Telecom

A History of Disruptors: Or How the U.S. Government Saved the Internet from the Telcos

Kenji Kushida is a scholar at Stanford University, who has written a most explanatory overview of how America came to dominate cyberspace, through computer companies. He traces the evolution of the Internet to a series of actions taken by the US government to limit the power of the telephone companies. Kushida looks at the USA, Europe and Japan from the perspective of what happened when telephone monopolies were broken up and competition introduced in the 1990s. more

Software Has Already Eaten Telecoms (It Just Has Indigestion)

The unconscious and near-universal belief is that packet networks are a telecoms service, and one that constructs an 'additive' resource called 'bandwidth'. This is demonstrably technically false. They deliver distributed computing services, as they calculate how to divide up an underlying telecoms transmission resource. The ubiquitous error is a failure to recognise that the hardware platform has already been devoured by the software industry. more

Supreme Court Delivers One-Two Punch to Agency Power

At the end of its 2024 term, the Supreme Court made two landmark rulings that limit federal agencies' regulatory powers. Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo curtails their ability to create new regulations, while SEC v. Jarkesy reduces their capacity to enforce existing laws. These decisions significantly weaken agencies like the FCC in regulating sectors of the national economy, marking a substantial shift in administrative authority. more

ICANN CEO Urges African Telcos to Shatter Monopolies

ICANN CEO, Rod Beckstrom, urges African leaders to "shatter" telecommunications monopolies in their nations in order to help lower the price of Internet access to their citizens during his opening remarks at the start of the 37th ICANN meeting in Nairobi, Kenya. Beckstrom noted that while 15 percent of the world's population lives in Africa, Africans make up less than 7 percent of all Internet users. more

Stimulus Driving Optical Developments

FttH networks had begun to arrive well before the financial crisis hit, but surprisingly it is the crisis itself that is now driving fibre beyond its first stage. This first stage was basically a continuation of the 100-year-old vertically-integrated telephone business model. This saw more of the same delivered at higher speeds and higher costs, and there was only a limited market that was willing to pay a premium for such a FttH service... more

Major New Funding Opportunities for Internet Researchers and R&E Networks

Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Action (NAMA) is a new policy program that was developed at the Bali United Nations Climate Change Conference. As opposed to the much maligned programs like CDM and other initiatives NAMA refers to a set of policies and actions that developed and developing countries undertake as part of a commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Also unlike CDM, NAMA recipients are not restricted to developing countries. more

Carrier Hotels: The Unsung Critical Part of Broadband Connectivity

Today's blog talks about a critical part of the broadband network that most people don't know about -- carrier hotels. These are locations that have been created for the specific purpose of allowing carriers to connect to each other. The need for carrier hotels became apparent in the year after the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. That new law allowed local competition for telephone service. more

The 500M Wireless-Only Connections

Around 500M Africans, Indonesians, and Indians are regular Internet users without a landline. Brazil, Indonesia, and Mexico add about 200M more. In total, something like 1B people were wireless-only at the end of Q3 2017. I'm comparing the number of Facebook users (over 250M in India) with the number of landlines (less than 20M in India) for a rough guess at how many are wireless only. In the developed world, 70-90% of all homes have a landline connection... more

From Subscribers to Connections

The global telecoms industry numbers remain impressive: By 2020 there will be 6 billion mobile subscribers -- of which, according to Nokia, 95% will have access to wireless broadband by 2015, and by 2020, there will also be 3 billion fixed broadband subscribers. However the relevance of these numbers will decline. By 2020 there will be 50 billion fixed and mobile connections. more

Free Broadband: The Shape of Things to Come

The UK's broadband market is one of the most competitive in Europe. The DSL network effectively covers the entire country, while the network of the dominant cable provider Virgin Media covers more than half of all households (about 12.6 million homes). Beginning in 2007, Virgin Media expanded the availability of its services not by increasing the footprint of its cable network but by utilising wholesale LLU services... more

Terahertz WiFi

While labs across the world are busy figuring out how to implement the 5G standards, there are scientists already working in the higher frequency spectrum looking to achieve even faster speeds. The frequencies that are just now being explored are labeled as the terahertz range and are at 300 GHz and higher spectrum. This spectrum is the upper ranges of radio spectrum and lies just below ultraviolet light. more

Is Technology the Problem?

We do live in turbulent times. There is such a lot happening, with many people feeling overwhelmed and lost. One of the reasons given why we do have these problems is technology. I would argue against that. In all reality, technology is a tool that we can use, and yes, we all know that we can use it for the wrong reasons (cars kill people, atom bombs, killer robots, chemical and biological warfare and so on). However, we have learned to live with it, and in general, the outcome from science, innovation and technology has been positive. more

T-Mobile Gives Free Unlimited Data for Pokemon Go - Raising Net Neutrality Concerns

T-Mobile announced today that as a part of its "T-Mobile Tuesdays" promotion it will give its customers unlimited data to play Pokemon Go until August 2017. Move called Net Neutrality violation. more

Google Working on Global Network for Cheap Overseas Calls

Google is in talks towards a deal with Hutchison Whampoa, the owner of the mobile operator Three, that will allow Americans to use their phones abroad at no extra cost, industry sources have disclosed. According to reports, the two companies are discussing a wholesale access agreement that would become an important part of Google's planned attempt to shake-up the US mobile market with its own network. more

AI in Telecom

NVIDIA recently issued its third annual State of AI in Telecommunications report. The company manufactures many of the cards used in AI data centers, so the company is clearly focused on AI adoption. NVIDIA issues similar reports for other industries. The 2025 report is the result of a survey that NVIDIA administered to 450 telecom professionals across the globe. more