Posted by: AT&T Blog Team on October 21, 2010 at 2:20 pm
(BACKGROUND: Today, the FCC released a technical analysis of the benefits from the reallocation of additional spectrum to commercial mobile broadband use. The FCC’s new analysis finds, using conservative projections and assumptions, that the spectrum deficit will approach 300 MHz by 2014, and that making additional spectrum available for mobile broadband use will add substantial economic value in the next five years.)
The following statement may be attributed to Robert Quinn, AT&T Senior Vice President, Federal Regulatory.
“The FCC’s forecast and the supporting analysis are fully borne out by what we see daily on our wireless broadband networks. Faster, more intelligent networks, coupled with increasingly more sophisticated connected devices and prolific application development has led to accelerated growth across the mobile broadband ecosystem. New wireless broadband devices are emerging at an unprecedented rate as are connected machine-to-machine devices. Consider that 57% of AT&T’s postpaid subscriber base now has an integrated device. All of this means that mobile broadband traffic is surging on the trajectories predicted in the FCC’s analysis.”
“We commend FCC Chairman Genachowski for understanding the urgency in making more spectrum available for mobile broadband, and for moving quickly to solve this major problem. Additional spectrum is not only essential for the wireless industry, it is vital in meeting the needs of hundreds of millions of wireless customers. More wireless spectrum will also support economic growth and job creation at an important time. We look forward to working with the FCC and Chairman Genachowski so that we can unleash the value of new mobile broadband spectrum.”
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Posted by: Hank Hultquist on October 19, 2010 at 11:01 pm
Day three of “House” Held Hostage.
While many (ok, just a few) folks are focused on the fate of “House,” the medical TV drama on Fox, we here in Tech/Telecom Policy Land are watching a sea change in what the Fox/Cablevision drama is telling us about the net neutrality debate.
Earlier this year, we filed comments in the FCC’s Open Internet proceeding, explaining, at great length, exactly why the “terminating monopoly” theory of net neutrality regulation (one of the policy justifications used for imposing rules on ISPs), just didn’t make sense in the Internet ecosystem.
Well, in a semi-controlled experiment still underway, Fox and Cablevision are doing a pretty good job proving that point. Some would even say the (ISP) King is dead. Long live the (Content) King. Fox and Cablevision are embroiled in a dispute over retransmission consent that has resulted in Cablevision customers losing access to Fox channels. Over the weekend, the dispute briefly escalated to the point where Fox was allegedly blocking Cablevision’s Internet customers from accessing Fox content on Hulu and Fox.com.
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Posted by: Hank Hultquist on October 15, 2010 at 2:41 pm
In Silver Blaze, one of the most popular Sherlock Holmes stories, Holmes solves the mystery of the disappearance of a racehorse in part by divining the importance of something that others failed to notice – the silence of a dog. Holmes concluded that this “curious incident” (which was really a non-incident) could only mean that the dog recognized the midnight visitor who took the horse.
Today, I’d like to focus on another curious incident. You may recall that a little over a year ago, AT&T and others brought to the attention of the FCC the fact that Google was blocking certain telephone calls to areas frequented by traffic-pumpers (i.e., companies with a business built on stimulating calling in order to collect terminating switched access charges). I was reminded of this curious incident yesterday when the FCC’s Chairman, Julius Genachowski, took some measure of credit for opening the iPhone to Skype simply by making inquiries.
The FCC made similar inquiries with respect to Google’s call-blocking practices, and Google responded by narrowing the scope of its call-blocking. But it has never stopped blocking calls to traffic-pumpers and the FCC has never again barked about this issue. To make matters worse, I have been told by rural carriers that some other IP-based providers have taken the FCC’s silence as license to block calls more generally to rural areas to which they are unable to complete calls at the rates they prefer.
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