July 2009

Verizon is currently wiring up New York City with fiber optic cables, but Boston mayor Thomas Menino wants to know why FiOS isn't coming to his city anytime soon. Menino has a theory, one that he recently aired during a radio interview: Verizon is retaliating. "They insinuated that we weren't going to get it because of my position on telecommunications," he said. Menino's "position on telecommunications" is that Verizon should pay more money. Specifically, Menino has been trying to change state law so that Verizon has to pay taxes on more of its network equipment that sits on public property. Verizon's FiOS has already been installed in numerous surrounding cities, leaving Boston a "copper hole in the fiber donut," said Boston's Chief Information Officer, William Oates. But despite their density, cities can be expensive to wire. Infrastructure can be hard to access, landlords are finicky about connecting to their buildings, and digging up the streets is tough, dirty work. Verizon is currently bringing FiOS to places like New York City and Washington, DC, but years after the FiOS rollout, neither place is near completion.

Speaking at the Virginia Summit on Broadband Access at the Piedmont Virginia Community College, Larry Strickling, the top official at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, said that now is "a new era" for broadband data, including public data about carriers that provide high-speed Internet service. He said that he hoped and expected that carriers will allow information about the areas in which they serve to be made publicly available, as they do in Canada. Strickling also said that broadband incumbents that seek to challenge broadband applicants who argue that their areas are "underserved" will have to make such information public - and in the same format as the broadband data collection efforts underway nationwide. "We need the data: I think it is a national imperative in which this data be collected," said Strickling, responding to a question about whether carriers will in fact provide states with the information necessary to create state-level broadband maps.

The federal government's definition of "underserved areas" for purposes of awarding broadband stimulus funds has caused consternation among some applicants - in particular municipal leaders who feel it excludes them from the program. further clarification of these rules may ease some applicants' minds as they prove more flexible than previously thought. The feds have defined "underserved areas" as areas in which: a) at least half of all households lack broadband or b) fewer than 40% of households subscribe to broadband or c) no service provider advertises broadband transmission speeds of at least 3 Mb/s. But that's actually the definition of "underserved." It's up to applicants to define the term "area." Say an applicant wants to bring broadband to three given census blocks - two qualify as underserved, but one doesn't. If, when grouped together into one proposed service "area," they do qualify as "underserved," then a census block that would have been disqualified by itself becomes fair game.

It appears some of AT&T's broadband customers across the United States were intentionally blocked from accessing the infamous forum 4chan over the weekend. The message board's founder Christopher "Moot" Poole encouraged 4chan users to contact AT&T to complain. The 4chan black out lasted for about 12 hours. AT&T claims it did so because of a denial of service attack originating from IP addresses connected to a 4chan server. unWired, also had to temporarily block 4chan because of what unWired described to Broadband Reports as "relentless ACK scan reports." Even if it turns out the ISPs' decisions were legitimate, the appearance of censorship raises the contentious issue of network neutrality -- the belief that ISPs should not be allowed to block or slow down traffic to any Website.