AP’s Laura Sukhtian has this interesting piece on the rise of blogging in Iran and the consequent government punishment of bloggers. Iran’s blogosphere, called Weblogistan, emerged in 2001 following a government crack-down on newspapers and now encompasses an estimated 70,000 to 100,000 active blogs.
With that much chatter, it was only a matter of time before the conservative Islamic government took steps to shut down unwelcome voices. In Iran, unlike in China, the government fears political speech much less than it fears cultural, social or sexual information that is not in keeping with the fundamentalist view of the clergy.
The debates on Iranian weblogs are rarely political. The most common issues are cultural, social and sexual. Blogs also are a good place to chat in a society where young men and women cannot openly date. There are blogs that discuss women’s issues, and ones that deal with art and photography. But in Iran, activists say all debates are equally perceived as a threat by the authorities. Bloggers living in Iran understand that better than anyone else.
But true political dissent is punished with arrest and imprisonment. Iranian Internet subscribers have to sign an oath that they will not visit non-Islamic sites and ISPs have to install what the article characterizes as sophisticated filtering technology, more stringent than any other nation’s filtering system aside from China.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:26 PM | Print | Comments (1)
As the fight over network neutrality heats up, a hearing by the Senate Commerce Committee tomorrow should produce some sparks. Particularly given the line-up of witnesses:
Kyle McSlarrow - president and CEO, NCTA
Earl Comstock - president and CEO, CompTel
Walter McCormick - president and CEO, US Telecom Association
Steve Largent - president and CEO, CTIA
Jerry Ellig - senior research fellow, Mercatus Center, George Mason University
Mark Cooper - research director, Consumer Federation of America
As usual, you can watch the hearings live at 2:30 pm on the Committee’s site.
An even more potentially entertaining hearing by the House Energy & Commerce Committee is slated for tomorrow, starting at 10 a.m. The topic of that hearing is the controversial Barton bill — the Committee has yet to post a witness list for that hearing.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 6:41 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Sprint Nextel holds a big chunk of broadband wireless spectrum, an asset the company plans to leverage with the launch of a high-speed wireless service in 2008. Although most of Sprint’s broadband plans are tied up with its cable company partners, it’s possible that the company’s upcoming broadband wireless service could serve as competition to cable modems and DSL service, according to company COO Len Lauer, who spoke today at Bank of America’s Media, Telecommunications and Entertainment conference.
“Our focus for that will primarily be on mobility, but it may also apply in competing with cable and DSL modems because if you’ve got a service that is running at a couple of meg per seconds and price it attractively, you could compete with the cable modem and DSL company,” Lauer said. He was quick to note, however, that Sprint Nextel wouldn’t compete against its cable partners, a group of companies that includes Comcast, Time Warner and Cox.
The cable partners, however, might be interested in offering this mobile broadband option as an add-on service to their own customers. “It could be something we could add to the cable offering…[the cable company could ask its customers] what about for another $10 to $15 per month you could also have the service going across on a mobility basis in all these markets across the U.S.,” he said.
Lauer said that Sprint Nextel plans to pick its broadband wireless technology solution by summer, with the wireless telco looking at WiMax, Flarion, IPWireless and CDMA, among the mix of broadband technologies it is testing. Once Sprint Nextel settles on a technology, it will take a couple of years to get the service up and running.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 5:12 PM | Print | Comments (0)DirecTV is working on a wireless broadband initiative, but don’t look for an announcement too soon, company CFO Mike Palkovic said today at Bank of America’s Media, Telecommunications and Entertainment conference. Sifting through the various technology and business partner aspects of mounting a wireless broadband service simply takes time.
“I do think it’s more important that we take whatever time we need to do it right,” he said. “You’ve got technologies that have got to be evaluated, you’ve got various manufacturing partners.”
In any event, DirecTV is still growing and hasn’t suffered because it doesn’t offer a high-speed service. “Yeah we’re doing fine now…our primary mission is to be the best video provider available to consumers. That doesn’t mean we can’t be significantly improved if we figure out a broadband solution,” Palkovic said.
Once DirecTV does figure out how to offer broadband services, the DBS player will explore the option of delivering video services over that broadband pipeline. “We’ll have the ability with these partnerships to get DirecTV into the house and around the house.”
That kind of technological expansion could coincide with DirecTV’s loss of another broadband-related partner: BellSouth. Once the AT&T and BellSouth merger goes through, DirecTV stands to lose its triple-play pact with the telco because AT&T has a similar deal with DirecTV rival EchoStar.
Not much can be done about that, Palkovic seemed to say, although it’s not a certainty that DirecTV will lose that valuable telco marketing partner. “I think they’re very happy with what DirecTV is doing for them,” he said. “We have a lot of time to figure out what a world would be like without BellSouth.”
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:09 AM | Print | Comments (0)AT&T’s Project Lightspeed, the video-over-DSL platform that will give the giant telco a multichannel video pipeline into the home, isn’t hampered by bandwidth limitations, according to company COO Randall Stephenson, who spoke this morning at Bank of America’s 2006 Media, Entertainment and Telecommunications conference. AT&T’s video effort is dependent on fiber built to the node or curb, with souped-up copper loops capable of transmitting 25 Mbps to 30 Mbps to the home.
This cost-effective and faster-speed-to-market approach has had its critics, who contend that the copper lines might not yield enough bandwidth for super-fast high-speed connections or bandwidth-intensive high-definition video channels. Stephenson said that in terms of high-speed service, it’s irrelevant that cable operators are pumping up their connections to 16 Mbps and more, speed levels that the Lightspeed architecture would be hard-pressed to match.
“In the foreseeable future, having a 15 Mbps Internet capability is irrelevant because the backbone doesn’t transport at those speeds,” he told the conference attendees. Stephenson said that AT&T’s field tests have shown “no discernable difference” between AT&T’s 1.5 Mbps service and Comcast’s 6 Mbps because the problem is not in the last mile but in the backbone.
Once AT&T enhances its backbone capabilities and (network neutrality proponents take note!) implements service level quality agreements with content providers, then you might start to see a difference in last-mile speeds, Stephenson argued.
In terms of Lightspeed’s ability to push through hundreds of video channels, including high-def video, “we’re not constrained by bandwidth. You’re not constrained by the size of the pipe anymore,” Stephenson said, referring to the switched-video capacity of the network which delivers only one service to a single customer at a time.
Stephenson said that when Project Lightspeed officially launches in San Antonio in June (the company currently has a “controlled” launch there), it will offer over 200 video channels and 50 high-def channels.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:42 AM | Print | Comments (3)
Leslie Cauley has this item in USA Today about the status of New Orleans’ free muni-Wi-Fi initiative. Greg Meffert, New Orleans’ CIO, claims that BellSouth is lobbying against legislation that would allow the city’s free Wi-Fi service to keep running after a state of emergency is lifted later this year.
Louisiana has a state law that bars cities from giving away broadband service, but New Orleans got an exemption from that law in the wake of Hurricane Katrina due to its state of emergency classification. Once the state of emergency is over, the city could lose its right to offer free Wi-Fi if it doesn’t get a further exemption.
Although BellSouth denies it is interfering with the city’s Wi-Fi plans, the telco can’t be happy that the city reached out to rival EarthLink last week to take over the network. EarthLink plans to spend $15 million in the next three years to build out the network to a 15-to-20-mile radius around the city.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:14 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Courtesy of Steve Rubel, this item about the State Department hosting a web chat on blogging, with BlogRevolt’s David Kline. Rubel thinks this is just another indication that the U.S. government is getting wise to the power of blogging as a political tool.
One pretty amazing step already taken by the government is the release on the Internet of hundreds of documents related to the invastion of Iraq, a move championed by Congressional Republicans in order to allow the blogosphere a chance to report their own conclusions about the lead-up to the war. So far, 600 documents have been released via a Pentagon web site.
The State Department may be ahead of the curve when compared to its government peers — the Department is gearing up to launch an electronic journal on emerging media, with contributions from a variety of commenters, including Dan Gillmor.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:42 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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