Broadband

Lompoc, California financed the construction of a Wi-Fi network that has attracted so few users it won’t be able to start repaying the loan — and a lot of other cities are facing the same predicament, according to the Associated Press. A $3 million plan to blanket Lompoc, Calif., with a wireless Internet system promised a quantum leap for economic development: The remote community hit hard by cutbacks at nearby Vandenberg Air Force Base would join the 21st century with cheap and plentiful high-speed access. Instead, nearly a year after its launch, Lompoc Net is limping along. The central California city of 42,000, surrounded by rolling hills, wineries and flower fields more than 17 miles from the nearest major highway, Read More ›

In a recent speech in Fort Wayne, Verizon Senior Vice President Thomas J. Tauke provided this update on the company’s FiOS rollout: In Fort Wayne alone, we’ve connected some 130,000 homes, multi-family households and small businesses to our fiber-to-the-home broadband service, called FiOS. Verizon is aggressively deploying FiOS across the country; we’ve already passed more than seven million homes, and we’re on schedule to pass 18 million premises by the end of 2010. This is a network, because of the fiber to the doorstep infrastructure, which has 100 mbps of capacity. Tauke also pointed out that the network will soon be capable of delivering much faster speeds: [O]ver the next five years broadband will be transforming itself, using new network Read More ›

Japan has 7.2 million all-fiber broadband subscribers who pay $34 per month and incumbent providers NTT East and NTT West have only a 66% market share. According to Takashi Ebihara, a Senior Director in the Corporate Strategy Department at Japan’s NTT East Corp. and currently a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies here in Washington, Japan has the “fastest and least expensive” broadband in the world and non-incumbent CLECs have a “reasonable” market share. Ebihara was speaking at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, and his presentation can be found here. Ebihara said government strategy played a significant role. Local loop unbundling and line sharing led to fierce competition in DSL, which forced the incumbents to Read More ›

Patients, adept at using the internet to schedule travel, conduct business, and access information with the click of a mouse, are now driving changes in the way state and federal policymakers address health care reform.
“Health IT” is the new buzzword for health care, and information technology proposals for healthcare reform are sprouting like daffodils in April!

Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen
So far this year, the National Governor’s Association has announced the creation of the State Alliance for E-Health, co-chaired by Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen and Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas. Their purpose is to bring together office holders and policy experts to, “address state-level health information technology (HIT) issues and challenges to enabling appropriate, interoperable, electronic health information exchange (HIE)”.
As quoted in the National Journal’s coverage of the event, Gov. Bredesen explained, “…the states can move much more quickly….I don’t trust the federal government to actually do anything on my watch.”

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Life is about “repeating the same mistakes” in different contexts, says Larry Lessig. In the current issue of Wired, the Stanford law professor compares the prevailing wisdom in the 1990s that Microsoft’s operating system would chill competitive innovation in the software industry with the current popular wisdom that we need net neutrality regulation to prevent broadband providers from blocking any use of the Internet which threatens their bottom line. Regulatory enthusiasts didn’t in the 1990s foresee the success of Linux, according to Lessig, and they may not appreciate the significance of municipal networks. According to MuniWireless.com, there were 312 cities and counties in the U.S. with networks up and running, or in the deployment or planning phase at the end Read More ›

Jonathan S. Adelstein
AT&T’s opponents may not get everything they thought they had from the FCC’s review of the AT&T/BellSouth merger. The process was a disgrace, as I discussed here and elsewhere leading up to the final decision. No federal or state regulator identified any competitive or public interest harms, yet Commissioner Jonathan S. Adelstein and Commissioner Michael J. Copps leveraged the process to deliver cash to state and local officials, unwarranted discounts to AT&T’s competitors and 3,000 previously outsourced positions to the labor unions.
AT&T also volunteered to maintain “a neutral network and neutral routing in its wireline broadband Internet access service,” subject to certain limitations. I argue that a nondiscrimination principle applied to the Internet would outlaw the partnership, bundling and pricing strategies that are the basis for all advertising efforts (see, e.g., this and this).

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Snyder, Tex. The Internet is bringing fundamental change to small-town Texas, according to Roy Bragg, a writer-at-large with the San Antonio Express-News. Highways leading into town are lined with vacant commercial and industrial buildings. Many open businesses bear the markings of life on the economic edge. They’re shoehorned into decrepit buildings that have seen a litany of failed ventures and show it — peeling paint; old, broken, painted-over signs; orphaned gas pump islands; drive-through lanes to nowhere; and the general sense that an office is a bad fit in a converted muffler shop. But there still is life in small-town Texas, and much of it is happening in the broadband pipes that deliver high-speed Internet to homes and businesses … Read More ›

HB 6456 — the bill which would streamline video franchising in Michigan — was signed into law by Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who noted that she expects it to create 2,000 jobs. Michigan becomes the 11th state to reform video franchising.

The FCC finally approved a long-overdue reform of anticompetitive video franchise rules by a vote of 3-2 after nearly a year of study. An Order will be issued sometime within six months. Grasping local officials won’t be able to drag out negotiations over franchise agreements with video service providers until the exhausted applicants capitulate to legal blackmail, a process which sometimes takes a year or two. Now, the negotiations will have to be completed within 90 days.
The deregulatory milestone is a victory for consumers, who will benefit from more rapid investment in competitive video offerings by AT&T and Verizon. It will also further reduce the possibility that broader telecom reform legislation will move through the next Congress, meaning fewer options to enact net neutrality regulation or pump up the current unsustainable universal service regime (which could lead to taxation of Internet traffic).

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The Wall Street Journal reports that cable rate increases are going to be the “most moderate in years.” The main reason: Verizon and AT&T are getting into video despite the opposition of politicians who want to raise taxes or fees and impose new layers of regulation. … cable companies that are facing the early waves of phone-company competition are showing the most restraint in raising prices. Cablevision, for example, which is facing threats from Verizon in much of its turf, has some of the lowest price increases in the business. Cablevision believes that its strategy of low price increases is responsible for a “surge” in revenue. This isn’t very surprising. As the price of anything falls, demand rises. However, there Read More ›