Featured Blogs

Starlink Comes to Africa - Markets and Competition

SpaceX Starlink Internet service will be available in several African nations in the second quarter of this year, and the price in Nigeria has been announced -- $600 for the "residential" terminal and a monthly fee of $43. Is there a market for Starlink at that price in Nigeria and other Sub-Saharan African nations? The IMF projects a GDP per capita of $2,580 for Nigeria this year (and $1,900 in Sub-Saharan Africa and $2,260 for Africa overall) so the market for individual consumer accounts will be much smaller than in what the IMF refers to as "advanced economies." more

GTLDs Valuation Components That You Must Not Overlook

This post outlines the valuation pitfalls that need to be avoided when competing for the acquisition of a new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD). The most widely used financial tools to determine the economic viability of a capital investment project, such as bidding for a new gTLD, are the Internal Rate of Return (IRR) and the Net Present Value (NPV), which measures the expected additional value a project would create if undertaken. more

Are There any Cable Companies Left?

Are there any companies left that we can still call cable companies? Everything in the business press still refers to Comcast and Charter as cable companies and AT&T and Verizon as telephone companies. It's getting harder to justify using these traditional labels, and maybe the time is finally here to just start calling them all ISPs. After all, these four companies collectively have 80 million broadband customers... more

Decoding the Cellular IoT Acronym Alphabet Soup

Do you know what all these acronyms and abbreviations mean related to cellular networks and the Internet of Things (IoT)? MTC, Cat-0, Cat-1, Cat-M1, LTE-M, NB-IoT, EC-GSM, LPWA, eDRX, PSM... I certainly didn't, but Tuomas Tirronen at Ericsson Research wrote a blog post titled "Cellular IoT alphabet soup" where he explained all of this for those of us who might be interested. more

DoH Might Not Be the Answer After All

DNS-over-HTTPs (DoH) has sometimes been regarded as the next big thing in web security. The system, it's been argued, can help to defeat many common types of cyberattack -- and particularly DNS cache poisoning and MITM eavesdropping. Presumably, this is the reason that both Google and Mozilla implemented DoH in their browsers (Chrome and Firefox, respectively) at the end of last year. In reality, though, it's far from clear that DoH is a solution to any real-world problem. more

Uncertain Knowledge

The establishment media frequently attack the Internet as spreading inaccurate, unchecked rumors as news. While that is certainly true, the Internet is also demonstrating that the establishment media is no better. In the past weeks we have been told that the Stuxnet virus was written by US and Israeli intelligence. The evidence? Some un-named Israeli intelligence officers grinned broadly at reporters when the subject was mentioned. Is that what it has come to? more

Internet Control Without “Firewalls”

Open Society Fellow Evgeny Morozov and I have written an Op-Ed for Project Syndicate about how the future of Internet control is not "firewall" censorship but more subtle forms of manipulation and pressure. Recognizing that censorship is too heavy handed and imperfect to be successful on its own, the Chinese government's Internet strategy is placing increasing emphasis on corporate self-censorship... more

Will 5G Implementation Lead to an Increase in Ransomware Attacks?

5G has arrived and is poised to supercharge our lives with ultra-fast download speeds and better than ever connectivity. It may not be ready to replace WiFi just yet, but AT&T has already deployed 5G networks in various cities across the US. 5G tech was the hottest commodity at CES 2019. According to some estimates, 5G will bring $12 trillion into the global economy by 2035, connecting everything from our toasters to our pet's collars and a range of other IoT devices. more

Internet Challenges Need Win-Win Solutions

The current internet versus telcos debate that is going to be played out at the WCIT conference in Dubai later this year is still following the old confrontational pattern. The telco industry, for all the right reasons, started off as a monopolistic one. With the limited technology and knowledge of that time this system has been able to deliver telephone networks to all the countries in the world, and the industry can be proud of that achievement... However technology and knowledge have progressed... more

Spotlight on TD-LTE Technology and Spectrum

As handheld devices grow ever more sophisticated and demand for content-rich services such as mobile video increases, mobile data traffic is likely to continue growing at an explosive rate. This represents good news for the industry, but next-generation wireless technologies will need to be ready to meet the challenge and able to cope with these increased demands on bandwidth. A recent TD-LTE spectrum workshop looked at the potential of TD-LTE technology to take us on to the next stage of wireless communication. more

Why More Effort Won’t Solve the Exceptional Access Problem

In the debate over government "exceptional access" to encrypted communications, opponents with a technical bent (and that includes me) have said that it won't work: that such a scheme would inevitably lead to security problems. The response -- from the policy side, not from technical folk - has been to assert that perhaps more effort would suffice. FBI Director James Comey has said, "But my reaction to that is: I'm not sure they've really tried." Hillary Clinton wants a "Manhattan-like project, something that would bring the government and the tech communities together". More effort won't solve the problem - but the misunderstanding lies at the heart of why exceptional access is so hard. more

Electronic Frontier Foundation Tells ICANN to Delete URS from .Travel

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has just told ICANN to drop the notion of applying the Uniform Rapid Suspension (URS) dispute resolution system to .Travel and other legacy gTLDs without undertaking a full Policy Development Process (PDP). In a June 12 letter, EFF stated: ICANN should not apply URS to the .travel domain, or to any additional domains, by the unaccountable means of staff inserting new conditions into the renewal of the registry operator's contract. Rather, the public policy implications of such a move demand that a full PDP be undertaken first.  more

Analysis of Wireless Broadband Plan in 2nd Stimulus Package

While it was good to see that the Administration included telecoms in its new stimulus package - which was launched in September 2011 - the concerns expressed when the project was announced last year still persist. Wireless is not a solution to the significant broadband problems the USA is facing. ... The new plan seems to be driven more by the failed attempts in previous initiatives to roll out more broadband infrastructure. more

Opinion: UK Moving Quickly Down the Slippery Slope…

Admittedly, I'm a not Johnny-come-lately with regards to surveillance, intelligence, telecommunications, network security, law enforcement, and a cross-pollination of all-of-the-above. I actually have a very colorful background of working within all of the aforementioned disciplines - at one time or another - either through the U.S. Military, U.S Government contractors, private industry, etc. ... And unfortunately, I am not generally "shocked" very often by much of the abuses being perpetrated on unwitting Internet users, both by supposedly "trusted" entities (e.g. Democratic Governments, ISPs, etc.) more

When is a Typo Not a Typo?

I was reading about the Nieman Marcus lawsuit and on a phone call related to the "Working Group on Mechanisms to Protect Rights of Others", when suddenly it occurred to me that this whole rush to rid the world of typos could eventually head in a messy direction... How far can this go? Let me take you back to that phone call I was on where representatives of Yahoo indicated they would try to secure Flicker.XXX as a TYPO of Flickr.com (their made up brand name) during a potential new TLD sunrise period. How backward is that? A Typo that became a brand, trying to call the generic name a variant of their trademark! more