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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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 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 files. I had enough to get started. Continue reading →

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 →