press release

The Federal Communications Commission released the results of its ongoing nationwide performance study of residential broadband service in its fourth “Measuring Broadband America” report.

The report continues the Commission’s efforts towards bringing greater clarity and competition to the home broadband services marketplace. The 2014 report reveals that most broadband providers continue to improve service performance by delivering actual speeds that meet or exceed advertised speeds, but some providers showed significant room for improvement, particularly with respect to consistency of speeds. This report highlights five evolving trends:

• Internet service providers (ISPs) continue to deliver the combined upload/download speeds they advertise, but a new metric in 2014 -- consistency of speeds -- shows there’s still work to be done.
• Download speeds performance varies by service tier, with some ISPs delivering less than 80 percent of advertised speeds.
• Fiber and Cable technologies continue to evolve to higher speed offerings, but DSL is beginning to lag behind.
• Consumers continue to migrate to higher speed tier.
• Upload speeds vary sharply.

Network congestion study:
The study uncovered network congestion at certain interconnection points during the report’s reporting period. Although that data is not included in the findings of the report, the FCC will make this data fully available with the report for the public to review and analyze. The FCC is also taking steps to better understand the issues that presented themselves, including by analyzing network impact on video service providers such as YouTube, Hulu, and Netflix and others and requesting more information from ISPs and video providers about peering issues. We are working to develop tools that measure and validate how these types of congestion issues affect the consumer experience. We expect to have instituted additional testing methodologies providing more information on network congestion and peering by winter 2014.

Seventy-five years ago at the 1939 American Library Association’s Annual Conference in San Francisco, the ALA Council adopted the Library’s Bill of Rights, echoing the spirit of a document from the Des Moines Public Library in 1938.

This document, refreshed in 1944, 1948, 1961, 1967, 1980 and 1996, remains the library profession’s major policy document on intellectual freedom.

All those revisions prove that the Library Bill of Rights is truly a “living document.” In fact, LBOR now has 21 Interpretations. ALA has recognized that it is a document of ideals, but also of practice -- which is why interpretations have been crafted to deal with such specific issues as privacy, children and services to the disabled.

Congressman Steve Stockman (R-TX) asked the National Security Agency to turn over all its metadata on the email accounts of former Internal Revenue Service Exempt Organizations division director Lois Lerner for the period between January 2009 and April 2011.

The request comes just hours after the Internal Revenue Service claimed it “lost” all of Lerner’s emails to or from Lerner and outside agencies or groups during that period, in which she allegedly coordinated with the White House, House Democrats and political groups to harass and deny tax-exempt status to groups critical of the President.

The IRS blames a “computer glitch” for erasing the emails which could have implicated Agency employees in illegal activity.

“I have asked NSA Director Rogers to send me all metadata his agency has collected on Lois Lerner’s email accounts for the period which the House sought records,” said Rep Stockman. “The metadata will establish who Lerner contacted and when, which helps investigators determine the extent of illegal activity by the IRS.”

Internet advertising revenues in the US reached $11.6 billion for the first quarter of 2014, marking a 19 percent increase over the same period in 2013, according to the latest IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report figures by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PwC US.

This is an historic first-quarter high and a significant increase over 2013’s first-quarter revenue level, which was record-setting at $9.6 billion. “Interactive advertising is seeing remarkable gains,” said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO, IAB. “Digital screens are a critical part of the marketing mix and these landmark figures speak to that irrefutable fact.”

These Q1 revenue levels speak to digital’s unique ability to identify the most relevant audience segments and deliver powerful results,” said Sherrill Mane, Senior Vice President, Research, Analytics & Measurement, IAB.

“With consumers increasingly relying on digital screens for everything from information to entertainment, numbers like these should come as no surprise,” said David Silverman, a partner at PwC US. “Interactive clearly offers a unique proposition for marketers and agencies -- an opportunity they are embracing and will likely rely on more in the future.”

The Federal Communications Commission has announced an enhanced review of the new access fees that Internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon have recently demanded from sites and services such as Netflix.

Chairman Tom Wheeler announced at the monthly open meeting that the agency would gather information from ISPs about all such access-fee arrangements, but said the Commission would provide no further guidance or written notice of this inquiry.

Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood made the following statement: "Demanding more transparency from Internet service providers is a step in the right direction. But it's not enough. The FCC also needs to protect Internet users from abuse and arm them with any information it finds in this investigation. By slowing down content from some of their video competitors, phone and cable companies have duped untold numbers of consumers into purchasing faster and pricier tiers of service. But selling users more expensive services won't fix a problem that the ISPs create elsewhere in the network.”

The results of an International Telecommunication Union test event have highlighted the need for phone manufacturers to improve their products’ compatibility with car hands-free systems.

The event found that an overwhelming majority of the phones tested would cause shortfalls in the audio quality of hands-free-supported conversations, a concern that automobile manufacturers say could be resolved through greater cooperation from phone manufacturers.

In a plea to solve a persistent problem, major car manufacturers, including Mercedes and Toyota, with hands-free terminal (HFT) supplier Bosch, have issued a strong call to mobile phone manufacturers to perform standardized tests on the behavior of their products within hands-free systems and to participate in the ITU-T Study Group 12 standardization work that develops interoperability tests.

Serious faults were observed in the worst-performing phones; some causing as much as a three-fold decline in voice quality, others completely failing to acknowledge that they had been connected to a vehicle’s hands-free system. Quality degradation of this extent has led to customer complaints to the car manufacturers, and experts say could give rise to safety risks as it could encourage drivers to use their phone by hand while driving.

According to new research from The Diffusion Group (TDG), despite the widening availability of ‘TV Everywhere’ services, tablet owners are significantly more likely to use over-the-top service apps such as Netflix than those offered by both TV networks and operators.

Almost half (48%) of adult tablet owners report using OTT video apps on occasion, compared with 37% that use broadcast network apps, 31% that use cable network apps, and 23% that use TV operator apps.

The use of tablet apps for both free and fee-based online services is not only more widespread but occurs more frequently than the use of TV-specific apps. For example 41% of tablet users engage OTT service apps at least once a month, compared to 26% who use apps from the ‘Big Four’ broadcasters, 21% that use cable channel apps, and only 16% who turn to TV operator apps at least once a month.

“Some 60% of adult broadband users now own a tablet such as iPad or Kindle Fire,” notes Michael Greeson, TDG President and Director of Research. “These portable platforms are rapidly becoming second televisions in the home, where three-fourths of tablet video viewing takes place. This is consistent with predictions TDG offered the very week the iPad was first introduced.”

Consumers worldwide still consider picture quality, sound quality, price, and ease of use to be most important to their upcoming replacement TV purchase decisions. According to the NPD DisplaySearch 2014 Global TV Replacement Study, picture quality is the most important feature for consumers in mature markets making an upcoming replacement TV purchase, with an importance index of 148.

Sound quality follows closely, with an index of 132 (the index compiles responses rating a driver “important” or “most important”; scores above 100 indicate relatively high importance). Price and ease of use ranked nearly as high as sound quality in mature markets, but in emerging markets having a good warranty or service plan ranked higher than both of those.

The Communications and Technology Subcommittee, chaired by Rep Greg Walden (R-OR), held a hearing to assess the state of media ownership, and the rules that govern it, in the digital age.

Members discussed the Federal Communications Commission’s inaction on the statutorily required 2010 quadrennial review of the media ownership rules, and the commission’s decision to forge ahead with new rules on joint sales agreements (JSAs) and other media ownership changes without the completed quadrennial review.

“Our laws need to reflect the reality of the world we live in today, not the world of the Ford administration,” said Chairman Walden. “As Americans’ habits have changed, so too should the way we look at local media. We live in a competitive landscape where increasingly we cherry-pick articles; we scroll through feeds and aggregators; we have multiple national news programming options, and we DVR almost everything to time-shift the programming we love. It’s a different world, why don’t our media laws reflect these changes?"

David Bank, Managing Director of Global Media Equity Research at RBC Capital Markets, added, “Much is made of the fact that the current regulatory framework for media ownership dates back to 1975. The current regulatory framework was constructed in a media ecosystem that basically didn’t include the Internet. While it may have contemplated a broad PC based Internet consumption environment, it certainly didn’t contemplate a mobile application based ecosystem.”

The Federal Communications Commission has launched a video consumer support service, the ASL Consumer Support Line, specifically designed to enable consumers who are deaf and hard of hearing to engage in a direct video call with a consumer specialist at the FCC.

The service will allow deaf and hard of hearing consumers to communicate in their primary language, American Sign Language (ASL). Until now deaf and hard of hearing consumers only had the option to communicate using relay services or by filing a complaint form online.