Benton RSS Feed

AT&T's plan to invest $14 billion in expanding its wireline broadband offering and its wireless 4G network will accelerate the policy discussion about how to regulate the nation's fiber optic communications infrastructure.

"This totally reshapes the discussion," said Harold Feld, senior vice president of the advocacy group Public Knowledge. AT&T is asking the Federal Communications Commission for permission to transition to an all Internet Protocol-based fiber network on a trial basis in a few of its wire centers. This experiment would in effect create a regulation-free zone in which AT&T could roll out fiber, roll back copper, and not be subject to rules that require them to continue to invest in their legacy networks. The move is important for AT&T, because the company is behind rival Verizon in its fiber-to-the-home offering, and is losing out to cable in terms of home broadband speeds. "From an engineering perspective, this totally makes sense," Feld said. "We want to see better broadband in America." However, he worries that the deregulatory push could have the effect of dialing back what's meant by universal service. "We're in danger of becoming the only industrialized nation to go back on access to basic phone service," he said.

AT&T is mindful of the raft of issues raised in its filing. A company official said, "We understand there are a lot of policy questions that have to be answered. A lot of technology and operations questions. We have to play four-dimensional chess to make this conversion." How the policy issues will be addressed is another matter. "Ideally, you'd do it legislatively," said Feld, but he doesn't see a path to a revised Telecommunications Act in the current political climate.

Verizon customers who have been long relegated to archaic 3G speeds can now rejoice. CFO of Verizon Wireless, Fran Shammo, announced that the company will finish implementing its LTE infrastructure with a full-blown rollout by the middle of next year. He added that Verizon will continue to look for opportunities to increase its spectrum in order to match demand, as about 250 million people utilize Verizon's LTE network, and the company hopes to increase that to at least 260 million by the end of the year. Verizon's LTE coverage should match the current 3G CMDA spread by the end of 2013.

A bipartisan group of House members said they are not satisfied with responses they got from nine data brokers, saying the industry needs to be more open about how it uses personal information collected about consumers. Reps. Edward Markey (D-MA) and Joe Barton (R-TX), co-chairmen of the Congressional Bipartisan Privacy Caucus, and five other lawmakers wrote nine data brokers last summer seeking more information about where they collect data, what type of data is collected, who buys the data, and how it is used. The lawmakers said in a statement that only one company, Acxiom, described itself as a data broker.

In its response to the lawmakers, Equifax, which is more well known as one of the three national credit reporting agencies, rejected the data broker label and instead said it offers "marketing services," which it noted only make up 1 percent of its business. Acxiom also was the only company that provided details on how many consumers asked to access data about themselves. Several others said they do not allow consumers to access their data because it is not personally identifiable. Acxion said in the last two years as few as 77 people each year out of the 190 million consumers it has information on asked to see their data. The companies did provide a few details on how they collect data about consumers. Their sources include consumers themselves, telephone directories, mobile phones, government agencies, financial institutions, and social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

[Commentary] For the first time in years, one single handset model has reportedly outsold the iPhone. Strategy Analytics says that more Samsung Galaxy S III phones than Apple iPhone 4S handsets were sold in third quarter of this year. Samsung moved 18 million such handsets while Apple sold 16.2 million during the three month period, says the research firm.

Samsung is currently the only company that can even come close to competing with Apple when it comes to smartphones. With each Galaxy smartphone iteration, Samsung continues to follow the Apple-like approach of controlling its own destiny as much as possible. Other competitors simply aren’t equipped to do so. So while Apple may have created the playbook for smartphone success, Samsung has replicated it more so than any other in this market. That actually shouldn’t surprise if you’ve followed the Apple v. Samsung trials: The courts have already found in favor of Apple for Samsung’s replication of certain smartphone design, features and functions.