AT&T Secures Nationwide 10x10 MHz AWS-3 Spectrum for $18.2 Billion

AT&T will pay $18.2 billion as the winning bidder on a near nationwide contiguous 10x10 MHz block of AWS-3 spectrum in the FCC's just completed Auction 97.

The licenses cover 307 million people representing 96 percent of the U.S. population and 96 of the Top 100 U.S. markets. AT&T said this spectrum includes 57 percent of MHz POPs covered by the valuable J-block of AWS-3 spectrum.

“Growth in our customers’ mobile data usage continues to explode, driven by mobile video traffic. This spectrum investment will be critical to AT&T staying ahead of customer demand and facilitate the next generation of mobile video entertainment,” said John Stankey, chief strategy officer-AT&T.

AT&T also stated that this spectrum investment, along with its other pending acquisitions, may cause the company to go above its 1.8x net-debt-to-EBITDA target. The company will use excess cash — after paying its dividend — over the next three years to pay down debt, and expects to return to historical debt ratios.

http://www.att.com

• The FCC's Advanced Wireless Services (AWS-3) Auction 97 raised a record $44.899 billion in bids.  A total of 1,611 licenses total were, covering 65 MHz of spectrum in the 1695-1710 MHz, 1755-1780 MHz, and 2155-2180 MHz bands ("AWS-3" bands).

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Verizon Spends $10.4 Billion at FCC's Spectrum Auction

Verizon Communications was the winning bidder or 181 licenses in the FCC's AWS-3 spectrum auction.  The company bid  $10.4 billion in total.  The licenses cover 192 million POPs, or 61 percent of the United States.

http://www.verizon.com
http://www.verizon.com/about/news/verizon-statement-aws-3-auction-results/

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Dish Network is a Big Spender in Auction

Dish Network, acting through its subsidiaries Northstar Wireless and SNR Wireless License Co, was the winning bidder on 702 spectrum licenses in the FCC's recently completed AWS-3 auction.  Dish's bids topped $13.3 billion, however the company qualified for a 25% discount by filing as a small business under FCC rules.

Dish Network currently does not operate any cellular networks.

Full auction results are posted here:

http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2015/db0130/DA-15-131A2.pdf

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BT Outlines its G.fast Ambitions

BT CEO Gavin Patterson today set out the company’s ambition to transform the UK broadband landscape from superfast to ultrafast.

BT outlined plans to deliver much faster broadband for homes and small businesses via a widespread deployment of G.fast, enabling speeds of up to 500 Mbps. Trial deployments to two pilot locations (Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire and Gosforth, Newcastle) are expected this summer to around 4,000 homes. If successful, BT anticipates G.fast rollouts starting in 2016/17.

The pilots will build on recent tests at BT’s innovation centre at Adastral Park, Suffolk which have shown that G.fast has the potential to deliver significant speed increases from existing and new fibre street cabinets as well as from other points closer to the customer.

“BT is a world leader when it comes to fibre innovation and we are excited about the next stage in our story,” Patterson said today. “We believe G.fast is the key to unlocking ultrafast speeds and we are prepared to upgrade large parts of our network should the pilots prove successful. That upgrade will depend however on there continuing to be a stable regulatory environment that supports investment.

“The UK is ahead of its major European neighbours when it comes to broadband and we need to stay ahead as customer demands evolve. G.fast will allow us to do that by building on the investment we have made in fibre to date. It will transform the UK broadband landscape from superfast to ultrafast in the quickest possible timeframe.”

http://www.btplc.com/News/Articles/ShowArticle.cfm?ArticleID=C3CBFDCD-832A-40E4-A31F-04DFD5F84D09

• BT's fiber network currently passes almost 22 million premises – around three quarters of the UK – and is open to all communications providers on an equal basis. 
  

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SolarWinds Acquires Librato for Cloud Monitoring

SolarWinds, which specializes in IT performance management solutions, has acquired Librato, a San Francisco-based cloud monitoring company, for a cash purchase price of $40 million.

Librato currently enables full-stack performance monitoring of infrastructure and applications on public clouds such as AWS and Heroku, or in a company’s own data centers using a rich set of OSS data collection agents and instrumentation libraries for a variety of technologies and languages such as StatsD, collectd, Rails, Ruby, Python, Node.js and Java. Librato also offers the unique ability to monitor and alert on unlimited metrics from hundreds of sources with second precision, correlate and analyze them to produce actionable results.

Solarwinds, which acquire Pingdom for its website monitoring service in 2014, said this latest acquisition will expand its solutions for monitoring and managing cloud-based applications and infrastructure. SolarWinds plans to bring these companies, Pingdom and Librato, under a new brand, SolarWinds Cloud, for providing visibility from the “outside in” (Web Performance Management) and the “inside out” (Cloud Infrastructure Management).

“As we evaluate the growth of the business-critical application, we see three ‘horizons’ of application deployment that require robust performance management – on-premise IT, IT as a Service, and IT in the Cloud,” said Kevin Thompson, president and CEO, SolarWinds. “We expect that the requirement to manage existing on-premise infrastructure will continue, but will now be coupled with the need to manage the performance of infrastructure and applications either fully or partially deployed in private and public clouds. As more and more businesses move aspects of their environments to Cloud-based deployment models, we believe we are the right company, with the right product set, to help manage infrastructure performance.”

http://www.librato.com
http://www.solarwinds.com

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NTT Com Connects Phones and Digital Signs with WebSocket and WebRTC

NTT Communications is testing WebSocket and WebRTC protocols to connect smartphones with digital signage.  The idea is to provide a convenient method for people to download things such as sightseeing information or disaster response information directly from a digital sign.

The test will be conducted at Mihama Town Resort American Village (American Village) in Chatancho, Okinawa Prefecture during the month of February.

NTT Com will encourage users share their photos by using smartphones to read a QR code on a digital sign to access the service website. Photos uploaded to the website will be used for the creation of mosaic art, which will turn the photos into small pieces of large mosaics that will be displayed on the digital signage. The mosaics will also be available for downloading to users’ smartphones. The test also will evaluate how traffic conditions affect real-time information uploading and downloading of photos using digital signage, specifically in terms of effectiveness, potential technological problems and system load characteristics.

http://www.ntt.com/release/monthNEWS/detail/20150130.html

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