Posted by: Frank Simone on November 23, 2010 at 11:24 am
If you’ve spent any amount of time in Washington, D.C. telecom circles you no doubt have heard AT&T shout from the roof tops that the marketplace for special access services is very competitive. But the NoChokePoints coalition has sought to discredit these claims by characterizing them like Kris Kringle’s in the holiday movie favorite Miracle on 34th Street, as the ramblings of an insane old man who should be institutionalized.
So, it was with great interest that I read the other day that one of the leading member companies of this coalition was boasting that they receive these services from fourteen different providers.
“T-Mobile now uses 14 different backhaul providers, including local exchange carriers, Ethernet wireless providers and cable companies. Economics is the main reason T-Mobile is using so many providers…[and] T-Mobile had to work with smaller providers to get the right mix of technology and price.”
Yes, fourteen. Twelve drummers drumming plus two. Ten lords a-leaping plus four.
At that moment, I understood Judge Henry X. Harper’s excitement when proof that Kris Kringle is Santa Claus was presented to the Court.
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Posted by: Joan Marsh on October 25, 2010 at 9:56 pm
Anyone who believes that FCC-mandated net neutrality could or should be applied to wireless networks ought to read Mike Dano’s recent article at FierceWireless. Dano’s focus is an FCC filing earlier this year by T-Mobile which described in detail the damage caused by a poorly designed instant messaging app that pinged the network with substantial frequency creating signaling problems:
“These signaling problems not only caused network overload problems that affected all [local] broadband users; it also ended up forcing [a reengineering of the radio architecture] to address this never-before-seen signaling issue.”
According to the filing, this one application caused an increase in data use of as much as 1,200 percent on a single device.
To be clear, I am not casting stones. We have been on the frontlines of the mobile broadband data and app revolution, working and investing furiously to keep pace with the exploding demand for wireless data services. But this experience shows once again how the advocated “all apps are created equal” regulatory straightjacket, which doesn’t even make sense for the wired web, is spectacularly ill-suited for wireless networks.
Even pro-Net neutrality advocate Robert Cringley has acknowledged that a handful of Slingbox streams are enough to overtake the capacity of a cell tower.
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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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