Public Knowledge recently wrote about a growing concern that 911 emergency services were having an alarming amount of difficulty locating callers who placed calls from indoors using mobile devices. This means that for many callers experiencing an emergency situation, help may not arrive on time.

Rumors or announcements of mergers often drop on Friday afternoons, especially around holidays. This time it’s the Wall Street Journal reporting that Sprint is considering a bid for T-Mobile.

I have some thoughts on this! Basically, the national wireless market is already too concentrated. We need more, not less competition.

Verizon wants to replace copper landlines destroyed by Hurricane Sandy with a new fixed wireless service called Voice Link. But should victims of natural disaster be guinea pigs when fundamental basic services are at stake? Especially when it means losing access to broadband?

Ever since Hurricane Sandy destroyed huge pieces of its landline network last October, Verizon made it clear it did not want to rebuild its traditional copper network. Most folks assumed that meant replacing damaged copper with fiber. While some consumers have grumbled about being upgraded to a more expensive service, no one doubts fiber to the home represents a step up – especially on the broadband side. 

But what about those communities where Verizon does not want to spend the money upgrading to FIOS? Turns out, rather than an upgrade to fiber, these communities will play guinea pig for Verizon’s new, cheaper, more limited wireless alternative called “Voice Link.”

We have all kinds of reality-challenged folks in Washington. We got those who believe that we need to go back to the gold-standard and abolish the Federal Reserve. We got those who think vaccinations cause learning autism. To this we can now add “the folks who think we can keep finding federal spectrum to auction forever.”

Today, Verizon Wireless announced its new pricing plans for mobile phones and data.  If you mostly use your phone for data, this is bad news.

Verizon’s New Pricing Plan

Good news, the FCC has decides to one again reboot its seven year old proceeding on “special access.” Given that I have been flogging the FCC since 2006 to do something about this, with occasional reminders since then, I am obviously pleased. For those new to this, “special access” is the rate businesses and competitors to telcos pay to telcos for wholesale access to their telecommunications capacity. When you place a call over your Sprint or Cricket cell phone, the call goes to the tower.

Today, we filed comments with a number of other public interest groups urging the FCC to issue rules that would prevent state and local governments from shutting off cell service in situations like the BART protests of last summer.

The comments that we filed today were replies to several issues raised in the first round. In particular, we were responding to arguments raised about who gets to initiate shutdowns, the constitutionality of some proposed and existing shutdown procedures, and the fact that government agencies cutting of access to the public airwaves still runs afoul of the First Amendment, even if they’re cutting off access in areas that aren’t traditional public forums.

Every now and then, somebody responds to something we did or said with such an inappropriate bullet point that we can only laugh. These often read like someone tried to use some application for picking key words and matching to bullet points, but the App is clearly still in Beta.

The response of CTIA-The Wireless Association to our White Paper on Usage Based Pricing, aka bandwidth caps, surpases even these usual whacko responses. It ought to win some kind of prize. Perhaps the “Please Check your Magic Eight Ball Again” Award, given for a response that not only demonstrates that you failed to look at the executive summary and conclusion, but actually confuses people who did.

On today’s podcast we discuss crafting a positive post SOPA/PIPA agenda on InterentBlueprint.org, updates for Verizon/SpectrumCo., Universal buying EMI, and the new “disc to digital” program from the movie studios.

The orders the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued last week in its review of the big deal between Verizon, Comcast and assorted other cable players will force the companies to play by the rules, and will provide a good view into how the industry is trying to construct its own little cartel.  The FCC staff asked a number of detailed questions, and the answers could show how Verizon and its four cable partners want to divide the world among themselves.