USA Today’s Leslie Cauley has this page one article on the upcoming broadband wireless auction rules and FCC Chairman Kevin Martin’s apparent promise to make way for an “open” broadband network.
Under Martin’s proposal, to be circulated in the agency as early as today, mobile services in these airwaves would have to allow consumer choice.
“Whoever wins this spectrum has to provide…truly open broadband network — one that will open the door to a lot of innovative services for consumers,” Martin said in an interview Monday.
What this would mean in practice: “You can use any wireless device and download any mobile broadband application, with no restrictions,” Martin explained. The only exceptions would be software that is illegal or could harm a network.
Over at Public Knowledge, Art Brodsky thinks Martin is playing games. Consumer groups want the auction winners to sell off slices of their spectrum to all qualified comers, ensuring diversity of ownership and a truly “open” broadband wireless world.
This fight is over the rules of the upcoming 700 MHz auction, a draft of which has been prepared by Chairman Martin’s office but not circulated to the other commissioners and certainly not issued publicly. According to an FCC staffer who spoke with Dow Jones News, two blocks of spectrum that are each 11 megahertz in size have been reserved for wireless services that meet Martin’s definition of open access, meaning that the licensees have little or no control over the types of handsets and services that work with their networks.
Google is reportedly encouraged by this block of open access spectrum and is considering bidding on it. (Google says that it is only hearing about Chairman Martin’s proposal through the grapevine, which, in fact, is how these things do work…Martin floats a trial balloon.) However, Frontline Wireless, which has been rising in stature over the past few months, is, apparently, locked out of the bidding because Martin’s office has failed to include certain conditions as part of the rules.
But all of this — Martin’s promise, Public Knowledge’s reaction, Google’s potential bid and Frontline’s shut-out — is wispy stuff indeed. Martin’s office obviously floated the draft rules to test the waters. The final rules, particularly after the other commissioners have weighed in, could be quite different indeed.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:39 PM | Print | Comments (0)AP’s Deborah Yao has created quite a stir with this piece about how Verizon removes its old-fashioned twisted-copper pair drop wires when it installs fiber-based FiOS service in a customer’s home.
Yao cites the case of Long Island resident Henry Powderly II, who, she implied, was unhappy that his copper drop was removed without warning. This practice, of course, has broader ramifications: old-fashioned copper plant is subject to line-sharing regulations that don’t affect fiber lines and dial-up ISPs are possibly hindered in serving homes that lack a copper drop.
Therefore, Verizon’s habit of removing copper wires without apparent customer notification can be construed as anticompetitive, or certainly Verizon’s rivals view it that way.
“It’s a horrendous situation…We don’t let General Motors build a highway and decide what size cars to let on the road,” said Joe Plotkin, marketing director for Bway.net, a New York Internet provider. “The small guys have tried to fight this re-monopolization of the network infrastructure.”
Yao’s piece got Slashdotted, Broadband Reports picked it up, and other publications picked up on the article and propounded upon its implications. Of course, Verizon’s rivals were happy to pass on this bit of news too.
But, the apoplectic guys over at Verizon’s Poliblog (see here and here) say that Yao’s piece is a slam job, and they’ve got good reasons to argue that. For one thing, Henry Powderly II claims that Yao twisted his quotes to portray the exact opposite of what he meant.
In a blog item (yup, he’s a blogger) entitled “The Associated Press use me DAMMIT!,” Powderly writes:
What we have here is a blatant foul, where one journalist has completely spun the words of another — a fellow journalist even — to make a point.
Moreover, Powderly doesn’t care whether his copper wire was removed or not.
To me, fiber or cable is the future and I’ve decided to embrace that. I believe the copper wires will go the way of the wood-fired kitchen stove, the ice box, the rotary phone or the rooftop television antenna.
For another thing, the part about not informing customers runs counter to Verizon’s policies and is the opposite of my own FiOS’ install experience. Verizon did in fact go out of its way to tell me about the copper wire thing, although the various representatives mostly dwelled on the fact that my phone would have a battery back-up in the case of a power outage.
And yet another thing that stems from my own experience: copper is a crappy medium and should be ripped out wherever possible. I say this because I once had DSL (Verizon) at home that was frequently bursting in and out. After months of investigation, the cause of the problem seemed to be that my copper wire was, at some point in the network, bundled together with the copper wires of nearby businesses, and those other wires “leaked” into my connection, wreaking interference havoc with my DSL service.
From a broader perspective, however, why in the world would we want to keep old copper lines in place? Policymakers and pundits perpetually promote fiber as a way to pull up the United States’ relatively low ranking in world broadband penetration and speeds. If Verizon or any other telco has to maintain both copper and fiber plant simultaneously, that requirement would no doubt slow down any progress we would make.
Finally, Verizon is only yanking aerial copper drops (from the pole to the house) and isn’t digging up underground drops. If someone wants to come along and restring a copper wire where one once existed, the costs to do so are pretty low.
Having said all that, it certainly doesn’t look good for Verizon to remove copper drops and Yao did a good journalistic job in tackling the idea (Powderly’s complaints notwithstanding.) The telco should probably just let the wires hang there in the offchance that some rival might one day want to use them.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:03 AM | Print | Comments (0)
The advent of Internet-based video is upending the business model that Hollywood and TV program producers have embraced for decades. Although the opportunities have yet to fully flesh themselves out, web-based threats are becoming all too clear and are foremost on the minds of most studio executives.
Content piracy and unauthorized distribution of movies, TV shows and big ticket events seem to be everywhere; the recent high-profile pre-theatrical release of Michael Moore’s “Sicko” on YouTube has only escalated efforts by content providers to find the means of searching the web for copyrighted video material.
But, unlike text, and even still images, video is fluid and entails multiple frames per second, making the task of identifying specific pieces of copyrighted content difficult, if not impossible, from simple searches alone. Washington, DC-based LTU Technologies, however, has a plan to help content providers scan the web for proprietary video based on its “image DNA” technology.
LTU has developed this algorithmic system after years of working primarily with law enforcement officials such as the FBI, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Bureau and the French Police to locate child pornography or terrorism-related images or find stolen art. This image DNA technology is an “exclusive descriptor that indexes, recognizes, and describes images by their visual content, instead of solely by keyword or file name,” giving LTU a leg-up over other kinds of recognition systems, such as digital “fingerprinting,” the company contends.
With digital fingerprinting, images or video frames are merely assigned unique identifiers so that when pirated versions of content appear on the web, the content can be identified only by its unique number. Image DNA, on the other hand, tracks “what’s going on in the totality of the clip,” Kevin Smith, LTU’s Vice President of Sales for North America said.
It’s superior to other methods of locating content because it can find content that has been altered, so-called “cloned” content, where, for example, background colors have been shifted, or content that hasn’t been fingerprinted or otherwise watermarked, or content where the watermarking descriptors have been corrupted, according to Smith. That’s because the video images themselves are encoded in a form of 3-D mapping that allows for more refined identification. (Check out the image below for the distinctions that LTU’s technology makes among different kinds of images.)
“We’re looking at the actual content of the image — we’re looking at the actual image,” Smith said.
Although more data-intensive on a frame-for-frame basis, LTU’s Image DNA system isn’t more costly that the current efforts to stamp or encode video for ultimate identification on the Internet, Smith argues. Content providers need only encode key frames of a video or TV show and then use web crawling tools to search the web, or scan specific suspicious sites, for content.
Still, hunting for copyrighted video on the Internet is bound to be a needle-and-haystack proposition given the vastness of the web and the staggering amount of copyrighted material that not only exists in archives but is also being created anew each day. Even given the uphill battle, LTU is getting the attention of Hollywood and the TV industry.
Smith says that his company has begun “a series of dialogs” with these content communities, primarily through their trade associations, the Motion Picture Association of America and the National Association of Broadcasters. Some of the discussions are well along and Smith believes that these groups and their members are more interested in using LTU’s technology to monetize content rather than yank content off the web.
(This item originally appeared in yesterday’s IP Media Monitor.)
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:07 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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