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Tuesday, 13 April 2010 12:32 |
 Jeffrey Eisenach, economist-for-hire, got a dozen other paid advocates for the carriers to sign off on a "report" that falls apart if you read as far as page 6. "With respect to market power, the evidence demonstrates that broadband markets are highly competitive and rivalrous" At high speed, nearly the entire U.S. has two or fewer suppliers, the local telco and cableco. Anyone who looks at their behavior can see they are very good at signaling each other. Costs of delivering broadband are coming down but prices in the U.S. are going up.
Co-signers Hal Singer, Bob Crandall, Bob Hahn, Wayne Leighton and Bob Litan all work with Eisenach at Empiris, a D.C. opinion-for-hire shop. A few minutes with Google determined co-signers Timothy J. Tardiff, William Taylor, and Len Waverman also have been funded by the carriers or their suppliers.
Because carriers pay for research doesn't mean it's wrong.
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Sunday, 04 April 2010 22:03 |
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Conflicts of Interest and Financial Disclosures. A conflict of interest may exist when an author (or the author’s institution or employer) has financial or personal relationships or affiliations that could influence (or bias) the author’s decisions, work, or manuscript. All authors are required to disclose all potential conflicts of interest, including specific financial interests and relationships and affiliations (other than those affiliations listed in the title page of the manuscript) relevant to the subject of their manuscript. Authors should err on the side of full disclosure and should contact the editorial office if they have questions or concerns.
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Saturday, 27 March 2010 21:14 |
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April 1 headlines: full stories to follow
China Mobile buys Sprint Nextel
Nitel auction agreement between cabinet and parliament.
Clinton kills "Internet Freedom" project to protect ACTA after lobbying by Cisco, AT&T, Microsoft
Slim puts 80% of assets in public trust for computer and fiber to every home in Latin America with children.
Comcast sheds NBC network, drops all suits against the FCC “I didn't want to let go of the peacock,” Brian Roberts lamented, “but the big profits at NBCU come from the cable networks.
FCC ex-inspector general hired by RUS
Sharing rural spectrum
Cui Bono squad
NECA Foia, no pay higher than FCC Chairman
Repeal Mickey Mouse
Building with antennas and dishes
Opt out of up to 10 channels all four carry ESPN so no competitive choice without it.
Policy: Don't ask any favors if you sue us
Connected nation pulls paper to save Gates funding.
Atkinson renounces non-profit status
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Saturday, 20 March 2010 00:04 |
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I found significant issues when I reviewed the 45 filings by Puerto Rico Telephone in their request for a subsidy from the Universal Service Fund. I am a reporter, not a lawyer. I have recently reported on the efforts of the broadband plan to provide broadband service to the poor, which appears not to have enough funding to reach even 25% of those eligible; the dramatic cuts in the total of USF/ICC; and the lack of funding to rapidly reach the remaining broadband unserved. When I saw an ex parte filed by Nancy Victory of Wiley Rein that she and former Commissioner Henry Rivera met with Chief of Staff Eddie Lazarus with the intent to get an increase in USF for PRT, I decide to review the record. I intend to write a story about the request later. This filing is about apparent contradictions and omissions in the record I need to research further. Since the issue is already before the Chief of Staff and four commissioners, I realized time might be of the essence so wanted to put this data on the record quickly.
I discovered:
1) At http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/view?id=6518710782 a survey filed by PRT found in 2005 "92.8% of households have either a fixed or a cellular phone." I have included below the methodology of that survey, with a sample size of 1600 households. It appear highly credible. It was actually paid for by Puerto Rico Telephone Co., Inc.("PRT"), which submitted it to the Puerto Rico Telecommunications Regulatory Board. That leaves 7% who did not have a connection, some of whom surely were servable but did no buy the service because of affordability or other reasons. That suggests that only a few percentage of Puerto Rican homes were not servable in 2005.
2) At http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/view?id=6520036979, a filing in 2008 by Ben Ross of WIley, Rein stated "Approximately 200,000 households in Puerto Rico have no access to telephone service due to a lack of infrastructure" According to a separate filing by the same firm, those 200,000 households "represents approximately 14.5 percent of all households on the island (200,000 out of 1.369 million)." http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/view?id=6516793127 The figure of unserved homes in 2008 is three to five times the figure in PRT's survey in 2005.
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Wednesday, 17 March 2010 16:47 |
NBP: inside the FCC's spectrum revolution (and its problems)
Matthew Lasar covers the practical issues that have tied up enough spectrum to more than double U.S. wireless capacity. Matt notes that operation in the 30 MHz adjacent to Sirius Radio 2320 MHz band is severely limited by fears of excessive interference, probably unfounded. I remember T-Mobile tried to block use of adjacent spectrum with interfernce claims the FCC engineers tested and proved the Deutsche Telekom subsidiary was stretching the truth. As every engineer knows, there is no actual shortage of spectrum.
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Wednesday, 07 April 2010 06:33 |
 "We will throttle," Ivan Seidenberg said April 6 in New York http://bit.ly/bTf10h. "The problem we have is 5 (percent) or 10 percent of the people." Moderator Alan Murray saw right away what that meant."MURRAY: It's video, right? I mean, it's video.
SEIDENBERG: But those are the people we will throttle."
Currently only 5-10% of mobile users watch a substantial amount of video, mostly at low bit rates. Ivan is therefore saying he needs to "throttle" anyone watching much video, which will soon be far more than 10%.
Could this be Ivan's "they are not going to use our pipes" moment that ignited the battles in D.C? Every lobbyist in D.C., including Ivan's own, is shouting net neutrality is unnecessary because none of the carriers will do anything like throttling most video. Comcast has demonstrated that even on cable very, very few users take enough bandwidth to be any issue. "Far less than 1%," Comcast's Jason Livingood recently told D.C. With almost no traffic intervention, Comcast's bandwidth costs are so low (about $1/month/customer) they tell Wall Street they have 80% margins on cable modem service. Everyone technical knows the "congestion problems" are wildly overstated
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Monday, 29 March 2010 21:11 |
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 The official Korean Communications Commission "has asked Apple Inc. to allow Koreans to use their own choice of basic search," writes the Korea Herald. NHN Naver has more than half the overall Korean search market, but the popularity of the iPhone is pulling Google closer. "If necessary, we will seek policy measures," an anonymous official tells the paper. He's responding to NHN CEO Kim Sang-hun's demand the government "create a fair environment for competition."
Google and Korea have many other battles. China Daily reports "On March 11, South Korea warned Google it would be penalized if its mobile games content was not regulated. A letter sent to Google stated that 'providing unrated games service as stipulated by laws and regulations is indisputably illegal, and we have demanded Google take corrective measures.' Korea also has been fighting Google to censor YouTube.
Giving users choice is proving powerful. Microsoft has lost 5% of the European browser market in the last month since the EU required them to give Windows users an easy choice of browser and Firefox now claims 40% of the EU market.
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Friday, 26 March 2010 17:22 |
  The United States plans a major offensive to change international organizations and treaties in favor of Hillary Clinton's definition of Internet Freedom. The issues need to be understood in depth, but a good place to begin is with what they are actually saying. Clinton is a smart and complicated individual trying to balance many political forces, under the pressure of continuous crisis in U.S. foreign policy and two wars; it wouldn't be surprising if her policy only served some of what most of us believe "freedom" means. Clinton sees things this way: "President Obama spoke about the need to build a world in which peace rests on the inherent rights and dignities of every individual. And in my speech on human rights at Georgetown a few days later, I talked about how we must find ways to make human rights a reality. Today, we find an urgent need to protect these freedoms on the digital frontiers of the 21st century.
There are many other networks in the world. Some aid in the movement of people or resources, and some facilitate exchanges between individuals with the same work or interests. But the internet is a network that magnifies the power and potential of all others. And that’s why we believe it’s critical that its users are assured certain basic freedoms. Freedom of expression is first among them. ...
Challenges must not become an excuse for governments to systematically violate the rights and privacy of those who use the internet. The United States is committed to devoting the diplomatic, economic, and technological resources necessary to advance these freedoms. ... Realigning our policies and our priorities will not be easy. ... we will work with partners in industry, academia, and nongovernmental organizations. ... Let’s say I want to create a mobile phone application that would allow people to rate government ministries, including ours, on their responsiveness and efficiency and also to ferret out and report corruption. The hardware required to make this idea work is already in the hands of billions of potential users. And the software involved would be relatively inexpensive to develop and deploy.
We should err on the side of openness.
We just have to keep incentivizing and encouraging the technology to be as low cost as possible so it can be as ubiquitous as possible."
Here's Clinton's speech, followed by a briefing by Michael H. Posner, Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and Alec Ross,
Senior Advisor for Innovation
Secretary Clinton: January 2010 » Remarks on Internet Freedom
Remarks on Internet Freedom
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Thursday, 18 March 2010 20:06 |
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 Harold Feld has proven himself one of the most thoughtful public interest types in D.C. His deep knowledge of the legal questions has often affected decisions. I think affordability and availability are the most important issues and they did little for those, but agree with Harold about how important some other moves are. From Harold http://bit.ly/cocw2L:
"So now we’ve had National Broadband Plan Day!. And, despite undeniable flaws and places where the Plan Drafters wussed out/”avoided controversy,” The Plan looks pretty damn good, actually.
Let me stress that: Pretty … Damn … Good! Not “oh well, I guess we need to make the best of it” or “it does some good stuff and has a lot of garbage.” I mean that, in a lot of real ways – including the horrible, brutally geeky, detail-oriented and unsexy ways that focus on things like pole attachments and duct work – this plan lays a good foundation to promote competition, promote deployment, and try some pretty courageous, novel and controversial thing to put this country on the road to Kick Ass Broadband Infrastructure For All, as opposed to merely adequate broadband infrastructure for some. ...
What I Like
Competition
First, the Plan starts by putting competition front and center. That was not previewed by Genachowski in his Preview Tour, leading to a fair amount of speculation that there would be nothing in the plan to offend the incumbent providers – or that it would only focus on releasing more spectrum for auction. [My attitude is talk is cheap and to look for results. 300 MHz of spectrum may in fact be enough to change things, but that's unproven. db]
The Plan focuses on improving wholesale competition through special access reform and a general review of wholesale policies. [Waiting for details, but Harold is right this can make a difference if done right. Bringing down monopolistic backhaul costs in extreme rural areas is crucial. db] We get our set-top box proceeding, with actual deadlines to get this stuff done. [this is big. Done right, it means I can chose to watch my video from the web rather than from the cable guy.]
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Thursday, 11 March 2010 00:37 |
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Blair Levin, broadband plan lead, wants to punch me in the nose, I joked. (He's not a violent person and I'm bigger.) More seriously, Blair profoundly disagrees with what I'm writing here. I hope he's right and the plan dramatically expands broadband in the U.S. When someone I respect so much disagrees, I doubt myself.
However, I refused to hold this article until after their intense pr campaign because changes are still possible. It's not too late to refocus things to more effectively help the poor.
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