October 2010

Schulzrinne Joins FCC as Engineering Fellow

Henning Schulzrinne Ph.D. has joined the Federal Communications Commission as a distinguished Engineering Fellow. Dr. Schulzrinne will provide leadership and valuable insight working collaboratively on important technical issues related to cybersecurity, public alerts and warnings, 9-1-1 services and public safety broadband communications.

Dr. Schulzrinne most recently served as the Chair of the Department of Computer Science and as a faculty member of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University, New York. He holds the distinction as a Julian Clarence Levi Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University.

Among the many prestigious positions he's held over the years, Dr. Schulzrinne served as a member of the Board of Governors of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Communications Society, as chair of the IEEE Communications Society Technical Committees on Computer Communications and the Internet, member of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), and as technical program chair of a number of conferences. He continues to serve on a number of conference and journal steering committees, including for the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and ACM SIGCOMM. Dr. Schulzrinne, who has published more than 200 journal and conference papers during his professional and academic career, earned his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Massachusetts. He received his undergraduate degree in economics and electrical engineering from the Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany, and his MSEE degree as a Fulbright scholar from the University of Cincinnati, Ohio.

Congress to investigate wireless industry

House Domestic Policy Subcommittee Chairman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) says he will probe the debt-collection practices of major wireless companies. The concern is that wireless contracts force customers to waive the right to sue, appeal or participate in class-action lawsuits. The development broadens a subcommittee investigation so that it also covers mobile providers. The subcommittee issued a report last year arguing that banks were misusing forced arbitration processes to collect consumer credit-card debts. In forced arbitration, a company requires a consumer to consent to resolving any dispute outside of court. Most wireless service providers have forced their customers to settle disputes through this process.

Internet provider asks feds to suspend West Virginia BTOP grant

The head of Internet provider Citynet is asking the federal government to suspend funding stimulus grant to expand broadband in West Virginia.

Citynet President Jim Martin sent a letter last week to the federal authorities overseeing the $126.4 million stimulus grant. In the letter to Earl Devaney, chairman of the Recovery and Transparency Board, and National telecommunications and Information Administration head Lawrence Strickling, Martin wrote that little will be done with the federal funds to increase the availability of "adequate and competitively priced high-speed Internet" in West Virginia.

FCC Chair Hoping For Retransmission Deals

The Federal Communications Commission is in talks with parties involved in ongoing retransmission consent negotiations -- that would include prominently Fox and Cablevision -- and that hopes the two sides would come to an agreement. The deadline for the Fox/Cablevision deal is Oct. 15. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said he's concerned about the impact on consumers of those impasses and that the FCC continued to "push for greater information and notice" of potential programming disruptions.

Retransmission Reform Advocates Call for Government to Step in

As the Oct. 15 deadline for a Fox/Cablevision deadline approached, groups pushing for retransmission reform weighed in with calls for the government to step in.

Public Knowledge called for at least keeping the programming on the air during negotiations while the parties "consider the use of arbitration." Public Knowledge was part of a group of petitioners that included cable operators, satellite operators and others calling on the FCC to mandate standstill agreements to keep programming on the air, and outside arbitration to help resolve the disputes. PK also sought "transparency for all retransmission consent contracts, and a requirement that retransmission consent licenses be on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms." "Now, New York area viewers may not see their Yankees in the American League playoffs, or the New York Giants play regular season games, if Cablevision doesn't reach agreements with three New York channels by tomorrow (Oct. 15)," said Public Knowledge's Gigi Sohn, adding that it could "also affect the Phillies in the National League Championship series."

Fress Press, another group that has argued the retrans marketplace is broken, weighed in at the FCC in an letter to Chairman Julius Genachowski. Free Press said that while it takes no position on the merits of those disputes, "to the extent that these situations inject uncertainty or result in the pulling of programming that consumers have paid for and expect to receive, the Commission must intervene to protect the public." Free press took the opportunity to push for arbitration as well mandatory break-outs of per-channel pricing, including retrans costs for TV station signals, and as a la carte.

Mobile phones help lift poor out of poverty: UN study

Mobile phones -- spreading faster than any other information technology -- can improve the livelihoods of the poorest people in developing countries, a United Nations report finds. But governments must design responsive policies to ensure that the benefits reach the broadest number in the most effective way, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development said in its Information Economy Report. Mobile phone subscriptions will reach five billion this year -- almost one per person on the planet, UNCTAD Secretary-General Supachai Panitchpakdi told a news conference on the report. Penetration in developed countries is over 100 percent, with many people having more than one phone or subscription. In developing countries, the subscription rate is now 58 per 100 people, and rising rapidly, with the rate in the poorest Least Developed Countries (LDCs) up at 25 from only 2 per 100 a few years ago, UNCTAD figures show.

Telecom Community Gathers For Public Knowledge Awards

Technology and telecommunications professionals gathered on Capitol Hill for the seventh annual Public Knowledge IP3 awards ceremony. The IP3 awards recognize individuals who have advanced the public interest in information policy, Internet protocol and Internet Policy.

Pamela Samuelson, professor at UC Berkeley's Law School and School of Information, took home the Information Policy prize. Renowned Cardozo law professor Susan Crawford received the honor for Internet Protocol. Canadian professor Michael Geist and New York filmmaker Nina Paley were honored for their work in intellectual property.

ISPs At Loss To Combat Internet Piracy

Do you know who's using your home network? More importantly, do the Internet service providers?

According to Mintel, nearly three-quarters of American consumers say they have Internet access at home, though only 56% say they subscribe to a home Internet service. That data suggest as many as 16% of WiFi users are piggybacking on their neighbors' connections, using a mobile connection or hotspot from a wireless provider or simply don't know where their Internet connection comes from. "One sixth of the Internet-at-home population isn't paying for it," Billy Hulkower, senior analyst at Mintel, tells Marketing Daily. He added that home Internet penetration barely moved between 2006 and 2009 despite the rise of Internet sites such as Facebook, Pandora and YouTube. The data suggest that people are using different methods to access the Internet "even if they haven't paid for access themselves." Younger and more affluent consumers are more likely to pirate WiFi service, with 20% of survey respondents from households with incomes higher than $75,000 saying they access the Internet from home but don't have a subscription.

For Bloggers it's the Two E's -- Election and Economy

The top stories in the blogosphere are often an eclectic mix of topics from technology and pop culture to science and war. But last week, with the 2010 midterm elections looming, each of the top five subjects focused on the election or a closely related subject-the economic issues helping define the campaign.

For the week of October 4-8, two of the top five stories on blogs were connected directly to the election according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. Last week, 17% of the links in blogs highlighted two stories about the 2010 campaign. One was an October 4 Washington Post piece about interest groups spending far more in this election cycle than in the 2008 campaign. The other was an October 5 Post story about how the political landscape remains strongly tilted toward Republicans. Another 11% of the links concerned a major force in the 2010 political landscape-the tea parties. The debate was generated by Senator Sherrod Brown's (D-OH) op-ed in the October 3 USA Today arguing that tea party populism is driven by anger at the government and divides the country, and is therefore not real populism, which fights for all Americans.

The Verizon Wireless Data Rip Off -- A Case Study

For several years now, without unilateral amends by the company, or intervention by the Federal Communications Commission, Verizon Wireless, has profited handsomely when subscribers push a wrong button on their handsets and unintentionally access the Internet.

15 million subscribers initiated data sessions generating over $90 million in revenues for Verizon. The revenue number is so high, because many handsets offer one button Internet access and even a few seconds of access generated a $1.99 fee as data users, lacking a monthly plan, trigger a per Megabyte fee regardless of whether only a few bytes got transmitted. What I find remarkable about this rip off is the "mystery" of how the charges rose to $90 million without either the company or the FCC doing something about it. Might Verizon have grown to assume such revenues would contribute to "making its numbers"? Might the FCC get all too easily persuaded that Verizon Wireless eventually would do the right thing?

Benton

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