Thanksgiving is upon us yet again and I’ve given some thought to those things in the industry and beyond that I am thankful for this year.

Net Neutrality: I am thankful for the net neutrality ruling, more as a consumer than as someone in the industry. From what I can see the largest ISPs and cellular companies had a big bag of nasty tricks waiting for all of us had it not passed. I feel like this ruling took back some of the power in the industry from the ISPs with the FCC as our watchdog. Now we need to wait a while more to see if the courts uphold the FCC. On the other hand, I am not so glad that net neutrality seems to have taken the Federal Trade Commission out of the picture for telecom. They were starting to take a hard look at monopoly abuses and one can hope the FCC will take up where they left off. There is some reassurance that the FTC says they will still play a role, but that role is clearly diminished.

Municipal Competition: I was glad to see the FCC tackle the prohibitions against municipal telecom. As somebody who works mostly with rural broadband issues, we need to encourage anybody, including cities and counties that are willing to tackle bringing broadband to rural places. I can understand why the large ISPs don’t want competition from municipal entities in big cities, but that still has not happened anywhere larger than Chattanooga and probably won’t. I have a harder time seeing why the large ISPs fight so vigorously against competition in rural areas where they don’t spend any capital to maintain their networks. These smaller communities are waking up to the fact that if they don’t take care of the broadband gap themselves that nobody else is likely to do so.

Inching Towards More Privacy: In this last year it became apparent to everybody that the NSA and a ton of commercial companies are spying on all of us. I love the parts of the industry that are taking the side of privacy. There’s Apple that is encrypting everything in a way that even they can’t decrypt. There’s a number of companies working on block chains and other forms of peer-to-peer communication that ought to be immune from snooping. And there are a number of web sites that now promise they aren’t tracking you. We have a long way to go, but it looks like people are starting to care about their privacy.

DOCSIS 3.1: I am thankful for technologies that are making broadband faster. The DOCSIS 3.1 technology that the cable companies are starting to implement will probably help the largest number of Americans get faster broadband. Several of the big cable companies are promising that they will offer faster speeds across the board. I think cable companies have finally awakened to the fact that it doesn’t cost them that much to give out more speed and it shelters them from the competition. And there s a slow but steady growth of fiber with companies like Google and CenturyLink leading the way. You will hear me whoopin’ and hollerin’ in this blog if somebody brings an affordable gigabit to my neighborhood.

Technology is Getting Better: The speed at which technology in and near the industry is improving is mind boggling. It seems like I hear about something new almost every day. This year saw 10 gigabit fiber terminals that are cheap enough for home and small business use. We’ve seen a plethora of improvements in OTT boxes like Roku and the gaming systems. 4K video has made it into the mainstream conversation in the last year. The speed and processing power of cellphones has literally doubled in the last year.

And My Readers: This marks my third Thanksgiving with this blog and I don’t seem to be running out of topics. I am truly thankful that people read this from time to time. I started writing this blog as a way to force myself to stay up with current events in the industry and it has done that in spades. I seem to learn something new every day, and for that I am most thankful.