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Unfortunately, no matter what else the stimulus bill may or may not have done, it's slowed down the rate of broadband deployment in the US over the last year. The Rural Utility Service (part of the US Agriculture Department) and NTIA (part of the US Commerce Department) have awarded only 15% of the first round money they promised to make available. To be blunt, they failed in their mission. more
Sure the iPhone has problems, but John Stankey of AT&T thinks restoring a $2B capex cut will fix them. It may take a little more money than that, but Glen Campbell of Merrill Lynch has confirmed he's on track. In a 50 page report that's one of the best I've read in years, Merrill destroyed the common belief that wireless has a significant spectrum shortage. more
This is a new development in the VoIP market. This is how one of my colleagues, Cullen Jennings explained it to me. Today we have two widely deployed global identifiers for reaching people. One is delegated address out of DNS and the other is phone numbers. So I consider an address like email: [email protected] or xmpp:[email protected] to roughly be out of the DNS namespace and phone number to be out of the E.164 name space. Phone numbers have lots of parts that are not cool, but they also have some cool parts... more
Former Southwestern Bell CEO, now General Motors CEO Ed Whitacre famously accused Google of free-riding his network, despite the obvious truth that Google pays for traffic delivery to peering points and ISPs gladly enter into reciprocal peering agreements in lieu of cash transactions that would likely result in a near zero payment as roughly equivalent traffic balances out. Mr. Whitacre did raise a legitimate question whether there are free riders and I'm seeing one darling and one unexpected group flying below the radar. more
Over the last few years the increasing amount of discussion about telecoms reveals that the real competition for telecoms companies is not from other telcos, but companies such as Google and others. While I agree with this, obviously it is important to analyse it further. more
The US Congress asked the FCC for a bold plan to achieve the bold vision expressed by the Congress... We discussed this issue in our Big Think group and here are some comments. more
I wrote this in response to some interest in my experience with the reality of FiOS. The short summary is that there is no magic. Sure having Fiber is nice but it isn't that much different than my "cable" service. The bigger difference between Comcast and Verizon is in the nature of the businesses. Comcast is a content company trying to move on to it looks beyond the STB with its purchase of NBCU whereas Verizon seems to want to continue the 1990's vision of the STB as its entrée into the home. more
At Tier1 Research, we hate to call out individuals for wrongdoing, but once in a while, it's absolutely necessary. At the moment, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is in the middle of the rulemaking process for network neutrality, a complex endeavor. While Tier1 is against interference from regulators as a concept, the proposed rulemaking document from the FCC, while vague, is not completely unreasonable... more
VoIP has been banned across most of Africa for a long time, feared by the state-owned telcos as a way for alternative service providers to bypass them with international calls, eroding a very lucrative part of their business. At profit margins of several thousand percent in some cases, it is not surprising that unlicensed operators have sprung up all over the continent, risking huge fines, confiscation of their equipment and even jail terms. more
Multiple reports today indicate that opposition is growing in Europe to plans for three-strikes policies that could lead to the termination of Internet access for some subscribers. In the U.K., protests are mounting over those plans in the recently introduced Digital Economy Bill. The BBC reports that thousands of people have signed a petition urging the government to reconsider its approach, while the Open Rights Group says it has seen a big spike in membership. more
"Outside applications need to be on an equal footing with our own applications," John Donovan said at a SUPERCOMM keynote here in Chicago. "My jaw dropped," one of his colleagues told me a few minutes later, because this is a reversal of AT&T's long-standing position they needed to be able to favor their own applications. AT&T D.C. needs to listen closely to their own CTO, because they are throwing everything they have in D.C. at preventing "non-discrimination" being included in the FCC Net Neutrality regulations. more
The Internet's existence within the regulatory system has been a disastrous failure. Network Neutrality is fine as far as it goes. The problem is that it leaves the current abysmal system in place. On my Economics and Architecture of IP Networks Mail list, Erik Cecil has been deconstructing the regulatory system. Bottom line -- the most significant thing that can be done for the citizens of the internet in the US would be for the FCC to declare the internet protocol to be telecommunications and no longer exempt from regulation. 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
The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University today announced the release of its 232-page study commissioned by the FCC examining global broadband deployment and usage. The draft of the study titled, "Next Generation Connectivity: A review of broadband Internet transitions and policy from around the world," has now been posted for public comment. more
In 2007, Johna Till Johnson, president of Nemertes Research, published a paper that hyped a so-called "Exaflood" - a kooky Discovery Institute idea about how the Internet would drown in its own data. The Nemertes press release on the paper was widely reported in newspapers. It described itself as a "... landmark study ... groundbreaking analysis ... evidence the exaflood is coming... It said: "The findings indicate that by 2010 ... users could increasingly encounter Internet "brownouts" or interruptions to the applications they've become accustomed to using on the internet." more
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