Submitted by acohill on Wed, 11/18/2009 - 09:30
Spain has decided that broadband is a "right," and is going to beginning legislating price and speed for bandwidth services. In the short term, this may get more affordable broadband to some rural areas of Spain, but in the long term, this kind of legislation tends to discourage innovation and competition.
In the U.S., it is tempting to look at rural areas the lack of broadband alternatives and think that legislation is needed, but there are options, like having local and regional governments make investments in broadband infrastructure and make it available to the private sector, which creates true competition. And this is already working and creating jobs in places like Danville, Virginia and Galax, Virginia. In both communities, open access fiber networks are creating private sector jobs and attracting new businesses to the downtown areas where fiber is available.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 11/16/2009 - 14:22
Eldo Telecom reports that incumbent providers have filed thousands of challenges to broadband stimulus proposals. It is hard to tell from the USDA/NTIA rules just how the challenges will be handled. The ones I have looked at all pretty much take the line that the area covered in a proposal already has complete or nearly complete coverage. The problem is that the "coverage" being cited as already available is almost entirely copper-based,and many if not most of the proposals involve building much higher performance fiber networks. So the incumbents are saying, "Don't give this project money, we already have "little broadband." And the communities are saying, "We don't want little broadband, we want big broadband." It will be interesting to see how this gets resolved.
USDA/NTIA have a difficult task. Reviewing all these challenges is going to further delay getting the broadband stimulus money out into the economy to create jobs, and if too many funding requests are denied on the basis of "little broadband" incumbent challenges, that also means no job creation and no help for the economy.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 10/20/2009 - 09:42
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has proposed to the FCC that $5 to $10 billion be spent getting fiber to anchor institutions like schools, libraries, and health care facilities in communities. It's a worthy idea, but as policy, the unintended negative impact will be to make it more difficult to get fiber to homes and businesses in those communities.
The Gates plan is dis-aggregation of demand, and what we want is aggregation of demand. The Gates Foundation will take the biggest spenders for broadband in a community and remove them from the buying pool. When this happens, costs for everyone else go up, or don't go down.
What very few people and policymakers understand is that true community broadband networks are very different from the command and control institutional networks that have been the mainstay of telecom for the past forty years. Policymakers in Washington and groups like the Gates Foundation are talking to senior telecom folks with no experience designing and managing community broadband networks that have a goal of getting everyone connected. When you talk to someone who has been building centralized, top down, single provider networks for thirty years, guess what you get? You get another centralized, top down, single provider network.
It really isn't a technology issue, it is a business model issue. Command and control, centralized networks (think the phone company, the cable company, any wide area institutional network) have a business model that does not work--if those models worked, we'd all have fast fiber connections today. So the Gates Foundation, with the best of intentions, certainly, is proposing something that will be an economic catastrophe for communities, businesses, and economic development.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 10/06/2009 - 09:33
In one of the strangest things to come out of government, the Federal Trade Commission has announced it intends to monitor and police.....blogs. That's right--there is apparently nothing more dangerous than a blogger who might be getting paid a few bucks to write a product review. So the FTC is setting rules for full disclosure on when a blogger might be getting paid directly or indirectly for writing a product review.
Most bloggers blog because they like to write and want to share some knowledge or information with others. Very very few make much money from it. And the few "blogs" that are thinly disguised spam don't fool anyone. Expect to see First Amendment challenges to this, among other problems.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 09/28/2009 - 09:00
The next couple of years could be interesting. Google has been an advocate for network neutrality, which the FCC has indicated it intends to promote. But AT&T has just accused Google of blocking phone calls to rural areas for users of Google's Voice service. AT&T may have a point--Google wants broadband carriers like AT&T to carry all of Google's services without prejudice, but if Google wants that, then it also has to play by the same rules the phone companies are obligated to observe, and one of those rules is that they can't block calls to areas where the access fees (e.g. rural areas) are higher.
Irresistible force, meet immovable object. Someone make some popcorn--this could be fun.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 04/23/2009 - 09:43
Wilson, North Carolina decided a couple of years ago to build it's own municipal fiber network after it got tired of begging incumbent providers for better services and getting turned down. Now the fight is being taken to the state legislature, where the incumbent providers are trying to get laws passed to prevent local governments from getting involved in telecom efforts but to also prevent local governments for applying for broadband stimulus funds. This is also happening in Pennsylvania.
Part of the problem is that Wilson selected a municipal retail model, which means residents and businesses buy their telecom services directly from the city, and incumbents typically fight this approach vigorously. An open access, open services model like those used with projects like The Wired Road and nDanville lets incumbent providers use the new community-owned digital road system to sell services--buyers of telecom services purchase directly from private sector providers, not the local government.
Wilson has started a blog on the issue.
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 01/23/2009 - 17:41
FCC Commissioner Michael Copps has been named Acting Chairman of the FCC. This is good news for communities; Copps supports competition and is likely to help communities do more by shifting FCC attention away from favoring incumbent carriers and more towards creating a level playing field for all public and private networks.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 12/29/2008 - 10:10
Wired has a thoughtful article about the potential (good and bad) for a broadband stimulus initiative. There is much speculation that the incoming adminstration will, among other spending initiatives, provide funds for broadband deployment.
Ironically, taking fiber to every home and business in America (about 80 million premises), would be much less expensive than many of the other "bailout" initiatives and would be much more likely to have positive effects. The total cost would probably be around $175 billion if done the right way, which is a series of well-designed local and regional initiatives pursuing a single open access, open services network with all telecom services provided by the private sector (and the network, the digital road system, managed locally or regionally as a public good).
Ownership and management structures should be allowed to vary; in some places direct municipal ownership might be the best approach. In other parts of the country, a regional broadband authority or a broadband coop might be more appropriate.
What we don't need is handouts to the incumbent telcos, who have, for the most part, diligently pursued failed business models and who have stubbornly refused to provide affordable business class services in the face growing demand. And we don't need a Federal Bureau of Telecommunications creating an Orwellian nightmare of centrally managed services. Local and regional governments have successfully managed road networks locally for decades. We can use this tried and true approach to build digital road systems. The Interstate Highway System is a good example of useful Federal intervention: Federal funds financed the development of highways, but states took over ownership and management once they were built.
We now just need to push that down a level, as what is badly needed is NOT more "information superhighways," but instead local connections to homes and businesses. When you get down to hooking up local property, this is best managed locally. Do we really want State or Federal agencies plowing up our yards and streets? Better to work with local governments, who already do this very well with water, sewer, and roads.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 12/03/2008 - 10:52
Outgoing FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has called for free Internet access nationwide, with adult content filters in place to prevent children from accessing porn. This would cost billions to implement, and it is not at all clear who would pay for it. "Free" to the user is not the same as "free" of all costs. Someone still has to fund the construction of the network and pay for the substantial ongoing support and maintenance. Free muni wireless networks have not always fared well, and many "free" projects have suffered from low use rates and mediocre service.
The fundamental problem with "free" broadband services is over-use because the cost to the user appears to be zero. Fees for broadband services are a very useful mechanism not only for paying for the system but also to regulate use. Network admins have extensive data that shows a small minority of users (typically about 5%) tend to use a disproportionate amount of total bandwidth (often using more than 50% of available bandwidth). Pricing services helps regulate use and maintain more consistent levels of service for all users.
Requiring providers to set aside a portion of the wireless spectrum for free use only raises prices for everyone else buying the euphemistically called "premium service." From an economic development perspective, free wireless broadband is not a business attraction strategy, and may even drive businesses away.
Wireless broadband is not a business class service unless no other alternative (e.g. fiber) exists.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 10/09/2008 - 13:15
A lawsuit filed by the incumbent telephone company in Monticello, Minnesota sought to stop the city from building its own fiber to the home (FTTH) network. The project was designed as a public/private partnership, with Hiawatha Broadband Communications, another Minnesota telecom firm, signed up to operate the system and provide services.
Yesterday, the 10th District Court in Minnesota dismissed the case, finding that the city had the right to issue bonds for a telecom utility and that the city had the right to operate a telecom utility.
The Court went into some detail about the meaning of a "public convenience," as there is a Minnesota law on the books that gives municipalities the right to own and operate a "public convenience." Part of the lawsuit alleged that a fiber network was not a public convenience, but the court has said that it is.
This ruling applies only in Minnesota, but it still may have some influence in other states. Monticello was particularly lucky, as the case was resolved in less than a year. Courts have generally found in favor of municipalities, but the cases often drag on for years.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 09/04/2008 - 08:50
With the release of Chrome, the new Web browser from Google, a side story has developed, as it appears that the End User License Agreement (EULA) for Chrome gives Google an irrevocable right to use any content you might post using the Chrome browser. As it turns out, the legal language in the Chrome EULA is cut and pasted from Google's other EULAs, including the Google services like their word processor and spreadsheet.
So anything you write using the Google word processor, Google immediately has a license to use, in perpetuity. That would include novels, short stories, business plans, school reports, news stories, blog postings, podcasts, videos--everything becomes the property of Google. It's a nonexclusive license, meaning you can still do whatever you like with it, but if you write the great American novel with the Google word processor, they can print it and sell it in direct competition with you. They can make a copy of your company business plans and sell it on the Web to competitors.
There is still no such thing as a free lunch.
Update: Google has amended the Chrome EULA to remove the clause that gives them the rights to content. But the problem still remains with other Google apps and services.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 08/04/2008 - 07:49
U.S. Treasury Secretary Paulson has endorsed "covered bonds," which are a new idea in the United States but have been used in Europe for centuries, according to this article. Covered bonds are secured by loans carried on the books of the issuing bank. Keeping the loans on the books forces the bank to pay attention to the performance of those loans, unlike the mortgage mess, where mortgages were packaged, re-packaged, and sold until no one really knew how the mortgages were performing.
Covered bonds can be used as an investment vehicle for issuing mortgages, but in Europe, they have been used heavily by the public sector to finance infrastructure, and are backed by the governments receiving the funds. Why are they different than general obligation bonds? Covered bonds enable local governments to tap a much larger, global marketplace of capital funds, meaning more cash could be available for local infrastructure projects at lower rates because of increased competition among lenders.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 07/22/2008 - 14:05
The National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors (NATOA) has called for a range of policy changes and investments that includes a guaranteed right for local governments to invest in broadband and fiber as the preferred mode of access.
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 07/11/2008 - 09:12
Comcast has been reprimanded by the FCC for blocking certain Internet services without telling customers and without regard for the level of use. Service providers can be as arbitrary as they like in managing their Internet access services, but they have to tell customer what they are doing. A service-based network would not need to penalize customers for doing something they enjoy, but they would probably pay more. Today's broadband model is upside down for service providers because they make the most money when a customer never turns their computer on; they make the least if the customer is on the Internet all day long. That is the exact opposite of every other business in the world, and it's why broadband is such a mess in the U.S. Fortunately, communities like Danville, Virginia are changing that model.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 06/25/2008 - 10:01
The FCC has finally released new definitions of broadband.
This is a major improvement over the old definition of "200 kilobits" as broadband. By this old definition, the country has very high levels of broadband penetration, but made the U.S. the laughingstock of the rest of the world. In much of Europe, residential broadband tends to be north of 40+ MEGABITS, or about 200 times more capacity than the FCC definition.
The graded scale is useful because it can provided benchmarks to measure progress in a community or region. If the FCC has provided targets, that would have been even better. For example, a ten year target could be to have 90% of businesses and homes in the "100 Mbps and beyond" category, and indeed, U.S. community broadband projects like the one in Danville, Virginia are deploying "100 Mbps and beyond" today.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 06/05/2008 - 12:07
Comcast has announced that it will start slowing down the traffic of its broadband users if they are using too much; "too much" generally means running P2P (peer to peer) filesharing applications like BitTorrent, which can run for hours or days while sending or receiving large files (like movies or music).
The strategy is reasonable, given that cable companies price their Internet services in part based on average use. Customers that far exceed those average use parameters slow things down for everyone else on that cable modem network segment, which often includes 100-200 neighbors. Cable modem bandwidth, like most wireless services, is shared among all connected users at an access point (wireless) or a cable network mode. Fortunately, not all users are doing something at the same time, but background applications like BitTorrent do run continuously for long periods of time.
Submitted by acohill on Sun, 05/04/2008 - 14:32
FCC Commissioner Deborah Tate spoke on the last day of the Broadband Properties conference. She had some interesting statistics that should give pause to anyone who thinks that DSL and cable modem broadband services are "good enough." Commissioner Tate noted that:
Tate went on to enumerate that choice was important to buyers of telecom services, and she listed that choice should be available for services, for providers, and for equipment.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 04/14/2008 - 07:49
The undersea fiber cables that were cut a couple of months ago were the subject of numerous conspiracy theories, but satellite photos have revealed the culprits--cargo ships that were anchored in the wrong place. Sometimes Occam's Razor (the simplest explanation is the likeliest one) is exactly right.
The object lesson for communities is to plan for cable outages by making sure local networks have redundant cable paths. Sometimes this is quite expensive to do when just getting started with community telecom investments, so an alternative to a second fiber cable is a high capacity wireless link that can handle local traffic (perhaps with somewhat less throughput) while repairs are made.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 12/10/2007 - 08:48
Eliot Spitzer, the governor of New York, has called for universal access to broadband in the state. The text of his speech is here (note that you have to scroll down past the agriculture remarks to get to the broadband stuff).
Unfortunately, Spitzer seems comfortable relegating rural areas to second class status. He calls for a minimum of 100 megabit connectivity in urban areas, but says that just one-fifth of that (20 megabits) is fine for rural areas. Cable and DSL are not going to provide universal access in rural parts of New York, so Spitzer has apparently decided that rural areas will have to make do with wireless while the cities get fiber. Rural citizens and legislators in the state should be outraged that the governor is willing to choke their economic future so easily.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 10/22/2007 - 08:58
This news report suggests that some cable companies are actively blocking certain kinds of traffic on their networks. The target of such blocking is peer to peer file sharing, in which the subscribers are often sharing very large files like movies and TV shows. From a network operator perspective, what you see is a very small number of your customers using a disproportionately large chunk of your network bandwidth, which can degrade service for other customers and increase costs.
Of course, the whole issue of net neutrality comes into play here, where the argument is that Internet access providers should not block traffic or offer preferential treatment to certain kinds of data over other kinds. But the access providers are on the horns of a dilemma, because the peer to peer sharing does have a measurable impact on their network.
But almost all of the arguments for and against traffic blocking, the rights of access providers to manage their own traffic, and free speech issues are red herrings. The real problem is the outdated and obsolete business model that nearly every access provider is still using.
It made sense, more than a decade ago, to sell bandwidth by the bucket to users because all folks were doing back then was email and some light Web browsing. And the Web in the mid-nineties was most text and a few pictures. Today, the media-rich Web is filled with sound and movie files of all kinds, and everyone uses them--look at the popularity of YouTube.
The current business model does not provide any cost information to consumers; that is, the "cost" of downloading a few emails is exactly the same as the "cost" of downloading an entire movie in DVD format. This is a classic and well-understood economics problem. Current pricing, to users, makes it appear as if there is unlimited supply (of bandwidth), which in turn creates unlimited demand.
The solution is simple. Rather than trying to discourage customers from doing things they want to do, you change the pricing model so that it conveys more information about the real cost of downloading things like movies.
In other words, you move from a business model of networks based on bandwidth, which we know is not working, to a business model based on unlimited bandwidth but where pricing is based on the service you want to use. So users that like to do peer to peer file sharing subscribe not to a bucket of bandwidth but instead subscribe to a service designed specifically to support high performance file sharing, and the price of that service will be based on the real cost of providing the service.
It is simple economics. Communities like Danville, Virginia are already rolling out networks that do this. These multi-service, open networks support real competition and will start driving innovation on the network because the business model support innovation, rather than stifling it.
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