Category Archives: FCC
Fine Print, Market Power and the Big ISPs
This post is a merge-and-rewrite of my earlier 2-parter, Why are incumbents so afraid of being truthful? My thanks to Tim Wilson, publisher and managing editor of Telemanagement, for reprinting this in his next issue – containing opinions with which the publisher does not necessaily agree! I’ll be providing other comment pieces to Tim over the coming months. Telemanagement is a great resource. Check it out here. And past the jump, listen to a terrific speech given earlier this month by Larry Lessig on America’s Internet woes.
The other day I got a piece of unsolicited mail from Bell Canada, promoting its Novatel U998 wireless modem, aka the Turbo Stick. It runs at speeds “up to” 21 Mbps.
The front of the card talks excitedly about “One extra-large, super-fast, anytime, anywhere connection – to go.” The back of the card then throws the Legal Dept’s wet blanket all over the deal, in nearly 200 words of fine print, enough for a short blog post. Sign up now and you’ll get a $20 Starbucks Gift Card – free!
Let’s start with this moronic giveaway, the world’s second most annoying marketing gimmick after Enter to Win. Here’s the math.
The card says you can get the Stick free if you sign up for a 3-yr term (to save the $174.95 retail hardware cost). The minimum plan goes for $30/month – but that’s with a Bell Bundle and without the extras. No bundle: according to footnote #2, that’s $35 over 36 months or $1,260. Then add the $35 activation fee and ballpark the 911 fee at $1/month (“Subject to change without notice”), making the total $1,331. If you don’t happen to know about the paper bill surcharge, add another $2/month for the 36 months: $1,403. Add taxes: $1,571.36.
10 minutes later, an additional $3,000
How do you like that Venti Frappuccino now? The Starbucks giveaway represents 1.3% of the value of what you’re committing yourself to on a 3-year plan. According to the baristas in my Starbucks office, the average customer ticket is about $4 a pop. So this free gift might last you a week, on a deal that commits you to Bell for 156 weeks. Read the rest of this entry
Digital literacy: is it time?
Proficiency in the use of digital technologies
The FCC’s Broadband Plan is coming to Congress on March 16 and it’s already making a difference. It has us talking about broadband in an unaccustomed way. Not just can we get faster, cheaper broadband. Not just can we get it to everybody. No, the FCC team recognized early in the game that even the most generous supply-side solutions would never solve the problem of the missing one-third – the proportion of Americans without broadband, which is roughly the proportion of Canadians without broadband.
Wanna buy a nice black box that will change your life?
New research is getting to the bottom of some interesting demand-side issues – particularly about broadband holdouts. Survey researchers have developed good tests for gauging the technical skills of respondents while they’re being interviewed over the phone. But there has long been a puzzle as to how to treat responses like “I’m just not interested in broadband” – a puzzle shared by both researchers and policymakers. Read the rest of this entry
Berkman on Canadian broadband, on hold
The Berkman Center’s final broadband report to the FCC – Next Generation Connectivity – was released this week. I’ve skipped right to the section on Canada (pp. 247-57) – and the news looks every bit as bad as it was in the first draft last October.
Canada’s broadband performance
(Final Berkman Report, p.247)
As the chart shows, the rankings are for the 30 OECD countries, but the data are from several different sources, including TeleGeography, Speedtest and Akamai. We also see Canada is in the lower quintiles on every metric except household penetration. As Berkman states (p.247): “Canada’s broadband penetration rates are often lauded, but the country is a poor performer on price and speed and a declining performer in penetration.” Read the rest of this entry
Google’s Gigabit Bonanza
Last week Google announced it will finance ultra high-speed residential Internet access over fiber in select US communities. North American broadband households get average downlink speeds of around 5 Mbit/s. No wonder this initiative has caused a lot of jaw-dropping, soul-searching and wild-assed speculation.
The announcement has gleaned very positive support from Washington’s advocacy community. Others have fretted about Google’s real motives, such as whether or not the company is planning to become a retail ISP. The incumbents and their fellow travellers have dissed the venture. For example:
“The Google plan is short on details, with no information on capital spending, and, in our view, should primarily be seen through the lens of regulatory posturing,” Sanford Bernstein senior analyst Craig Moffett wrote in a research report. “We do not view Google’s announcement as a serious threat to the broadband businesses of either the cable or telecom operators.”
Short on details? Jeez, the project just got announced. The details will come as part of the “experimental” process. Like, that’s the whole point. And the suggestion Google is engaging in “regulatory posturing” is a hoot coming from the carrier sub-culture, which pretty much invented regulatory posturing. Read the rest of this entry
Imagining the Internet (10): the end-to-end principle
And the end of the Pew futures questionnaire for this year…
Q.10 – Will the internet still be dominated by the end-to-end principle?
A. In the years between now and 2020, the internet will mostly remain a technology based on the end-to-end principle that was envisioned by the internet’s founders. Most disagreements over the way information flows online will be resolved in favor of a minimum number of restrictions over the information available online and the methods by which people access it.
B. In the years between now and 2020, the internet will mostly become a technology where intermediary institutions that control the architecture and significant amounts of content will be successful in gaining the right to manage information and the method by which people access and share it.
[my answer: A]
Please explain your choice, note organizations you expect to be most likely to influence the future of the internet and share your view of the effects of this between now and 2020.
[elaboration]
“By 2020, the Internet will still be dominated by the end-to-end principle. But general adherence to the principle doesn’t mean gatekeeping will disappear. The big development will be much more visibility for the dozen or so Tier 1 network operators, who collectively provide access to every part of the Internet on the basis of their settlement-free peering relationships. Read the rest of this entry
Battle of the broadband studies (2)
Last week the Berkman Center for Internet and Society released their draft report on broadband for the FCC – Next Generation Connectivity: A review of broadband Internet transitions and policy from around the world (links and info page here).
Open access is good policy
The new report puts the lie to Ottawa’s broadband myth-making based on selective use of data. It also condemns the CRTC for its coddling of the incumbents and mismanagement of the evolution to market-based competition. The policy focus of the study is the use by national regulators around the world of open access rules as the primary tool for creating competition in the residential broadband market:
“The idea was that the incumbents – the former Bell companies here [in the US], Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) in Japan, British Telecom (BT) in the United Kingdom, and so forth – would be required by law to lease to newly entering competitors parts of their existing network on nondiscriminatory, regulated terms. This would lower the cost of entry and allow entrants to innovate in the electronics attached to the network, or in customer care systems or services they would offer, rather than investing in digging trenches and making holes in the walls of the houses of subscribers to pull their own, independent wiring” (p.81) Read the rest of this entry
Battle of the broadband studies (1)
The FCC is doing its due diligence on the National Broadband Strategy, due for delivery to Congress on February 17, 2010. One of the most anticipated pieces of this big puzzle is the international benchmarking study commissioned of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. A draft of the study has just been released, entitled “Next Generation Connectivity: A review of broadband Internet transitions and policy from around the world” (pdf). It makes very interesting reading, especially when contrasted with the ISP-financed, Canadian consulting study released here last week – “Lagging or leading? The state of Canada’s broadband infrastructure” (pdf).
The Lagging study has two points to make. The general point: broadband in Canada is in fine shape, thank you. And the more particular point: we get a bad rap because of what the author refers to as “serious methodological errors” – especially on the part of the OECD. Read the rest of this entry
