Category Archives: Internet Access

700Mhz Owners and Uses: Public Safety Counts, Too

700owners.gif There are other issues in 700Mhz spectrum allocation than AT&T’s bottom line:
“It is a life or death issue,” said Harold Hurtt, Houston Chief of Police and President of Major Cities Chiefs, an organization that represents 63 of the nation’s largest police organizations. Hurtt made his comments in a video interview distributed during the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO) International 71st annual convention in Denver.

— 700 MHz On The Line by samc, dailywireless.org, Monday, September 5th, 2005 at 1:00 pm.

And some of that spectrum has already been allocated. AT&T just cherrypicked the biggest previous 700Mhz spectrum holder, Aloha Partners, but there are more than a dozen others. Don’t be surprised if some of those get gobbled up, too.

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AT&T Goes Around FCC with Aloha 700Mhz

aloha.jpg Why wait for the auction when there’s another way?
AT&T announced today that it has purchased 12MHz of spectrum in the prime 700MHz spectrum band from privately-held Aloha Partners for close to $2.5 billion. Aloha purchased the spectrum in Federal Communications Commission auctions held during 2001 and 2003, but hasn’t done much with the licenses since the auctions ended.

The licenses to the spectrum cover around 196 million residents of the US and 72 of the 100 largest metropolitan areas, including the ten largest markets in the US. AT&T isn’t divulging much in the way of specifics for the bandwidth, other than saying that the company will use it for voice, data, and video. “Aloha’s spectrum will enable AT&T to efficiently meet this growing demand and help our customers stay connected to their worlds,” said Forest Miller, AT&T’s group resident for corporate strategy and development.

— AT&T surprises with beachfront 700MHz spectrum purchase By Eric Bangeman, ars technica, October 09, 2007 – 12:29PM CT

And since Aloha got this batch of 700Mhz spectrum in a previous auction with no open access strings attached, AT&T can thumb its nose at Google about that. For the particular geographical locations that Aloha covers.

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FON: Cringely to Spain to Britain to U.S.?

logofon.png Cringely claims credit for wireless craze:
Several years ago I wrote a column describing a system I had thought up for sharing Internet hotspots that I called WhyFi. Among the readers of that column were some entrepreneurs in Spain who went on to start the hotspot sharing service called FON, which now has more than 190,000 participating hotspots. Those Spaniards have been quite generous in attributing some of their inspiration to my column. And now this week FON signed a deal with British Telecom that promises to bring tens of thousands more FON hotspots to the UK and beyond. This isn’t FON’s first deal with a big broadband ISP — they already have contracts with Speakeasy and Time Warner Cable in the U.S. among others — but it is one of the biggest and points to an important transformation taking place in the way people communicate.

— You Can’t Get There From Here: The myth of bandwidth scarcity and can Team Cringely really make it to the Moon? By Robert X. Cringely, Pulpit, PBS, October 5, 2007

Much like really fast broadband in Japan, FON is an American idea that people in another country adopted and ran with. Continue reading →

Benton, Universal Service, TPRC, Social Contract

bentonfoundation.png Many good papers on aspects of universal service at the Benton Universal Service Project:
As Congress and the FCC put universal service reform at the top of its telecom policy agenda, the Benton Foundation is supporting a series of papers advancing a new vision for Universal Service — for making broadband as universal as telephone service is today and a pathway for retaking the lead as a broadband leader. This project outlines the policy rationale, the pathway forward, and the 12 key steps for advancing universal broadband and modernizing the universal service program for the information age.
Many of the authors of the papers are on a panel this afternoon at TPRC, including topicssuch as
The social contract implicit in telephony universal service versus the social contract implicit in broadband universal service.
Hm, maybe Verizon could learn from that one?

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When I invented the Web, I didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission.

timbi.jpg One sentence sums it up:
When I invented the Web, I didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission.

&mdash: Net Neutrality: This is serious by timbl (Tim Berners-Lee), DiG, Wed, 2006-06-21 16:35

That’s Internet freedom. That’s why we need net neutrality.

What is net neutrality?

If I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can communicate at that level.
Where you and I are any pair of participants on the Internet. Continue reading →

FCC Investigating Wiretapping?

ejm_crop.jpg Now this would be a good thing if it happened:
House telecom subcommittee Chairman Edward Markey (D-Mass.) repeated his call for the Federal Communications Commission to investigate widespread allegations of telecom privacy law violations by intelligence agencies that received cooperation from telecom carriers in anti-terrorist surveillance efforts.

— Markey renews calls for FCC investigation into wiretapping, By Jeffrey Silva, RCCWireless News, September 12, 2007 – 2:13 pm EDT

That would be about as likely as Gonzales starting such an investigation.

Oh, wait:

After Markey wrote Martin in March to ask him to launch an investigation into whether telecom privacy laws have been broken, the FCC chairman wrote Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to verify that the agency could not conduct such a probe because it would violate federal laws governing disclosure of state secrets. Gonzales, who recently announced his resignation, has yet to respond to Martin.
Markey points at a number of events since his first request, such as that it’s not a secret anymore that the government has been using telcos to wiretap.

It would be good if the FCC were to represent the public interest, rather than just the telco and cableco and the administration’s interest.

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PS: Seen on Fergie’s tech blog.

Twaddle v. a Wonder of the World

goldengate.jpg It’s good to see a newspaper not mince words:
A free-for-all web (after normal monthly broadband charges have been paid) is one of the wonders of the world and a binding force for all communities.

…

The Federal Communications Commission has just been advised by the US department of justice, under heavy lobbying from the operators who stand to gain from higher data charges, that a neutral net might “prevent, rather than promote” investment and innovation. This is twaddle. An open-access net has produced one of the greatest surges of innovation ever recorded and has given an opportunity for people all over the world to communicate with each other and share knowledge on equal terms. Long may it continue to be so.

— In praise of… a freely available internet, Leader, The Guardian, Tuesday September 11, 2007

The Guardian brings up a related point:

It has only become an issue because the US Congress is scrutinising the question of “net neutrality”, though why the US authorities – rather than an international body – should deem themselves to have jurisdiction over the internet is not clear.
The usual answer to that is that a properly constituted international body would do even worse. Although nowadays, it seems the otherwise unlateralist U.S. government is toeing the (pseudo-)capitalist international party line.

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Copper-Based Competitors

highlander.jpg The chutzpah:
Ed Shakin, a lawyer for Verizon, said network-sharing requirements are no longer needed in certain cities now that cable companies and other competitors have rolled out Internet and phone service. “What competitors want are artificially low prices,” he said. “It comes down to a fight about price, not availability.”

— Telecom Changes Put Competition on the Line, By Kim Hart, Washington Post Staff Writer, Thursday, September 6, 2007; Page D01

So Verizon is reducing the number of competitors, but as long as there is at least one, that’s enough, they say. Apparently Verizon thinks its competition is the Highlander: There Can Be Only One.

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The Amazon Channel

packages.gif It’s all very well to talk about net neutrality or Internet freedom and how it affects 700Mhz spectrum sales or freedom of the press. But what does all this have to do with the average Internet user?

Suppose the telcos and cablecos get everything they want.

To buy a BBQ grill on eBay, you’ll have to pay for the eBay channel. This is above whatever you pay the seller for the grill or eBay for your membership. You’ll have to pay your local Internet access company just to let you get to eBay to participate in the auction. Oh, maybe you’ll be able to get there anyway, but your access may be so slow that you’ll pay for the eBay channel out of frustration.

If you want to buy a book from Amazon, you’ll have to pay for the Amazon channel. For search you’ll need the Yahoo channel or the ask.com channel or the google channel. Assuming your favorite search engine is even offered as a channel. Many smaller services probably won’t be.

Maybe it won’t be quite this bad. Continue reading →

Warp Speed From Behind

JBrbop02.jpg As we’ve mentioned before Japan has Internet connections much faster than those in the U.S. This point is getting more mainstream media play:
Broadband service here is eight to 30 times as fast as in the United States — and considerably cheaper. Japan has the world’s fastest Internet connections, delivering more data at a lower cost than anywhere else, recent studies show.

Accelerating broadband speed in this country — as well as in South Korea and much of Europe — is pushing open doors to Internet innovation that are likely to remain closed for years to come in much of the United States.

The speed advantage allows the Japanese to watch broadcast-quality, full-screen television over the Internet, an experience that mocks the grainy, wallet-size images Americans endure.

— Japan’s Warp-Speed Ride to Internet Future, By Blaine Harden, Washington Post Foreign Service, Wednesday, August 29, 2007; Page A01

So is it just for video? If so, maybe we’d better let the telcos have their way. Continue reading →