Legislative IMPACTS
In October, Governor Brown signed Assembly Bill 1665, which actually lowered California’s
standard for broadband performance from 25 megabit-per-second download speeds and three
megabit-per-second upload speeds, to 6 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up. Brown made the decision
despite the advice of the California Public Utilities Commission to the FCC to maintain the
higher standard.
We’re using more powerful mobile devices and applications and generating more internet
traffic; not just as consumers but as creators and publishers of content. We need a 21 st century
communications infrastructure that delivers more speed, capacity, and reliability—not less—
for downloads and uploads.
Senate Bill 649 also made its way to Governor Brown’s desk in October. According to
Mayor Tate, “It was a controversial bill that would have usurped the ability of California cities
to locate and charge for the placement of cell equipment. The City of Morgan Hill supports
advances in technology, but it shouldn’t be mandated that the telecom industry can just come
in and do whatever they want. We wrote a letter of opposition, which the League of California
Cities recommended, and we were up in Sacramento on the steps of the Capitol to rally against
the bill. Governor Brown vetoed it, but there’s still work to be done.”
Gilroy Mayor Roland Velasco said that while the City of Gilroy did not write a letter of
opposition to SB 649, he shared Mayor Tate’s views on the matter. He added that, like Morgan
Hill, Gilroy considers communications infrastructure a priority and a key driver of economic
development.
The bill would have prohibited local discretionary review of “small cell” wireless antennas,
including equipment collocated on existing structures or located on new poles or structures,
including those within the public right-of-way and buildings. It would also have preempted
adopted local land use plans by mandating that “small cells” be allowed in all zones as a use
by-right.
The ink wasn’t dry on the Governor’s veto before analysts were speculating that a
similar bill would surface next year. In light of the limited municipal authority we have, our
communities should give careful consideration to policymaking and pursue opportunities to
partner with others in local or regional broadband infrastructure development initiatives.
South County gets a
“D” in BROADBAND
Based on a “report card” widely-used by Northern California agencies and cities to rate their
broadband availability against a range of performance benchmarks, both Morgan Hill and
Gilroy get a D grade while San Martin gets an F+. San Jose and other cities to the north and
east generally get a C grade, matching the California average.
Looking at primary broadband providers, the low grades for Morgan Hill and Gilroy have
been attributed to a lack of consistent upgrades by Verizon to the legacy telephone system it
operated before Frontier Communications took ownership in early 2016, and the below
industry average cable infrastructure maintained by Charter Communications. San Martin,
which is largely unserved by Charter, has had poor
service from AT&T. As result, certain
South County communities
have experienced performance below
state averages. South County
commercial and industrial
customers have fared less
well than residential customers
as their needs are more specialized
and they don’t represent a
mass market.
There’s no doubt that our local
leaders want to bring those grades up,
as do the cities to the north and south
who are working to improve their own.
In a changing economic, technological and
regulatory environment, South County has an opportunity to
find new ways to work with primary broadband providers as well as
secondary and specialty providers. It will be interesting to see what kind of
roles and policies our cities develop to influence the advancement of our
communications infrastructure.
GILROY • MORGAN HILL • SAN MARTIN
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2017
Where will
we BE in 2021?
Cisco Systems, one of the most respected
and influential network solutions companies
in Silicon Valley history, predicts the
demand we’ll place on our broadband
infrastructure within the next three years…
• Worldwide internet traffic will
reach an annual run rate of 3.3
Zettabytes. It took about 40 years
to reach an annual run rate of one
Zettabyte (2016).
• There will be three times more
internet-connected devices than
people on the planet.
• The average American will have
13.2 per devices and connections.
• Over half of all devices and con-
nections will involve machine-to-
machine applications such as smart
meters, video surveillance, health-
care monitoring, transportation, and
package or asset tracking.
• Broadband speeds will nearly
double (in capability, not necessar-
ily delivery of service).
• Wi-Fi and mobile devices will
account for 73 percent of internet
traffic. Wired networks will account
for 37 percent of internet traffic.
• Globally, there will be nearly
541.6 million public Wi-Fi hotspots,
up from 94 million in 2016.
• A million minutes of video content
will cross the network every second.
At that rate, it will take over 5
million years to watch the amount
of video crossing the network per
month.
• Consumer Video-on-Demand (VoD)
traffic will nearly double, equivalent
to 7.2 billion DVDs per month.
• Video surveillance will grow
15-fold.
Source: Cisco.com
gmhtoday.com
21