Dear Friend of Servato,
We hope everyone has safely returned home from trips to the lake, beach, or somewhere in between for the 4th. We decided to wait to send this June edition of our monthly newsletter today because of the awkwardness of having the holiday on a Wednesday last week. We cover travel, trending news, and more from Servato HQ.
Did You Make the Cut?
The FCC released the 220 providers that are eligible to counter-bid rural areas identified by the commission. Like my football coaches used to preach, "The low man wins". The rules for the bid process are extremely detailed but can be disseminated through the formula and table shown in that article. The big takeaway? If you are a landline provider that is already making long-term commitments to FTTH, you will be well prepared to reap the benefits of the weighting factors that go into place. Low latency, gigabit tiers earn more "implied support" than say a baseline, high-latency network, despite them bidding the same amount. There is a technical pdf that can be found at the bottom of the second link if you want to dig further.
Consolidation
You have probably read and heard all about the AT&T - Time Warner merger, and how Fox will fall into the hands of Disney, Comcast, or both by the end of this month. Vertical integrations have been the classifying nomenclature leading to Justice Department approval. Skepticism still surrounds this reasoning because of the advertising machines that can now be built out of having an end-to-end communications conglomerate. Some customers are feeling real effects of this already with DirecTV price hikes going into effect only days after the announcement. Similarly, we are seeing cooperatives fight a similar battle like Horry Telephone is currently with WBTW pricing. Keep up the good fight!
Countdown to ISE!
In five weeks we will head to Denver for the premier event in the ICT industry space. We look forward to meeting old friends and new. In the coming weeks, we will highlight a few things about our past ISE experiences that have contributed to Servato having a great experience.
In 2016, Servato hosted a panel discussion at ISE Expo in San Antonio that included Curtis Ashton from CenturyLink, Daniel Jameson from TDS, Jim Caron from FairPoint, and John Greene from NLBC. Great conversation around backup power best practices and industry trends lead to discussion around why and when a remote management technology makes sense. The main takeaways from that panel can be found here
As we get closer to ISE in Denver, we look forward to starting conversations around your DC power needs.
Sincerely,
The Servato Team
