Tag: Broadband

The Fairmont Hotel San Jose
170 South Market Street
San Jose, CA 95113-2307

The Federal Communications Commission todayannounced that the Federal-State Joint Conference on Advanced Services will hold a meeting on broadband policy Thursday, November 6, 2008 at the Wireless Communications Association International’s 14th Annual Symposium and Business Expo at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, California.

Sometime next year, the new Administration will start to figure out a plan for collecting information about where broadband is, and how to increase deployment. The delay will be necessary because while Congress passed the bill to improve broadband data collection, S. 1492, there isn’t any money actually set aside to pay for the program. Until appropriations bills are passed for the next fiscal year, FY 2010, which starts Oct. 1, 2009, there won’t be any money. As a result, it could be calendar year 2010 before any program gets going.

The bill is a worthwhile first step, because it puts Congress on record as wanting more information about broadband.

Russell Senate Office Building
Room 235
Washington, DC

PK President Gigi Sohn will be testifying at the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee on the subject of “Broadband Providers and Consumer Privacy”. Witness lists and testimony will be available here.

A few weeks ago, Google organized and launched the Free the Airwaves campaign. PK, the other members of the Public Interest Spectrum Coalition, along with the Wireless Innovation Alliance are all in support of the campaign to get-out-the-word about the benefits of whitespaces and to get techies like you more involved in the effort.

Prior to setting a cap on the amount of bandwidth a high-volume customer could use before having service terminated, Comcast instead cut off a set number of users regardless of how much bandwidth they used, according to documents released by Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum.

Comcast announced at the end of August that it would impose the 250 GB usage cap on subscribers that had been hinted at for weeks. The cap, which takes effect Oct. 1, appears to cover uploaded material and downloads, given that Comcast’s example included the number of digital photos that could be uploaded.

In announcing the cap on its Web site, Comcast said: “We’ve listened to feedback from our customers who asked that we provide a specific threshold for data usage and this would help them understand the amount of usage that would qualify as excessive.” Comcast made its announcement on Aug.

Thanks to Comcast and Verizon/AT&T, we now know a little more about the limits of “unlimited.”

Comcast announced that, starting Oct. 1, it will impose a 250 GB cap on usage. At the moment, the announcement is relatively benign, although there are lots of dangers lurking in the weeds.

Comcast has long complained that it needs to engage in legitimate “network management,” as opposed to the management techniques the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) found not to be so legitimate. One of the meat-cleaver approaches would be to lower the demands on the network as a whole. However, this new cap doesn’t appear to help Comcast meet its network management challenges.

It didn’t take Comcast long to run away from its latest embarrassment. On Wednesday, Comcast Senior Vp Mitch Bowling told Bloomberg News that in an effort to control traffic, Comcast might slow down the transmission of packets from its heaviest users by “10 minutes to 20 minutes.” Here’s the story. PC Magazine had the same story.

On August 1, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled that Comcast’s interference with its customers Internet traffic violated the Commission’s policies and was not reasonable network management. Today, the Commission released an Opinion and Order detailing its analysis and commanding Comcast to cease its discriminatory practices.

The following statement is attributed to Gigi B. Sohn, president and co-founder of Public Knowledge:

“With today’s Order, the FCC acted to protect the rights of Internet users and set the precedent that unreasonable, discriminatory behavior like Comcast’s will not be tolerated. It agreed with public interest advocates and technical experts that Comcast’s conduct violated FCC principles and was not reasonable network management.

For the second straight year, I addressed the EDUCAUSE/Cornell Institute for Computer Policy and Law, held at Cornell’s beautiful campus. The Institute gathers 50+ higher education information technology (IT) professionals – usually campus CTOs, librarians and legal counsels, and teaches them the substantive particulars of IT policy issues and advises them how to be strong advocates.

We just produced a two-minute video on selectable output control, entitled “Selectable Output Control: How the MPAA wants to break your TV (again)”. It’s a quick summary of what SOC is and its potential effect on home entertainment devices.

Check it out on YouTube.