WCA November 2016

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54 Wire & Cable ASIA – November/December 2016
From the Americas
After reaching just six metro areas in
four years, Google Fiber is considering
wireless for its Internet customers
“Google parent Alphabet Inc is rethinking its high-speed
Internet business after initial rollouts proved more expensive
and time consuming than anticipated – a stark contrast to
the fanfare that greeted its launch six years ago.”
The name Google is more usually associated with
overachievement than with miscalculation. But Jack
Nicas, of the Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau,
was calling attention to the outlay, by Alphabet’s Internet
provider Google Fiber, of hundreds of millions of dollars
to lay fibre optic cable in a handful of USA cities to offer
connections roughly 30 times faster than the national
average. Now, however, a course change is in progress.
Alphabet has suspended fibre projects in San Jose,
California, and Portland, Oregon, and is trying to cut costs
and accelerate its expansion elsewhere by leasing existing
fibre or asking cities or power companies to build the
networks.
People familiar with the company’s plans told the WSJ
that Alphabet hopes to use wireless technology, rather
than cable, to connect homes in metro areas including Los
Angeles, Chicago and Dallas. (“Google’s High-Speed Web
Plans Hit Snags,” 15th August)
Mr Nicas supplied context for the turnabout. Google
announced its fibre project in 2010, when telephone
companies were perceived as moving slowly to roll out
faster broadband service. More than a thousand cities
signed on, and service was begun in the Kansas City area in
November 2012.
Expectations ran high. But to this point Google Fiber has
reached just six metro areas, providing an example of the
challenges facing digital companies seeking to move into
more traditional lines of business.
“The delays in Alphabet’s fibre plans follow stumbles in
other arenas outside the company’s core Internet search
and advertising business,” wrote Mr Nicas. Early last
year, privacy concerns moved Alphabet (Mountain View,
California) to stop selling the first version of its Glass
wearable computer. More recently, it dissolved a robotics
team it had put together from six separate acquisitions.
Google Fiber has begun construction in five new metro
areas and announced plans to reach another dozen cities
in the next few years. Now, as noted by the WSJ , those
dozen cities will be the test bed for a push into wireless
technology.
Dismissing security concerns, the USA
reassigns an important telephone-
numbers management contract to an
overseas company
Over the protests of critics who claim that the selection of a
non-USA company poses national security risks, in July the
Federal Communications Commission made its choice of a
new clearing house for routing billions of mobile telephone
calls and text messages across the United States.
The FCC is giving the New Jersey-based Telcordia
subsidiary of Ericsson AB, the Swedish technology giant,
the very big job of operating a sprawling national system to
track and route wireless calls and texts among hundreds of
service providers.
The routing system was initiated in the 1990s to enable
individual and business subscribers to keep their
mobile telephone numbers when they switch carriers.
But intelligence and law enforcement agencies quickly
discovered its usefulness for tracking and tracing phone
numbers in investigations.
Some current and former intelligence officials expressed
concern that awarding the new contract to a foreign-owned
company could raise the system’s vulnerability to
cyberattack.
The contract to operate the system, worth up to $1 billion
over seven years, had been held since 1997 by a small
Virginia company, Neustar.
Over the course of an intense bidding process, with the
backing of several large carriers Telcordia apparently
convinced the FCC that it could do the work more cheaply
than Neustar; this, despite Neustar’s vigorous effort to
hold on to the assignment, worth more than $460 million
in 2014.
Bryan Koenig of the legal news site Law360 (14th June)
supplied background for the tussle over a new Number
Portability Administration Centre, or NPAC: “Telcordia is
seeking FCC approval for the…contract, approval that
Verizon and others want expedited to end the purported
tens of millions of dollars [the] industry loses each month
from the delay, but which a coalition of smaller carriers
and a policy institute say should be slowed to ensure
transparency and avoid a rushed transition that could lead
to misdirected and dropped calls.”
Neustar said last year it would facilitate a transition even
as it sought to contest the change in the Circuit Court of
Washington DC. The company started pressing the FCC
for greater transparency in the bidding process after it was
revealed in late April that Telcordia had employed a small
number of foreign nationals, including one Chinese citizen,
as computer coders for early work on its system.
While the FCC did not disqualify Telcordia, it required the
company to scrap its extensive work to that point and start
over, with outside help only from “vetted USA citizens.”
 FCC officials said they had worked to address the
national security concerns raised in the course of
the bidding process. After the five-member board of
commissioners voted in closed session to give the
final go-ahead to Telcordia as the new local number
portability administrator, or LNPA, FCC spokesman Mark
Wigfield said (21st July), “I can confirm that the plan was
voted on and approved.”
Dorothy Fabian
Features Editor