May 2014

White House ‘strongly supports’ NSA bill

The White House is putting its support behind legislation to end some of the country’s most controversial surveillance programs. Ahead of the House vote on the USA Freedom Act, the White House said that it “strongly supports” the bill, which would “provide the public greater confidence in our programs and the checks and balances in the system.”

“The bill ensures our intelligence and law enforcement professionals have the authorities they need to protect the nation, while further ensuring that individuals’ privacy is appropriately protected when these authorities are employed,” the White House added.

The legislation, written by Patriot Act author Rep Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), would effectively end the National Security Agency’s bulk collection and storage of records about Americans’ phone calls. Instead, private phone companies would keep that data and hand it over to government agents who had obtained a court order.

AT&T's Stephens: Local permitting efficiencies could drive more FTTH deployments

AT&T is feeling encouraged by its initial rollout of its 1 Gbps fiber-based broadband service and a more favorable permitting process from local communities.

AT&T CFO John Stephens told investors that these factors are making it more bullish about the opportunity to potentially extend service into new markets outside of Austin (TX). Like other telecommunications companies, AT&T needs to get permitting approval from local communities to get access to necessary rights of way (ROWs) along public streets and utility poles to lay fiber and install related network electronics.

"In Austin, we were able to do a success-based build with some of the new streamlined permitting, right of way easement processes," Stephens said. "What we have seen is great adoption by our customers of high-speed products, strong customer satisfaction scores and appreciation for the product."

The early success and acceptance of the Gigapower service in Austin combined with its ongoing U-verse broadband expansion efforts has driven the telco to consider deploying FTTH in other markets.

Patent Troll Bill Shelved Over Industry Fighting

Tech industry hopes of a solution to the problem of patent trolls became more elusive when lawmakers gave up on patent legislation after being unable to reach a compromise on some details.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT), announced he’s pulling the patent troll legislation for the foreseeable future because of an inability to resolve some outstanding issues.

“Unfortunately, there has been no agreement on how to combat the scourge of patent trolls on our economy without burdening the companies and universities who rely on the patent system every day to protect their inventions,” Sen Leahy said.

Disagreement between tech companies and universities over “fee shifting,” or who pays the legal fees when patent troll lawsuits fail, has been a stumbling block for lawmakers.

Why the AT&T-DirecTV Deal Is the Dumbest, Most Wasteful Deal Ever (at Least Since Comcast–Time Warner Cable)

[Commentary] AT&T just announced that it is buying DirecTV, the nation’s top satellite-TV company, for a total transaction value of $67.1 billion (that’s $48.5 billion in cash and equity, plus $18.6 billion in debt).

For this kingly sum AT&T gets a satellite-only company with declining profits and no physical assets located here on planet Earth. This is by far the dumbest, most wasteful deal ever. (Well, at least since Comcast announced its plans to buy Time Warner Cable.)

These two takeovers are a perfect illustration of everything that’s wrong with America’s telecommunications market. Case in point: For the total price of these two mega-deals, $67 billion, AT&T and Comcast could collectively deploy super-fast gigabit-fiber broadband service to every single home in America.

AT&T: Dish Would Have Posed Regulatory Problems

AT&T chief financial officer John Stephens answered a question that has been on many investors’ minds in the past few days, saying that regulators would have had difficulty approving a deal for Dish.

Stephens said while DirecTV’s was still the carrier’s first choice, Dish’s spectrum would have made it more difficult to obtain regulatory approval. “Dish has been very loud about their intentions to get into broadband,” Stephens said. “From a regulatory perspective, bringing a company that either is or intends to be in broadband with another broadband company would be likely to raise additional regulatory scrutiny.”

AT&T exec: We'll be adding 1,500 to 3,000 cell sites per year for 'foreseeable future'

AT&T Mobility will likely be adding between 1,500 and 3,000 macro cell sites to its network per year for the next few years as part of a wide-ranging effort to beef up its network and improve coverage and capacity, according to a senior AT&T executive.

Bill Smith, president of AT&T network operations, said the carrier would be adding that many sites to its network per year "for the foreseeable future." That will likely happen in parallel with AT&T's deployment of new spectrum bands for LTE service, such as the 2.3 GHz WCS band or AWS-3 band, which the Federal Communications Commission will be auctioning later in 2014.

Marc Andreessen: In 20 years, we’ll talk about Bitcoin like we talk about the Internet today

A Q&A with Marc Andreessen, cofounder of Netscape. The investor and Web browser pioneer thinks we'll all look back in 20 years and conclude that Bitcoin was as influential a platform for innovation as the Internet itself was.

He says that tech companies think their meetings with President Barack Obama on privacy are a waste of time. And he calls net neutrality a "lose-lose."

In a wide-ranging interview with The Washington Post, Andreessen painted a picture of a future that's distributed, messy and fraught with tension and the “balkanization of the Internet.” He added that Bitcoin originally came from the fringes, but is being mainstreamed today. And regulators are still trying to catalog it. “You've got people at the Federal Reserve, and the Treasury Department and IRS that are figuring it out,” he said.

Experts: Consumers have to protect themselves online

In an increasingly dicey web environment, consumers need take a more active role in protecting themselves. Maintaining good password hygiene is a good example.

Too many consumers have easy-to-crack passwords and far too many use the same passwords over and over again on different sites. If you know you're not going to do this, get a password management program to do it for you.

Most importantly, users need to realize that the web isn't the leafy green suburb it once was. Gangs have moved in and there are a lot more dangerous streets. It's not a war zone, but you've got to keep your wits about you and take responsibility for your own safety.

"Hackers today are not just two guys in a dorm room who are trying to goof on you. They're well-funded, well-organized criminal organizations whose intent is financial gain," said Michael Malloy, vice president for products and strategy at Webroot, an antivirus and security company in Broomfield (CO). And avoid dubious websites like porn and gaming. Out on the web, "there are good neighborhoods and there are bad neighborhoods," said Malloy.

TV Audience Only Partially Attentive To Ads

An explosion of marketers' messaging from TV, radio and online platforms doesn’t necessarily mean they receive full -- or even half of -- consumers' attention for those advertisements.

For example, of the 160 TV commercials each person is exposed to on a daily basis -- 75 minutes in total when considering the five hours a day spent watching TV content -- only 30%, or 23 minutes a day, gets “full attention” for those ads.

This comes from a recent analysis from Media Dynamics, a media research consultancy. Ed Papazian, president of Media Dynamics, says that 50% to 60% of the audience is only partially attentive when a commercial appears on the screen. Papazian says his estimates come from a number of third-party researchers, such as Simmons and MRI, as well as other studies.

Papazian tells Media Daily News: “The main point is that far from being bombarded with ads, as many seem to believe, most consumers are perfectly capable of controlling their intake of unwanted advertiser sales pitches by zapping the ads, by absenting themselves -- in the case of TV -- or by simply not paying attention.”

Feds Could Save $20 Billion with Better It Infrastructure Initiatives, Study Finds

Perhaps data center consolidation, virtualization, cloud computing, remote access and infrastructure diversification aren’t the sexiest terms in the federal repertoire, but they do hold the keys to as much as $20 billion in annual savings, according to a study by Meritalk.

The study, underwritten by Brocade, is based on survey results from 300 federal network managers who estimate that if the government were to fully leverage all five initiatives, it could save about 24 percent of the government’s $80 billion information technology budget.

The survey’s results sound promising, but there’s a caveat: Two-thirds of the surveyed network managers reported their networks are ill-equipped to meet current mission needs, and much further away from being able to fully embrace newer tech initiatives like cloud computing. If network managers could magically flip a switch and significantly increase network speed by approximately 26 percent, the survey claims the government could cash in $11 billion in savings in one year.

Benton

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