Category Archives: Internet Access

AT&T’s Striped Bass

ph_striped_bass.jpg You may recall that the FCC at the last minute in 2006, after the elections and before the electees took office, agreed to some conditions on the merger of Bellsouth with AT&T. Among them was a $10/month DSL plan.
The merger commitment specifies that the plan had to be offered. That means to me that it has to be put forth as an option!!! (If there’s a fifty pound striped bass somewhere out there in the ocean, that’s not an offer of fish!)

So I don’t think AT&T is honoring its $10/month commitment.

— Is AT&T Honoring its Merger Commitments? David Isenberg, isen.blog, Friday, July 06, 2007

This is the same $10/month service USA Today announced AT&T was developing back in January. Maybe they’ll just keep “developing” it until the 48 month time limit expires, or make it available to a few people and claim they’ve honored their commitment.This is what SBC used to do: claim availability if one person per ZIP code could get a service, and the FCC let them get away with that.

Isenberg asks:

Do you think the FCC will investigate?
Continue reading →

Broadband Produces Employment

crandall.jpg
lehr.jpg
Litan.jpg
Many have assumed that broadband is good for the economy; now here’s a study with rivets:
More specifically, for every one percentage point increase in broadband penetration in a state, employment is projected to increase by 0.2 to 0.3 percent per year.

— The Effects of Broadband Deployment on Output and Employment: A Cross-sectional Analysis of U.S. Data, By Robert Crandall, William Lehr and Robert Litan, Brookings Institution, 2007

Of course, this is like saying every state in medieval Germany that had a printing press produced employment in the printing industry. There are economic and social effects far beyond mere employment. What should be done?

The paper has a few recommendations:

The surest route to lower prices is provided by increasing competition in the delivery of broadband services.
Continue reading →

Broadband in Two Countries

BBArussfig1070702.gif Broadband growth is slowing in the U.S.:
Price reductions and other factors led to 40 percent growth in adoption from March 2005 to March 2006. Over the following year, growth was a more modest 12 percent, the Pew Internet and American Life Project said in a report Tuesday.

“The low-hanging fruit was picked … so you saw a slowdown understandably going to 2007,” said John Horrigan, Pew’s associate director for research.

— Study: Broadband Growth Slowing in U.S. By Anick Jesdanun, AP Internet Writer, 3 July 2007

Meanwhile, back in the USSR Russia:
The broadband market in Russia, particularly in Moscow, is growing quickly. The Ministry of IT and Communications reports that the fixed broadband market grew 42% and wireless broadband market showed a 61% annual growth rate in 2006.

— FTTx and DSL in tussle for Moscow market share, PointTopic, 3 July 2007

And in Russia it’s mostly fiber to the home, enabling even faster future speeds.

-jsq

Giant Beasts Gently Swatting

gz.jpg Susan Crawford pithily describes the current Internet access market:
The duopoly is something like Shamu and Godzilla on hire for televised wrestling – giant beasts gently swatting at one another for the cameras. They aren’t competing, these giants. There is a clear failure in the market for highspeed internet access in this country.

— Moving Slowly in the Fast Lane by Susan Crawford, Susan Crawford blog, Tue 19 Jun 2007 10:29 PM EDT

What is to be done? Continue reading →

Media Ownership

media-ownership.gif While we’re on the general subject of postal and Internet rates and a free press,, let’s look at who owns the U.S. media:
In 1983, 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the U.S. … When the 6th edition of The Media Monopoly was published in 2000, the number had fallen to six. Since then, there have been more mergers and the scope has expanded to include new media like the Internet market. More than 1 in 4 Internet users in the U.S. now log in with AOL Time-Warner, the world’s largest media corporation.

In 2004, Bagdikian’s revised and expanded book, The New Media Monopoly, shows that only 5 huge corporations — Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch’s News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) — now control most of the media industry in the U.S. General Electric’s NBC is a close sixth.

— Number of corporations that control a majority of U.S. media, Media Reform Information Center, accessed 21 June 2007

This might be worth remembering the next time you hear that the market will sort out any problems and there’s no need for regulation. Would that there were a market so that that could be true.

-jsq

TV, Literacy, and the Internet

Whether Ray Bradbury is right about the cause being TV or not, it appears that U.S. adults don’t read very well:
In the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) assessment, 1994-98:
  • The mean prose literacy scores of U.S. adults with primary or no education, ranked 14th out of 18 high-income countries;
  • The mean prose literacy scores of U.S. adults with some high school, but no diploma or GED, ranked 19th out of 19 high-income countries;
  • The mean prose literacy scores of U.S. adults with a high school diploma or GED (but no college), ranked 18th (tie) out of 19 countries;
  • The mean prose literacy scores of U.S. adults with 1-3 years of college, ranked 15th out of 19 countries; and
  • The mean prose literacy scores of U.S. adults with a bachelor’s degree or higher, ranked 5th.

— The Twin Challenges of Mediocrity and Inequality: Literacy in the U.S. from an International Perspective, Sum, Andrew, Irwin Kirsch, and Robert Taggart, Educational Testing Service, Princeton, NJ, February 2002. Quoted in Fact Sheet Overview, National Institute for Literacy, accessed 7 June 2007.

Apparently U.S. adults only really learn to read in college, and not all that well even then. And if they can’t read very well, it’s a safe bet that they don’t read very much. Continue reading →

FCC and Wireless Broadband

As we’ve seen, the FCC is trying to decide what to do with some 700Mhz commercial spectrum. Now we hear that:
The upcoming auction of wireless spectrum in the 700MHz band presents an opportunity for wireless technology to be a third broadband pipe beyond just DSL and cable Internet, Martin said.

&mdash FCC chairman champions wireless broadband access, Upcoming spectrum auction viewed as opportunity, By Paul Krill, InfoWorld, May 03, 2007

FCC Chair Kevin Martin said this at Microsoft offices in Mountain View, CA. One has to wonder why he’s announcing a purported competition measure at the offices of the world’s most famous monopoly. But nevermind that. Continue reading →

Home for Cryptome

I wasn’t going to comment on the disconnection of Cryptome by Verio, because I’m not sure I’m in favor of everything Cryptome does. However, the timing of the shutdown just after Cryptome published information on Coast Guard not meeting TEMPEST security standards got my attention. But what really prompted me was this text of a letter from Justin Aldridge of Verio to John Young of Cryptome:
Please refer to our Acceptable Use Policy. Unfortunately, at the technical support level, we cannot provide you with any further information about the termination.

— Cryptome Shutdown by Verio, Cryptome, May 2007

Ok, surely that’s just tech support refering to legal. Continue reading →

Industrial Internet Policy

Susan Crawford posted a laundry list of countries that have an industrial policy (she prefers economic policy) involving the Internet:
  • South Korea: “the government said where they wanted to go, invested in research and development, [and invested money and made micro loans], and they’re now seeing 70% of adults (not just kids) involved in online social networks. Very high speeds, very low cost.”
  • Hong Kong: “also not embarrassed to talk about economic policy and telecom.”
  • India: its “government ‘proposes to offer all citizens of India free, high-speed broadband connectivity by 2009.’”
  • Japan: Have I mentioned lately that almost every Japanese can get broadband, and usually it’s ten times faster than what we can get stateside?
Now the point here isn’t whether the specific country government policies are good, bad, etc. Continue reading →

U.S. Number 25 Worldwide

While the U.S. is number 15 out of 30 OECD countries in broadband users per capita, U.S. is number 25 among all countries worldwide as of the end of 2006. That last according to a survey by Point Topic, as interpreted by websiteoptimization.com, whose writeup also contains more legible versions of graphics from the OECD report than the OECD report itself has (wso uses HTML while OECD used proprietary formats).

-jsq