US Telecom Association wants 'archaic' regulations gone | TheHill

US Telecom Association wants 'archaic' regulations gone | TheHill: Steve Davis, chairman of the board of U.S. Telecom, said some of the regulations cited "don't apply to cable companies or any of our competitors, and to the extent that they ever served a purpose, that purpose has long since evaporated."

The group pointed to a number of regulations they want to avoid, including requirements that companies "separate local and long-distance business, and requiring traditional phone companies to continue the provisioning of obsolete technology."

The group cited a speech Wheeler gave in February in which he noted that a large percentage of investment recently by telephone companies went to "maintaining the declining telephone network, despite the fact that only one-third of U.S. households use it at all."

"The future regulatory environment should be one that is based upon the world as it exists today," the group’s president and CEO, Walter McCormick, told reporters. "That is sort of like the overall theme we think public policy should move towards. This petition is a little tiny baby step in that direction."

The world of POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) is still very much alive in much of the United States, where some 19 million homes and small businesses still rely on the publicly switched telephone network (PSTN) and dialup wireline Internet service. As long as it exists, regulators will be hard pressed to scrap rules designed for POTS without a firm transition plan in place.

The Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers (ILECs) could potentially get more than they wish for in making this request. The Federal Communications Commission could respond by effectively saying, "OK, if you don't want to comply with outdated POTS rules, you are hereby subject to Title II of the Communications Act and thereby must deploy advanced telecommunications infrastructure throughout your service territories."

South Korea’s gigabit broadband woes should serve as object lesson for FCC regulators | Network World

South Korea’s gigabit broadband woes should serve as object lesson for FCC regulators | Network World: Private South Korean firms, notably KT (the former Korea Telecom), SK Telecom and the cable provider CJ Hellovision, became the principal participants in the gigabit project, with the government committing about 5 percent of the total estimated budget.

But by 2011, only a very small-scale 1Gbps pilot project with 1,500 households in five South Korean cities had been launched, all with government funding. None of the private firms could make a case for moving ahead, however, since they had not yet developed a business model to justify the scale of investment that the KCC had said would be necessary.

Three years passed without any indication of progress on the effort, leading many to believe that the plan had hit an impasse. Then in July 2014, Chairman Chang-gyu Hwang of KT, the dominant broadband provider in Korea, representing almost half of the country’s total broadband market share, called a press conference—an announcement that I hoped would be an encouraging milestone.

Chairman Hwang told those assembled that the company faced its first annual deficit in 2013 due to its sales declines in wired broadband, along with almost-flat growth in mobile subscribers. It was the worst time in the company’s history, one that he called a “devastating year of poor performance.” KT even had suspended new customer marketing for 45 days and asked 8,300 employees to voluntarily resign to help the company overcome this crisis.

The real object lesson here is commercial investment in high cost telecommunications infrastructure is fraught with substantial business risk. It's that business risk -- and not the risk of common carrier regulation as some such as this article warn -- that produces market failure that in the United States has left some 19 million homes and small businesses without wireline Internet access according to Federal Communications Commission estimates.

The Perennial Need for Speed | Light Reading

The Perennial Need for Speed | Light Reading: Vodafone, for one, sounds eager to get away from this obsession with the megabit flow. Matt Beal, the operator's head of technical architecture, envisages a time in the not-too-distant future when speed will be irrelevant and customers will not be able to distinguish between network technologies on that basis. "Customers will solely be focused on the service that we render -- its ability to be agile to their needs, and its ability to be relevant and personalized," he told UBB Forum attendees during his presentation.

Beal is correct in this assessment. Speed is important now because existing infrastructure is still largely metal wire-based and limited in the throughput it can offer. The pricing models of the legacy cable and telephone companies also reflect this, charging consumers more for higher speeds and imposing bandwidth consumption caps.

But as fiber to the premise providing excellent throughput replaces legacy infrastructure, speed will no longer be a distinguishing feature of Internet service for the vast majority of consumers.

A Digital Desert: The Internet Debate Pits Local Communities Against Broadband Giants

A Digital Desert: The Internet Debate Pits Local Communities Against Broadband Giants: Bradley County and other rural communities outside Chattanooga have requested that EPB expand its world-class fiber connection to their area, because companies like Charter have failed to do so. EPB wants to expand its service to rural customers where economically feasible, but a state law passed in 1999 - before most American homes had internet access - is keeping the utility from doing so.

The economics for EPB (Chattanooga's local nonprofit electric utility) to construct fiber to the premise (FTTP) telecommunications infrastructure for Bradley County, Tennessee could well pencil out more easily than for the incumbent legacy phone and cable providers -- where it thus far hasn't.

It's time for state policymakers to repeal laws (or the federal government to preempt them) that restrict expansion by nonprofit telecommunications providers like EPB. It makes no sense from a public policy perspective to preserve a for-profit duopoly as an exclusive franchise without a broad socio-economic justification when lower cost community providers may be economically more able to bring FTTP connections to most all American homes and small businesses.

CWA's support of AT&T/DIRECTV merger based on fallacious logic

CWA says AT&T-DIRECTV merger will advance broadband buildout, help consumers, Workers | Speed Matters - Internet Speed Test: The AT&T/DIRECTV merger will improve the economics for AT&T’s investment in high-speed broadband, the critical infrastructure for the 21st century, CWA said. Video is the major driver of broadband expansion, producing the revenue stream to support investment in high-speed networks. As a stronger video competitor, a merged AT&T/DIRECTV will have the economic incentives to increase investment in the high-capacity networks that are so essential to drive economic growth, jobs, and the social benefits enabled by high-speed digital technology.

So asserts the Communications Workers of America in comments filed with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission in support of AT&T's acquisition of DIRECTV.

The problem is the logic does not hold up. AT&T's deriving additional revenues from DIRECTV video services does not necessarily mean those additional funds will be invested in landline Internet infrastructure.

And why should that be the case, AT&T will likely ask itself once the deal goes through, when satellite does the job of delivering video content to residential premises? Instead, any video revenue bump from the deal will likely be plowed into earnings and dividends, not CAPex.

LTE Reinvigorates the Broadband Wireless Access Marketplace, According to ABI Research - Yahoo Finance

LTE Reinvigorates the Broadband Wireless Access Marketplace, According to ABI Research - Yahoo Finance: LTE has turbocharged the mobile Internet experience for end-users, which has reflected in rapid adoption of LTE-capable smartphones along with other mobile devices, but it has also reinvigorated the broadband wireless marketplace. According to ABI Research, 1.26 billion households do not have DSL, cable, or fiber-optic broadband. Fixed and mobile telcos are looking to LTE to make the connection.

This is more an aspirational than realistic scenario. Radio spectrum lacks the bandwidth necessary to serve premise demand where there are typically multiple devices and heavy use of video streaming. In addition, the business and pricing models of the mobile space players like Verizon and AT&T are not designed to serve premises with "bandwidth by the bucket" pricing tiers and consumption caps.

Consumers Need Greater Internet Access and Faster Broadband Speeds

Consumers Need Greater Internet Access and Faster Broadband Speeds: Washington, D.C. – The Internet Association submitted comments to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today calling on the agency to implement pro-consumer policies to bring faster and better broadband service to all Americans, promote competition and choice in the broadband market, and protect an open Internet.

“The Internet is an indispensable tool that is necessary to stay competitive globally, and the Commission has a mandate to ensure the deployment of advanced broadband services nationwide,” said Michael Beckerman, President and CEO of The Internet Association. “Access to high speed Internet service is not a luxury in today’s economy. It is a necessity. Policymakers must encourage broadband abundance and ensure high speed Internet service is deployed everywhere.”

Of course there is little competition at the network edge controlled by incumbent legacy telephone and cable companies because the microeconomics make it a natural monopoly or duopoly with little incentive to invest in upgrades and expansions.

If the Internet Association wants to see the edge upgraded and expanded to fiber to the premise (FTTP) infrastructure needed to create the abundance it wants, it will have to build that infrastructure as its member company Google is doing with its Google Fiber unit.

But as an open access network. The incumbent telephone and cable companies would be hard pressed to respond. But they too could win in the end with open access FTTP since they could offer services to customers over it.

Don't call it broadband

It's time to relegate the term "broadband" to the history books. Along with "high speed Internet." The reason is these terms are no longer appropriate in the 21st century when fiber optic cables can deliver 1 gigabit and greater bandwidth to customers.

Exhibit A in the case against "broadband" is none other than the legacy incumbent telephone companies that coined the term in the 1990s to differentiate what was then called "advanced services" from dialup narrowband service. They want to dictate to consumers what constitutes "broadband" and "high speed" and what they consider good enough using technologically obsolete and rapidly outdated standards. Their other motivation is to preserve pricing schemes based on contrived scarcity that treat Internet service like a consumption-based utility where consumers pay more for higher speeds and bandwidth tiers similar to those used in water and electricity service.
 
Using the terms "broadband" and "high speed Internet" allows the legacy telephone and cable companies to control the conversation by defining what constitutes "broadband" and "high speed Internet."

It also misdirects resources. If the United States had uselessly wasted time and effort in the 1920s and 1930s debating the definition of electric power service (the number of volts, amps, etc.), electrification of much of the nation would have been significantly delayed.

It's time for consumers to take control and define for themselves what constitutes high quality Internet telecommunications services that meet their needs and provide good value and service for their money.