March 2009

AIG Drives Media Narrative

Last week, the media narrative for a complex economic crisis got much simpler. The coverage focused on one corporate villain and one angry public. With news of the AIG bonuses driving that narrative, the economic crisis generated its highest level of weekly coverage to date. From March 16-22, it filled 53% of the newshole according to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. That not only marks a major increase over the previous week (35% of the newshole). It is the highest level of weekly coverage for any story other than the 2008 presidential campaign since PEJ started its News Coverage Index in January 2007. As further evidence of the week's lopsided news coverage, the No. 2 story, turmoil inside Pakistan, was all the way back at 3% of the newshole. The catalyst for last week's news agenda was the revelation that failing insurance giant AIG—which had received about $180 billion in bailout funds—was paying out $165 million in bonuses. As fallout spread from Capitol Hill to the Connecticut homes of AIG officials, the bonus story accounted for more than half the economic crisis coverage. And the overarching theme was outrage.

Consumer groups, phone companies spar over US broadband stimulus

Phone companies faced off against consumer groups on Monday, in a debate over how $7.2 billion in federal broadband spending should come with a mandate that Internet networks remain open to all traffic. As the government prepares to set rules for doling out the funds, public interest groups say providers vying for money should not discriminate based on content or applications.

"The federal government is not a charity for broadband providers. It is an investor," said Ben Scott, policy director for the consumer group Free Press. Industry has long contended that nondiscrimination and interconnection requirements tie their hands and have argued that they need to be able to manage their network. They also say the requirements would discourage investment.

Free Press defines that nondiscrimination as: "Grant recipients must not provide or sell to Internet content, application, or service providers, any service that privileges, degrades, prioritizes, or discriminates against any lawful content transmitted over the grant recipient's Internet access service. Grant recipients must offer bandwidth for Internet service upon reasonable request, on rates, terms and conditions that are just, reasonable and nondiscriminatory. The nondiscrimination condition should not be construed to prohibit a grant recipient from engaging in reasonable network management consistent with the principle of nondiscrimination."

Privatizing the Public Trust: A Critical Look at Connected Nation

The $350 million broadband mapping program required by the recent stimulus bill would be set back if there is widespread participation in it by a group called Connected Nation, according to a new report issued by Common Cause, the Media and Democracy Coalition, Public Knowledge and Reclaim the Media.

Connected Nation conducts mapping and broadband demand surveys around the country through subsidiary organizations. It started as Connect Kentucky, and has repeatedly told a story of its successes there and around the country in measuring broadband deployment and creating demand for the service. According to the report, "It would be a setback for our broadband policy if Connected Nation were to take a prominent role in broadband mapping and data collection if it continues on its present policy course because the organization does not represent wise public policy and because it distorts its results."

The report argues that Connected Nation's policy restricts the collection and use of information gathered from the telecom companies and other incumbents that make up its board. The report also argues that Connected Nation has overstated its achievements.

The Proper Role for Broadband Mapping When Implementing Fiscal Stimulus

Through public hearings on broadband stimulus, it is starkly apparent that demand for spending broadband stimulus funds far outstrips the $7.2 billion in available funds. These hearings, by the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and Agriculture Department's Rural Utilities Service (RUS), have assembled officials and interested parties to examine and address the gap. The same is true of the realm of broadband data, and in the $350 million allocated to that task by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Consider the competing needs to: Produce meaningful data that support existing law; Align with key metrics that inform the goals and metrics associated with the emerging National Broadband Strategy; and Allocate resources to projects that are expedited, transparent, and accountable.

Part 1 of this article looks at two laws that set the scope of broadband mapping initiatives addressed in section 8 of the joint NTIA and RUS call for comment. The conclusion? The broadband mapping provisions associated with the ARRA are: 1) Narrowly scoped; 2) Ideally suited to visually depict unserved areas; 3) Related directly and exclusively to expanding the scope of S.1492, Section 103(c) as amended; and 4) Potentially misleading and harmful if allowed to drive and dominate the broader need for good-quality broadband data.

Part 2 of this article responds to the questions about the broadband mapping initiative posed in the joint NTIA-RUS call for comment.

Everyone Agrees: Fiber's The Gold Standard

Daily's readers may be a chorus to his sermons in the church of fiber, but he's starting to hear competitors admit fiber's superiority, too. Their arguments against pushing all in on fiber boil down to three points: 1) "Our technology can compete with fiber." 2) "No one needs the capacity of fiber." 3) Fiber's too expensive. Daily counters that no technology has the same capacity as fiber; we need fiber to support UltraHD video applications; if you're building a network from scratch, it's cheaper to lay fiber than copper; over time it's very easy to upgrade the capacity of fiber by simply swapping out the electronics, whereas it's much more expensive and complicated to upgrade copper; fiber's cheaper to operate than copper as it's more reliable; and sure, laying fiber everywhere will be expensive, but so was laying copper everywhere 100 years ago and no one regrets that decision. Finally, fiber is sooo much better in your diet than copper -- ever eat a penny?

Clyburn speaks to Economic Stimulus Summit

House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) hosted an Economic Stimulus Summit on March 21. Much of the summit was a question and answer format on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Bill of 2009, of which Rep Clyburn was a co-sponsor. This consisted of Clyburn aides fielding questions and comments from the participants about procedures and access to stimulus funds in local communities. Rep Clyburn said, "We are not going to enter the twenty first century in rural South Carolina without broadband access." In Bamburg County, where he recently visited, just 55 miles from Columbia, "...I might as well throw away my cell phone and my Blackberry," he said. "Our youth won't get the education they need to be fully competitive, if we do not allow them full access to the Internet." "The Senate took out the $6 billion we had put in for broadband for rural communities, and I jumped on top of the table, when I heard that."

Questions surround health IT money

The U.S. lags behind many other countries in adoption of electronic health records. A report in the New England Journal of Medicine, based on surveys from 2007 and 2008, found that 4 percent of physicians had extensive, fully functional electronic records systems, while 13 percent had more basic systems. The real goal of getting hundreds of thousands of doctors to quit using paper files and join the digital age is for doctors' offices and hospitals to be able to easily share patient information, something the vast majority can't do today. That would cut down on mistaken and unnecessary procedures and give doctors faster access to more accurate information about patients' medical histories and drug regimens. Typically, many systems aren't connected to other physicians or hospitals. Dozens of vendors compete to sell proprietary systems that often cannot communicate with each other. Installation costs are prohibitively expensive for some doctors, particularly those in small practices. Lawmakers and the Obama administration say they are aware of those problems and tried to write the stimulus legislation to address them. The bill envisions new standards to drive development of systems that are better able to communicate, and requires doctors and hospitals to show they're going to be able to put those systems to "meaningful use."

Big companies including General Electric Co. will likely profit from the billions of federal stimulus dollars going to doctors who buy and use electronic health records. But little-known niche players could be among the biggest winners. One such company is eClinicalWorks, a closely held firm in Westborough, Mass. The company, founded a decade ago by computer-programmer Girish Kumar Navani, his cousin and his physician brother-in-law, now has about 750 employees and expects $100 million in revenue this year. In the next few years, the company plans to hire 500 more people, up from 150 before the stimulus bill was approved.

Two for one deal: Telecom can save billions while reducing energy consumption

Putting America and the rest of the world back on economic sound footing could save money and reduce carbon emissions. How could that be? The answer lies in Moore's law. Moore predicted the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double about every two years. That law has held up for more than four decades. That's why laptops, mobile phones and other devices improve in performance while dropping in price. One answer to the current economic troubles is to extend Moore's law and its ability to cut costs and boost performance into new areas. Achieving energy-efficiency by applying communications and information technologies could save $950 billion on energy over the next 12 years, according to a McKinsey & Company analysis in the Smart 2020 report, commissioned by the Global eSustainability Initiative. Those energy savings would reduce carbon emissions by 7.8 billion metric tons. The report foresees a different world, where more people work from home and networked information systems reduce energy usage.

IT Gives Smart Grid Initiatives A Jolt

The federal stimulus bill is giving smart grid initiatives a jump start, allocating about $11 billion for utilities to shift their energy supply networks to digital technology, increasing efficiency and reliability and cutting costs. The bill includes $4.5 billion the Department of Energy will use mostly to provide matching grants to utilities for smart grid development and $6.4 billion that probably will be provided to utilities as loans. Smart grids let utilities better manage the flow of power to homes and businesses, and raise prices when demand is high and lower them during off-peak times. They also give energy customers more information on their energy consumption so they can program high-use electrical appliances like heating and air conditioning systems to reduce consumption at times of peak usage. This technology relies heavily on networks and switches for power management, data collection, communications, and real-time monitoring, as well as building sensors and applications for meter reading and optimizing energy use and distribution. "IT is going to power this whole thing," says Todd Thibodeaux, CEO of CompTIA. "None of this is going to work without software and hardware." The smart grid effort along with other energy initiatives in the stimulus package could create 370,000 jobs, with 85% of the funds going to IT jobs and the remainder going to construction, says Daniel Castro, a senior analyst with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington think tank. Jobs created will span traditional IT professions, including specialized ones to support smart meters, networking protocols, the communication infrastructure, and related networking hardware and infrastructure, Castro says.

Smart Grid is found susceptible to cyberattack

Researchers say malicious code could propagate on next generation Smart Grid devices, which are intended to give customers better control over the electricity they use. Gunter Ollmann responds saying "many people underestimate the advances that have been made in overall system security as we progress towards a Smart Grid infrastructure."

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