to the compensation offered to affiliates of rival networks, often by more than 50%.

Fox set the terms allowing the launch of the feed sometime ago as part of their affiliate renewal contract. Fox affiliates cannot compel the network to switch the feed off, but in markets where local stations do manage to sign deals with streaming services, the local station will replace the national feed.

The announcement is bad news for Sinclair Broadcast Group, the largest local station owner in the country. Sinclair has yet to sign a contract with Hulu to allow carriage of its owned and operated Fox-affiliates, so where a local Sinclair Fox affiliate operates, streaming services will carry the national Fox feed instead.

Viewers will be able to watch all Fox Network shows, including whatever NFL game Fox’s national feed chooses to carry. But missing from the lineup will be local news and other programming.

AT&T’s idea of a small cell deployment on an existing utility pole in Oakland, Calif. (Image courtesy: Omar Masry, a city planner living in the area, who warns other city planners: “Don’t let this happen to you.”)

Some of America’s biggest wireless telecom companies are spending millions lobbying Washington and state legislatures for the right to place a myriad of new wireless transmitters and small cells in the public rights-of-way without local communities having much say about where they go and what they look like.

Utility Traffic Jam

Over the next five years, tens of thousands of new “small cell” devices are expected to be placed on utility poles to manage forthcoming wireless services, and that represents a conservative estimate. Every major wireless carrier is contemplating new line-of-sight 5G communications networks that will require a massive deployment of new wireless antennas that will serve a smaller audience of devices than traditional cell towers have. But wireless companies will not be alone. Cable operators are also expected to enter the wireless business, not only to resell other providers’ cellular services but also to deploy new low power, line of sight networks to manage the Internet of Things (IoT), which will wirelessly connect devices ranging from home appliances and heating/cooling systems to vehicles on the road, utility meters, shopping carts, for sale and street vendor signs, traffic signals, and much, much more.

It’s an entirely new world for local governments tasked with approving permit requests to place cellular and wireless infrastructure on private and public lands. With billions to be made managing machine-to-machine communications, smart cars, and expanded wireless internet, every player has a vested interest in making sure local governments don’t impede their potential profits.

That is why companies like AT&T are pushing hard for new limitations on local government objections to their sprouting wireless infrastructure. Their idea is to override local control and shift to their proposed statewide or federal guidelines conveniently favoring them by putting time limits on communities to contemplate an application, eliminating certain rights for local governments to object to those applications, and making certain wireless companies don’t have to pay what they consider excessive fees or taxes to local authorities for the right to use the public space.

For local governments, responsiveness to citizens who have to live next to wireless infrastructure is important, and not only because of pseudo-scientific fears of the health impacts of wireless signal radiation. Aesthetic issues alone often make or break current wireless antenna applications.

The POTs and PANs Blog notes that time is short for local communities to get their wireless infrastructure policies in place for the incoming boom of mini-cell sites and IoT networks.

Pole Refrigerators and 100-Foot Fake Pine Trees

Traditional cell towers are easy to spot because they are tall and very visible with wireless antennas often serving multiple carriers fixed up and down across the tower. The next generation of wireless networks will be powered by much smaller antennas attached to utility and light poles. In some cases where nearby trees can block signals, providers propose new 100-foot tall monopoles, sometimes disguised to resemble a tree — albeit a very, very tall one. To know how those trees could be removed with efficiency, you can learn this here now.

Some early generation “small cells” resemble a compact refrigerator and weigh several hundred pounds. These are usually mounted approximately half to two-thirds up a utility pole and are very visible. Some have loud cooling fans, others need additional infrastructure like external power that will busy-up the utility pole with more cables and supports. In a storm strong enough to take out a utility pole, you would not want to be underneath a falling “small cell.”

The Tree Trimming Flat-Top Haircut is Back

Arborists warn that some early 5G installations have taken a serious toll on nearby trees also in the right-of-way because the technology requires a direct line-of-sight to the antenna. This has resulted in aggressive tree-trimming to keep foliage far away from the small cell, and that trimming sometimes includes reducing the height of nearby trees.

A University of Surrey study found that small cells mounted 10 meters up a pole faced at least a 30% chance of having their signals blocked by trees. At 15 meters, that chance of signal blockage is reduced to 10%. At 25 meters, it is less than 1%. But that would require an 82-foot high utility pole in the neighborhood. The standard utility pole in the United States is about 40 ft (12 m) long. Either aggressive tree trimming or tall utility pole placement to avoid trimming is likely to create controversy in suburban residential neighborhoods.

City planners are being urged to contemplate what kind of enforceable policies they want to permit in the public space set aside for infrastructure, because as author Doug Dawson noted, it’s going to get busy up there:

I doubt that any city is prepared for the possible proliferation of wireless devices. Not only are there four major cellular companies, but these devices are going to be deployed by the cable companies that are now entering the cellular market along with a host of ISPs that want to deliver wireless broadband. There will also be significant demand for placement for connecting private networks as well as for the uses by the cities themselves. I remember towns fifty years ago that had unsightly masses of telephone wires. Over the next decade or two it’s likely that we will see wireless devices everywhere.

Comcast may be undercutting its own fiber broadband aspirations by introducing a cheaper way for customers to get gigabit broadband service over their existing Comcast cable connection.

Customers in seven new areas, including most of Colorado, Oregon, southwest Washington State, and the cities of Houston, Kansas City, San Francisco and Seattle now have access to Comcast’s DOCSIS 3.1-powered gigabit downloads. (Upload speeds are limited to a much less impressive 35Mbps.)

Comcast announced the new communities as part of their gradual rollout of DOCSIS 3.1 — the standard that powers cable broadband — across their national footprint. These communities join Utah, Detroit, Tennessee, Chicago, Atlanta, and Miami where Comcast has already introduced the new speeds.

It is Comcast’s latest foray into gigabit speed broadband, and it is decidedly focused on the cities outside of the northeast (except Boston) where Comcast has not faced significant competition from Google Fiber or AT&T Fiber, both delivering gigabit speed internet access. Verizon FiOS, predominately in the northeast, only recently introduced gigabit speed options for its residential customers. Comcast continues to be among the most aggressive cable operators willing to boost broadband speeds for its customers, in direct contrast to Charter Communications, the second largest cable operator in the country that is predominately focused on selling 60-100Mbps internet packages to its customers.

Comcast sells multiple broadband speed tiers to its customers.

Comcast’s efforts may undercut its own fiber-on-demand project, which wires fiber to the home service for some Comcast customers seeking up to 2Gbps service. That plan comes with a steep installation fee and term commitment, making it a harder sell for customers. Comcast’s DOCSIS-powered gigabit will retail for $159.95 a month, but Comcast is offering pricing promotions ranging from $70-109.99 a month with a one-year term commitment in several cities. The more competition, the lower the price.

In Kansas City, where Google Fiber premiered and AT&T is wiring its own gigabit fiber, Comcast charges $70 a month, price-locked for two years with a one-year contract. Customers who don’t want a contract will pay dearly for that option — $160 a month, which is more than double the promotional price.

In Houston, where AT&T has not exactly blanketed the city with gigabit fiber service and Comcast has been the dominant cable operator for decades, gigabit speed will cost you $109.99 — almost $40 more a month because of the relative lack of competition. Customers who bundle other Comcast services will get a price break however. Upgrading to gigabit service will cost those customers an additional $50 to $70 a month, depending on their current package.

“Additional prices and promotions may be tested in the future,” the company said in a news release.

Comcast does not expect many customers will want to make the jump to gigabit speeds and a higher broadband bill. Rich Jennings, senior vice president of Comcast’s Western/Mountain region, told the Colorado Springs Gazette that gigabit service was a “niche product for people who want that kind of speed.”

Comcast does suspect a number of signups will be from broadband-only customers who don’t subscribe to cable television.

Mike Spaulding, Comcast’s vice president of engineering, thinks the service will appeal most to those who rely entirely on a broadband connection for entertainment and communications.

“There’s not a lot of need for gigabit service for one customer to do one thing,” Spaulding told the Denver Post. “But what it does is enable an even better experience as more devices in the home are streaming, whether it’s video or gaming or whatever they are doing in the home. Most of our customers subscribe to the 100Mbps package today. Less than 10 percent of our customers are in the 200-250Mbps. We’ll see where one gig takes us.”

One place a gig may take customers is perilously close to Comcast’s notorious 1TB usage cap, which is currently enforced in Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, New Mexico, Western Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, South Carolina, Utah, Southwest Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin, even for this premium-priced internet tier. Customers exceeding it will automatically pay a $10 overlimit fee for each 50GB of excess usage, up to a maximum of $200 a month. An unlimited ‘insurance plan’ is also available for $50 a month, which removes the 1TB cap.

Customers will have to use a new modem if they upgrade to gigabit service, either renting one from Comcast for around $10 a month or buying a compatible DOCSIS 3.1 modem. Two of the most recommended: the Arris Surfboard SB8200 ($189) or the Netgear CM1000 ($171.99) (prices subject to change).

We will mail it to you on floppy disks because your internet connection is too slow to download it.

While FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) decry government regulation as responsible for destroying capital and incentives to invest, the state of Kansas this week ended its all-out experiment with deregulation and trickle-down economics on steroids, with a Republican-dominated state legislature calling it a giant flop.

In charge of the Grand Experiment in Trickle-Down, Doubled-Down is Gov. Sam Brownback, who has systematically hobbled the state’s social spending and investment programs since becoming governor in 2011. He adopted his ‘vision thing’ from Reaganomics proponent Art Laffer, who apparently forgot the Reagan Administration’s penchant for all things deregulation was not all sweetness and light and had to be tempered by President George H.W. Bush after he was elected in 1988.

But what if history could have a second chance? What if a state kept its pledge of no new taxes and slashed regulation and oversight to the bone. Would it result in a free market paradise where government got out of the way for the public good? Would lower taxes result in more tax revenue as Kansas businesses boomed? Would infrastructure take care of itself?

To find out, Brownback slashed the state’s income tax, eliminated the top income tax bracket and delivered a disproportionate share of the tax cut benefits to the economic motivators (also known as Kansas’ richest families) who would supposedly use the surplus to invest in businesses and jobs. At the urging of the powerful small business lobby, backed by the Koch Brothers and their octopus of astroturf anti-tax groups demanding reform, Brownback zeroed out taxes on “pass-thru” income, which effectively allowed anyone running a LLC or small business to evade taxes.

There were moderate Republicans in Kansas that warned about the prospects of Brownback’s questionable assertion that low taxes and low funding of the state government would bring a new era of growth and prosperity. But dark money and Koch’s political machine saw to it those politicians were “de-elected” and replaced with Brownback’s army of minions.

In addition to creating budgetary ruin with tax revenue cratering, essential digital infrastructure crashed and burned. Deregulation and a mediocre state broadband expansion effort didn’t make internet service in Kansas better. In fact it got worse, along with the finger-pointing over who was responsible.

Last fall, Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts brought then FCC commissioner Ajit Pai to the community of Allen to meet with executives working for a dozen small telephone companies who were having trouble upgrading their networks across the great expanse of rural Kansas.

Brownback

Roberts wasn’t ready to claim federal government regulation was responsible for the mess. But Pai’s reflexive claims that deregulation incentivizes for-profit companies to invest in better broadband simply wasn’t working in Kansas either. The only solution for The Free Marketeers in rural Kansas turns out to be handing out government money to expand rural broadband, except in Kansas, there was very little money to be had after Brownback took an ax to the state budget.

The Wichita Eagle unintentionally drew a contrast between the thinking of providers that want to blame everyone else for the problem and plain reality for Brian Thomas, who works for the Blue Valley Tele-Communications Company.

“It really all comes down to a quality of life perspective,” Thomas told the newspaper. “I think we all live that. That’s our jobs, to provide that.”

The newspaper noted that without government money, the only way private companies could afford to pay to replace thousands of miles of ancient copper phone wiring in favor of fiber would be to make internet service so expensive that only businesses and the ultra-wealthy would be able to afford it.

So while Brownback’s great social experiment carried on, internet expansion and upgrades stalled in many communities across Kansas. In Allen, where Pai met to extol the virtues of private investment, the town librarian at Allen’s public library got some help from the Manhattan (Kansas) library system to install an inexpensive Wi-Fi hotspot that, once switched on, almost immediately filled its parking lot day and night with what the newspaper called “internet-starved townspeople.”

Allen County, Kan.

“There are several people who will watch movies outside” after hours, town librarian Nikki Plankington said. “The kids use it for the Pokemon Go thing. I don’t know what that’s all about, but the kids use it.”

While the public library did its part, Kansas’ for-profit private internet providers are going in a different direction – complaining a lot and asking for handouts with no strings attached.

The Eagle reported Pai’s meeting with rural telecom executives turned into a ‘whine and cheese’ reception. The phone companies had a laundry list of dislikes they wanted the deregulation-minded Pai to fix for them while they pondered upgrades:

• The Universal Service Fund/Connect America Fund, financed by ratepayers through surcharges on their phone bills, was “obsolete” and didn’t provide enough money.
• The federal government didn’t allow ISPs to chase after the deepest pockets to pay for their upgrades — popular online websites like Netflix and Amazon.com.
• The FCC’s definition of broadband as 25Mbps ignored the fact Kansas phone companies wanted to deliver considerably lower speed service, claiming customers don’t want more than 10Mbps.

If the government could be lobbied to lower standards, eliminate regulation, and deliver or at least compel a cash welfare infusion from content providers and ratepayers, there was no need to ask rich Kansans to stop counting their money long enough to invest some of it in better broadband.

Catherine Moyer from Pioneer Communications claimed it was unfair to ask companies and customers to pay for upgrades when those internet titans like Netflix, Amazon, and Google make countless billions in profits using Pioneer’s network with absolutely no compensation for doing so.

“My customers and the customers here in Allen and all the customers in Wichita for that matter that have voice service pay a proportion of their bill,” she said. But, “there’s a whole group of people and companies utilizing the network that don’t pay into the fund in any meaningful way … so they haven’t helped build out this network.”

When the newspaper suggested she was effectively asking for higher taxes and paid lanes for internet content companies like Netflix that Moyer claimed was consuming 35% of Pioneer’s available bandwidth, she didn’t seem to have any objections.

“It’s not necessarily what people want to see, but in the same light, if you want these networks and you want these speeds, you have to somehow fund that. And who should fund it?” Moyer asked.

The next issue that doesn’t work for Kansas telecom companies is the FCC’s standard that broadband service be at least 25Mbps, and if a phone or cable company wants public dollars to build out their networks, they better choose a technology capable of delivering that kind of speed.

“One thing that kind of concerns me a little bit is having the FCC dictate, or Washington dictate, the level of speed I’m required to have in order to maintain a certain level of funding,” said Archie Macias of Wheat State Telephone, which serves rural communities in Butler, Cowley, Chase and Lyon counties. Macias is upset because his system uses fiber optics that can easily handle 25Mbps, but his customers only want to pay for 10Mbps.

“I’m not going to build a network that’s like having 500 channels on a TV that you’re going to watch 12 or 13,” he told the newspaper.

Wheat State currently offers four broadband plans in areas where fiber service is available:

• $39.99 Pro (10/2Mbps)
• $49.99 Multi-Pro (15/3Mbps)
• $69.99 Power-Pro (25/5Mbps)
• $79.99 Mega-Pro (50/20Mbps)
• $10 discount when bundled with other services

What customers choose for broadband service is often an issue of pricing, not speed.

In more populated parts of Kansas, customers are still trying to cope with DSL service that has not seen significant upgrades for a decade. Since Brownback isn’t doing much to help, and tax cuts and deregulation have failed to inspire the kind of robust broadband expansion “light touch” regulation is supposed to provoke, a lot of Kansans are leaving the state for good.

An abandoned farm.

One of those threatening to flee is Christianne Parks, who lives in Allen and endures not-even-close-to-being-broadband.

“Eventually, I probably would get bored out of my mind and leave,” 19-year old Parks told the newspaper when asked what she would do if her broadband situation did not change.

Last fall, the newspaper pinpointed some of the real problems afflicting the state’s economy and missing from the list were taxes and regulation. Deregulation-inspired consolidation in the state’s critical agribusiness sector decimated rural farms and the local economies that depended on them. When the farmers leave, Main Street businesses soon follow. The 1970s and 1980s was the era of the Rust Belt in the northeast and midwest. Now parts of the midwest including Kansas risk being labeled a Wheat Belt of economic deterioration.

Since 2000, 81 of Kansas’ 105 counties have lost population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The consensus is that trend will get worse, according to the newspaper – especially among young people – until and unless someone can find a way to get better internet service to the outlands. Brownback’s hands-off policies favoring providers are in contrast to New York’s more aggressive rural broadband funding program that seeks to achieve near 100% penetration of broadband service in the state over the next few years. New York regulators also compel companies doing business in the state to share some of their wealth from mergers and acquisitions, most recently requiring Charter Communications and Altice to expand their broadband networks to improve service and reach customers they don’t serve today.

The free-market-solves-everything concept celebrated by Pai and the Koch Brothers has now been tested and failed in Kansas. Among the few bright spots for broadband in Kansas are civic-minded telephone or cable providers that look beyond return on investment formulas in their community, and more commonly community-owned broadband networks or co-ops with a motive beyond profit — delivering decent broadband to maintain, sustain, and grow their local economies.

Recovery from the “free market miracle” train wreck started last fall, when a wave of moderate Democrats and Republicans were elected with a pledge to do everything possible to kill Brownback’s vision of paradise. This week, the Republican-dominated legislature had enough of living in Brownback’s PretendLand and overrode his veto of their plan to raise income taxes across the board and kill his legalized tax evasion scheme for business owners to bring in an additional $1.2 billion over the next two years to invest in Kansas.

The improved broadband that could result may give something for the state’s wealthiest citizens to do in their free time besides count their money.

Johnson

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) is in favor of banishing Net Neutrality and allowing service providers to sell paid broadband fast lanes, claiming some uses of the internet are more important than others.

Speaking alongside FCC Chairman Ajit Pai on a live interview with WTMJ Radio in Milwaukee with no guests in opposition, Johnson claimed unless cable and telephone companies are given additional economic incentives to risk capital, broadband service improvements will be slow in coming.

Johnson added ISPs should be allowed to adopt paid prioritization.

“You might need a fast lane within that pipeline so that [medical] diagnoses can be transmitted instantaneously [and] not [be] held up by maybe a movie streaming,” Johnson said.

“I want everyone to have what I call digital opportunity, and to do that you need to have a regulatory framework that gives all of these companies — satellite, wireless, fiber — a strong incentive to invest,” added Pai.

“As a businessperson, you need the economic incentive to risk your capital and the minute you have government regulation it reduces the certainty in terms of what you can get from return on investment, you are going to invest less,” argued Johnson. “We’re seeing that right now because of what [former FCC] Chairman Wheeler did.”

Pai

Pai argued that outdated FCC rules were also responsible for reducing broadband investment, particularly rules that require phone companies to continue maintaining their existing wireline network to provide universal access to telephone service.

Pai characterized Net Neutrality as government control of the internet.

“Do you want the government deciding how the internet is run?” Pai said, noting he favors “light touch” regulation where private companies manage their own businesses with targeted enforcement action by the FCC. “In 2015, on a party line vote, the FCC went the other way and put the government, rather than the private sector, at the center of how the internet operates.”

By getting rid of the Obama Administration’s Net Neutrality policies, Pai believes that will return the U.S. to an era of where cable and phone companies invest in their networks and expand rural broadband.

“As Chairman Pai said, Net Neutrality is a slogan,” added Johnson. “What you really want is an expansion of high-speed broadband. In order to do that, you have to create the incentives for those smaller ISPs to invest and if they don’t really control their own fiber — if the government tells them exactly how they are going to use their investment — there is less incentive for them to invest so we’ll have less high-speed broadband.”

“Consumers will be worse off because of this term Net Neutrality,” Johnson said.

“We at the FCC need to be focused on investment in infrastructure,” Pai said, not Net Neutrality.