Next-Gen Telecom, UK Edition September 26, 2007
Posted by ianmartinez in : Trends, Networking , add a commentFrom Cisco’s policy blog, good news on next-generation access in England.
Richard Allan says:
The difficulties remain but the call is now for all stakeholders collectively to work out how to address them. This is being led by Stephen Timms MP, a Minister well known for both his expertise in and passion for ICT, who is to organise a Summit on Next Generation Access.
It’s always good when a dormant debate erupts, if what you’re trying to do is push the envelope. Hopefully vendors and regulators there won’t find themselves at cross purposes.
Meanwhile, over O’Reilly, Raj Singh lambastes Vodafone UK’s decision to remove the User-Agent field from the mobile browser headers, calling it “walled garden” at its worst. It’s always interesting to me when the barriers to better, more accessible communications aren’t coming from regulators, they’re from the companies themselves.
We’ll see how both issues play out — while neither has direct implications for the U.S. market, they’re both worth watching in a global context.
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New Broadband Blog September 11, 2007
Posted by ianmartinez in : General, What's New?, Networking, Policy , 2 commentsThe Internet Innovation Alliance has launched Broadband Hub, a new blog for the discussion of national broadband issues by three of the sector’s heaviest hitters: Larry Irving, President of Irving Information Group, and former head of NTIA under President Clinton; Bruce Mehlman, co-founder of Mehlman & Vogel and Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Technology Policy under President G.W. Bush; and Laura Spinning, a longtime industry workhorse with experience at Level 3, USTA, and the office of Senator, and then Vice-President, Gore.
This won’t be just another meaningless rumination on broadband policy. I expect these three, whose combined experience in the sector surpasses the life span of most tech companies, to inform the debates in a major way.
The money line, in an inaugural post about Internet traffic issues:
Internet users collectively create enough new digital information every 15 minutes to fill the Library of Congress.
Perhaps an early question for the new trio to address, courtesy of 463: Broadband rationing?
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Muni Wi-Fi Redux September 4, 2007
Posted by ianmartinez in : Trends, What's New?, Networking, Policy , add a commentMaybe if I keep pointing links at Salon’s Machinist, I’ll get Farhad Manjoo’s autograph.
I cannot say how many times I’ve found myself reading Machinist, completely disagreeing with Manjoo’s main point, and completely captivated by his argument. Not a single other tech or telecom blogger does that for me. Manjoo is not only a spectacular writer, but he sees so far past the conventional wisdom on the space in which tech, telecom, policy and culture interact (we agree a lot, too, by the way).
Late last week, we saw a flurry of stories on Municipal Wi-Fi, driven mostly by the languishing network in San Francisco. The New York Times Bits blog joined Machinist in pointing to hiccups in the project. Several major cities have now had noteworthy setbacks in deploying their wireless networks.
This wave of municipal setbacks (remembering that such networks in small rural communities have done fairly well) is food for thought. The San Francisco network stumbled in large part due to Earthlink’s business struggles and general job cutbacks. A renewed questioning of municipal Wi-Fi’s efficacy from a business perspective is interesting no matter what your politics on the matter.
Earthlink’s problems aren’t limited to Seattle, according to the Houston Chronicle:
EarthLink last week agreed to pay the city a $5 million penalty, giving it nine months to find an investment partner for the project and an option to walk away from the deal if it can’t. It doesn’t mean the deal is dead, but it’s definitely on life support.
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More On Ownership August 27, 2007
Posted by Grant Seiffert in : General, What's New?, Networking , add a commentOhhhhh, Machinist. You make us smile with your topical, timely posts about issues near and dear to our hearts.
Last time I touched on ownership in the new digital age, and tried to point to a few high-profile cases where the question wasn’t really who owns what but what “ownership” even means. This phone cracking case is yet another example of lines are blurred in ways that even cut-and-dry contracts don’t always clarify.
More here as events warrant.
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NXT Up August 15, 2007
Posted by ianmartinez in : General, What's New?, Networking , 1 comment so farBack in June, when the NXTcomm trade show was still in full swing, there was some grumbling in the blogosphere about attendance for the first year show.
While we were excited about the conference’s potential, and folks like Corporate Events Thoughts were very enthusiastic about show floor, there were some detractors about the event.
Scott Wharton over at ipBusiness said morale was “down everywhere,” something I certainly didn’t observe — in fact, no one who saw this work of art could have thought such a thing. It didn’t stop there. “IMS, IPTV, VoIP, WiMAX, all topics with their significant announcements and promises of greatness in prior years, were relegated to minor and spotty success stories but not much new to add to the telecom conversation,” he wrote.
The official audit numbers for the show tell a different story, one that matched the “mood” I and many of my colleagues perceived. According to the results, courtesy of Exhibit Surveys, Inc:
NXTcomm attracted 15,273 attendees to its debut at Chicago’s McCormick Place on June 18-21, with some 500 exhibitors occupying over 200,000 square feet of exhibit space… Nearly 450 journalists and independent analysts attended, and industry members generated over 480 announcements and press releases from the show… 81 percent of the 2007 exhibit floor was rebooked for NXTcomm 2008 in Las Vegas
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And So It Goes August 1, 2007
Posted by ianmartinez in : What's New?, Networking, Policy , add a commentWell, the 700 MHz auction rules are set. Of course there’s lots of chatter throughout the policy world, with everyone weighing in and no one completely satisfied — or completely objective.
My favorite telecom read (and former employer) Communications Daily (subscription only) cited the consensus voting at the FCC, with all 5 commissioners approving the auction rules and only a partial dissent — on open access — by Commissioner McDowell. Commissioner Adelstein called the open access compromise “meaningful, though not perfect.”
(more…)
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