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Verizon is the big winner in the 700 MHz auction, gaining the 20-odd MHz C Block set of national licenses: The FCC has announced the provisionally winning bidders in the nearly $20b auction that ended a few days ago with over 1,000 licenses at stake. Verizon spent $9.6b overall ($4.7b of that for the C Block licenses) in the auctions, while AT&T spent $6.6b, Echostar $711m, and Qualcomm $1b. The variety of other licenses obtain gives Echostar nearly national coverage, while Qualcomm is likely filling out its needs for MediaFLO, a national media broadcast network aimed at cell phones and mobile devices.
FCC Chair Kevin Martin has asked the FCC’s inspector general to investigate what wrong with the D Block auction, which failed to receive its reserve bid. This was a mixed public safety/commercial band that Harold Feld, among others, alleges had its auction sabotaged through a set of vague requirements that could have led a winning bidder to forfeit its bid receipts while acting in a manner that conformed to the auction requirements.
Posted by Glennf at 1:26 PM | Comments (1)
The FCC has received a “provisional” winning bid for the national “C Block” licenses in the 700 MHz auction underway: The C Block, a national set of about 20 MHz of prime frequency real estate, has received a bid crossing the minimum $4.6 reserve price: $4,713,823,000 to be precise. The overall auction now stands at $13.7b after 18 rounds. This pretty much ensures that the open access, open device rules so fought over and then acquiesced to by major carriers will be enforced, and it’s likely to push more openness into existing U.S. cell markets.
Posted by Glennf at 9:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
News.com reports that a Senate bill moving forward won’t allow states to prohibit municipal broadband: The Senate bill passed 15-7 in the commerce committee, and the influential Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), called the new language reasonable. Municipalities will have to provide 30 days notice before starting their own service and solicit private bids, but aren’t required to accept those bids. The bill lacks net neutrality provisions, however, and might be held up for months or until next year.
A competing House bill states only that municipalities can’t treat their own networks preferentially over other broadband providers. This might come in cases like Philadelphia in which a city has signed over its telecom business to a municipally authorized network. However, Philadelphia like others cities has moved to authorize rather than operate networks, which might exclude them from such provisions.
Posted by Glennf at 12:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
EarthLink and Google won the right to negotiate a contract to provide Wi-Fi service to San Francisco, but privacy advocates are out in force: Why is this an issue here and not in Philadelphia? Because EarthLink is solo in Philadelphia—so far—and hasn’t discussed privacy implications much. Google, on the other hand, has talked very specifically about how they’ll track and store data about individual behavior to feed them ads. They’ve even applied for patents for that kind of tracking and delivery.
Interestingly, these kinds of concerns have often been brushed aside or marginalized. This time, with a high-flyer like Google involved, mainstream media and privacy-oriented Web sites and organizations are covering it quite extensively.
The San Francisco Chronicle brings up how requiring a login identity to use the free Google service would allow extremely fine tracking of a person’s whereabouts or path through a city even for those using pseudonyms. Google said in its bid, the Chronicle reports, that tracking data would be stored for up to 180 days. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) points out here that once this data exists, law enforcement would come looking to use it. The SF technology department’s head Chris Vein, said privacy was an important factor in evaluating bids, but it’s hard to see how that’s the case yet—the city hasn’t started its negotiations, and thus it’s unclear whether they’ll push for more protection than is in the bid. The SF Metro Connect proposal (Seakay, Cisco, and IBM) had strong privacy guarantees.
The AP notes that Google won’t comment on the privacy concerns.
The Media Alliance evaluated the six bids that San Francisco considered, producing a chart that evaluates what’s being offered for protecting privacy and what’s on the table for digital inclusiveness. For instance, they note that the Philadelphia plan EarthLink has agreed to include advance payments and other methods of providing computers and access to lower-income residents. Their SF bid has no such provisions, although, again, this might happen during negotiations of the details.
EFF and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) assembled this comprehensive comparison of privacy and information gathering details among the six bids.
Jeff Chester raised a number of these issues in his The Nation article two weeks ago, by the way, which I covered at the time, and which received less attention as the EarthLink/Google bid was still one of six.
Meanwhile, Google and EarthLink might work together on another city notwithstanding Google’s statement a few days ago that they plan no more Wi-Fi networks beyond Mountain View and San Francisco.
Posted by Glennf at 3:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
I’ve written disparagingly about the WAPI spec over the last two years: The WLAN Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure (WAPI) standard backed by the Chinese government has two key flaws. First, it’s not international. Second, it’s proprietary. Nonetheless, the government—despite earlier indications that the standard was stalled or wouldn’t be enforcement—has decided to keep pressing on.
Companies that make Wi-Fi chips or devices designed for use within China were at one point going to be banned from selling in that country unless they partnered with a domestic firm, one of about a dozen, that had access to the license for the specification. The issue became heated enough that the US government in the form of Colin Powell and others became involved. The requirement was dropped, and the standard was introduced into the ISO process in the hopes of getting approval through that body.
According to IDG News Service, ISO is extremely unlikely to become part of any ISO WLAN security standard. The IEEE 802.11 Working Group pointed out the problems in a filing: There’s no way to evaluate the actual security given an undisclosed mechanism; and there’s no shipping devices with WAPI embedded, or even prototypes to test.
I’d add to that a concern I have beaten the drum about: There is zero chance that a government-backed security standard doesn’t include back doors for monitoring. The complaints about 802.11i being “American” or “Western” or even “garbage” (as WAPI’s developer stated) are a smokescreen for the ongoing desire by the Chinese to reject Western hegemony over its technology and reject security methods that allow for no penetration.
The response in China appears to be that companies will continue to develop WAPI which might find a market among government buyers. A Beijing-based analyst thinks it unlikely it will become mandatory for all Chinese users—which makes sense with likely tens of millions of existing Wi-Fi devices already in use in the country and no timetable for WAPI-based systems to become available.
Posted by Glennf at 12:06 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Bush’s Indian entourage of security is jamming, monitoring radio frequencies: To prevent untoward events, Hindustani Times reports, Secret Service agents jam all manner of radio frequencies and surveille others. The Hotel Maurya Sheraton is the base for operations, apparently, causing disruption to the hotel’s network access and police radios. The expectation is that television remote controls and mobile phones may not work in a three-kilometer radius, the paper reports.
Posted by Glennf at 10:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
A pair of bills introduced in Congress last week want to leverage unused television channels: The two bills want to move forward on allowing wireless broadband over television channels in areas in which stations aren’t broadcasting. The New America Foundation, which promotes multiple uses of existing frequencies and open spectrum policies, says 40 to 80 percent of TV spectrum is empty in rural areas. The bills differ in how much of this spectrum they’d allow to be used. When the digital television transition is complete, now mandated for Feb. 2009, the remaining analog frequencies will be auctioned off, and thus if a pre-existing “white space” use were in place, that might reduce the spectrum’s nationwide value.
Posted by Glennf at 11:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Sen. Hillary Clinton supported grants for a nonprofit to extend broadband into South Bronx: In a speech on site, the senator suggested that in areas that private firms find it unprofitable to install and operate broadband networks that communities could create their own networks. She backs a federal grant for one such network in the South Bronx that would bring in fiber and Wi-Fi.
While it might seem unlikely that the South Bronx would suddenly turn into a high-tech haven, stranger things have happened. An affordable local work force coupled with low real-estate prices and fiber optic lines has turned many rural and urban blighted communities into enclaves of good-paying jobs. I saw this in Maine, where service jobs started popping up along fiber routes.
Posted by Glennf at 10:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The AP reports that Robert M. McDowell will occupy the third Republican seat on the FCC commission: While he may be pro-something, he’s not coming in with a pro-ILEC (incumbent local exchange carrier) position given that he was until this moment the senior vice president and assistant general council at the Competitive Telecommunications Association, a CLEC or non-Bell trade organization.
This is fascinating from the perspective of municipal wireless and other services, because registered CLECs and similar organizations will be among the bidders and beneficiaries of municipally bid or franchised broadband and telecom networks. With two Democrats on the commission generally supporting broader ownership of media and local control, Mr. McDowell could wind up voting against pro-ILEC positions. That remains to be seen.
Posted by Glennf at 10:03 AM | Comments (0)
In this New York Times piece, I look at the transformation of community wireless networking advocates from hardware hackers to political operatives: The first wave of community wireless networking (CWN) groups appeared around 1999 and 2000, and this first wave inspired a larger wave that followed. While CWN initially focused in many cities on installing hotspots and helping to set up free locations, the larger themes have taken over as hardware as gotten cheaper to buy and easier to run.
When I started thinking about writing this article months ago, I thought I would be writing an elegy for community wireless. It seemed to me that membership had dropped, groups had disbanded, and leaders had left their positions. Instead, after talking to a few dozen people, many involved since the early days, I discovered that the focus has shifted away from the brute force stage and into subtlety.
In the early days, most groups were talking about how to create antennas, build node maps, modify firmware, buy gear for cheap, and get locations hooked up. Some were thinking all along about building their own citywide networks; others just wanted to convince all manner of venues to offer service for free.
Over time, it’s become so easy to create a Wi-Fi hotspots or even a zone spanning a fair amount of area, that the challenges have shifted to issues like network neutrality, or making sure that everyone can use a network without prejudice for purpose or equipment. Many of the ideas of community networking have found their way into municipal proposals, and many of the wireless advocates I spoke to have tried to shape these proposals—often successfully.
Seattle Wireless probably represents one of the highest achievements in the area of neutrality, because they’ve built a network of what looks like now over a dozen nodes that use an open-source mesh routing protocol to create a neutral medium. Anyone can plug in multiple times into any point on the network to create tunneled services across the entire redundant, optimum route system. There are no rules on what the network is used for, which makes it unique. Their new Capitol Hill location gives them one of the highest points in Seattle from which their antennas can be “seen” and thus employed. (A bad bit of phrasing I wrote in the article makes it sound like the tower is their only location; it’s just a centrally located, very high one.)
Posted by Glennf at 11:06 PM | Comments (0)
The FCC has moved closer to auctioning four megahertz in the 800 MHz band for air-to-ground telecommunications and data: This auction is being closely watched as it will pave the way for domestic U.S. data and cell calls in the air being a much cheaper method of relaying than via satellite. The order released today [PDF] doesn’t set a date, although May 2006 is likely based on conversations I had recently with four interested parties, two or three of which will be bidders on the spectrum.
The executive summary of today’s order: Realistically, it pushes back the practical deployment of cell-based voice and any pure data in domestic aircraft to terrestrial stations from mid-2007 to mid-2008, and almost certainly no earlier, unless Verizon Airfone wins all the licenses and is able to complete a transition much faster than it now says is possible. One month ago, the four operators I spoke with (AirCell, Connexion by Boeing, OnAir, and Verizon) were expecting a mid-2007 launch based on a mid-2006 auction. (Verizon Airfone said Monday in a press release that they would be able to launch data services in 2007 if they win a license, but this doesn’t conform with the below details.)
The 4 MHz will be auctioned in an odd way, with three potential configurations: two sets of 3 MHz overlapping across 2 MHz in the middle; a set of 1 MHz and 3 MHz; and a set of 3 MHz and 1 MHz. The logic is that two pairs of 1.5 MHz bands are needed to provide reasonable speed. The remaining 1 MHz is left over, and there’s no provision for a winning bidder of 1 MHz to build out service. Companies can bid on all kinds of pieces, and the optimum dollars for a single configuration will win out.
Verizon Airfone currently occupies all 4 MHz for its underused phone service and will have two years following the auctions to move its service down to 1 MHz which may overlap with a winning bidder. They may win the bidding, and this order today requires more monitoring if they do so. They received a five-year license renewal running until 2010 for their phone service.
AirCell, a potential bidder and existing operator of a U.S.-wide network of ground stations used for general (non-commercial) aviation, filed several requests for changes to Airfone’s incumbent terms. Among them were a request to reduce the transition from 4 to 1 MHz to six months (or even one year, they suggested later) instead of a full two years. This was denied, and it’s a shame, because it means that any winner of 3 MHz in any of the three configuration options will be unable to deploy for as long as two years following the auction’s completion unless Verizon chooses and is capable of migrating faster. The order notes that Verizon has to touch and test every ground station and about 3,000 commercial and government planes—there’s no possibly of remote upgrades.
AirCell also wanted Verizon’s license to use 1 MHz dropped from five years down to two, asserting that this gives them an extra benefit in operating in the 1 MHz longer to detriment of whichever winner bidder (if not Airfone) has to share that 1 MHz of spectrum in a non-interferring manner. This was denied, too.
Space Data, a stratospheric tethered balloon broadband firm, won a decision that allows it to use the air-to-ground frequencies on its balloons, but lost the rights to use the frequencies for secondary purposes unrelated to air-to-ground transmissions.
And yet another decision went against AirCell’s desire, too. The FCC commonly offers bidding credits to what they define as “small” and “very small” businesses, based on the average three years’ preceding revenues. AirCell and Space Data had fought for 35 percent credit for very small and 25 percent credit for small businesses. Boeing—which operates its satellite-based Connexion service internationally—thought 25 and 15 were enough; Airfone wanted none. The order specifies 25 and 15 percent credits for very small and small businesses they define as averaging $15 million over the previous three years and $40 million, respectively. It’s unclear where AirCell and Space Data fall as both are privately held and don’t appear to report revenue.
Interesting, two of the three sitting FCC commissioners—the temporarily majority-wielding Democrats Copps and Adelstein—both used the opportunity to concur (which means disagree with in this context) in part with the order because they dislike the monopoly it continues to grant Verizon Airfone by implication. Adelstein wrote [PDF], “Ultimately, we could have taken a number of more specific actions to support competition in the event Airfone wins the exclusive three megahertz license. But we fail to do so today.” Copps wrote [PDF], “I remain concerned that America’s aviation industry and its passengers will not have the full range of choices in air-to-ground broadband that they might otherwise have enjoyed.”
Posted by Glennf at 9:43 PM | Comments (0)
An SF resident wants the city to follow its rules for releasing documents: Kimo Crossman has been corresponding with me for several days about his efforts to get the City of San Francisco to release full documents about the request for proposal/information (RFP/I) to build a municipal wireless system. Crossman alleges that the city and state’s sunshine laws, which require a fairly unfettered amount of access to public documents, regardless of origin, are being ignored.
Crossman’s site documents the process of trying to track down an individual responsible and get them to respond. He maintains that the companies involved in the bidding don’t have the right to self-redact documents, and that the amount of omission is far above what the law should require for openness.
We’ll see how this plays out. I hope an SF-based reporter or publication takes up this issue. It’s not about proprietary information; it’s about requiring the same sort of exposure of information from this process as cable franchise boards and telecom regulators require from the incumbents and competitors operating in those spaces. There shouldn’t be a lower bar for releasing information from municipal broadband bidders.
Update: Sasha points to an article in this week’s Bay Guardian which covers the issue as deep as they can—without getting any substantive answers from the city government on the sunshine issues. It’s slanted towards the socially progressive view, but they’re wearing this slant on their sleeve.
The Bay Guardian also devoted its lead editorial to excoriating the secrecy.
Posted by Glennf at 10:55 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Truck stops in Texas with free Wi-Fi may have to filter content: A Slashdot poster connects the dots in a Texas house bill that would require filtering on any state-provided wireless network on public property. This means the truck stops that have been equipped would need filtering. I don’t need to make snickering references here, as you can read plenty on Slashdot.
Posted by Glennf at 8:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
This time, it’s Verizon Wireless, a subsidiary of the phone giant, which says that Wi-Fi doesn’t work over areas: The Austin Business Journal reports on Verizon Wireless’s interesting timing in upgrading service in the Texas Capitol. It’s interesting that they choose this moment for a massive improvement in voice and data service—including EVDO upgrades—when the legislature has a pro-incumbent, anti-municipal, anti-public/private partnership bill in front of it.
The article doesn’t mention who paid for this upgrade; it sounds like Verizon Wireless did as part of their routine infrastructure improvements. But still—please. There are no coincidences in coordinated lobbying efforts.
A spokesperson for Verizon explains that the new “broadband” service will be everywhere.
“It’s different than Wi-Fi. With Wi-Fi, you’re limited to one spot. Broadband access allows you access anywhere the service is offered, which in this case, is throughout the entire building.”
Uh, yeah, maybe you need to read an article or two about how SBC and Cingular are going to eat your lunch in the data game through integration of VoIP, DSL, 3G, and Wi-Fi? Or possibly visit La Defense in Paris where they have Wi-Fi, strangely, throughout the entire massive building. Or possibly you could visit Qualcomm’s headquarters in which they freely admit that Wi-Fi available…throughout their entire campus.
How exciting to have “broadband” of a few hundred kilobits per second everywhere, shared among thousands of people. How interesting to note that you have to add special equipment in order to provide full-speed interior coverage with EVDO.
Sigh.
If this is Verizon Wireless’s Wi-Fi plan, dissing it through inaccurate statements that misrepresent it, SBC and Cingular are going to mop the floor with them on the data side. They’ve just admitted that EVDO doesn’t work well in interior spaces, haven’t they?
We already knew that, but now they’re stating that they have no idea how Wi-Fi deployments work, either. Worse, they even point out EVDO’s big disadvantage: “users must be Verizon Wireless customers to access the service.” That’s right: instead of a network that the state of Texas owns and operates and provides “free” access to at megabits per second for its staff and legislators, each user must have a laptop and a PC card (hundreds of dollars) and a subscription.
Is anyone going to complain that taxpayer money is going to Verizon instead of an internal information technology department in the state that could offer higher bandwidth at enormously lower cost and deliver voice over IP (oops, competes with Verizon) as well as streaming video and audio? There’s some free public Wi-Fi available (courtesy Austin Wireless City Project), but it’s only in select rooms.
I’ll stop being irate now.
Posted by Glennf at 4:34 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Part of our ongoing coverage of municipal networks, wireless or otherwise, finds us in Texas: The legislature is considering a bill that would block any form of municipal networking, according to the reading of the blogger I’ve linked to. It’s hard to disagree in reading the text of the bill, shown here with emendations to the existing law. This is a deregulation bill that also sneaks in some nasty language throughout.
As part of the deregulation the principle of universal access appears to have been cut:
It is the policy of this state to ensure that customers in all regions of this state, including low-income customers and customers in rural and high cost areas, have access to telecommunications and information services, including interexchange services, cable services, wireless services, and advanced telecommunications and information services, that are reasonably comparable to those services provided in urban areas and that are available at prices that are reasonably comparable to prices charged for similar services in urban areas.
So no more of that. But more importantly for our considerations, section 54.201 eliminates the phrase “for sale” from a list of prohibited municipal activities. These previously prohibited activities were strictly telecommunications limiting certain kinds of specific competition with competitive and incumbent voice providers. A few small changes, and it prohibits all municipal information and telecommunications services—including private/public partnerships that the FCC just paraded out in their broadband wireless report. The revised section would prohibit municipalities and utilities on their own or with other entities from offering services. [link via Muniwireless.com]
Posted by Glennf at 10:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Russell Shaw at Corante interviews Chaska’s IS Manager: Chaska spent about $800,000 in initial capital outlay, and used a privately sourced $1,000,000 loan to cover early expenses. They’ll repay that loan within a year—they launched in Nov. 2004—and expect to have a return on their investment within 18 months of launch. The service has about 2,000 of 18,000 residents subscribing across the town’s 250 square miles, all of which offer coverage. The town stayed under the radar, avoiding major incumbent complaints. The town expects to grow to 35,000 residents within five years.
The FCC’s Wireless Broadband Task Force avoids any mention of the word municipal in their initial report. It’s a good report, encouraging the growth of broadband wireless, but all of the projects they mention are private or public/private in which a city provides some resources or a contract to a private firm. There are no public-only efforts mentioned.
The Wall Street Journal connects the dots between wires and muni network opposition: Lee Gomes mildly opines that opposition to municipal networks, particularly wireless ones, are entrenched in incumbents desire to keep making their wire base pay. Philadelphia’s position has been misrepresented, the city says, because it plans to make municipal utility poles and other access available, but contract out the building, operation, and risk to private enterprise.
Posted by Glennf at 10:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Now you see it, now you don’t: The New Millennium Research Council has removed the page listing its board of directors. On their About page, it used to have a link to the board and to internships. Now just look at it. The NMRC was behind the report that came out last week agitating against municipal broadband; they are owned by Issue Dynamics, a PR firm representing cable and telephone companies, including Verizon.
If we take the WayBack Machine from the Internet archive and set it to Feb. 2004, we can see that Karen Buller, Allen Hepner, Barbara O’Connor, and Jorge Schement are listed as board members. When I saw this page a few days ago, Allen—identified as affiliated with Issue Dynamics back then—was relegated to a contact page where he is listed as executive director.
Buller was listed as the chair of the board. I’m unclear who funds her organization as this information isn’t provided on their site. The National Indian Telecommunications Institute seems to have great goals and is widely cited across the Net as a progressive force.
But Buller sits as a member of the board of directors of the Alliance for Public Technology (APT) alongside Barbara O’Connor, the founding chair. The APT states on its board of directors page that “Membership is open to all nonprofit organizations and individuals, not members of the affected industries.” However, inexplicably, the sponsors and affiliates page lists BellSouth, SBC, and Verizon. The statement about this is that “These affiliates provide a portion of APT’s financial support but do not vote or serve on its Board of Directors.”
That’s a great non-denial denial, just like the Heartland Institute’s very specific note that no donor provides more than 10 percent of their budget.
If you view the HTML at APT’s Web site, the first comment reads: “Designed and developed by Issue Dynamics, Inc. For more information see http://www.idi.net”. Welcome to another arm of IDI. The Executive Director, Sylvia Rosenthal is “also Assistant Vice President of Issue Dynamics Inc. where she devotes her time exclusively to management of APT.” The group is linked via SourceWatch.
Jorge Schement is a professor at Penn State and a co-director of the Institute for Information Policy, which lists Issue Dynamics and Verizon among their sponsors.
Am I going to wake up with a horse’s head in my bed? I’m a fish-a-tarian. Could it be a full-sized Tofurkey, instead? [Thanks to Karl Bode of DSL and Broadband Reports; he can have half a horse’s head.]
Posted by Glennf at 3:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
There’s a lot more readily available details about the New Millennium Research Council than I realized: The NMRC is the co-publisher of a report that says municipal broadband is anti-competitive and a waste of taxpayer dollars. eWeek broke the news yesterday that they’re a division of Issue Dynamics, Inc., a group that specializes in creating the appearance of grassroots and independent support for ideas on behalf of their clients. They don’t hide this specialty.
The NMRC lists this relationship on their About page; I’m embarrassed that I missed noting this: “The NMRC is an independent project of Issue Dynamics, Inc. (IDI), a consumer and public affairs consulting firm that specializes in developing win-win solutions to complex policy issues.” (IDI lists the US Internet Industry Association as a client; the head of the USIAA wrote part of the NMRC report.)
An email correspondent who prefers to remain anonymous but has had dealings with the NMRC and IDI wrote in to note, “If you need an ‘independent’ third party to provide support for your particular issue interest, IDI will find an independent expert who will write a supportive piece for you—the report will then be issued by the NMRC or another front org. There is no direct money passing from the corporation to the person writing the research, and as a technical matter, the funding for NMRC comes directly from IDI. However, people like Verizon pay IDI a pretty stiff retainer, and IDI essentially uses part of that to fund NMRC.”
IDI says about NMRC: “A unique component of Issues Management & Research services is our relationship with the New Millennium Research Council. The New Millennium Research Council (NMRC) has an experienced staff that provides clients with topical briefs, targeted policy research, and in-depth issue analysis. The NMRC also provides clients with a network of policy experts who can provide content and services over a range of topics. NMRC research projects include, but are not limited to, telecommunications, Internet, and technology policy issues.”
The executive director of NMRC, Allen Hepner, wrote in this article at IDI’s site (which is linked from the NMRC About page), “Next Generation think-tanks are able to present their views to larger populations including national and influential decision makers and attain a new level of credibility at a much lower cost. When it comes to winning the war of ideas, bigger isn’t always better in this case.”
Posted by Glennf at 9:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Interesting editorial concludes that spectrum management is leading to municipal wireless fights: If you follow Thomas Hazlett’s logic from start to finish, he argues that the reason there’s a pull for municipal wireless—including from municipalities that have fought or imposed tough conditions on other forms of broadband in the past—is that companies that would like to provide such services are stymied by bandwidth scarcity. If they had the bandwidth, they’d have built the service, and would already be providing effective competition for incumbents. Craig McCaw provides one example: he bought MMDS bandwidth and now is looking at providing competitive offerings to wireline broadband.
I agree with elements of his reasoning. If the cell companies and other firms interesting in wireless data had enormously more bandwidth, it would be substantially easier for them to trial and roll out data services without worrying about scavenging bits and pieces and trying the most advanced, most spectrum-scrounging alternatives. (Scarcity promotes ingenuity, too, so there’s a case to be made for giving billion-dollar companies a box full of parts and asking them to build a spaceship.)
Hazlett is dead on about the lack of coordinated spectrum policy management in the U.S. It bites us again and again compared to the lockstep of parts of the rest of the world, making us less competitive in that businesses have to support many standards and many bands. There’s no logical path forward. Diversity breeds strength, one might argue here, too, but sometimes easier is just better. The efforts introduced by FCC chair Michael Powell to reform the MMDS band, thus reallocating and freeing up massive amounts of sweet-spot spectrum plus the eventual freeing of VHF and more UHF bands when the DTV transition is complete (in some future decade) might eventually provide the necessary bandwidth for “easier.”
Hazlett does sidestep the entire cost issue. 3G spectrum was available in Europe, and telcos practically bankrupted themselves bidding it up during the bubble’s growth worldwide. American carriers avoided spending resources just before a time they could scarce afford it, and that might be why we have six strong carriers who just collapsed into five and possibly soon four.
Posted by Glennf at 12:37 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Intel will help municipalities fight pro-incumbent, anti-municipal services legislation: Intel Telecommunications Group head Sean Maloney says the adversarial role between municipalities and incumbents communications providers is counterproductive, and the laws that require right of first refusal are not a good model. He doesn’t like free Wi-Fi, either, though, because it undercuts that there profit motive we’ve heard so much about.
Maloney notes a variant on my take on the subject: I believe municipalities should focus on hiring a company to build a vendor-neutral network over which any service provider can offer their logical signal on a level playing field. Maloney wants municipalities to create a bidding process in which incumbents have just as much reason to build the infrastructure as they would on their own.
Intel needs muni-Fi in order to push mobile and fixed WiMax. An Intel spokesperson tut-tutted about lobbying, but said Intel would use its influence. Which is, ah, let’s see. Well, close enough, but we’ll be happy to watch King Kong fight Mothra from a distance.
Posted by Glennf at 7:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Open Park offers free Wi-Fi during inauguration: Park yourself on Open Park’s network between 14th and 15th Sts. NW in Pershing Park so you can moblog, photoblog, and text-blog during the event. Unless the Secret Service decides that holding a camera phone up makes you a national security threat. This location is along the parade route.
Posted by Glennf at 10:34 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Sascha Meinrath of CUWiN and Esme Vos of Muniwireless.com offer complementary insights on Indiana’s frightening telecom bill: The bill in Indiana has elements that are familiar to me in my reading of Pennsylvania’s and Wisconsin’s legislation. The short story is that Indiana’s law has the least protections for municipalities trying to offer wireless, telecom, and cable services. In fact, just the mere intention by a commercial operator to offer service within nine months—no commitment needed, nor do they have to build out in that period—scotches any municipality’s plans.
Sascha Meinrath provides a detailed analysis of the bill’s provisions noting how high the bar is set for municipalities and how easy it will be for incumbents to prevent municipal networks even in cases where one might imagine they’d be allowed. Sascha cites a case in Kentucky (via a colleague of his) that is precisely the kind of delay he’s talking about.
Esme Vos looks at job creation and how municipal networks help communities keep or bring in new jobs. Telecom and broadband go hand in hand with the needs of companies. [links via GigaOm who also provides a link to the laws in various states prohibiting municipal broadband and related services.]
Posted by Glennf at 7:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Esme Vos dissects the latest state bill that caters to incumbent operators: Existing law prevents municipalities—with their tremendous tax-free advantages as opposed to the massive subsidization of telcos and cable operators—from running their own cable TV systems. A modified bill, introduced by a graduate of the colleges of Zig Zigler and Dale Carnegie, adds telecom services to that mix. Esme would like to know which companies are behind this particular emendation to Ohio’s law. [link indirectly via GigaOm]
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Esme Vos reports on Madison, Wisconsin’s efforts to build a municipal wireless network: Madison is skirting the law enacted July 2004 that prevents municipalities from building any kind of network—phone, data, or cable—without a number of intermediate steps, such as hearings. Madison is using a third party, so they aren’t subject to the law. They’re essentially establishing a new franchise, as Esme points out.
Esme also notes a hilarious situation that resulted when Jackson, Wisconsin, was sued by the telco and cable trade associations in Wisconsin. Esme reports that the city says the suit was dismissed because the judge ruled the groups lacked the standing to bring a lawsuit! Who could sue? Probably only a state agency, I’d wager, having read the Wisconsin law. [link via GigaOm]
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WAPI’s back: The ISO has put the proprietary Chinese standard that only Chinese firms are allowed to implement on the agenda for consideration. It’s ridiculous that a standard that cannot be examined in full nor made available under reasonable and non-discriminatory terms to licensees would become a potential international standard next to 802.11i. It won’t die despite its political and technical futility. [link via TechDirt]
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The Pennsylvania law requiring municipalities to get approval from telcos to build their own for-fee networks just keeps spawning more reporting and writing: Coverage of the bill’s progress to law has certainly reawakened a broader interest in the impact and extent of these laws, along with the telcos and cable companies involvement in suppressing local exchange competition.
A letter to The Inquirer from an attorney involved on the municipal side of the equation for utilities disputes whether Philadelphia should build its own network. He makes interesting points about Philly’s own abilities and its own anti-competitive behavior. If Philly bid out to have a private contractor—a CLEC, even—build and operate a vendor-neutral network, this would probably answer three of his four concerns.
Jim Hu reports at News.com about the marketing and lobbying carried out by telcoms to crush efforts to build local data, cable, and telecom networks. The article cites incumbents talking about how investments in infrastructure and operations are gambles for local municipalities, while they’re proven business initiatives for the operators—even as the operators claim unfair advantages in costs to municipalities. That’s a contradiction I’d like to see resolved. They seem to point to inexperience as the issue, but municipalities are typically contracting services to established players, some of whom build out on contract for operators.
Operators may be pulling the teeth out of municipal services to avoid the pressure of having a faster timetable to provide cost-competitive service as the story’s concluding graf tells a lesson: “We only got cable modems last spring after the cities began making noise about building our own utility,” said Peter Collins, Annie Collins’ husband and the director of information technology for the city of Geneva. “The big part of what that proved to us is we scared the hell out of them and all of a sudden proved we don’t have to rely on them for our telecom future.”
Finally, the Washington Post rounds up municipal networks nationwide, focusing on the consumer rights that various legislation appears to have forestalled, according to consumer advocates. They note that these bills put control in the hands of corporations rather than, say, a public utility district or citizens or elected officials. The Supreme Court has upheld that municipalities can’t control their telecom destinies if higher entities, like the state, tell them not to.
The existence of successful projects nationwide for cable, voice, and data seem to belie the contention that the incumbent operators are making. The more successful projects that roll out and offer services that incumbents weren’t planning on introducing or that go far beyond those services, the harder it will be to make a compelling argument that cities can’t run their own services for the benefits of their own citizens.
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The Philadelphia meets (beats?) Verizon story has legs: This story blew up worldwide, and I believe Esme Vos gets some or most of the credit for it turning into an international rather than local story. Others are free to post comments disagreeing with that statement. Esme analyzes the political side of this story this morning.
Cynthia Webb of the WashingtonPost.com posted an extensive set of links following the story across the developments of the last few days, which I won’t attempt to replicate, but rather guide you to read through and follow her links.
Jesse Drucker at the Wall Street Journal files an update about the law being signed.
Matt Richtel at The New York Times reports, too, declaring it a victory for Verizon Communications. Richtel quotes the governor’s deputy chief of staff stating something that I had pointed out—that it’s unclear what the incumbent has to build out when asked by a political subdivision. But, Mr. Myers said, the language of the law is so vague that it is not clear whether the telecommunications provider would have to use the technology favored by the city, like wireless Internet access, or whether it could provide Internet access using a different technology. [NYTimes link via the wireless weblog]
Sascha Meinrath reads HB30 very closely, and worries that as signed into law, the statute requires that anyone who wants any broadband service that the local exchange carrier doesn’t offer has to petition the LEC and sign a commitment to buy into service for one year. The law lists any person, business, local development district, industrial development agency, or other entity. So the petitioning process isn’t limited to municipalities: it is new providers, consumers, and business that either want a particular service from someone else or want to offer a particular service to someone else. If anyone can dispute this interpretation, please post in the comments.
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Four delegates to a join ISO/IEC meeting were refused visas: The four delegates (out of six on the team) represented the technical side of the Chinese WAPI (Wireless Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure) security standard which was widely criticized last year with complaints from U.S. businesses manifesting themselves in a cabinet-level statement from the U.S. WAPI is a native Chinese standard that the country planned to keep proprietary and would require all WLAN products to incorporate for sale within China. Non-Chinese firms would have to partner with domestic counterparts that were approved to add the standard. China eventually backed off on their WAPI requirement, for now. The reason for the visa being denied was not given.
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Pennsylvania’s Governor, Edward G. Rendall, did sign House Bill 30, giving incumbents veto power over municipal networks: However, if you read the release, you’ll find some remarkably candid discussion of the issues surrounding municipal networks and the various actions taken to ensure Philadelphia’s network will go forward given an agreement signed with Verizon. Other municipalities may go into high gear as they have until Jan. 1, 2006, to avoid the first-refusal requirement. The governor’s release notes that the bill was adjusted to provide more grandfathering over the course of its development.
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The AP reports that Verizon and Philadelphia have an agreement to allow the city’s Wi-Fi network to be built regardless of the telecommunications bill: The story reports that Verizon has agreed to waive its first right of refusal to build a broadband network when Philadelphia requests permission under the law, if the bill becomes law. The bill has not yet been signed by the governor, but unless vetoed before midnight tonight, it will automatically become law.
The language in this story indicates that this side agreement has more of a chance of being enforced because it binds Verizon to carry out a provision in the law instead of being extra-legal, as some early reports and participants indicated.
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Larry Abramson of All Things Considered weighs in with a report on Philly Wi-Fi: The governor hasn’t signed the bill yet, and NPR adds their somewhat objective two cents. It’s so objective that they give Verizon a little too much of a bully pulpit. Verizon complains that the municipal government has enormous cost advantages, but that’s a blind: Verizon will have a 2015 requirement for 100-percent access in Pennsylvania, which gives them plenty of time to push back on that requirement in years to come. Philadelphia wants to offer 100-percent access by 2006. There’s no way that Verizon could build out such a service profitably in that time at any rate that would make sense to residents.
I’ve said it several times during this discussion, but Verizon would love to avoid building infrastructure. They’d love to sell logical service on a single bill—that is, the Internet dial tone not the Internet copper and wireless. It’s incredibly cheap for Verizon to add, say, 50,000 customers on infrastructure they don’t have to finance, build, and maintain. In fact, the Verizon rep said as much: cities can raise money more cheaply and aren’t subject to taxation. Thus Verizon would benefit from cities building Internet infrastructure resold to Verizon on a cost-plus basis, as well as to all comers.
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Technology Opportunities Program (TOP) granted money to a number of community wireless groups: TOP was defunded in the FY 2005 budget. Sascha Meinrath, who noted this defunding on his blog, said via email that an important ally of community wireless groups was lost with the end of this program. The program disbursed $250 million since 1994.
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Providers might be threatened by Philadelphia’s planned Wi-Fi network: A bill was introduced at the state level in Pennsylvania that would prohibit the kind of networks that Philly plans to build. Comcast and Verizon denied any interest in suppressing the plan, noting that the bill has been in the works for a year, and includes a revamp of educational telecommunications funding. The article doesn’t look at draft of bills. I compared the early text of the bill from April 2003 with the current text, and it does, in fact, have the same language prohibiting municipalities from engaging in for-fee networks:
A POLITICAL SUBDIVISION OR ANY entity established by a political subdivision, including a municipal authority, may not provide any telecommunications services to the public for compensation within the service territory of a local exchange telecommunications company operating under a network modernization plan.
Update: Great analysis from Esme Vos over at Muniwireless.com about how the Philadelphia situation might play out. As she notes, the legislation restricts compensated networks, not free ones, among other angles she explores.
More updates: An Associated Press story adds some details, including the fact that municipal systems in place by Jan. 1, 2006, are exempted—expect a speed-up on Philadelphia’s plans. The bill gives the incumbents 10 years to offer broadband statewide, and requires contributions and discounts. The fact that the carriers get another 10 years of monopoly in exchange for offering schools 30 percent discounts (among other items) is a little like saying, “You can keep repairing this toll highway and keep the proceeds, but school buses pay less”—while preventing municipalities from building local arterials.
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The Tampa International Airport apparently thinks the FCC rule that landlords can’t control unlicensed spectrum doesn’t apply to them: The airport is retaining legal counsel to deal with the issue, which was settled definitively by the FCC earlier this year. We wrote about this decision in June. I don’t see much leeway in the FCC stating it has exclusive authority to resolving matters, and that rules prohibit landlords from placing restrictions.
The article quotes the airport’s executive director’s position. “There’s been talk that airports do not have the authority to regulate telecommunications services within the airport,” said Louis E. Miller, executive director of Tampa International Airport. “We think that’s ridiculous.” Fascinating that an FCC ruling would be dismissed as “talk.” If this makes it to federal court, it’s certainly possible that a court could rule the FCC doesn’t have this authority, but it’s seems doubtful, as the FCC has such a broad mandate covering this issue. There were numerous lawsuits about condos and satellite TV antennas, and the FCC appears to have definitively resolved that in their own favor.
Here’s a great equivocation from a trade association that seems to side with the airport: While the FCC does have the authority for frequency regulation, it does not stop an airport from “managing” the usage of spectrum, said Bill Belt, director of technical regulatory affairs for The Telecommunications Industry Association. The Web site for this group shows it advocates market-based regulation of spectrum. The board of directors doesn’t seem to represent any particular landlord/airport bias, either: Lucent, Cisco, IBM, and Intel are all on the board.
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The Wall Street Journal notes that easier regulation and a lower tax burden might contribute to VoIP as a cellular complement: A new phone from Motorola might be one of the first to hit the U.S. market in which voice calls could travel over home Wi-Fi, hotspot Wi-Fi, and GSM cell networks. Reporter Jesse Drucker writes that the Yankee Group estimates one-third of people’s cell calls would be within range of some Wi-Fi service. Offloading minutes via Wi-Fi could be appealing to consumers if the cell companies don’t count those as in-plan minutes. It allows carriers to be more “generous,” reducing customer churn, and it avoids filling expensive cell spectrum with more calls.
Sprint PCS and Cingular are both pursuing this hybrid option, which a potential FCC decision that would make VoIP calls exempt to local regulation and taxation could aid. The cell companies can more easily add a service that has a single national taxation and legal structure. SBC is again the catbird seat with a large footprint of Wi-Fi hotspots of their own and available for resale that could be used.
I predict that the $1.99 per month unlimited FreedomLink Wi-Fi that SBC is offering to its DSL customers (with six months free with a year commitment) finds its way by spring into Cingular customers’ mailboxes for a slight premium: I wager $10.00 per month, partly to counter T-Mobile’s excellent footprint and $20 per month unlimited Wi-Fi for its cellular customers.
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The NY Times follows some of those wires (and wireless signals) around the DNC’s FleetCenter home: This thorough report by Seth Schiesel follows some of the complexity managing wired and frequencies at an event of the scale of the DNC. After reading this article, I’m amazed that anything manages to work. Other stories in this vein indicate that thousands of miles of wire were pulled for this week, while the RNC venue in New York might top 40,000 miles because of some slightly longer distances involved in two spaces being used.
The Wi-Fi problem is clearly explained, and it appears that the planners did hope to reserve space for Wi-Fi. I’m guessing that the wireless equipment used by camera operators is incredibly noisy, spewing out far more than is legal out-of-band (slop-over) signal. Because Wi-Fi has such a low amount of legal signal, it’s very likely that the electronic newsgathering (ENG) is treading all over its neighbor’s space. There should be at least a few clear Wi-Fi channels.
The network is apparently geared to handle the equivalent of 3,000 T-1 lines—but tell that to my buddy who not only didn’t get his paid-for T-1 line drop, but was told there was nothing that Verizon could do about it.
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FCC rule allows end-users to change out antennas on their Wi-Fi and other gear legally if the manufacturer has performed the right tests and the antennas conform to certain guidelines: Jim Thompson alerted me to FCC rule 04-165 issued July 12, 2004, which has some substantial changes for devices that use unlicensed spectrum, most significantly Wi-Fi. The rules affect devices that operate under Part 2 and Part 15 rules, and we’re most concerned with Part 15, which governs 900 MHz, 2.4 GHz, and several bands in 5 GHz.
The most notable general applicable of this rule change is in section 2, which starts with point 18: “Replacement Antennas for Unlicensed Devices.” Until now, the FCC has required that any antenna to be used with a device operating under Part 15 rules had to be tested and certified as part of a system. There was no mix and match proviso. Further, the FCC required unique connectors for each manufacturer, and required new connectors to be designed as the existing ones became commonplace.
“Wait,” you may ask—“I can go to HyperLink Technologies or other companies and buy antennas with the right connectors and attach them to my Wi-Fi gateway. If it’s illegal, how can I buy this gear?” Simple. It’s legal to sell antennas; it’s illegal to use them. It’s the same logic that guides the sale of bongs and switchblade kits. It’s opposite to the logic that underlies the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The antenna/switchblade law essentially says that the seller isn’t responsible for all the uses to which a purchaser may put a product. The purchaser is obliged to know local and federal rules and conform to them.
Thus, attach the antenna, and you’re a pirate. Assemble the switchblade, and you’re a criminal. Forget that there have been approximately zero prosecutions for the use of these antennas on home or business systems. But no one wants to be in de facto violation of a law, especially businesses that may considering building out Wi-Fi as part of their operations. The lawyers might look askance, and the companies might have to pay enormously higher fees to purchase legal antennas—if they’re available. Those fees help cover the companies’ cost in certifying the antennas as part of a system, but also represent their lock-in market for legal use.
The FCC rule doesn’t suddenly make all antennas legal for all systems. Instead, they have chosen a clever middle ground. For new devices—or, presumably for recertification of old devices—manufacturers will be allowed to test the system with high-gain antennas of each major type, like omni, patch, yagi, and so forth. Once the device is certified, the manufacturer can release the characteristics of the antennas they tested for both their in-band and out-of-band signal patterns and strengths. (Out-of-band transmissions are the inevitable but not intentional frequencies that are broadcast on at typically very low levels due to harmonics and other technical radio issues.)
Thus, if Linksys certifies its WRT54G with a very high-gain yagi antenna within the Part 15 rules, then a user can add a lower-gain yagi that has all its parameters within those levels and be perfectly legal.
Jim Thompson provided a longer, detailed explanation via email:
“Let’s say you have a (warning, plug alert!) HS3000 that has been tested with a 9dBi omni. Were you to find an 8dBi omni from a different manufacturer, with similar out of band gain (i.e. it doesn’t generate more gain in the restricted bands, thereby causing a system that would otherwise comply with the restricted band limits to ‘go illegal’), you could use it.
“You could also attach a 2.2dBi omni, as long as it didn’t have more gain out of band than the antennas with which the device is certified. You can repeat the above paragraph substituting ‘yagi’ or ‘patch’ or ‘grid’ antenna everywhere ‘omni’ occurs.
“What you can’t do is certify (let’s say) with a single 2.2dBi omni, and then have your customer attach a 13dBi yagi, (without recertification), nor could you say, certify with a 13dBi yagi and have your customer attach a 13dBi patch (or omni).”
I have some suspicion that the recent array of Linksys add-on antennas were certified under this new rule and delayed for release until such point that the rule could go into effect. This rule would dramatically reduce the cost of re-certifying gear for more antennas, and it makes it possible for Linksys to sell a huge matrix of their own antennas at no additional testing cost beyond the initial certification. On the other hand, it also makes it easier for third parties to sell antennas legally for Linksys’s devices, but sales of legal antennas for illegal uses has seemed to curtail sales before this.
Remember that until a device is retested under these rules—and who knows if manufacturers will pay to retest the current generation of equipment—you’re still technically violating the law by mixing and matching antennas. Watch for more news on this front, as devices are certified until these new rules.
The FCC decided to leave the connector rules intact, even though manufacturers argued that it’s so easy to get their “proprietary” connectors from third parties, that the current rules just added cost and complexity. The FCC demurred, noting that it wanted to make it just hard enough to make adding an antenna an intentional act. It gets lost in the furor over unscientific concerns about the risk of Wi-Fi and 2.4 GHz electromagnetic radiation that microwaves can injure humans at sufficiently high gain—far, far higher than the Part 15 rules allow.
The FCC said in regards to the connector issue, “…our concern that removing this requirement might have the unintended consequence of allowing uninformed consumers to inadvertently attach an antenna which causes the device to emit at levels in excess of the limits for human exposure to radio emissions.” Good enough. It preserves the market for pigtails, that’s for sure.
This section also revises the rules about integral antennas for 5 GHz (802.11a and other uses) devices. The FCC will now allow externally detachable antennas for these devices, which adds flexibility.
The FCC tweaked a number of other rules, including one that appears to reflect a change in thinking from its one-off approval of Vivato’s beam-focused Wi-Fi—I’m trying to better understand that section. In another part, they tweak measurement standards. Part 5 covers changing rules for frequency hopping to make it possible for future Bluetooth flavors to work legally in the U.S.
Interestingly, spectrum etiquette in unlicensed bands was discussed in part 6, but the FCC declined to take any action. They gave props to Microsoft for a proposal they might implement in the future that would reduce the noise of devices that aren’t actively transmitting. Some of these principles are already embodied in 802.11h, which was a required extension for 802.11a to operate in the 5 GHz band in Europe.
I converted the FCC document from Word to HTML and linked it in the headline of this article, but you can also download the rule in three formats: Word, PDF, and plain old text.
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Newbury Networks wardrove through Boston for a few hours and found lots of open access points and promiscuous Wi-Fi cards: They’d like to piggyback some publicity on the upcoming Democratic National Convention by noting that it’s easy to find unsecured access point and easy for a Wi-Fi adapter to associate with an unknown point without user intervention.
Still, the real issue is whether DNC operatives and even press will be wandering around outside the Wi-Fi-less convention center with laptops trying to connect to random networks or with their cards trying on their own. It’s much more likely that those attending the DNC won’t take basic security precautions like using a VPN tunnel or even turning off their wireless card when there’s no network they’re trying to use.
Still, with this knowledge in hand—what do you do with it? Newbury Networks says in their press release, this potentially sets up a dangerous security scenario based on the level of open Wi-Fi networks in range of the FleetCenter. Sure. And?
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Japan might tax the use of unlicensed spectrum for wireless LANs to protect market for licensed spectrum holders: The logic cited is fairly bizarre—that charging for unlicensed use is “fair,” which I presume means “fair to companies that paid large amounts of money for cellular telephone spectrum” but not “fair for citizens who own the airwaves and can now not see fit to use them for free.” Japan perhaps has a different regulatory framework than the U.S.
Imagine a bill hitting the House of Representatives suddenly that proposed a consumer tax on Wi-Fi? I think the recall petition would be filled with signatures before the bill reached its second reading. The bill in Japan won’t reach Parliament until 2005, at which point the legislators involved will probably have been voted out of office, or buried under