June 2010

FCC looks for valley support of broadband plan

Hoping to enlist Silicon Valley in the upcoming battle in Washington over whether the Federal Communications Commission can spark the creation of a national broadband system, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said Wednesday at Stanford University that the future health of the nation's democracy is at stake if a few "gatekeepers" control access to the Internet.

In a strongly worded talk preceding meetings with executives at Google and Apple, Commissioner Copps told members of the Churchill Club, a Silicon Valley business and technology forum, that the building of a national broadband system is like the canals, railroads, interstate highways and telephone and electrical systems built by earlier generations. "Increasingly, our national conversation — our news and information, our knowledge of one another — will depend on the Internet," said Commissioner Copps, who called a national high-speed Internet system linking most homes and businesses "America's great enabler" of job creation, education and solutions to problems like global warming.

In other remarks, Commissioner Copps said the FCC has a growing interest in the quality of journalism, hinting that he would support some sort of public subsidy for the beleaguered news business. Citing statistics showing a 50 percent decline in the newsgathering capacity of broadcast television, and a 30 percent decline in the newsgathering capacity of newspapers, Copps said, "new media has not found a model to replicate online what has been lost offline." "We don't have a model to support the level and the kind of journalism our democracy requires," he said, citing data that 95 percent of original newsgathering is done by newspapers or broadcast television, including much of the content available online. "This is one of the biggest problems the country faces right now."

Proposed Third Quarter 2010 Universal Service Contribution Factor

Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC) submitted projections of demand and administrative expenses for the third quarter of 2010. USAC estimates 3rd quarter interstate and international end-user telecommunications revenues at $17.575565 billion. To determine the quarterly contribution base, the FCC decreases the third quarter 2010 estimate of projected collected interstate and international end-user telecommunications revenues by the projected revenue requirement to account for circularity, and decreases the result by one percent to account for uncollectible contributions. Accordingly, the quarterly contribution base for the third quarter of 2010 is $15.340788 billion. The proposed contribution factor for the third quarter of 2010 is 13.6%.

FCC Set To Brainstorm Spectrum Ideas

On June 25, the Federal Communications Commission will convene a discussion on possibly freeing up spectrum currently reserved for television broadcasts for wireless broadband.

"We are looking to gather information that will help us make better use of the frequencies now allocated for television, both for provision of television service to consumers and as we look at the possibility of recovering some of those frequencies," said Alan Stillwell, deputy chief of the FCC's Office of Engineering and Technology, who is organizing the forum along with Rebecca Hanson of the Media Bureau. In the National Broadband Plan released in March, the FCC proposed shifting 120 MHz from broadcast to broadband by repacking stations more closely together and by coaxing some stations to share channels. The 120 MHz accounts for about a third of the broadcast TV band. Stations that agreed to share channels would be rewarded with some of the proceeds from the eventual auction of the freed-up broadcast spectrum to wireless broadband operators. Although leading TV engineers have accepted the FCC invitations to the forum, they may be more interested in instructing the FCC on why they want to keep their spectrum than in helping the agency devise ways of reallocating it.

Edward Lazarus Compares Electricity Expansion to Broadband

Edward Lazarus, Chief of Staff for the Federal Communications Commission, delivered a keynote at the Pike and Fischer Broadband Policy Summit.

Using electricity as an analogous system to broadband, he spoke about the need for government action to expand adoption and availability. Lazarus invoked the creation of the Rural Electrification Agency as a possible model for the expansion of broadband. Broadband like electricity requires large amounts of investment and large scale adoption prior to becoming a useful service. Lazarus compared the initial hesitancy of the farmers to use electricity to today's hesitancy to accept rural broadband. Farmers who initially had electricity, did not use it to its full potential, and thus because they saw the cost of it without realizing the benefits, they were unwilling to support it. The successful fusion of the private sector and government is what caused the spread of electricity. Many applications for electricity invented by the private sector not only made life easier for farmers, but also fostered the invention of new technology like the assembly line.

Industry Advisory Group Isn't Substitute for the FCC

[Commentary] It only took a couple of months, but the telecom industry, with some other chosen companies, established a technical playpen that could have far-reaching implications for Internet policy. The new Technical Advisory Group (TAG) announced June 9 starts with a core group led by AT&T, Verizon and Comcast. Google and DISH Networks are members. But there are no consumer or public interest representatives in the original cast.

While having technical experts talk to each other about technical has been a standard way of doing business for decades, the main concern over this TAG is what role it will play in the highly charged world of Internet practices and policy. It depends to whom one speaks. Dale Hatfield, the group's "facilitator," was quoted in the original announcement as saying, "The TAG will function as a neutral, expert technical forum and promote a greater consensus around technical practices within the Internet community." That's fine and as it should be. Others had a different interpretation. Randy May from the Free State Foundation and Tom Lenard from the Technology Policy Institute, each were quoted as saying the TAG is a step toward industry self-regulation, with May going to far as to say the group was a reason for the Federal Communications Commission to "ditch the reclassification" of broadband telecommunications services.

The reclassification exercise is built around the need to redirect universal service funds, to allow the FCC to deal with privacy, cybersecurity and other issues they will not be able to deal with absent the proper legal authority. The TAG — You're IT group will deal with none of those and heaven knows they need to be dealt with.

OECD Broadband Stats -- USA ranks 15th in Penetration

The OECD has released new statistics on broadband penetration in OECD countries as of December 2009. These include the number of broadband subscribers per country, broadband subscriptions by technology and the percentage of fibre connection in total broadband.

There were 283 million broadband subscriptions in OECD in December 2009 with the inclusion of Chile as a member of the OECD. The average penetration rate across the OECD has grown to 23.3 subscriptions per 100 inhabitants up from 22.8 in June 2009. Fiber continues its growth relative to other broadband technologies with fibre accounting for half of all broadband connections in Japan (54%) and Korea (49%). Other leading countries include the Slovak Republic (28%) and Sweden (23%). DSL is still the dominant technology in the OECD, accounting for 60% of all lines. Cable makes up 29% and fibre based connections have grown to 11% of all lines.

States roll out ONC-approved IT plans

Maryland, New Mexico and Utah have received the green light from Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology to move forward with a plan to implement a functioning health information technology exchange. The three states are working to streamline the transfer of electronic health data among hospitals, physicians and patients through these exchanges.

Nobody Wants to Pay Taxes to Save Newspapers, and Why Should They?

The newspaper industry is almost, but not quite, running like a headless chicken in the last throes of life thanks to the digital revolution. Can it be supported by extra taxes? Should it be?

Regardless of your answer, a new survey shows that nobody wants to pay the tax anyway. A national telephone survey by Rasmussen Reports has a staggeringly bold statistic to support this fact: Of 1,000 adults surveyed over two days this week, 84% of respondents oppose imposing a 3% tax on cell phone calls to provide a fund to prop up the newspaper business and "traditional" journalism. 76% of people opposed a 5% tax on computers, including devices like iPads and Kindles for the same purpose, and 74% opposed a tax on news Web aggregators to help support the "traditional" news services they draw their stories from. A full 71% of respondees opposed the idea of creating a tax-funded program to hire and support young reporters to work in nationwide newspapers, and only 14% of those surveyed supported the notion. Instead of taxing the public (the news consumers, remember!) to save an old industry, perhaps the FTC's efforts are better spent helping the industry grasp the amazing opportunities the digital revolution offers, taking all the core values and energy of "traditional" journalism into the new medium. Check out this fascinating effort by the Journal Register Company, reported by Niemen Labs, to try to revolutionize its business. Taking a leaf out of uber-high-tech Google's book it's creating a limited-place "ideaLab" program where journalists would have 25% of their time freed up to experiment with new media's hottest tools to try to create ideas for future JRC news publication. As the JRC's CEO John Paton notes, journalists were once famed for being revolutionary, rule-challenging, anarchic, and innovative ... hence the current trend to "support" the status quo by taxation is actually rather shocking.

The Anti-Web Movement Is Gathering Pace

It's created billions in sales, gave media companies their first taste of the Internet, encouraged self-expression where there was oppression and caused an explosion in publisher plurality. But, after 15 years as the net's publishing platform of choice, a movement is growing that wants to put the web back in its box.

Blame the "app". With little prior culture of mobile web consumption, publishers have barely given their HTML efforts five minutes in the sun before preferring to code snazzy, custom, closed interfaces instead in the likes of Xcode and Objective-C, in iPhone's case. After the desktop OS and browser wars of the late 90s settled down in to uniform web standards, many of us had thought the web, which runs through my veins, would become the mobile platform of choice in the same way. But, the rise of the revenue-making app store sales channel has coincided with publishers' realization that, if there are precious few ways of monetizing content on the desktop web, then little would be different on the handset or tablet flavor. Many publishers now seem frustrated with the lack of profit and the loss of character that comes with formulaic, template-driven pages. It's the first big challenge to the web orthodoxy we have enjoyed for nearly two decades.

Huawei's Brave New World

A Q&A with Kevin Zhang, vice president of global marketing at Huawei Technologies. Many people outside of China haven't heard of Huawei . But the Chinese telecom equipment vendor has been gaining on its European and U.S. rivals, including Ericsson, Nokia Siemens and Alcatel-Lucent, with its pricing advantage as well as its technology.

Benton

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