Category Archives: Rural Access

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 →

RCCC Stock Up Just Before 700Mhz Auction

rcc.png Previously I wondered where the big wireless telephone carriers would find enough bandwidth to buy outside the pending 700Mhz auction, as Republican Commissioner Robert M. McDowell suggested. Well, the place to look is the stock market. A day before the FCC decision of yesterday, the stock of Rural Cellular Corp (RCCC) went up about 30% on news that Verizon was buying RCCC. Such a sale has to have been pending for some time; probably at least six months. So it seems that McDowell’s assertion is useful political cover for Verizon, if not prediction of future acquistions. Maybe both; I guess we’ll see.

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FCC’s Martin Wireless Auction Plan

rmm.jpg The Post has some interesting analysis of which FCC commissioners said what when they approved Chairman Kevin Martin’s 700Mhz wireless auction plan:
The “open-access” provision was endorsed last month by FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin, a Republican, and gained support from the two Democratic commissioners, Jonathan S. Adelstein and Michael J. Copps. Deborah Taylor Tate, a Republican commissioner, also voted in favor of the deal. Martin said he hoped the proposal would encourage a new entrant to compete with the cable and phone companies that provide broadband service.

Republican Commissioner Robert M. McDowell voted against the proposal, arguing that placing any conditions on the sale of airwaves would hurt smaller carriers by making smaller licenses without any requirements appealing to larger bidders.

“Smaller players, especially rural companies, will be unable to match the higher bids of the well-funded giants,” he said.

— FCC Approves Airwave Use For All Phones, Wireless Network Opened To Options if Not Firms, By Kim Hart, Washington Post Staff Writer, Wednesday, August 1, 2007; Page D01

It’s not clear to me where the bigger players will find enough smaller licenses without any requirements to be worth their while. Unless those licenses are also attractive because of the Universal Service Fund.

What did the corporate players say? Continue reading →

Universal Slush Fund

tstevensmain.jpg The regulatorium in action:
A decade-old telephone tax intended to help bring affordable service to rural areas has instead turned into something quite different: a bottomless and politically protected well of cash for cell phone companies that do big business in rural America.

Over the past four years, there’s been nearly a tenfold increase in government subsidies paid to a handful of so-called “competitive” providers — cellular phone companies paid by the fund to offer service in rural areas where an existing carrier already receives a subsidy.

The Universal Service Fund has collected $44 billion over its 10-year lifetime from a surcharge on the phone bills of nearly every American.

Regulators and lawmakers have long viewed the fund as inherently flawed. Even a member of the federalstate board that runs the program calls it “bizarre.” But efforts to change it have been derailed repeatedly by companies that benefit from the largess, and by supporters in Congress who represent sparsely populated states.

— Federal fee on phones is windfall for cell firms, By John Dunbar, ASSOCIATED PRESS, Updated: 07/29/07 6:37 AM

The article goes on to say wireless telephone companies benefit the most because they can connect rural customers at much less cost than landline telcos can. But that’s not all. Continue reading →

Presidential Spectrum

John Edwards A presidential candidate sends a letter to the FCC about reallocating 700Mhz spectrum currently used by analog TV:
In recent years, the Internet has grown to touch everything and transform much of what it touches. It’s not the answer to everything, but it can powerfully accelerate the best of America. It improves our democracy by making quiet voices loud, improves our economy by making small markets big, and improves opportunity by making unlikely dreams possible.

— Edwards Calls On FCC To Make Internet More Available And Affordable, John Edwards ’08, 30 May 2007

The letter goes on to propose sensible concrete actions. So not only is this letter remarkable in that a presidential candidate sent it, but also that what he writes makes sense.

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PS: Seen on Art Brodsky.

Fire Participation

Now here’s an interesting use of the web:
InciWeb is an interagency wildland fire incident information management system. The system was developed with two primary missions: The first was to provide a standardized reporting tool for the Public Affairs community during the course of wildland fire incidents. The second was to provide the public a single source of information related to active wildland fire information.

A number of supporting systems automate the delivery of incident information to remote sources. This ensures that the information on active wildland fire is consistent, and the delivery is timely.

— About InciWeb, Accessed 13 May 2007

The small map is for the Bugaboo fire that started near Waycross Georgia and burned more than 300,000 acres through the Okefenokee swamp into Florida, as of 12 May 2007, with two interstates closed (I-10 and I-75). Sure you can read about it on CNN and other mass media; when they realized much of Florida was closed, they picked up on the story. 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 →

Is It Broke?

I’ve seldom seen so many conclusions reached by pole vault in one paragraph:
Everybody agrees that there are no actual problems with net neutrality, and as our own Chris Wolf explained last week, it doesn’t make sense to fashion legislative remedies to situations that don’t actually need remedying. If anything, it just shows that the supporters of net neutrality laws are looking for any avenue possible to impose restrictions on ISPs that would benefit the big online content companies. Whether through the Senate, through the FCC, through the state legislatures, it doesn’t really matter. Any opportunity to regulate the Internet is one they want to pursue.

— Ask Questions First, Change Policy Later, Hands Off the Internet, April 3, 2007 at 10:24 am

Everybody? Such confidence to be able to speak for everybody with no exceptions! Situations that don’t need remedying? I think the situation before August 2005 needed less remedying; now that the telcos have already gotten the FCC to abrogate net neutrality, the situation does need remedying. Restrictions on ISPs that would benefit the big online content companies? Only in the sense of no new charges for something they’re already paying for, and restraints on the ISPs restriction content or speeds. “Any opportunity to regulate the Internet”; oh my. How dastardly those net neutrality proponents must be! Continue reading →

FCC, Time-Warner, and Rural VoIP

Here’s an interesting FCC ruling:
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has ruled that incumbent local exchange carriers must connect to VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) services, overruling two state public service commission opinions.

…

The rural carriers had argued that FCC rules don’t require them to connect to the wholesale vendors because they don’t provide direct voice service to residents.

But the FCC said that argument was a misinterpretation of its rules.

— FCC: Local telephone carriers must connect to VOIP, Local carriers must allow Internet telephony service by rivals, contrary to state rulings. Grant Gross, PC World, Sunday, March 4, 2007; 11:10 PM

That seems to be a big victory for VoIP, driven, interestingly enough, by a request from Time-Warner. Continue reading →