The much-watched auction of the 700 MHz wireless broadband spectrum is underway and in two days of bidding, the tally now stands at $2.7 billion. (RCR Wireless and Daily Wireless have the best coverage of anybody out there on the auction's progress.) Round One brought in 1,849 bids worth $2.4 billion and Round Two brought 1,122 new bids, raising the tally by 15% to nearly $2.8 billion.
Of particular interest is the spectrum known as the C Block, which has drawn heavy hitters including Google, AT&T and Verizon. That slice of the spectrum will be subject to the widely publicized open access requirements contained in the auction rules, but only if the spectrum fetches $4.6 billion. If it doesn't, then the spectrum will be put out for re-auction without the open access requirements, which are designed to enable consumers to use handsets and applications of their own choosing for services offered over the spectrum. As of yesterday, the C Block bids stood at $1.2 billion.
Even if the $4.6 billion requirement is met, carriers could game the open access requirement to minimize its impact, FCC Commissioners Michael Copps warned earlier this week. The Democratic Commissioner is floating the idea of setting up some kind of "trust but verify" process at the FCC that would monitor whether carriers are meeting only the letter of the requirement but not its spirit.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:25 PM | Print | Comments (0)Time Warner's plan to test metered broadband service has sparked a firestorm of fears that residential broadband service will get too expensive unless we all exercise surfing self-restraint. The good old days of mindless surfing, in other words, might be coming to an end. Fanning the flames is the fact that Time Warner's test calls for metered usage beyond 5 to 40 GBs, barely enough, at the low end, to watch one HD movie online per month and do everything else too.
It's too soon to tell exactly how these ceilings would play out in the real world if Time Warner (and other cable companies, such as Comcast) actually proceeds with a metered usage plan. But University of Chicago Law School professor Randy Picker (one of the speakers at the Internet Video Policy Symposium, btw) raises an interesting question: If metered broadband becomes the norm at home, we will start shifting our broadband usage to the office?
He calls this "bandwidth shifting."
As to bandwidth shifting, once we are all on metered plans at home, how much of our downloading will we do at the office? Will we all turn into bandwidth shifters?
I'd wager a lot of money that in a world with metered broadband usage, workplace Internet usage would soar. From 1999 to 2002, I had only a one-way cable modem (yes, remember that? a stopgap measure before true DOCSIS devices were ubiquitous) at my home and I couldn't wait to get to my office to use my pricey shared T1 (or whatever I had.)
Before that, I had dial-up at home, as did everyone in my workplace, and we all spent more time than we should have on non-work matters during the day simply because dial-up was such a drag. With a meter running on home broadband usage, it's almost a no-brainer that folks are going to wait until they get to the office to download films from iTunes or play video games or watch online TV shows.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:12 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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