of AG Internet Knowledge, LLC
Posts tagged ‘Internet’
Bruce Kushnick recently pointed out to me that the FCC is using data from a period between 1997 and 2002.
The key difference between then and now is that through 2002, the ISPs still had control of the market, but today, the phone and cable companies rule.
Continue reading ‘The ISP Market Has Changed Since 2002 — Does the FCC Recognize This?’ »
David Isenberg has convened those concerned with infrastructure at meetings called Freedom To Connect for many years. This year, he’s Senior Advisor to the FCC’s National Broadband Taskforce and instead of Freedom to Connect, he convened a group of eminent speakers for a panel called Workshop: Future Fiber Architectures and Local Deployment Choices.
While much FCC policy has been inward looking, refusing to treat the world as a laboratory in which alternate polcies are tested, some failing and some succeeding. Both failures and successes provide useful lessons.
Two representatives of successes were present, Herman Wagter of citynet.nl in Amsterdam and Johan Henæs Norwegian equipment maker INS Communications.
Art Brodsky at Public Knowledge first sounded the alarm about Connected Nation at the start of 2009, saying the organization was connected to Kentucky’s Republican governor and to telephone company lobbyists, enabling it to charge the state $400,000 and then make the state do the work.
More recently, Brodsky claimed that bids were rigged in Connected Nation’s favor in the state of Florida, arguing that there was no other explanation why the highest bidder won a broadband mapping contract.
Maps are important. They show where the government should invest money. They say who has broadband and who does not. If the maps are drawn by the phone companies, they could direct stimulus money only to the areas they don’t care about, bypassing wealthy areas they would like to deliver service to but have not yet built out.
Today, NYPIRG is calling out such policies. In its report (available in .pdf format here), NYPIRG says, “Contracts or grants to map data … must include requirements
that the mapping entity disclose any financial or other relationships to broadband providers. If data are self reported by a broadband provider and not independently verified, that should be disclosed and the data should not be considered accurate until independently verified.”
The report does not specifically name Connected Nation, but readers understand that’s the problem that’s addressed by this recommendation — a recommendation that is so obvious that it should not have to be said.
The report contains a massive number of other good ideas, endorsing structural separation, better data collection, an internet literacy curriculum and more.
NYPIRG’s report is a masterpiece.
Today is OneWebDay and around the world, people will be celebrating the internet and drawing attention to the digital divide. Events will be held around the world, including here in New York City, where several speakers will talk about freedom and the internet.
On Saturday, I spoke at a related event, talking about What Broadband Is And Why We Need It. I argued that broadband is not a luxury.
Broadband is faster than dialup, and the speed enables not just convenience but entirely new applications. I like to compare it to the diffrence between a phone call and the telegraph. The telegraph was patented in the U.S. in 1837, while the telephone was patented almost forty years later.
With a phone call, you get direct contact, intimacy, and the ability to ask and answer questions immediately. The telephone does more than transmit data faster than the telepgraph.
In order to use broadband for real time applications, it needs to have low latency. Just as a phone call on earth is different than a phone call to the space shuttle, applications that encounter latency break or degrade in quality.
Continue reading ‘OneWebDay Speech: What Broadband Is And Why We Need It’ »
In three applications, satellite provider Hughes Network Systems has applied for about $650 million to serve “all rural and rural remote unserved and underserved areas in the U.S.”
Satellite broadband is a special case. Although it can reach virtually anywhere in the U.S. — to any place from which you can see the Southern sky — it has unique flaws.
Satellite signals are transmitted over a sufficiently long distance to introduce latency, a delay of almost a full second that can degrade or even break some applications — especially those employing voice.
I don’t believe that 10 percent of the stimulus should be spent on delivering this lower quality service. Instead, I hope that the stimulus will be spent on delivering the same quality of service to rural areas that is currently enjoyed in wealthy areas of the United States.
I do see a limited use for satellite. There is an application from Motorbrain Consulting, Inc. of Lincoln, Maine, to deliver satellite service to 3,400 homes that have no other option, free to the customer, for 2 years, at a cost of $ 5,571,784. That’s less than $100 per home per month, and seems reasonable.
The state of Maine is mountainous and heavily forested, making it difficult (but not impossible) to bring wireless or fiber service to many homes. I think that Motorbrain’s application has merit.
At 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.
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. Continue reading ‘The Smart Network Prevents HD Voice’ »