President Obama began working on Cuban rapprochement during his 2009 presidential campaign. After over five years of thought and negotiation, the Whitehouse announced a major shift in Cuba policy, which included allowing telecommunications providers "to establish the necessary mechanisms, including infrastructure, in Cuba to provide commercial telecommunications and Internet services, which will improve telecommunications between the United States and Cuba." more
Here are my opening remarks at F2C: Freedom to Connect yesterday: "I am honored to be among so many remarkable people. We have to be remarkable people, because we have a hell of a job to do. The Internet has been given to us. It is a miraculous gift, and a boon to our lives... at least in part because it accidentally matured outside the purview of profit and loss. Now the money has arrived. If you want to see what happens when the money arrives, look at Nigeria or Venezuela or Russia or Iraq..." more
There are a number of stimuli which are pushing Canada's burgeoning FttH market, and the government and telcos alike have made significant steps to improve the reach and capacity of broadband infrastructure. These measures will show real benefits for consumers in recent years. From the government's side, its Economic Action Plan, launched in 2009 as a response to the global financial crisis, included a pledge to provide $225 million over three years towards its Broadband Canada Program, geared to extending broadband coverage to underserved communities. more
Back in 1999 I wrote a column that envisioned the uses of digital wireless in the home. I compared two nascent, much-touted wireless protocols, Bluetooth and HomeRF. I completely, totally, slippery-dash missed Wi-Fi. There had been a public 802.11 spec since 1997. The first 802.11b devices, which made Wi-Fi popular, burst onto the scene in early 2000, just a few short months after my clueless insights. Today HomeRF is forgotten, Bluetooth is for ugly ear jewelry and Wi-Fi rulz... more
Since its founding, Amazon has reinvested profit in building infrastructure. They began with retail sales and distribution infrastructure and later added Amazon Web Services (AWS), providing data center and hosting infrastructure. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also established Blue Origin, a company to provide satellite launch service and eventually to support space travel. Last year Amazon filed an application for a 3,236-satellite constellation of low-earth orbit Internet service satellites - Project Kuiper. more
A colleague sent me a story by Cecilia Kang in the Washington Post: Survey finds gap in Internet access between rich, poor students. With my interest in programs to get connected computers into low income households, my friend knew I would be interested in the article which talks about a survey released Thursday by the Pew Research Center. Indeed, I would commend the Washington Post article and the survey itself to you for reading. I want to highlight the problem representing the survey results in the Washington Post. more
John McCain has introduced a new legislation at the US Senate, which is called Internet Freedom Act... I agree with the statement about the governmental control and regulation -- we've done exactly this in Bulgaria, and the results are stunning (for the US user): today Bulgaria ranks No. 1 among the EU in number of users per capita who are connected to the Internet at speeds above 100 Mbps (in the US, the typical connection speed is 3 Mpbs), or 30 times faster than the US, and in many cases, people are connected via fiber, at 1000 Mbps, or 300 times faster. more
A striking trend revealed in a report to be released next week by the Web Foundation, an organization set up by the inventor of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, indicates that the rate at which the world is getting online has fallen sharply since 2015. more
Should Google's provision of information services be regulated? Yes, if the decision is based on Google's own standards for determining whether to regulate tele-information companies. In recent comments to the FCC, Google described "broadband openness" rules, aka net neutrality, as a "fundamental necessity." Without such rules, the search engine giant, aka Big Search, fears that broadband providers would "promote only their own pecuniary interests over the far broader interests of Internet users..." As the Wall Street Journal noted last year, however, Google engages in the same type of discriminatory service practices they want the federal government to prohibit... more
One of the most interesting outcomes of the COVID-19 crisis has been a huge resurgence of telephone calls. While broadband usage is up 40% or more in some markets, the volumes of traditional voice calls have skyrocketed. Verizon says it's now seeing an average of 800 million calls per day, which is double the number of calls made on the last Mother's Day. Verizon also says the average length of calls has increased by one-third over recent averages. more
Late last year I participated in the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT-2012) in Dubai, organised by the UN agency the ITU. I reported extensively on that event, which was aimed at updating the International Telecommunications Regulations... From the outset there were several reasons WCIT might fail, not the least of which was the fact that the various technological, political and regulatory issues facing the new much broader telecoms environment were not sufficiently separated and so could not be addressed in a rational and systematic manner. more
NBC soon will join the ranks of content providers offering a streaming option to cord cutters and mobile consumers. This future service warrants special attention, because two corporate affiliates within the Comcast family will participate in many parts of the United States: Comcast as the last mile, "retail" ISP and Comcast the parent of NBC-Universal. Operating as an ISP, Comcast has at least three pricing/interconnection options, each of which raise questions relating to network neutrality... more
On Friday, the decision to deregulate "special access" circuits was upheld. The case had been brought by the Ad Hoc Committee, a long standing body of large business users, one of the main categories of buyers of high capacity leased lines to interconnect business premises. more
I cringe whenever I hear the arguments that we can't have community owned infrastructure for connectivity because local governments can't fix potholes. I wouldn't mind it so much if that argument wasn't used to shut off further discussion. We should be asking why we are denied the "dumb-pipes" that provide vital infrastructure and why we allow phone (and TV) companies to horde vital infrastructure. Instead we accept the "pothole" argument as a reason we can't be trusted to communicate on our own. more
Well if you've been following tech news today, you probably already know -- after month (years, really) of work, the MeasurementLab.net (M-Lab) initiative has now officially launched. Given how many people have been working on this project, I'm amazed it didn't leak. Having just launched, I've been stunned by the immediate outpouring of interest — not only did it peg our servers, taking a couple of the research tools momentarily offline, but my inbox has been entirely flooded by correspondences. more
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