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^{John Wohlstetter
April 25, 2003
Technology

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Cyber-Safe Meets Fail-Safe

_{John Wohlstetter
April 25, 2003
Technology

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This February the Bush Administration released The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, a long-awaited document spelling out the nation’s cyber-security strategy, a crucial element falling into the homeland security portfolio. Heightening cyber-fears is the military’s concern about battlefield e-mails sent home, which travel through the public networks at the end of their cyber-journey; the military has its own Secret Internet Protocol Network for war messages Read More ›

^{John Wohlstetter
March 13, 2003
Technology

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The 3-Wire World

_{John Wohlstetter
March 13, 2003
Technology

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Washington has often bedeviled captains of industry, as the telecom industry learned in its infancy. Trans-Atlantic cable entrepreneur Cyrus Field’s brother Henry said of the time he and his brother spent lobbying Congress to match the British investment share (4 percent) in the first cable: “Those few weeks in Washington were worse than being among the icebergs off the coast of Newfoundland. The Atlantic Cable has many a kink since, but never did it seem to be entangled in such a hopeless twist as when it got among the politicians.” Read More ›

^{John Wohlstetter
January 21, 2003
Technology

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Dumber than “Dumb and Dumber”

_{John Wohlstetter
January 21, 2003
Technology

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Near the end of his tenure as WorldCom CEO, John Sidgmore told a trade association audience: “If you get away from the debt and fraud, this is a tremendous company with tremendous asset [sic]. It needs to be saved and it will be.” And if you get away from the terrorism and mass murder, al- Qai’da is a transnational affinity group, right? Read More ›

^{John Wohlstetter
November 13, 2002
Technology

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9-11 Plus One

_{John Wohlstetter
November 13, 2002
Technology

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The year since “the world changed” has been marked by many changes in American life. By solid margins, both houses of Congress have just voted to authorize the President to use preemptive force against an adversary, based upon apprehension of a threat of mass terror whose imminence is the subject of sharp disagreement. Read More ›

^{John Wohlstetter
August 21, 2002
Technology

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Local and Long Distance

_{John Wohlstetter
August 21, 2002
Technology

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WorldCom’s spectacular implosion seems to have caught many regulators by surprise. They missed it partly because they were unable to see that the core voice business of the long distance industry was collapsing. Long distance managements were loudly trumpeting the Internet Age, when data revenues would rise so steeply that voice could be free. That vision likely will come true — eventually. But data revenues in recent years did not grow fast enough to replace losses in voice revenues; this made inevitable WorldCom’s bankruptcy. Read More ›

^{John Wohlstetter
July 19, 2002
Technology

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Tsar of Telephony

_{John Wohlstetter
July 19, 2002
Technology

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The Supreme Court recently considered the future of telecommunications regulatory policy, and responded by resurrecting a ghost from the bygone era of monopoly telephony. This threatens the growth of robust facilities-based telecommunications market competition — most notably, that for emerging broadband data and video services. Read More ›

^{John Wohlstetter
May 31, 2002
Technology

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FCC Reform

_{John Wohlstetter
May 31, 2002
Technology

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It seems almost churlish to suggest reforms for an agency whose current commissioners have shown signs of a welcome shift away from harmful policies of the past. It amounts to penalizing those doing pretty well now for acts of predecessors who did great damage. But there is no assurance that some future constellation of commissioners will retain good judgment, and there is ever the problem of attitudes among longtime staff. Thus, certain reforms are appropriate notwithstanding today’s solid cast at the agency. Read More ›

^{John Wohlstetter
May 3, 2002
Technology

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The Enron Network

_{John Wohlstetter
May 3, 2002
Technology

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It has been widely predicted that the collapse of Enron and its politically explosive aftermath will not spur much in the way of regulatory changes, save those pertaining to accounting, executive compensation and corporate governance. These, of course, may well prove far-reaching. But in another way Enron’s impact will reverberate far beyond specific regulatory changes. Enron will, by revaluing specific companies, radically transform industry structures in the telecommunications industry Read More ›

^{John Wohlstetter
April 16, 2002
Technology

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The FCC’s Third Broadband Report to Congress

_{John Wohlstetter
April 16, 2002
Technology

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January marked a true Internet access milestone: Americans, between work and home, spent more time online with broadband connections than with narrowband, with 51 percent of total hours of use racked up in the fast lane. Reaching this cross point required a 63.6 percent jump in broadband minutes during 2001, while narrowband usage actually declined, by 3.5 percent. Read More ›

^{John Wohlstetter
March 27, 2002
Technology

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Internet Nation

_{John Wohlstetter
March 27, 2002
Technology

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On February 5 the Department of Commerce released its latest report, A Nation Online: How Americans Are Expanding Their Use of the Internet. Prepared by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), the report presents a wealth of data on Americans online. And to be complete as well as democratic, the report discusses why many Americans are offline. But its democratic genuflection to those still offline is tempered by its signature statement: “With more than half of all Americans using computers and the Internet, we are, truly a nation online.” Read More ›

^{John Wohlstetter
February 22, 2002
Technology

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The Broadband Bandwagon

_{John Wohlstetter
February 22, 2002
Technology

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From the Bandwith online newsletter of Discovery Institute: Defenders of current broadband regulatory policy note that broadband deployment to date tops the pace of key consumer technologies of recent decades. Read the rest of the online newsletter here.

^{John Wohlstetter
February 8, 2002
Technology

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Techno-Terror II

_{John Wohlstetter
February 8, 2002
Technology

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The previous issue of Bandwidth presented a snapshot of how information and communication technologies can help enormously in fighting the war against terrorism. That the war will be long-term and wider than at present was made clear by President Bush in his State of the Union address: No longer counter-terrorism alone, but also a war waged against states who seek weapons of mass destruction, including preemption if necessary — even in the sole judgement of the United States Read More ›