ManyMedia

Defining the term “broadband” is hard enough, given the various competing interests working to have the FCC see things their way. But defining the term by identifying exclusionary uses is, well, AT&T. Ars Technica was on top of this filing, and wrote up their concerns in AT&T to FCC: gaming is not “broadband,” but an added service. Specifically, AT&T is instructing the FCC to disallow certain uses of your Internet access, specifically online gaming, as part of the defining what “broadband” is.

They WHAT? That’s right, their testimony advises the FCC that AT&T knows best what we should do with our Internet access.

In testimony submitted to the FCC, AT&T advises that they (by way of the government) need to define what we can (and shouldn’t) do with our Internet access:

Specifically, the Commission must first define the discrete set of applications and online capabilities that must be made available to all Americans to achieve the Recovery Act’s goals.  As discussed below, for residential customers those services should include basic web-browsing capability, email, and online services ….  Thus, the task at hand really is not about “defining broadband” in the abstract.

The testimony continues (with my emphasis):

There are a host of aspirational broadband services that are beginning to emerge in this country, as well as myriad sophisticated applications involving streaming video, real-time voice, and the like.  All are no doubt “broadband” services.  But for Americans who today have no terrestrial broadband service at all, the pressing concern is not the ability to engage in real-time, two-way gaming, but obtaining meaningful access to the Internet’s resources and to reliable email communications and other basic tools that most of the country has come to expect as a given.

So AT&T wants to be free to deliver itty-bitty “broadband” to the rural folks.  AT&T is redefining “access” to meet a more traditional incumbent monetizing strategy: set sites low by defining a bare minimum, then find “aspirational” uses that they can bill extra for. The Ars article is worth a read. However, lessons can be learned from gamers that benefit corporate boardrooms as well. John Hagel and John Seely Brown wrote an article in last January’s BusinessWeek: How World of Warcraft Promotes Innovation. The article describes how various elements of online gaming can benefit the business mindset.

Companies seeking to thrive in a world of increasing uncertainty and accelerating change will need to foster this disposition among their own executive team and employees. They would be well advised to take a closer look at World of Warcraft, both in terms of the approach taken to foster this disposition and as a potential recruiting ground for employees who can bring this attitude and approach into the company.

AT&T isn’t looking broadly at providing access to the Internet. This is an example of Not Neutrality. AT&T has a plan, and your dreams may not be part of it.

Content, Life, Network, Policy access, ATT, broadband, definitions, FCC, Internet, Net Neutrality, online gaming, Policy

The National Broadband Plan hasn’t been completed as a draft or even bullet points, but the ax is already coming down. The Plan is likely to disappoint us, says Business Week in their article National Broadband Plan: Why Consumers May Be Let Down:

Defining broadband is an important effort (so is mapping out where broadband is), but consumers are likely to be disappointed by the National Broadband Plan, because the divide between what the American people want and how the government works means a lot of consumers’ desires will fall into the chasm between.

There’s no “likely” about it. American citizens who are hoping for better access to the Internet–or any access at all–will most certainly be disappointed to find out that nothing will change except for the increasing cost. I’m not surprised, but wish it wasn’t costing taxpayers so much.

Telecom lobbyists are paying less and getting more for their campaign contributions these days. I don’t see a reason to believe that things will change, given the current perspective and dialog. More importantly in this article, the notion of “broadband” (the means of getting access to the Internet) is being framed as the end game. Broadband is not the end game.

Make no mistake: Broadband is NOT the same as the Internet. Broadband is a poorly defined speed, a pipe, the means by which we access the Internet. It’s a marketing term used by the telephone and cable companies to describe their paltry offerings, which have resulted in the United States being ranked 17th in the world (and falling). A significant problem with using “broadband” as our national goal is that the FCC has not defined or measured it, or assessed its distribution (PDF). Of course the telephone and cable companies know, but they aren’t telling. And they’re effectively in charge for now.

If I could pull the plug on this well-financed debacle, I would in a heartbeat. Instead of focusing on the means (the pipe used to get there), let’s focus on the real goal: access to the Internet.

I propose that instead of pursuing this losing battle, we start talking about a Global Internet Plan for America. Why?

• We’re really trying to get access to the global Internet resources: everything that is available now and being created in the future. We want access to the global Internet. The Internet offers advanced information services and benefits to everyone, in many languages and many forms.
• The United States of America has unique political and technological resources, so this Plan is uniquely designed for Americans. Americans care about each other. We want our nation recover to economically. We want the best for our kids. We want all benefits to be widely available, in rural as well as urban settings. We don’t want our families, friends, or ourselves to be denied or limited access to the benefits of the Internet for any reason.

How do we get there? The current “debate” needs to be reframed to show priority for citizen-customer concerns and experiences. As the debate is framed now, it allows incumbent service providers to divide and conquer the conversation, the possibilities for change, and our future. Here are a few new ways to talk about this global Internet plan for America.

Decoupling access from delivery: The global Internet represents significant economic development benefits in the form of more competitive choices, lower prices, and faster performance. However, our service providers are increasingly serving as gatekeepers, choosing what information and how (devices, speed, etc.) we can or can not access it. Americans will realize the greatest benefit only if we decouple the Internet goods and services from the delivery pipe (broadband). This is called structural separation. For the greatest amount of benefit, we should be allowed to choose for ourselves what information to access, on our schedules and according to our needs, using our choice of hardware devices and software.

Monopoly rents as private taxation: Since the telephone and cable companies are the only game in town (where there is Internet access), they have considerable persuasive abilities when it comes to raising rates.  Citing Kushnick’s Law: “A regulated company will always renege on promises to provide public benefits tomorrow in exchange for regulatory and financial benefits today.” For instance, we’ve already paid $300 billion dollars in approved phone rate increases for telephone company promises that have never been fulfilled. One way of looking at this is as a private tax that takes in ever-increasing amount of our income. How often have you heard of local Public Utilities Commissions denying rate hikes? That doesn’t happen very often!

Coverage is not competition: Broadband service over telephone lines (DSL) has physical distance limitations, so is not available to all homes or businesses. Broadband over cable lines (cable modem service) passes a majority of homes in the nation, and is sometimes the only choice for access. In these areas, the price of access is high. What this means is that there are parts of the nation which either do not have access to the Internet at all, or have effectively one choice for providers. A Brookings Working Paper from 2002, The United States Broadband Problem: Analysis and Policy Recommendations (PDF), states the problem accurately:

Thus the effect of current industry structure is to generate a stable duopoly in residential Internet services, with continued monopoly control in most other markets – by the ILECs in voice and business data services, and by the CATV industry in residential video. Neither industry would logically be interested in provoking highly dynamic competition in open-architecture, high speed, and/or symmetric broadband services to either businesses or homes. Hence the slow pace of improvement in broadband services is not surprising. Unfortunately, however, it damages the economic growth, social welfare, and national security of the United States, and indeed of the world.

This means that any claims of nationwide coverage are suspect. As mentioned above, actual coverage and subscriber/customer data is not shared with the government, so the FCC doesn’t know how bad this problem is. However, there is no reason that access to the benefits of the Internet should be denied to any of our nation’s citizens. Keeping the data secret does not serve in the nation’s best interest. I want an Internet plan that works for all Americans.

There are more issues that can be properly described: problems inherent in the current state of the industry, and solutions that support ubiquitous access to the global Internet by all Americans. This is a plan I want to see come to life. This is the plan that will bring benefits to the entire nation. I am not alone in calling for this plan.

I welcome your additions in the comments below. Thanks go to George Lakoff for perspective on reframing this issue.

Content, Devices, Network, Policy choice, incumbents, Internet, self-determination, service providers

The blog called municipal networks & community broadband has an interesting article, How NTIA Dismantled the Public Interest Provisions of the Broadband Stimulus Package, on how the NTIA has gamed the stimulus rules in favor of incumbent interests.

Making private companies and public, non-profit entities equal in their ability to apply for stimulus funds actually privileges existing large telecommunications firms because they have the resources to push their way to the front of the line – especially with all the paperwork required of applicants.

The declaration that existing telecommunications companies are in the public interest is only one of the ways the NTIA has structured the BTOP to favor existing private providers.

Another is the speed definition NTIA has chosen in its broadband definition. NTIA chose minimum “broadband” speeds reminiscent of those from more than a decade ago rather than the modern speeds common across the networks of our international peers. The minimum download speed of 768kbps and upload of 200kbps is pitiful. Moreover, adding insult to injury, the anemic baseline speed is based on advertised rates rather than actual rates, perversely encouraging network owners to overstate their capabilities.

It’s sad but not a surprise, given the amount of lobbying money that the telephone incumbents put into Congress. While the NTIA’s interpretations are likely to ensure that some of us continue to have “broadband,” few of us in the United States will have meaningful access to the Internet. This is the difference between the means and the ends.

Network, Policy broadband, Internet, NTIA, stimulus funds

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the Rural Utilities Service (RUS) of the Department of Agriculture released their initial 121 page “Notice of Funds Availability” (NOFA), the “stimulus program” for “broadband” projects. (I note with some consternation that the NOFA is specifying a tool (broadband) rather than the end goal of providing access to the Internet.) One of the major challenges in this NOFA is that it is designed to promote projects in unserved areas. The reason this is a challenge is that obtaining numbers for communities that are served, under-served, or unserved are difficult to come by, and even harder to prove.

Geoff Daily of AppRising has an intriguing idea. In his article Why Not Force Incumbents To Show Which Areas Are Served? Daily points out that the definitions underlying rural Internet access subsidies are rather problematic because they effectively limit funds to only the most rural areas (by excluding marginalized urban areas), and allow the incumbent telephone interests to refute claims of service by the upstarts. To address this problem:

I’d like to propose an alternative solution: why not force incumbents to show which areas are already served by threatening to consider all areas unserved that they don’t produce verifiable data for showing that they offer service there?

By doing this we’ll save applicants from wasting a lot of time and money collecting data that already exists, plus we’ll also enable them to know if the area they’re putting together a project for qualifies for subsidies before submitting their application. Additionally we’ll be able to take this data and use it to inform the broadband maps we’re charged with creating.

On the carrier side, we give them a clear reason for why they should give up their data on the availability of their services so as to insure we’re not subsidizing duplicative investment. And at the same time we can remove any appearance of prioritizing the protection of private service provider interests over making real progress in the deployment of broadband.

Hey, the incumbents have the real numbers. Why not make good use of them?

Network, Policy, Uncategorized access, incumbents, Internet, SOHO Nets, stimulus, underserved, unserved

Perhaps it should be no surprise that when it comes to real access to the Internet, the government is swayed by promises of “broadband” and claims of existing “competition.” Federal stimulus funds are hard enough for some service providers to come by. Now we learn that municipalities wishing to provide Internet access to their citizens are targeted for exclusion. Telephony Online’s article Broadband stimulus details separating likely winners, losers, states:

One group of broadband stimulus hopefuls that has been in large part swept out of the running by the specifics of the plan is individual municipalities of any size. Though the stimulus plan stoked broad interest from municipalities earlier this year, many of them have been frustrated by the program’s preference for “underserved areas,” which the government has defined as areas where where at least half of all households lack broadband, where fewer than 40% of households subscribe to broadband, or where no service provider advertises broadband transmission speeds of at least 3 Mb/s.

Those rules sent the city of Northfield, Minnesota, for example, which had hoped to secure stimulus funds, back to the drawing board in its efforts to finance its plans. Melissa Reeder, Northfield’s information technology director, told the local press, “Honestly, I don’t think there’s a single Minnesota city that would qualify.”

This policy decision is short-sighted and will not deliver on the promises of Federal stimulus funds. Now you can expect to pay twice (once in the form of taxes to pay for the stimulus funds and once for your ISP bills) for more of the same.

Network, Policy access, broadband, Internet, muni nets, municiple networks, Policy, stimulus, stimulus funds

Chris Anderson of Wired has a new book (Free: The Future of a Radical Price) and interesting article, Tech Is Too Cheap to Meter: It’s Time to Manage for Abundance, Not Scarcity. Anderson points out that the price of computer processing, bandwidth, and hard-drive storage have dropped, and continue downward, such that the effective cost of providing those services are near zero. (Indeed, the billing components are more costly than the actual services.)

When your phone company tells you that your voicemail inbox is full, that’s artificial scarcity—it costs less than a nickel to store 100 voice messages, and the average iPod could store more than 100,000 of them (voice messages are recorded at lower quality than music, so they take up less space). By forcing subscribers to spend time deleting voicemails, the phone companies were saving a little on storage costs by spending a lot of consumer time. They managed the scarcity they could measure (storage) but neglected to manage a much more critical scarcity (customer goodwill). No wonder phone companies are second only to cable TV companies in “most hated” rankings.

What does this mean? Tech is really about opportunity and access, not the pipe we are limited to use. Our current national debate about broadband is about the screwdriver, not what that tool will allow us to create. That’s a significant difference. This is a debate about existing telecom and cable providers managing scarcity, as opposed to giving us access to manage our own abundance.

Life, Network, Policy abundance, broadband, Internet, Policy, scarcity, SOHO nets

The FCC recently posted a Notice of Inquiry, FCC-09-51. The purpose of this NOI is stated in the Introduction, which begins:

This Notice of Inquiry seeks comment to inform the development of a national broadband plan for our country. Its focus is to enable the build-out and utilization of high-speed broadband infrastructure. But “infrastructure” barely hints at the importance of what we are undertaking. High-speed ubiquitous broadband can help to restore America’s economic well-being and open the doors of opportunity for more Americans, no matter who they are, where they live, or the particular circumstances of their lives. It is technology that intersects with just about every great challenge facing our nation.

I signed and support this Comment in response to the NOI. The comment points out that (1) the term “broadband” is not the same as the Internet, (2) broadband’s true value is that it gives access to the Internet, and therefore (3) when designing a National broadband policy, we should make sure that it supports the value of the Internet.

Network, Policy broadband, Comment, definitions, infrastructure, Internet, national broadband plan, Net Neutrality, Network, NOI, Policy

DRCN, Design of Reliable Communication Networks, will be held in Washington DC on Oct. 26-29, 2009. This is the group’s seventh conference, first time in the United States.

About the conference:

DRCN 2009 is a well established forum for scientists, engineers, designers and planners from industry and academia who have interests in reliability and availability of communication networks, end systems and related topics. From equipment and technology for survivability to network management and public policy, through theory and techniques for survivable and robust network and application design, the aim of the conference is to bring together people from those disciplines in a lively forum. We hope you will join us in Washington, D.C., USA during October of 2009.

At this point they’re calling for papers (limited 8 pages, to be published in IEEE Conference Proceedings) by April 1, and proposals for tutorials by May 15.

Events, Network, Policy conference, Internet, reliability, SOHO nets, telecom

MuniWireless has a post called Find out if your ISP is a bad ISP with Glasnost in which author Esme Vos asks if your ISP is “playing funny games” with your Internet connection. She urges inquiry:

Simply go to Glasnost (appropriate name as it refers to a period in the 1980s in the USSR when there was a bit more openness and transparency). Glasnost is but one weapon in your arsenal for finding out the TRUTH about your broadband connection and your ISP. It is a product of Measurement Lab, founded by the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, the PlanetLab Consortium, Google Inc. and academic researchers: “M-Lab was developed in 2008 after Vint Cerf and others at Google initiated conversations with network researchers to learn more about challenges to the effective study of broadband networks.”

Vos reported that her ISP came out clean. I can report (finally, after days of busy servers) that my ISP is doing well as of this post. However, all ISPs will not have such good reports.

As a matter of business ISPs will remind us that there are two sides to every story, in this case the service users and the service providers. To their credit, they will need to take steps to understand the user-side demand and manage their resources to provide the best services possible. I’d give them this credit if they didn’t “play funny games” in the process.

Content, Network Glasnost, Internet, ISPs, MuniWireless, service providers

eComm, “the world’s leading-edge telecom, Internet communications and mobile innovation event,” is being held in San Francisco, CA, at the San Francisco Airport Marriott Hotel, from March 3-5, 2009. This year’s theme is Defining the Post-Telecom Era, which the conference organizers will do in a series of rapid-fire talks from a wide range of speakers.

You can save $400 on registration fees by registering before the end of January. Additionally, if you wish to save an additional 20%, contact me for details.

Content, Events, Network, Policy communications, conference, Internet, telecom