Tag: fcc

Archaic Telecom

700 MHz Public Spectrum at Work on the Gulf Spill

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The FCC reported that  emergency agencies in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama were able to stitch together a 700 MHz radio network to connect first responders and government workers.   This was an ad hoc telecom effort to, in effect, route callers into the right conference group.

The agencies in these Gulf states created a workable, but still somewhat primitive (compared to what’s coming), radio trunking system to share available frequencies more efficiently and allocate them into separate radio talk groups.

A better solution is in the works.
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Archaic Telecom

Communications Act Version 2.0

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Congress announced on Monday that they will start the process of revising the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The key committee players (Sen. Jay Rockefeller, Sen. John Kerry, Rep. Henry Waxman, and Rep. John Boucher) will bring together “stakeholders” in a “series of bi-partisan, issue focused meetings beginning in June.”

As you may vaguely remember, the ’96 legislation was intended to spur innovation and competition by forcing the incumbents to unbundle parts of their networks and make them available to competitive carriers at wholesales prices.

The incumbents resisted mightily both in the trenches and in the courts, and the competitive carriers that have survived to this day are just holding on.

There is a big difference this time around as Congress rolls out 2.0 of the Act. Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

The Real FCC Plot: Open Internet Access

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After the FCC lost its net neutrality case against Comcast, I put on hold a project to review a series of YouTube videos involving Chairman Genachowski. The rough plan was to gain some insight as to how the FCC would approach net neutrality, open internet, and universal access based on Genachowski’s public statements. I wasn’t going to do this alone, instead I would enlist the resources of Crowdflower’s cloud workers to help with the analysis.

That was ages ago (last month). Since then the FCC has announced its plan to place has placed broadband transmission under Title II regulation and has regained the net neutrality high ground. And in response, one well known, respected FCC watcher, Glen Beck, has said that the President plans to regulate the Internet and control the “misinformation” through net neutrality—there was also some talk about Marxism and public utilities.

This was enough to spur me into action and get those videos scanned for certain keywords.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

FCC’s Third Way Approach

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As expected, the FCC has decided to reclassify Internet broadband as a telecommunications service. It’s approach is to apply Title II common carrier requirements to Internet broadband, but forbear most of the provisions except six, those associated with denial of service and unreasonable practices (in other words, net neutrality).

You can read the legal theory behind the reclassification and forbearance here.

Updated: After reading through the legal reasoning behind the FCC decision, I was nodding in agreement with some of the ideas being explored. One is that different parts of Internet communications require separate regulatory approaches.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

FCC Reclassification: Vonage, Nay.

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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

Social Studies

New York Senate Telecom Committee Is on the Phone

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Earlier this month, I glued together two neat apps using parts supplied by two different VoiceXML unified communications companies. The first lets me call in to a VoXMLPHP script hosted by Tropo, which then interprets my voice commands and reads news articles using their API wrappers.  The  second sends SMS headlines (using Twilio’s APIs) from my favorite news sources to my not-so-smart-phone (it’s an ancient model).

Both have their place in my work schedule.  Another idea that’s been taking root in this blog is crowdsourcing of public policy  and moving government documents to the Internet, accessible using open-standards protocols (RSS, et. al.)

Hold these thoughts.

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Archaic Telecom

Telecommunications By Any Other Name….

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I’d like to put aside, permanently, the debate about the correct classification of cable service, which has been argued in the courts for years.  In fact,  the underlying question—what is digital communications—has been endlessly and unproductively analyzed in legal and regulatory areas since the 1970s.   The classification question during the disco era,  is it basic or is it enhanced service?, is still with us in the iPad age in the form of,  is it telecommunication or  information?

To me, the bigger issue is why making the right choice from the FCC’s categorization menu—telecommunications, information services, advanced services, advanced services with telecommunications (DSL),  advanced services minus telecommunications (cable modem), etc. —has become the only way to impose non-trivial obligations on carrier and service providers.Continue reading

Quote of the Day
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By allowing innovation to be easily implemented at the edge of the network, the end-to-end design of the Internet has lowered technical, financial, and administrative …

Archaic Telecom

Verizon Blinks

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As we all know, Verizon went public on Tuesday with its agreement to allow Skype’s VoIP application to run on its network. There are still a few gotchas for Verizon subscribers who want the service, but in the world of telecom this is momentous. Faced with the FCC’s proposed rules for net neutrality and a new fifth principle of non-discrimination, Verizon (along with AT&T) has relented.