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The Chilean Undersecretary of Telecommunications (SUBTEL) has begun a year-long pilot study of SpaceX's Starlink satellite Internet service. I don't know how many test locations they are planning, but the first two have been selected. Last week I discussed the first, the John F. Kennedy school in Sotomó, an isolated town at 41.6° South on a fjord in Chile's Lake Region, and the second will be in Caleta Sierra on the coast about 1,200 miles north of Sotomó. SpaceX is also considering a European pilot study in Georgia and perhaps (hopefully) others. more
Here's the question: is it meaningful or important for a federal agency to have regulatory authority over high-speed Internet access connectivity? Right now, the FCC (which is supposed to oversee "communication over wire and radio") has no clear authority to make policy about high-speed Internet connectivity. (Transport is different than content - this post is not about applications or uses of this connectivity. Be careful when you talk about the Internet "ecosystem," because transport has been historically and remains different from everything else. I'm talking about the capacity to send packets from Point A to Point B, whether provided by wired or wireless providers.) more
Amazon announced that they would be providing satellite ground station service last year and Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web services, announced its availability in the video at the end of this post. AWS Ground Station is a fully managed, ready-to-go ground station service... This sounds like a compelling case, especially for a small operator or startup, but I don't know how the prices compare to existing services or building proprietary ground stations. more
I’ve been keeping tabs on the news about telemedicine since it was touted throughout the industry as one of the big benefits of having good broadband. One piece of news comes from a survey conducted by Nemours Children’s Health. This is a large pediatric health system with 95 locations in Delaware, Florida, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The company treats almost half a million children annually. Nemours released a report on Telehealth in July. The report was based on a survey of 2,056 parents/guardians of children. The survey had some interesting results, more
OneWeb has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. OneWeb CEO Adrian Steckel stated that they were "close to obtaining financing" but failed as a "consequence of the economic impact of the COVID-19 crisis." That is plausible, but they were also far behind SpaceX Starlink in launch cost and capacity. (SpaceX, remains open as an essential industry working on defense contracts, but two employees have tested positive for COVID-19) and financial analyst Tim Farrar said SpaceX faced a "near-term cash problem" even before the pandemic). more
It started with a report in the New York Times, citing a study from Arieso, saying that "Top 1% of Mobile Users Consume Half of World's Bandwidth". Arieso said that part of the reason for the increase in download volumes may be Apple's Siri voice feature on the iPhone 4S which allows consumers to dictate to the phone and enter more text and data... Other news outlets picked up the story and lost all perspective. more
One of the oddest aspects of FCC monitoring of broadband is that the agency has accepted the premise that any broadband product faster than 25/3 Mbps is adequate broadband. This means that the FCC has completely accepted that broadband provided by cable companies is adequate and is something the agency doesn't have to be concerned with. The FCC makes the automatic assumption that broadband from cable companies is good broadband... more
The current battles being fought over net-neutrality were over before they began. Whether you regard it as a good thing or a bad thing the world already has a multi-tiered internet and it's likely to become even more stratified in the coming years. Most markets, or perhaps countries is a better grouping, depend on commercial organisations to deploy broadband access and to serve the consumers that sign-up. The internet service providers that governments and customers depend on to reach more and more consumers and in increasingly difficult locations (read 'less likely to generate revenue') are there to make money. more
To date, proponents of a neutral internet have had relatively scant reason to raise their voices beyond anything more than a murmur in Australia. While the FCC's Open Internet Order of 2015 has been hailed as a significant win for consumers in the US, and the wording of proposed legislation to institute ex-ante regulation of service providers is soon to be considered in the EU, Aussies have been quarantined from anything other than the fringes of the Net Neutrality debate. more
With $72 billion invested in mobile broadband it would be hard to argue that this market is suffering from a lack of investment. More than half of this is taking place in Asia. Over the last two years close to 300 mobile operators in 120 countries have launched mobile broadband networks (using the 3G HSPA technology) and some 70 of these are already planning the next upgrade of their networks using the LTE technology -- the first $5 billion of investment money has been committed to that technology. more
A lot of rural America continues to hope that low orbit satellite (LEO) service will provide a broadband alternative. It's been a while since I've covered the status of the companies proposing to deploy constellations of satellites for providing broadband. In March, OneWeb filed for Chapter 11 restructuring when it was clear that the company could not raise enough cash to continue the research and development of the satellite product. more
In the 1950s and 60s, large numbers of immigrants came to London from the Caribbean and other Commonwealth countries. They had few resources, yet needed somewhere to live. Many fell prey to exploitative landlords. These unscrupulous rentiers packed tenants into formerly swanky parts of town, which then became slums. This process even birthed a new word in British English - "Rachmanism" - to define the archetypal unethical treatment as practised by one notorious landlord. more
We're just back from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, where more than 85,000 attendees from over 200 countries gathered to discover what the 1,800 companies present had to showcase. As expected, some of the show's biggest themes focused on the Internet of Things, the mobile cloud, Big Data, 4G LTE and wearable devices... After speaking to a cross-section of service providers, it became clear that many operators are already starting to leverage their investment in existing 4G LTE infrastructure... more
Google co-founder Larry Page came to Washington last week to take on the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), the lobbying group that represents over-the-air television stations. It's a whole new adversary for the beleaguered broadcasters, who have been fighting cable and satellite television for years. The Federal Communications Commission is currently considering a proposal, by Google and other tech players. It would allow tech companies to build electronic devices that transmit wireless internet signals over the "white spaces," or the vacant holes in the broadcast television band. "We have an ambitious goal called pervasive connectivity through ubiquitous broadband networks," said Page... more
In the February 13th edition of the Wall Street Journal, Professor Thomas W. Hazlett offers a breathless endorsement of market concentration with the T-Mobile acquisition of Sprint, his go-to example. Apparently, mergers and acquisitions benefit consumers because they enhance competition and generate all sorts of positive outcomes that could not possibly have occurred but for the reduction in the number of industry players. more
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