Today SB 649 as most recently amended by the author passed out of the California Assembly Local Government Committee on a 6-1-2 vote. If you’d like to listen to nearly 3 hours of hearings on the bill you can click below. Note that there is a few-minute-break about 30ish minutes in to the recording due to a technical glitch at the California Channel.
The next Assembly hearing is on July 12, 2017.
jlk
Published reports late today have Sprint putting aside its merger talks with T-Mobile to focus on a potentially MUCH MORE IMPORTANT deal–one with Charter and Comcast (or is it Comcast and Charter). I’ve predicted a deal like this for years.
Why is a Sprint-MSOs deal more important than a deal with T-Mobile?
As I’ve said before, cable TV MSOs are like Visa: “Everywhere you want to be.”
Sprint needs to strike a deal with the biggest MSOs to gain access to the fat backhaul offered by MSOs, the quick deployment and provisioning of small cells on cable TV strand (and inside cable TV pedestals), and to the back or front yards of millions of homes passed by the cable operators.
Who are the real losers? Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Mobilitie. As to the first three, they are likely to be blocked for Cable TV strand-mounting of small cells in the major markets controlled by Comcast and Spectrum. As for Mobilitie, I believe it stands to lose the most from any Sprint-MSO deal that will invariably drive a silver stake into the heart of what I can only call a very troubling and disjointed ‘5G-but-not-really-5G’ piecemeal deployment of small cells that aren’t really all that small.
Oh, yes, Crown Castle and Extenet, as well as other fiber/builder providers will suffer from a deal like this which would cut into the heart of their fiber and node businesses in a really big way.
Not too long after Sprint inks a deal with the MSOs it can expect to cease to operate as a separate entity as the cable operators swallow Sprint whole to bring the wireless services under the sole control of the MSOs. For the MSOs it gives them the existing Sprint network, such as it is, outside of the MSO’s footprints to offer streaming video services over Sprint’s wireless network. This would likely follow AT&T’s deployment of offering streaming video services via wireless outside of the existing wireline U-Verse and Giga-whatever footprint.
T-Mobile should now expect to receive merger-partnering overtures from other first tier and second tier cable operators. Moreover, it can expect to slide to a solid last place with a Sprint-MSO deal.
Those of you old enough will recall that Sprint largely came out of Cox Communications’ pioneer FCC licenses. What’s old is new again, and we live in interesting times.
–Jonathan
When SB 649 was voted out of the California Senate on May 31, only a 3 or 4 Senators knew the contents of the Bill at that time, yet it secured passage on a 31 to 1 vote.
A couple of days ago, the drastically amended SB 649 was released back into public view in advance of its first Assembly hearing next Wednesday. Small cells started in SB 649 at being 28 cubic feet, then went down to 21 cubic feet in the Senate, but low and behold now small cells are up to 41 cubic feet…or even larger!
The industry’s current compensation schedule for the their theft of the people’s property is still, well, a theft (or gift) of public property.
Some new small cell sites in the public right-of-ways and utility easements are proposed to be allowed WITHOUT any local government notice, review, or permits. Safety? Not here.
All cell sites, whether in the public right-of-way, on public property, or on private property are proposed in the bill to be subject only to a non-discretionary permit process. NO MORE PUBLIC INPUT ON ANY NEW CELL SITES IN CALIFORNIA.
There are so many more things wrong with SB 649 that it boggles the mind. The illustration below is a good illustration of what SB 649 is to those who have become even more greedy in the last few weeks.
