June 2014

A law restricting advertising on public television will remain in place after the Supreme Court refused to review a case in which a San Francisco station challenged its Federal Communications Commission fine for airing messages from a bevy of commercial sponsors.

Minority Television Project, the license holder for public television station KMTP-TV in San Francisco, sought to overturn lower court rulings that upheld a 1981 law that restricts public stations from airing ads for commercial products or political candidates.

The station also said that the court should reconsider a 1969 Supreme Court decision that allowed the government to place some restrictions on broadcast content, arguing that the media landscape had changed so much in the last 45 years. It contended that it didn’t make sense that stations had limits on First Amendment protections while other media do not.

Los Angeles school district officials have allowed a group of high schools to choose from among six different laptop computers for their students -- a marked contrast to the 2013 decision to give every pupil an iPad.

Contracts that will come under final review by the Board of Education would authorize the purchase of one of six devices for each of the 27 high schools at a cost not to exceed $40 million.

In the fall, administrators, teachers and students at those schools will test the laptops to determine whether they should be used going forward. What they learn will affect the future of an ongoing effort to provide computers for all students in the nation's second-largest school system.

"The benefit of the new approach is clear," said Los Angeles Unified school board member Monica Ratliff, who chaired a panel that reviewed the technology effort. "Why would we treat all our students -- whether they are a first-grader or a high school freshman -- as if they all had the same technology needs? They don't.... To have a one-device-fits-all approach does not make sense."

Since 2013, Comcast's wireless gateways have by default broadcast a second signal that turns each customer's modem and router into a public Wi-Fi hotspot.

It's all part of Comcast's plan to create a nationwide Wi-Fi network of more than 1 million hotspots that the cable company can sell access to. Routers broadcast public Wi-Fi signals, unless you ask Comcast to turn it off.

Comcast deflected criticism by arguing that the hotspot's bandwidth is separate from the bandwidth subscribers pay for, so it won't reduce the customer's Internet speeds. But what about electricity? Alex Gizis, CEO of Speedify, which makes software that bonds Internet connections to combine bandwidth, decided to investigate.

To test the effect of people using the hotspot, Gizis plugged the Comcast modem and router into a power strip that was being monitored by a "Kill A Watt" meter. After testing the devices while idle, "we then connected two Windows laptops to the Xfinity hotspot, one watching Netflix and the other downloading files," he wrote. "You could immediately see the difference in the power meter, as the devices jumped from 0.14 Amps when idle, up to 0.22 Amps when actually being used. To translate this into dollars and cents, we used the average cost of power here in the Mid-Atlantic, which is $0.162 per KWh."

Comcast spokesperson Joel Shadle told Ars that the Speedify test relied on Comcast's business equipment, rather than the equipment that's used for the residential hotspot program, and that the equipment was outdated.

How soon will AT&T and Verizon, whose revenues once were driven by voice products, find they both generate more fixed network revenue from video and high speed access than from voice?

Answer: AT&T will likely get there sooner than Verizon.

In fact, AT&T might find that voice is just the third most important revenue source, in the consumer fixed network segment, just as soon as it acquires DirecTV. Should AT&T succeed in its bid for DirecTV, video entertainment would possibly reach $37.1 billion, eclipsing even data services -- at about $28.3 billion in annual revenue -- as drivers of AT&T fixed network segment revenues.

After a DirecTV acquisition, voice would be only the trailing third most important revenue source for the fixed network segment. Of $89.7 billion in total revenues, voice would represent 22 percent of fixed segment revenues. Video would represent 41 percent of total fixed network revenues. Internet access and other data services would represent 32 percent of total fixed network revenues.