BBWN Bites: Starry Spreads FWA Sunshine to Rural Broadband
Today's wrap-up also includes a look at smart home automation growth, a Missouri utility's plan to power-up fiber broadband, an update on Reliance Jio's Gigabit Fiber progress and Oxford's discovery of the pros and cons of taking millions from a private equity investor to study AI.
Starry will use its recently won spectrum from the 24GHz auction to deliver gigabit-capable broadband to the home, including in rural regions often unserved by traditional fixed-access providers. The wireless broadband provider won 104 licenses for 51 partial economic regions across 25 states, bringing its total potential footprint to 40 million US households when combined with its existing territories. Starry's platform and architecture can deliver broadband for less than $20 per home passed, the company claims; it uses dozes of base station sites and a proprietary antenna system for its point-to-multipoint solution and could target international customers, CEO Chet Kanojia hinted in a release. Want more details? (See Starry says spectrum wins widen reach to 40M US households.)
Smart home automation revenue will increase at a 25% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2019 and 2024, hitting $54 billion in five years, according to a new report from Juniper Research. The Far East and China, followed by North America and West Europe will lead adoption, followed at a distance by the rest of Asia Pacific, West Europe and Latin America, the study finds.
Traverse City Light & Power is getting into the fiber broadband business after the Michigan utility approved contracts to begin building and operating a network during its board meeting on Tuesday, reported 9&10 news. It chose Fujitsu to deploy Phase I of the $3.3 million project for downtown homes and businesses, a trial run that will be the basis for an expansion to all customers, Light & Power hopes. It will install the fiber infrastructure this summer and add its first subscribers this fall; the network will pay for itself with 402 residents and 378 businesses, although costs were not disclosed, the article said. Light & Power will be the sole user of the infrastructure and does not expect to offer dark fiber services, according to the local news site.
Reliance Jio is expected to unveil pricing in July for its long-awaited Jio GigaFiber, which has undergone testing for several months and is now ready for prime time, My Smart Price and other Indian news sites reported. Local experts predict Reliance Jio will debut the gigabit broadband services during its July corporate meeting and follow its tradition of low-cost, high-quality offerings that disrupt competitors within its footprints. A triple-play plan with 100 gigabytes of data at 100 Mbit/s may cost INR 600 ($8.61), My Smart Price wrote -- a.k.a. "cheap and worthy."
Blackstone multi-billionaire (OK, $126 billion, to be precise) Stephen Schwarzman donated £150 million ($188.7 million) to Oxford University for a new institute where the esteemed educational institution can unite most of its art faculties and house a new center to study the ethics of artificial intelligence. This, of course, led to many online and social media discussions (and diatribes) about whether, how, and if a man who earned most of his wealth from private equity could or should donate to a university and whether Oxford should accept the gift. More worrisome, perhaps, is that almost all Schwarzman's money goes to the building -- not to staff who are more important to any discussion or resolution of this monumentally vital topic, given AI's ever-increasing role.
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— Alison Diana, Editor, Broadband World News. Follow us on Twitter or @alisoncdiana.
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Here's where you can find episode links for 'The Divide,' Light Reading's podcast series featuring conversations with broadband providers and policymakers working to close the digital divide.
As we have for the past two years, Light Reading will present our Cable Next-Gen Europe conference as a free digital symposium on June 21.
Charter has sparked RDOF work in all 24 states where it won bids. The cable op booked about $19 million in RDOF revenues in Q1, and expects to have about $9 million per month come in over the next ten years.
As we have for the past two years, Light Reading will stage the Cable Next-Gen Technologies & Strategies conference as a free digital event over two half-days in mid-March.
Launch of 2-Gig and 5-Gig FTTP tiers in 70-plus markets puts more pressure on cable ops to enhance their existing DOCSIS 3.1 network or accelerate their upgrade activity centered on the new DOCSIS 4.0 specs.
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