BellSouth is going for broke in its approach to the pending rewrite of the 1996 Telecom Act. The major telco ballyhooed at a National Press Club lunch today a working paper by two esteemed university professors which concludes that complete and total deregulation of the phone business is the best policy to pursue in a legislative overhaul.
In their paper “Can We Avoid Repeating the Mistakes of the Past in Telecommunications Regulatory Reform?,” Charles Fine of MIT and John de Figueiredo of Princeton looked at a series of industries that had either been partially or totally deregulated and concluded that partial deregulation is ultimately too little and too late against the backdrop of changing market conditions.
Fine and de Figueiredo say there is an object lesson to be learned for telecommunications.
We believe these case studies, in railroads, natural gas, banking, airlines, and wireless telephony, can be helpful in shaping the understanding of the regulatory issues to be addressed in the telecommunications industry today. The principal shocks to hit telecom in the past decade have been technological and have converged upon each other: the emergence of the Internet and the rise of ubiquitous wireless communications networks for mobile telephony and data exchanges. These new technology platforms have triggered the development of both a completely new communications infrastructure that enable competitive alternatives to traditional voice and data telephone services. Each of these technologies has enabled new entrants to compete with traditional telephone companies whose primary business had been to offer voice and data services over networks built with copper wire. Increasingly, copper, fiber, and wireless networks compete with each other and are substitutes for each other, with copper networks being subject to the most stringent regulatory constraints.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 4:05 PM | Print | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Today, the city of Seattle, one of the nation’s high-tech centers, will take the debate over municipal broadband in large U.S. cities to another level. This afternoon the city’s Broadband and Telecommunications Task Force is expected to release a report that, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “contains a number of bold recommendations”, including support by the city of a fiber optic network.
As P-I’s John Cook reports:
“Seattle cannot afford to dawdle,” Steven Clifford, chairman of the task force and the former chief executive of King Broadcasting Co., wrote in a draft report. “Broadband networks will soon become what roads, electric systems and telephone networks are today: core infrastructure of society.”
“The long-term problems and challenges that Seattle faces are not likely to be solved by wireless,” he said. “What Seattle and all cities will need is a big, big pipe capable of 25 to 100 megabits (per second) each way.” Although the capital costs are high, Clifford said, the total cost per megabit makes fiber the cheapest and most compelling system they studied.
But the report is not expected to propose a rapid deployment of ubiquitous fiber.
“We did not recommend to go ahead and fiber Seattle tomorrow,” [Clifford] said. “There may be some new technologies emerging that will allow you to get fiber to the neighborhood and have some other hop to the home, other than fiber, that can still give you the fat pipe.”
The strategy proposed in the report would have the city leverage its existing fiber infrastructure.
Task force member Ron Johnson, vice president for computing and communications at the University of Washington, said the city is well positioned with an existing fiber optic network According to the report, more than 450 miles of fiber optic cable runs through Seattle. “We have fiber in places that most people don’t,” Johnson said. “Most of the people involved in this process saw that as an extraordinary asset.”
The report’s authors are clearly concerned that Seattle will lose its world-class status as a high-tech center.
If Seattle does not move forward with the network, it could lose its edge to cities such as Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Seoul, South Korea, which have placed big bets on broadband, Johnson said. “There are areas of the globe that are light years ahead, and Seattle should want to be among the global leaders,” he said. “Without the city playing any role and without taking the initial steps we outlined, other cities are going to fare much better because there will be more robust competition,” Clifford said.
Not surprisingly, the two incumbent broadband network providers disagreed with the Task Force’s recommendations.
“Our view is that incentives for us, as an existing broadband provider with the network and resources already in place to operate in Seattle, would be far less expensive and far faster to market than attempting to create a new telecommunications system,” Comcast Senior Vice President Len Rozek wrote. Qwest wrote that it would prefer that the city let the market for broadband develop in an “open and unfettered environment.”
Whether and how the city would pursue a partnering strategy for the fiber network remains to be seen.
Johnson believes it’s unlikely that Comcast or Qwest would cooperate with the city on a new fiber-optic network, but he said a third-party provider or non-profit entity could be attracted to the opportunity. The city could operate its own network, although Johnson said he would prefer a partnership with a telecommunications provider.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 2:15 PM | Print | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Business Week’s Olga Kharif writes today of a new venture called Nethercomm which is touting a system for delivering high-speed service over the crucial last mile via…gas lines. Nethercomm contends that it can deliver 100 Mbps service using wireless technology for up to six miles from a phone company fiber connection point. While Nethercomm contends nothing will go ka-boom in the set-up, let’s hope that there aren’t too many active electronics in the network.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:25 AM | Print | Comments (0) | TrackBackA new article in the Heartland Institute’s IT&T News makes the case against municipal broadband service and posits a reasonable rebuttable to the contention that high-speed service is an essential service, just as electricity and water is.
Unlike water or electricity, high-speed service providers cannot count on a 100% take-rate, Steve Titch, the article’s author notes.
If broadband were really a consumer necessity the way electricity is, we would see virtually 100 percent penetration in the areas where broadband is available, just as we do for electricity. Municipal broadband proponents say we don’t see that level of penetration because of high prices. That assumption is questionable, though: Many households are willing to pay $100 a month or more for electricity, while broadband tops out at about $50 a month (and on average runs closer to $30 or $40).Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:00 AM | Print | Comments (1) | TrackBack
An amicus brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court by Progress & Freedom Foundation senior fellows Jim DeLong and Solveig Singleton argues that “bad patents undermine the confidence of our intellectual property system and empower those who would abolish it.” The brief was filed in support of a petition for a writ of certiorari by the plaintiffs in KSR v. Teleflex.
According to a PFF press release:
At issue is a patent held by the respondent that claims “invention” of the combination of two pre-existing designs — an automobile adjustable accelerator pedal and an electronic throttle control. A district court ruled against the patent, finding that anyone with an undergraduate degree or modest industry experience “would have found it obvious” to connect the two devices. A Federal Circuit Court of Appeals panel vacated that judgment because the petitioners hadn’t found objective evidence that anyone suggested the combination before the respondents filed their patent.
DeLong and Singleton…believe the case is the perfect vehicle for High Court review because “every schoolchild knows what an accelerator pedal is.” They add that the case reflects the growing importance of intellectual property to the economy, the unease about patent quality, and the fact that the current standard applied by the Federal Circuit causes harm.
“The Federal Circuit’s test says, in essence, that all doubtful cases, all cases in the gray area, will be decided in favor of patentability. It has decided to run zero risk of rejecting a meritorious claim even at the cost of accepting numerous non-meritorious claims,” DeLong and Singleton argue. “This is not sensible doctrine. Nor is it in accord with the statutory language or the precedents of this Court.”Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 2:42 AM | Print | Comments (0) | TrackBack
From David Isenberg’s isen.blog:
The latest figures on Japan’s Internet connectivity, reporting through year-end 2004, are out. OK, OK, so Japan has 75,000,000 mobile phone based Internet users. I am more intrigued that there are now over 2,400,000 FTTH homes. A footnote explains that only about 1 million are in apartment buildings (collective housing) while the other 1.4 million FTTH users are mostly from single-family homes. There are 13 million DSL subscribers and just under 3 million CATV customers. The population of Japan is 125,000,000. The U.S. population is 290,000,000. So multiply by 2.3 to compare U.S. Internet numbers.
Here’s the data David’s referring to.
In an earlier post, Isenberg had cited the fact that the U.S. has fallen from 13th to 16th in per capita broadband penetration during 2004.
In another recent post, David asks the question, “Whatever happened to the Bush broadband policy?”, and cites an editorial by John Eger in Public CIO Magazine. Eger is Lionel Van Deerlin Chair of Communication and Public Policy at San Diego State Univ., and president of the World Foundation for Smart Communities, a non-profit corporation founded to help “local communities get connected to the global information economy.”
According to Eger, “Unlike the earlier shift of manufacturing jobs to less developed East Asian countries, the loss of the latest round of high-tech software and service jobs will have dramatic — some say devastating — impacts on America’s economic wealth and well-being.” Describing U.S. national communication policy as “bankrupt,” Eger called on President Bush, Congress and new FCC Chairman Kevin Martin to “act swiftly and decisively…to ensure that America has the infrastructure of the 21st Century, and that our cities once again are allowed to retool so that all our citizens get connected.”
Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 2:09 AM | Print | Comments (0) | TrackBackA 5/16 article by Jon Lafayette in Television Week provides an interesting look at Scripps Networks’ strategy to expand from its niche cable-channel model into a profitable video-intensive broadband platform.
This year Scripps will begin delivering “vertical” multimedia channels with an even narrower focus than its cable channels. These “verticals” will combine video with “text, slide shows, audio, links and specialized tools such as calculators to help viewers do projects.” With its focus on relatively low-cost productions that blend entertainment, information and instruction, Scripps seems well suited to be a relatively early mover into the broadband video space.
The main source cited in the article is Burton Jablin, Scripps Networks executive VP. While Jablin said Scripps remains committed to VOD, he added that today’s VOD platforms “can’t offer as much content of various types as these vertical channels.” Jablin “said the time is right for Scripps to move into broadband now because most viewers who use the web sites associated with Scripps cable networks are already hooked up to broadband,” with Scripps online videos accounting for seven million streams during March. Jablin also said Scripps “expect[s] broadband to be profitable.”
Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 1:26 AM | Print | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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