Tag: fcc

Archaic Telecom

Back at the FCC: Carrier Voice Revenue is Shrinking

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Last week, the FCC released its annual report on carrier revenue based on Form 499 filings, this blog’s favorite regulatory worksheet.

And those numbers confirm what we already knew: revenue from voice—both mobile and fixed line—has already plateaued and is coming down fast.

The FCC reported that the total 2009 telecom revenue pot from both end-users and carriers providing services to other carriers dropped to $281 billion from 2008’s $297 billion.

The 2010 FCC numbers, while preliminary, all point to the inevitable and long-predicted slide as the industry transitions to data services.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Douglas Holtz-Eakin: AT&T Is Not a Monopoly

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Economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin has filed his $.02 in the FCC’s AT&T/T-Mobile docket.

According to Eakin, who was John McCain’s economic adviser on the campaign trail:

If this merger is approved by the FCC and the Federal Trade Commission, no monopoly will dominate the telecommunications market. T-Mobile was hardly the only competitor and AT&T still must compete with its main national rival, Verizon.

You can read the rest of his letter below.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

So Who Invented the Cell Phone Again?

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CNET has gone on a spelunking expedition into the recent AT&T FCC filing and brought a few things up to the surface. One nugget that caught my attention is from a document written by AT&T’s Chief Technology Officer, John Donovan.

Donovan says AT&T “invented the first mobile phone and the first mobile network”.

Wait, wasn’t there another company involved? It will come back to me.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Group Conferencing Startups: Pay the USF Fees

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It’s a slow afternoon here, so I had a little time  to consider one mind-numbing regulatory aspect of the growing number of group messaging and conferencing startups.

Eventually when these companies (Fast Society, Group.me, et. al) start charging for their services—most of them don’t now—my understanding is that they will be required to file an FCC Form 499.

Ok, so it was a very slow day.

Remember Form 499? That’s where providers of telecommunications for pay—and that includes call conferencing services—tell the FCC about their VoIP revenues apportioned to interstate connections.

And then our regulators calculate how much money is owed to the Universal Service Fund kitty.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Google on USF Reform: Bill and Keep

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Maybe it’s the result of a second espresso I had this morning, but Google’s recent comment on the FCC’s Notice of Proposed Rule Making on Universal Service Fund reform doesn’t read like a typical carrier screed.

It’s their engineering culture. They won me over a little when they said that “IP transmission, in itself, is not ‘magic pixie dust’ that somehow creates a regulation-free zone.”Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

FCC: Usage Based Pricing is a Non-debate

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Missed Aspen Institute’s IDEA Plenary (“a transatlantic dialogue to address common interests in a free and open Internet capable of enhancing economic growth”) held in Brussels, Belgium yesterday?

Not to worry, FCC Chairman Genachowski was there to address the gathered international leaders,  and his talk, “The Cloud: Unleashing Global Opportunities”, was posted on the FCC site today.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Universal Service Fund Follies: The XO Files

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I raise my cup of espresso to the FCC for starting the process to reform the Universal Service Fund with the ultimate goal  of modernizing a rusting regulatory structure that is not up to task of universal broadband service.

Reading the beginning of the FCC’s recent Proposed Rule Making on the USF, I was all to ready to discount the glib appraisals of the Service Fund as “inefficient” and “broken”.  Sure it’s not perfect, I thought, and of course there are loopy incentives encouraging some inefficient activities, but…

A dispute between XO Communications, “one of the nation’s largest communications service providers”, and the Fund’s administrator, the Universal Service Administration Corporation or USAC, unfortunately seems to validate some of the harsh criticisms hurled at the current USF regime.

It has all the makings of an on-the-edge-of-your-seat FCC caper: battling attorneys,  hyper-diligent auditors, endless bureaucratic procedures, ambiguous forms, battling attorneys, and battling attorneys.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

FCC to Launch New Rules on USF

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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 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.”

Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

ITExpo Regulatory 2.0: Shoot All the Lawyers

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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

Archaic Telecom

Zoom Telephonics Tests Open Internet

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Back in November 2010, Zoom Telephonics, makers of cable modems, filed a complaint with the FCC against Comcast.

The modem manufacturer cited anti-competitive practices in Comcast’s new Physical and Environment (P&E) acceptance testing of their modems. According to Zoom’s filing, “Comcast’s P&E testing regime contains a host of unreasonable, irrelevant, time-consuming, and costly requirements.”

Current statutes in the Communications Act (Title VI, section 629) allow cable operators to restrict the use of modems to those that do not cause network harm or enable service theft.  Zoom says that its modems are being excluded based on testing criteria involving, ahem, modem weight, labeling, and packaging.

With  the approval of the FCC’s new Open Internet rules in December, Zoom seems to have a new line of attack.  Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Verizon’s Full Court Press

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To everything there is a season. A time to propose Open Internet rules. A time to seek relief from these arbitrary and capricious rules in the courts, specifically the DC Court of Appeals.

Let’s say it’s not a complete surprise that a carrier, Verizon in this instance, has decided to challenge the FCC’s recent rules on the Open Internet. Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Twilight of POTS Regulation

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Telecom consultant Gary Audin has recently come out with a solid overview article on a question that has no doubt kept telecom wonks up at night: Can the PSTN be Shut Down?

I include myself in that geeky group who ponders whether the public switched telepone network (PSTN) can be unplugged. For those not familiar with the building blocks of our legacy telephone system —class five and four switching points, trunks, copper pairs—his article should be edifying.

Audin’s end-of-life discussion (available from webtorials.com) was triggered by an AT&T comment submitted to the FCC back in December 2009. The unthinkable is more than an academic exercise for our nation’s largest carrier. In their filing, AT&T asked the FCC to workout a “firm deadline for the phase out of POTS service and the PSTN.”

AT&T was writing in response to the FCC’s National Broadband Plan inquiry, and their suggestions and advocacy are framed as a way to achieve this agency’s call for universal  broadband: dropping support of the PSTN, they say, will allow it to focus on in its major IP initiative, U-verse (more on that later).

I suppose I’m impressed that AT&T is looking to the FCC for leadership in this area, considering their overall low opinion of our nation’s telecom regulators.

So you know they must want something.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Snowed In with the FCC’s Open Internet Rules

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After burning off my holiday calories shoveling out of Snowmageddon 2010, I was ready to settle down with a good book and a flagon of mulled cider. Perhaps I was still looking for more Sisyphean exercises, so instead of Harry Potter, I reached for my MacBook and downloaded the FCC’s complete Report and Order in the Matter of Preserving the Open Internet, otherwise known as the Net Neutrality rules.

Published on Friday, this 87-page document, excluding appendices and the commissioners’ separate statements, contains over 400 footnotes. A lot of work was expended, so kudos to the FCC’s paper-meisters.

Spoiler alert: the good part starts at Section IV ( paragraph 115, page 62), “The Commission’s Authority to Adopt Open Internet Rules.”

I am all for the Report’s net neutrality rules for transparency, no blocking, and no unreasonable discrimination. But after reviewing the FCC arguments in section IV, along with the usual relevant cases, I don’t think this dog will hunt.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

FCC on Specialized Services: Yawn!

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The FCC voted 3-2 (along the usual party lines) to approve the Open Internet Order  or as the media refers to it, NET NEUTRALITY.  I suppose a set of rules that has brought condemnation from both sides of the argument can’t be all that bad. Consumers received some protections with a non-blocking rule subject to reasonable network management. As expected, the FCC did not approve its third-way approach (Title II reclassification with forbearance of many statutes).  And the agency also decided to leave mobile broadband to its own devices, so to speak.

I was most curious about the fate of specialized services, the new category of vaguely defined advanced (or as  the Google-Verizon proposal put it “additional”) capabilities that was in the FCC’s original Notice of Proposed Rule Making issued back in late 2009. And which the FCC asked for additional comments again in September 2010.

Anyway, after the FCC’s barrage of questions and stated concerns—most significantly over anti-competitive practices and re-allocation of telecom investments—it ultimately  took the completely radical stance of doing nothing.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Meanwhile Back at the FCC

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In case you weren’t at the Web 2.0 Summit earlier this month to hear FCC Chairman Genachowski, O’Reilly has published the interview on YouTube. My Google Reader had already bombarded me with excerpts of Genachowski’s remarks (“net neutrality will happen”) and his unhappiness with the Google-Verizon proposal.

Still curious about what he said, I decided to sit through most of the interview during my lunch hour. It was a typical Genachowksi performance that he gives to interviewers who are not entirely up to speed on the issues. He was gracious, jocular, and made sure to sprinkle his conversation with the right words: innovation, competitiveness, less government, openness, and market-based forces.

And then he took an indirect swipe at the carriers when he said : “…it’s the market and consumers picking winners and losers, not people who control access to the Internet.”  Followed by a right-jab when he called the Supreme Court’s Comcast decision “seriously incorrect.”

Somewhere in course of my viewing I started to stare at a map behind the Chairman. I first thought it was a map of the world, the kind you see in television newsrooms. It was actually a conceptual Web 2.0 geography that broke the Internet community into separate islands and land masses.

Continue reading