November 2012

FCC Details Storm-Related Cellphone Problems

For all of the modern communications that keep people connected, cellphones rely on an age-old technology that has repeatedly demonstrated its own instability during emergencies — electricity. Power systems failures throughout the Northeast have been the main culprits in the shutdown of more than 20 percent of the cell tower sites in 10 states, causing millions of lost calls on Oct 31, government and industry officials said. Slow progress was made in restoring some services. Federal Communications Commission officials said that the percentage of cell tower sites not working in the storm-damaged areas declined “by a few percentage points” as of the morning of Oct 31, down from about 25 percent on Oct 30. Wired broadband and cable television systems remained out of service for “well under 20 percent” of homes in hurricane-affected areas, the FCC said, down from 25 percent on Oct 30. But widespread power outages as well as wind damage and submerged equipment continue to affect users of wireless and wired communications services.

After Sandy, Wired New Yorkers Get Reconnected With Pay Phones

Natural disasters tend to vindicate the public pay phone. With their clunky bodies mounted high and sometimes behind glass stalls, they generally remain serviceable during power outages, even amid flooding. When times get tough, in fact, the biggest challenge is often keeping the devices free of coin overloads.

"Phones that normally do two dollars a day are taking in $50 a day," says Peter Izzo of Van Wagner Communications, one of 13 local pay-phone-operating franchises in New York City. "In times of distress, the people of the city love them." After the storm struck, people under umbrellas waited in line at some pay phones downtown. "During disasters, we sometimes have to empty them every day," says Thomas Keane, chief executive officer of Pacific Telemanagement Services, a pay-phone operator whose New York locations include transit stations, hospitals and police offices. "It takes 300 to 400 calls a day for that to happen."

A Look inside Verizon's Flooded Communications Hub

Eleven years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Verizon Communications is once again scrambling to repair severe damage to a key switching facility inside its historic headquarters building in lower Manhattan.

The massive facility for interconnecting key communications lines sustained heavy damage after planes struck the Twin Towers more than a decade ago. This time the enemy was water shoved ashore by Hurricane Sandy. The building is one of the worst hit of a number of facilities that carriers were rushing to fix Oct 31. The Federal Communications Commission said the number of cellphone tower outages dropped on the second day after the storm made landfall, with just over a fifth of the sites in storm-affected areas in the Northeast offline, down from about a quarter on Oct 30. The depth of the challenges facing telecom providers was on display inside Verizon's facilities in lower Manhattan. The company's headquarters—a key communications hub just north of the World Trade Center site at 140 West Street—was in a state of crisis not seen since the 9/11 attacks, which partially destroyed the building. Mud still covered parts of the ornate lobby. Down below, 3½ floors of the building's five-level basement were still submerged, the brackish water sloshing up the walls of the stairwell. Verizon employees said Monday night's storm surge was so powerful that it breached the protective plugs that surround cables coming into the building. As a result, water flooded the critical basement "cable vault" that takes in communications cables and directs them to switching gear upstairs, which wasn't damaged. On Wednesday, Verizon employees took a reporter inside the vault, illuminating the huge dark room with flashlights. The cables were still damp, and leaves littered the floor.

Hurricane Sandy Broke Only 10 Percent of New York Area’s Internet

Renesys concludes that about 10 percent of the networks in the New York metropolitan area went down, which is really low given the fact that the local electric company, ConEdison, actually cut power to the lower portions of Manhattan, where a lot of those networks are based. It also says something good about the planning of those whose networks stayed up and running, and those who keep the backup generators running and who aren’t getting much sleep. Even so, in the grander scheme of things, it’s still a lot: Renesys compares the impact of the networks that went down to that of an entire country the size of Austria going down. It is something we’ve seen before. Case in point: Egypt.

On Twitter, Sifting Through Falsehoods in Critical Times

During Hurricane Sandy’s peak, Twitter was abuzz with activity, as tens of thousands of people turned to the microblogging service for alerts, updates and real-time reports and photographs of the storm. Trouble is, not all of it was true.

Deliberate falsehoods, including images showing the Statue of Liberty engulfed in ominous clouds and sharks swimming through waterlogged suburban neighborhoods quickly spread through the service, as did word that power would be shut off for the entire city of New York and that the floor of the New York Stock Exchange had been flooded. Twitter says it cannot possibly regulate the millions of messages on its service, and that a bit of misinformation and mischief is to be expected. But in recent years, the service has become an indispensable funnel of information in critical times for many people, especially for those who lose access to power or cable TV. For them, it can be a crucial lifeline. Twitter has also become an invaluable tool for local government, news and relief organizations, which can monitor updates and dispatches from smartphone-wielding citizens. “The limits of Twitter come into play during a situation like a hurricane,” said John Palfrey, co-author of “Born Digital,” an examination of Internet technology’s impact on society. “There’s great power in it, but also great power for deception.”

Analyst: Hurricane Sandy to Cost Ad Industry $500 Million

The storm that hit the Northeast this week -- and with it many companies in the media and ad space -- has prompted the yanking of ads and a slowdown for many U.S. marketers in a key area of the country. In a new report that cites the impact of the hurricane and other economic variables, media-research firm Pivotal Research Group lowered its U.S. ad forecast to a 0.5% decline in the third quarter, a 1.4% decline in the fourth quarter and zero growth for the full year.

Massachusetts Legislators Advise FCC to Mind the Border

Led by Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), members of the Massachusetts congressional delegation have written Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski to advise him to make the incentive auctions transparent to Congress as well as the public, and urged him to make sure that stations along the border with Canada -- which include ones serving Boston and other Massachusetts markets -- are not adversely affected by repacking. "Many of our constituents, especially low-income individuals, Spanish speakers and seniors, are reliant on free, over-the-air programming," they said. They added that cord-cutters are also a constituency that underscores the need to preserve over-the-air signals.

Cable's Social Contract on America and Other Cable Scandals: But Who's Counting?

[Commentary] The last presidential debate has concluded and it is now clear that no party is going to bring competition to broadband, Internet, or phone, much less cable service.

In our last few articles we discussed that America paid over $360 billion for fiber optic networks they will never receive from Verizon, AT&T and CenturyLink, and that there is no real 'Internet freedom' because there is no serious Internet and broadband competition. You have more choices for candy bars or diet beers than there are for Internet and broadband services. But AT&T and Verizon are not the only ones with skin the game. The cable networks are also closed to broadband and Internet competition as well, even though they, too, were able to charge customers for upgrades of the networks. Here's the smoking gun: By the end of 2012, based on an FCC Order known as the "Social Contract", cable customers were charged an additional $54 billion and counting; that's over $1000 per customer, for upgrades of the cable plant. And this is only part of the largesse the cable companies appear to be getting from customers. There's probably another $30-$40 billion that's been charged over the last decade for 'pass-throughs' and made-up fees that have been added to the cost of cable services.

Wanted: A definitive analysis of social media data

The 2012 race is the first to be measured not just in polls but also in tweets, likes, searches and blog posts. In most of the major news events this cycle, cable and television outlets — and online news sources — are quick to jump on the statistics released by social media firms as context for how each campaign did. These types of analyses offer what feels like a quasi-scientific take on the event, but experts are grappling with how valuable it all really is. The hunt is on to establish a Dow Jones for social media or, perhaps, to witness the emergence of a Nate Silver-style savant who can scan the digital whitewater rapid rushing by on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere for the why-it-matters bottom line.

Sec Napolitano warns of cyberattack on utilities

A debilitating cyberattack on power plants or water systems could produce the same sort of rampant outages and widespread disruptions caused by Hurricane Sandy, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano warned.

“If you think a control-system attack that takes down a utility even for a few hours is not serious, just look at what is happening now that Mother Nature has taken out those utilities,” Sec Napolitano said at a Washington Post cybersecurity event, noting the effects in some cases can be “life threatening.” Her remarks are only the latest example of the administration’s efforts to highlight the country’s cybersecurity vulnerabilities. In doing so, federal leaders have emphasized the need to boost the digital defenses of the nation’s critical infrastructure while facilitating the exchange of information between government and the private sector.

Benton

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