Internet Statistics by Alex Goldman

America’s National Broadband plan seems predicated on the idea that smartphones can serve poor people. The cellcos are telling Wall Street’s financial analysts and the policy makers in Washington that there are more cell phone-based internet connections in the world than fixed wireless or wireline connections. But skeptics are starting to show that those cellphones may be underused, overpriced, and come with caps. Meanwhile, cellcos’ core businesses are threatened. Prices will rise and service caps will fall. Washington — and policymakers around the world — should allocate more resources and spectrum to services that deliver true internet, not the restricted walled garden of the cellcos.

This debate was central to the fascinating discussion at the State of Telecom event at Columbia’s Instititue of Tele-Information, held in mid-October. I attended the afternoon sessions.

Continue reading ‘Smart Phone Skeptic’ »

Many people in the U.S. use Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone service today. But I contend that the FCC has killed the technology. How can I make this assertion? After all, there are over 20 million VoIP subscribers in the U.S.

However, the VoIP services that exist today are a shadow of what the technology makes possible. VoIP has been choked so that it no longer disrupts telephone service. VoIP has been fenced in by the FCC so that it offers no more than telephone, a move that was intended to protect cellular and wireline phone companies.

Continue reading ‘How The FCC Killed VoIP’ »

The FCC plans to force the cellcos to warn users who are about to incur a large bill. Let’s see if this gets past the lobbyists and the courts. Gut check time for the FCC.

While most branches of the Obama adminstration are seeking to describe their policies as bipartisan, the FCC today chose to describe its new internet policy as a Third Way.

The Third Way is a phrase made popular by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. It describes an attempt to navigate a path between socialism and the free market. Given the extent to which the Obama administration’s opponents attack so many things it proposes as “socialism”, it is courageous of the FCC to use this term. (To be fair, the FCC says it’s seeking a middle road between re-regulation of a utility and the unfettered free market.)

The FCC does not want to regulate the internet if the internet is defined as the websites and services that we use when we connect to the internet. The FCC wants to regulate the price that users pay to connect to the internet and to be able to police monopoly power at the access level. To this end, the FCC refuses to abandon the great mistake of 2002 in which the FCC first decided that the internet was comprised of both a telecommunications component and an information service.

The problem with this splitting of the internet atom is that the internet consists of interdependent services.

Continue reading ‘FCC Seeks Third Way for Internet Regulation’ »

http://www.tested.com/news/this-is-why-people-hate-the-phone-company-att/60/

” Reading AT&T’s announcement that the nationwide rollout of its femtocell product–called the Microcell 3G–is about to begin called into sharp relief the level at which I expect to get screwed by the phone company. About halfway through decoding the PR doublespeak, I had an epiphany. It was if I suddenly saw the words on the page for the very first time. “

Here’s a draft executive summary.

Here’s a list of whom Forbes expects to win.

My comments, based on what we know at this time, are here.

(h/t Karl Bode’s twitter feed)

“Of course the lesson learned is that in the Internet age, the harder a company works to stifle criticism, the more attention that criticism gets. The better path is perhaps to listen to what your customers are saying about your business practices, and change them where possible if you value your customers,” Bode writes.

The legal documents are here:

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/23/magicjack-legal-docu.html

Feld warns that the telcos are really attacking a still-unpublished National Broadband Agenda.

When I last wrote about MagicJack, I was very upset with the service. It was not working.

Imagine my surprise — and pleasure — when MagicJack called me to discuss the problem. After some back and forth, the MagicJack representative recommend that I purchase a powered USB hub. Continue reading ‘MagicJack Keeps Improving’ »

Today, the state of Florida endorsed years of bad service by fining Verizon a mere $2 per customer for slow repairs on the Gulf Coast, according to DSL Reports.

Time and time again, regulators have implicitly endorsed poor service by refusing to fine telcos at a level that would provide a disincentive for harm to consumers. Verizon got away with this activity for years and is paying less than a month’s profit per customer.