Blog - Page 68

Oklahoma’s telecom regulators appear on the verge of loosening or eliminating many of the state’s price controls. SBC, the state’s main telecom company, said it would immediately deploy DSL service in 68 new communities and would upgrade all 208 of its switching centers in the state by 2007. Many regulators and state legislators call this practice — of investing in new technology when outdated regulations are relaxed — a quid pro quo threat. The rest of the world just calls it good business. In today’s competitive communications marketplace, too-big-for-their-britches state utility regulators cannot force companies to make large unprofitable investments. Governors, state legislators, and utility regulators everywhere should take notice: state telecom policy matters. One wishes these state commissions didn’t Read More ›

The National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) will hold another of its frequent meetings this weekend in Austin. These gatherings have been an opportunity for nervous state commissions to consider ways to reinvent themselves now that competition in telecommunications is eliminating the justification for utility-type regulation in this sector.
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John Rutledge, a key economist in the early Reagan administration and since a super smart watcher of financial markets, doesn’t like China’s currency change. He and I agree that China’s U.S. dollar peg has been a boon for both nations over the last decade. (I first wrote about the Chinese monetary issue and urged them to retain the dollar link after visiting China two years ago.) Our mild disagreement now hinges on politics. Were American politicians smarter about economics, and were our own Treasury Department not agitating for a Chinese currency change, I would be perfectly happy for China to continue its dollar peg. The idea that floating and flexible exchange rates are somehow “free market economics” is wrong. The Read More ›

George Gilder and Bill Joy just finished their panel on “Is Technology Making Us Safer?” at the Always-On conference at Stanford University. Joy, once a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and now a new partner at Kleiner Perkins ventures, seems to have somewhat moderated his views on the “relinquishment” of technology — for example, saying biologists should have a sort of Hippocratic oath to help prevent the spread of dangerous bio-information rather than a bureaucratic government response as he previously suggested — but he is still just as worried about global warming as ever. He asked George, “Don’t you read Nature magazine?” as if the climatologists published there are dispositive. Joy said there is a consensus about global warming, and asked Read More ›

There may be remote, isolated parts of the country where it makes some sense for local officials to spend tax dollars on wireless broadband networks. But for most of America, it is a bad idea. Here is the number one problem that municipalities who want to get into the telecom business face: The technology is improving so rapidly that they are either digging a bottomless pit or they will be stuck with something that belongs in a museum before they retire the bonds that paid for it. Philadelphia wants to be the “number one wireless city in the world.” Years ago, France wanted to be number one in computers. Remember the Minitel? The government of France distributed free terminals to Read More ›

A terrific young economist named Mike Darda notes a particular irony in the China money move: “[P]rotectionists in Congress thought they could jawbone China into dramatically appreciating the Yuan against the dollar to the benefit of U.S. exporters and to the detriment of U.S. consumers and importers. Dropping the dollar peg at a time when the dollar is rallying accomplishes just the opposite.”

China today dealt a blow to the protectionist sentiments building in the the U.S. Congress and thus did a great favor to the global economy, especially American technology companies. China slightly changed it currency’s (the yuan) value against the U.S. dollar, from 8.3/US$ to 8.1/US$. The move is immaterial economically but allows China to claim it has “revalued.” The large revaluation so many U.S. politicians were seeking, but did not get, would have been bad for both China and the U.S. China has fixed the yuan to the dollar since 1994, a brilliant move by then-economic minister Zhu Rongji. The peg created a single economic fabric stretching across the Pacific, kept China from catching the Asian flu of 1997-98, helped Read More ›

I’m stunned the pundits aren’t discussing John Roberts’ potential impact on communications law! Seriously, I was surprised to learn he grew up in my home county in Indiana and attended a small, private, country school outside my hometown of La Porte. La Lumiere School’s other famous alum was a genius of another sort — the late comedian Chris Farley. The Wall Street Journal did report that when Roberts listed his personal investments when he became an appellate judge, among his stock holdings were Time Warner Inc. (TWX), Dell Inc. (DELL), Texas Instruments Inc. (TXN), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), and Intel Corp. (INTC). Maybe this is standard fair, but it could reflect a mild interest in technology. Also, his father was an Read More ›

Last week’s Senate Commerce Committee hearings on the digital TV spectrum transition were important in their own right. But they also got me thinking about a related telecom issue: municipal telecom networks. It now seems most parties are satisfied with a “hard date” transition of the 700 MHz band (UHF TV channels 52-69) in 2008. This means broadcasters will go all digital in a smaller spectrum band, and the vast and mostly vacant 700 MHz space will be opened up for all sorts of new technologies and services. This is a good thing, but by the time it happens, it will have been almost 20 years — twenty! — since this process began. Huge amounts of great spectrum have been Read More ›

The latest broadband deployment report from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced a 34% jump in total high-speed (broadband downstream, narrow-or broadband upstream) lines, from 28.2 to 37.9 million at year-end 2004. 35.3 million of these lines (93%) were to residential and small business users. DSL jumped 45%, from 9.5 to 13.8 million lines; cable modem lines rose less sharply, 30%, from 16.4 to 21.4 million lines. The remaining 2.7 million lines were for miscellaneous access modes, with 700,0000 fiber or powerline and 500,000 satellite. Advanced service (two-way broadband) lines rose 42%, from 23.5 to 28.2 million lines, with 26.4 million of the 28.9 million total (94%) representing residential and small business users. Advanced service thus represented 76% of all Read More ›