Tag: fcc

Archaic Telecom

Brand X and Information Cooties

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With pre-election talk of new telecom laws and in the aftermath of the Comcast decision, I was hoping to not revisit the spooky crypt containing moldy Supreme Court decisions and worm-eaten FCC regulatory rulings for a few months. But I was dragged back into this basement last week, when I received an email about a new study commissioned by “Broadband For America.”

BfA is “dedicated to making broadband available to all Americans” and counts former FCC commissioner Michael Powell as an honorary co-chairman. There’s not much else about the organization on their web site, besides a list of, ahem, grass-roots organizations that make up its membership. You can read more about BfA in the reference section.

Written by University of Pennsylvania law professor, Christopher Yoo, “Reclassifying Broadband as a Title II Telecommunications Service” takes the view that because the FCC’s third-way approach is in contradiction of statutes, rulings, Supreme Court decisions, and plain common sense that it can not possibly pass legal muster..Continue reading

Archaic Telecom, The Rack

Microsoft’s Solution to Cyber Attacks: PC Health Certificates

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Quarantine officers on our flight

If you haven’t already, please read Seymour Hersh’s insightful and non-alarmist New Yorker article on cyber security in the context of the recent Stuxnet virus and China’s growing hack capabilities.

The Hersh piece contains a very simple solution to safeguard our nation’s IT against government or mere freelance hackers: mandatory encryption of all commercial and civil Internet communications.

While this broad approach is attractive in principle, cost and inconvenience make this less than desirable. And there’s also opposition from the same government intelligence agencies responsible for protecting us against cyber attacks in the first place: they wouldn’t be able to eavesdrop as easily.

Though perhaps not the most credible candidate, Microsoft has offered its own proposal, an idea that has proved useful in managing infectious diseases: PC health certificates.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

FCC Reminds Fox,CableVision of its Obligations

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On Friday, the FCC sent out a letter to Fox and Cablevision requesting both to state how they  are meeting their statutory obligations ( “to negotiate in good faith”) over their current retransmission dispute.  As Yankee fans are painfully aware, Cablevision and Fox had an agreement that expired on October 15 to carry WNYW, WWOR, and WTXF channels. Cablevision pulled its rebroadcasting of local MY 9 and Fox 5 television, which carries the Yankee games in the New York area, in a disagreement over its payments to Fox.

You can read the full letter after the jump.

It is powerful thing to see the public interest that’s written into the telecom laws being asserted with these two combatants. As a  former coworker of mine would sometimes remind us  during contentious meetings: where’s the customer’s voice in all this?Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Scientific American: US Broadband is Awful

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Holy Heisenberg! Scientific American, the magazine better known for writing about dark holes and gene splicing, has editorialized earlier this month on the state of US broadband. While SA has in recent years taken on more topical subject matter, there opinionating on broadband was a bit of a surprise to this long-time reader.

Referring to a study from Harvard’s Berkman Center—I believe it’s the “Next-Generation Connectivity” report, which we’ve written about—and no doubt informed by pretty impressive advisers (over 140 Nobel laureates have written for SA), the editors point out the sorry state of US broadband.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Mapping Fun with FCC Data

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I wanted to get this post out before we close up shop for a small business-related trip. We’re taking off to study social networking issues in a beloved southern European country noted for its incredible contributions to art, culture,  food, and civilization as we know it. We’ll be back on October 10.

To the matter at hand … mapping FCC competitive data. I had been looking for a better way to show and share this regulatory agency’s “477” records on ISP competition. I then discovered the potent Google Maps Data APIs, which let you send and receive geo data as a feed. With access to the feed and using Google mapping software, data can be viewed, analyzed, and even updated by large distributed groups.  It’s really an amazing tool.

So with a little bit of effort I loaded competitive ISP data for suburban NJ into a shared Google Map. I’ve conveniently embedded it into this post.Continue reading

@NYC

Kodingen: Free, Easy Web Development Environment

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I missed this month’s New York Tech Meetup due to a previous engagement that was scheduled over 5000 years ago. By the way, Matt Merriam has a nice summary of September’s NYTM demos. One of the startups, Kodingen, caught my attention. It is a free web development environment that encourages a community to provide support and cheering. I filed this away.

I was intrigued by the recent release of the FCC’s open APIs for accessing competitive ISP data. I had already hacked out—I am not a developer by any means— tools for graphically displaying the FCC’s “477” data on Google Maps (see references below). Could I somehow combine this all into a single project and perhaps use the amazing Google Maps Data infrastructure for sharing my results?

A tall order.  That’s when I brought Kodingen back to the head of my to-do list, and so I registered on the site to see what I’d be up against.  In fact, this is a delightfully simple open-source environment to work in.

Nothing against my current hosting service, Bluehost, but I was able to start working almost immediately in Kodingen without any of the usual obstacles and annoyances.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

"Sergey, I am your father"

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Is this what Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg metaphorically whispered into the Google founder’s ear?  I’m still reeling from the Google-Verizon non-aggression pact and what it will mean for a  competitive and open Internet.  Some have pointed out that the proposal is merely a regurgitation  of the FCC’s six freedoms for an open Internet.

True, but up to a point.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Meet Our New Regulators: Verizon and Google

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So there wasn’t an agreement between Google and Verizon, as reported by The New York Times, on price tiers. Instead the two companies released a modest proposal and legislative framework for an open Internet.  I like the boldness of their end-run around that puny regulatory agency, the FCC, by directing their demands, oops I mean request, to Congress.

Google-Verizon has more advice for the FCC after the jump.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

AT&T Charged with Slamming

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Ars Technica reported a few months ago that the practice of slamming still lives on. Slamming involves the deceptive switching of a customer’s voice carrier. It is one of those minor protections spelled out in Title II of the Communications Act.

By the way, the specific rule is covered in  section 201 ( “any such charge, practice, classification, or regulation that is unjust or unreasonable is declared to be unlawful” ) and is one of  the six sections that will be applied to cable broadband providers in the FCC’s novel third way approach.

So it is disturbing to read that AT&T was caught  slamming customers in Illinois. On Friday, the FCC granted a complaint against AT&T for switching a customer of Unitel Communications without first receiving authorization.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

FCC: 14 Million Americans Without Adequate Broadband

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On Tuesday, the FCC released its sixth annual report, as required by law, on the state of US broadband. Their conclusion:”… broadband deployment to all Americans is not reasonable and timely.”  This differs from the five preceding reports.

The reason for this agency’s change of mind?  The FCC decided— justifiably— to set the benchmark for high-speed Internet access from a piddling 200 Kbps to a somewhat more meaningful 4 Mbps for downloads and 1 Mbps for uploads.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Google Puts its Foot Down on Title II

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The FCC just posted an ex parte filing from Google in which the search giant makes it feelings on net neutrality and Title II reclassification crystal clear. Here’s the money quote:

“The FCC needs to assert affirmative oversight and enforcement authority regarding the broadband services sector, much as the U.S. Federal Trade Commission uses its more general jurisdiction to oversee other industry sectors, such as providers of Internet applications and content. In that regard, I discussed how, in light of the Comcast decision, continued use of Title I ‘ancillary’ authority to oversee the broadband sector likely would expose the agency needlessly to repeated significant litigation risks affecting a wide range of broadband- related policy priorities. ” Continue reading
Archaic Telecom

Deal of the Day in 2015: “No Data Limits btwn 8-9 PM”

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You can sense where the Internet may be heading by looking at the bandwidth policy platforms that core infrastructure vendors are offering to carriers.

With equipment from Tekelec, a major networking equipment player, cable companies can monitor and allocate bandwidth dynamically, as well as grant special deals to subscribers.

For example, a video web site could temporarily allow downloads to not count against a customer’s data limits as set by the cable ISP.  Or the web site of a content provider could purchase better QoS—lower latency or more bandwidth—between its servers and subscribers’ endpoint devices.

Tekelec’s Camiant Policy Management platform would handle all this.

There’s nothing inherently illegal with allowing carriers to price discriminate based on volume, service, or even time of day.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Non-innovative ISPs

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A article in Wired by Ryan Singel does a nice job of explaining why the cable ISPs need regulation. As this blog has also been saying, reclassification of their services as telecommunications, the current FCC strategy, undoes a bad course steered by the Powell FCC with help from the Supreme Court.

Here’s the money quote:”The broadband barons don’t want to provide you fast internet. It’s too close to being a utility for their tastes (that’s boring and lacks huge profit margins) and requires too much investment.”

What he said! The broadband cable providers’ business model is about restricting the possibilities of the Internet. For example, I suspect your ISP is like mine (I’m stuck with Comcast) in redirecting bad URLs (“404” errors) to their own highly-skewed page of alternative suggestions. Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Is Google Voice Net Neutral?

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Not according to, er, AT&T.  “Intellectual contradiction” and “noisome trumpeter” and other mean words were lobbed at Google by AT&T in a letter to the FCC in September 2009.  You get a little dizzy reading this contrivance especially when AT&T is holding this search provider’s feet to the fire by quoting an  FCC policy statement on Internet competition: “consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service.”

Wow, so does that mean AT&T is suggesting that the FCC should be regulating Internet applications to promote competition?

This would all be another day-in-the-life of squabbling service providers—read below the he-says-she-says between AT&T and T-Mobile over competitive pricing for TDM-based backhaul — but this is Google, and Google Voice is now open to the public.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

FCC Notice of Inquiry on Broadband Reclassification

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Let the games begin and ex parte filings flow! The FCC formally opened its proceedings yesterday on the classification of broadband Internet.   The agency released a 64 page, footnote-chocked Notice of Inquiry, Framework for Broadband Internet Service, to set this round in motion.

The document nicely explains the recent  history that led to the agency’s third-way approach and the policy considerations at stake (universal service, privacy, public safety).  I reviewed parts of this thing, especially the section covering recent legal history, and it all stands as a sobering reminder of how the FCC (under Chairman Powell) went completely off-course in 2002.

In the FCC’s 2002 Declaratory Ruling that cable modem was an information service, it called broadband cable a  “single, integrated service that enables the subscriber to utilize Internet access service,” and that telecommunications component (the transmission part) was “not . . . separable from the data processing capabilities of the service.”

Even in 2002 that clearly wasn’t the case.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

The AT&T-Verse

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Waves of bad news coming out of AT&T recently stand as a reminder of what life would be like if the crown was restored to this former monarch.

First there was the iPad security escapade wherein a group of hackers fooled a very insecure AT&T web form to display email addresses of iPad owners. Then the pre-order web meltdown in which customers for Apple’s iPhone 4  were faced with an AT&T back-end order entry system that stopped working. Then there’s the customer who received a terse cease-and-desist voicemail response after he emailed AT&T’s CEO Randall Stephenson to complain about the new caps on data—Zappos’s Tony Hsieh is probably smiling and FedExing a copy of his latest book, Delivering Happiness, to Randall.

Add to this brew the usual problems with AT&T’s 3G coverage (see TechCrunch’s  wireless frustrations) and barely acceptable customer service, and you’ll get a pretty good sense of how telecom was delivered in the Middle Ages (circa 1970s) when AT&T and the Bells were the only games in town.

And to rub salt into our wounds, AT&T is threatening to cut off investment in its U-verse/IPTV cable rollout if the FCC doesn’t reconsider its reclassification of cable broadband as Title II telecommunications.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Visualizing Broadband Competition

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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