Yesterday was the deadline for VoIP providers to comply with the FCC’s e911 rules. And based on the reports, a few VoIP providers aren’t yet in full compliance, meaning that huge chunks of their territories are off-limits for marketing new customers. Top independent VoIP provider Vonage told the FCC in a filing that only 26% of its service areas meet the e911 rules because it is awaiting cooperation from competitors who control the 911 network.
The VON Coalition, however, estimates that the “vast majority” of VoIP customers are covered by full e911 service. SunRocket, a rapidly growing VoIP company, claims that 96% of its customers are covered.
Other than that, it’s hard to tell what impact the deadline has had, or which VoIP providers will suffer the greatest customer sign-up slowdown. It is clear that the situation could have been a lot worse.
The FCC initially ruled that VoIP providers would have to cut off customers in areas where the companies were not in full e911 compliance. But, the Commission later modified that draconian measure to simply bar VoIP providers from marketing new customers in the off-limit areas.
Update: According to this press release, Packet8 has fully complied with the FCC’s rules.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 4:37 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Sony is now probably really, really sorry for the rootkit fiasco and probably really, really regrets its initial posture of indifference toward the world’s outrage over the company’s spyware-infected CDs. But, too late! Eliot Spitzer is now on the case.
The feared New York Attorney General has warned consumers to not buy Sony music CDs and last week dispatched investigators to buy Sony CDs at various stores. He discovered that despite Sony’s reassurance that the infected discs had been recalled, many of the CDs were still plagued by the problematic DRM technology.
“It is unacceptable that more than three weeks after this serious vulnerability was revealed, these same CDs are still on shelves, during the busiest shopping days of the year,” Spitzer said in a written statement. “I strongly urge all retailers to heed the warnings issued about these products, pull them from distribution immediately, and ship them back to Sony.”
[Note: An earlier version of this item twice misspelled Eliot Spitzer’s name as “Sprizter.” Don’t know why I didn’t catch that. I do know the correct spelling of the New York Attorney General’s name. And I wasn’t making fun of him with an intentional misspelling. Really.]
Update: Business Week’s Steve Hamm has a pretty interesting timeline of events leading up to the rootkit disaster and a summary of all the key players. It looks like Sony knew about the problem weeks before it became public and wanted to keep quiet about the problem rather than alert the millions of users with compromised computers.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:15 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Hoping to help spur an economic revival in the devastated area, the City of New Orleans plans to build the country’s first municipally owned wireless Internet system that will be free to all users. Mayor Ray Nagin will unveil the new project at a press conference today.
Powered in large part by donated equipment, the service will launch today in the French Quarter and expand out over time. The system will offer 512 kbps service, which, technically, runs counter to a state law that bars cities from offering Internet service faster than 144 kbps. But given that New Orleans is still in a state of emergency, the city apparently is exempt from that law.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:58 AM | Print | Comments (0)The parish of Lafayette, LA was in the spotlight earlier this year for holding a public referendum on funding for a municipal broadband project. The vote came in overwhelmingly in favor of the intiative, and the cable and phone companies, which battled the city in true local politics style, seemingly lost.
But that’s not the end of the story. According to this local article, BellSouth is still duking it out in the courts. Although the legal maneuvering is kind of murky, BellSouth and two Lafayette residents “have appealed the decisions of local judges to dismiss their lawsuits seeking to block funding of Lafayette Utilities System’s telecommunications business.”
The telco has until December 4th to file its brief with the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeal advancing its argument that the $125 public loan needed to build the system violates state law. (Tip of the hat to David Isenberg.)
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:44 AM | Print | Comments (0)Throwing fear into the hearts of not only cable operators but pretty much everybody in the communications world, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin plans to revive at a Senate hearing today the idea of requiring cable operators to sell their channels à la carte, according to the Wall Street Journal. At a Senate Commerce Committe forum on indency, Martin will announce that the FCC has conducted a second study on the issue, which is whether cable operators should be forced to sell their channels on an individual or “themed group” basis as opposed to large tiers of channels.
The first study conducted by the Commission, under the leadership of former Chairman Michael Powell, found that forcing cable operators to offer à la carte channels would raise the cost of cable service because cable networks would lose the value of being packaged together with their peers and be forced to raise their fees. This new report, however, apparently reaches the opposite conclusion.
The Journal article claims that Martin will advocate the use of à la carte to create “family friendly” tiers, a concept now backed by Senate Commerce Committe Chairman Ted Stevens (R-AK).
Although the notion of à la carte cable channel sales had its origins in the rising cost of cable service, with some consumer groups calling for individual channel sales as a cost-saving measure, the idea has been turned on its head by conservative “family values” advocates as a way of blocking indecent or inappropriate content. Martin has embraced the conservatives’ views on indency (see this Salon piece on Martin’s indecency campaign), hiring Christian activist Penny Nance as his key advisor on these matters.
Update: Martin’s full statement to the Committee is here. He justifies the à la carte effort by discrediting the report prepared under Powell.
Last year, former Chairman Powell and previous staffer Ken Ferree submitted a report to Congress concluding that a la carte and tiered pricing models (such as a family tier) were not economically feasible and were not in consumers’ interest. I had many concerns with this report, including the logic and some of the assumptions used. I asked the Media Bureau as well as our Chief Economist to take a more thorough look at the issue. The staff is now finalizing a report that concludes that the earlier report relied on problematic assumptions and presented incorrect and incomplete analysis.
Needless to say, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association is none too happy. In a statement, NCTA CEO Kyle McSlarrow said:
We can’t comment on any new FCC a la carte report until it’s released and we’ve had a chance to review it, but previous and recent analyses were consistent in their findings that government pay-per-channel regulation would be likely to hurt consumers by increasing prices, decreasing choice and reducing diversity in programming, and it would do so in a way that violates the First Amendment.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:04 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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