Feld warns that the telcos are really attacking a still-unpublished National Broadband Agenda.
Archive for the ‘Telecommunications’ Category
Feld Warns of Telcos’ “Tea Party Tactics”
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010MagicJack Keeps Improving
Thursday, January 7th, 2010When 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. (more…)
Fines Do Nothing To Telcos
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009Today, 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.
AT&T Wireless Data Congestion Self-Inflicted?
Monday, October 26th, 2009Brough’s slashdotted analysis of the issues in the AT&T Wireless network, built on a mailing list and the work of David Reed, makes interesting reading.
Advice on Phone Bill Pricing
Friday, September 25th, 2009Found some excellent advice on phone bill pricing from User Centric.
The most basic piece of advice, one that everyone should know, is here:
Two 6 second calls, each at 6 cents per minute:
11% USF with 60 second initial costs 6.66 cents
6% USF with 6 second initial costs 0.63 cents.
This is 10 times the price!
DRM: Unnecessary, Expensive, Broken
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009“Academic criticism of DRM and the entertainment community’s enthusiasm for it are two debates that have run on parallel tracks for some time,” Wendy Seltzer, Law professor at the University of Colorado’s Law School, Berkman fellow, and board member of Tor, told me today.
“Policy makers bow to the entertainment companies without listening to academic concerns.”
One such academic paper is “Digital rights management: Desirable, inevitable, and almost irrelevant,” (available here in .pdf format), a three page screed published in 2007.
Digital Rights Management (DRM) software is designed to make it impossible to copy and share songs, movies, software, and other products which, because they are digital, can be distributed virtually for free.
Not all academic research opposes DRM, Odlyzko said, precisely because DRM is complex. “There are all these nobs to turn, so you can produce lots of PhD theses and conference papers,” he wrote to me in an e-mail.
The Smart Network Prevents HD Voice
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009At the HD Communications Summit in New York yesterday, a wide variety of conflicts were clarified, but the starkest of those conflicts is that between the business model of the cablecos and telcos and new technologies like HD Voice.
The technology
HD Voice samples a greater amount of spectrum, at least twice as much of it as a regular phone call does, to make calls easier to hear. Early adopters might be first responders, financial companies, medical institutions, and anyone else for whom a small misunderstanding could involve a significant risk.
But in the long term, the technology is likely to succeed or fail depending on whether or not consumers like it. The benefits, such as intimacy, clarity, and simply not having to repeat yourself during a call, will not be immediately obvious to anyone who buys the service because it only delivers clear benefits if the network and both phones are using HD Voice. (more…)