FCC to Launch New Rules on USF

FCC Chairman Genachowski has set a vote tomorrow for a  Notice of Proposed Rule Making on Universal Service Fund and Intercarrier Compensation reform.

Some of the ideas Mr. G sketched out in a speech today, in which he called the ICC System “flawed” and “unstable” and the USF “plagued with inefficiencies”,  had already been outlined in the FCC’s National Broadband Plan.

The most striking proposal in the speech, delivered at The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, was a plan to “phase down intercarrier payments.”

As I’ve written about before (see the “Shoot the Laywers” post), the ICC rewards local carriers, mostly rural, with high per minute payments for calls terminated on their switches.  These access fees are split with services that have set up intimate talk —read porn—conference bridges in what is referred to as “traffic pumping.”

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ITExpo Regulatory 2.0: Shoot All the Lawyers

There was one part of ITExpo I was able to attend remotely.

The Regulatory 2.0 sub-conference at ITExpo is an under-appreciated gathering of lawyers, FCC observers, engineers, and legally-savvy telecom entrepreneurs, who all had definite viewpoints on net neutrality and other regulatory matters.

Thank you Rich Tehrani and TMC (the organizers of ITExpo) for live-streaming the panel discussions of this “co-located” event to the millions of policy wonks who care about section 706 authority. 😉

Not knowing what to expect, I tuned into the “If Engineers Wrote the Rules” chat. It was less than an hour, but I thought someone on this panel would suggest how the telecom rules should be organized in a more logical, Spock-like way.

Other than wanting to remove lawyers with great prejudice from the FCC, the only policy recommendation offered was less rules.

While I didn’t agree with many statements coming from the panel, which included Richard Shockey, co-author of the SIP RFC and now board chairman of the SIP Fourm, it was a stimulating discussion and I learned a few things.Continue reading

Visualizing Broadband Competition

After tuning into parts of Google’s IO  conference last month,  news about version 3 of the Maps API slowly made its way into my waking consciousness. I had some time last week to explore this newer, cleaner Map interface as part of a project I’ve been thinking about.  I wanted to get a handle on competition in the broadband sector, a topic I’ve been covering since the start of this blog, and was hoping to use visualization tools to get answers and also generate new questions.

While trolling the FCC’s Gov 2.0 sitelet, I came across files containing service provider competitive data.   I then  learned about the extensive data the FCC captures from carriers on a per zip code basis as part of its “Form 477” database.  Some of the 477 statistics are publicly available, but much is still closed off, (Hey, FCC open those files!)

I just needed a way to render zip codes into geo data suitable for mapping. A few more Google searches led me to state-by-state files of zip code polygon paths at the US Census Bureau’s page of cartographic boundary data.

I had enough to get started.Continue reading

FCC Reclassification: Vonage, Nay.

Based on “anonymous sources”, the New York Times is reporting that the FCC will reclassify cable broadband today as a hybrid beast, part information  and part telecommunications service. This is based on the well known principle that voice (a transmission that doesn’t involve a change in format) can infect the information part (a format changing transmission) and… forget it, it’s too painful to go into.

So you would think that information and content providers would uniformly welcome the FCC’s new classification scheme as a way to preserve net neutrality? Not so fast.

As I had argued in an earlier post, facility-less VoIP carrier  are not going to be very excited about having the legacy telecommunications legal superstructure of Title II placed over them.

If you dig into recent FCC filings, you’ll see that at least one major VoIP provider, Vonage,  has concerns about the FCC’s helping hand.Continue reading