November 2009

More Bandwidth, Money Needed For Broadband Research

Academics at a Federal Communications Commission National Broadband Plan workshop focused on broadband research signaled that the country was going to need more bandwidth and money to help support research into broadband. Virginia Tech professor Charles Bostian made a pitch for spectrum sharing rather than wholesale reclamation of spectrum from other users and for sharing it where it would do the most good, which he argued was not in the band where broadcasters and public safety operations reside. Bostian said that everybody agrees more spectrum is needed, but that the idea of sharing the so-called "white spaces" in TV channels is not the way to go. He said that instead there needed to be more focus on developing spectrum that could be more easily and efficiently shared, the unlicensed WiFi spectrum for example. He also said the goal there should not be to avoid all interference, but to manage it. Vint Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist, talked about repurposing, but aimed it at the cable and satellite folks. He said that both cable -- he was including telco services as well -- and satellite had huge capacity dedicated to "decreasingly quality video" and, in the case of satellite, to "raining down digital bits." He said if some of that could be repurposed to "rain down" Internet capacity, "we could be doing some very interesting experiments," pointing out that would require partnerships between private industry and government. Chip Elliot, chief engineer at BBN Technologies, argued for requiring any broadband deployment using government funds to be research-enabled, meaning that researchers would get to share it for experimental purposes.

Google Moves to Acquire Teracent

Google has reached an agreement to purchase Teracent, a startup which has built a technology platform that promises to enable advertisers to adjust and customize online display ads on the fly. Teracent's technology customizes graphic advertisements based on who is watching them, so that a retailer's closest store could become part of an ad, for example, or new products could be swapped into a company's standard ad with minimal effort. Ads can also be changed based on the time of day and a person's language. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Executives at Google expected the transaction to close during the current quarter. The Google acquisition is part of an effort to expand the base of display advertisers by automating the creative process. Google has long predicted that via the Internet, brands, particularly direct response brands, will eventually be able to advertise every single product in their portfolio, rather than putting resources behind a product or two in a single national ad campaign.

FCC Filing Deadline for the Commercial Broadcast Ownership Report

The Federal Communications Commission's Media Bureau has extended -- until January 11, 2009 -- the deadline for broadcast stations to file Form 323, the commercial broadcast ownership report.

UN ponders 'Net "10 commandments"

Write a new 10 Commandments of the Internet, Peter proposed, and draft them on a tablet PC on Mount Sinai. The "Peter" in question was Internet historian Ian Peter, and the place was the UN-backed Internet Governance Forum 2009 held last week in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, a few kilometers from Mount Sinai. Peter's model for his proposed commandments isn't Moses, but the engineers and computer science guys who dreamed up the Internet back in the 1960s, building it through an amazingly open and collaborative effort that continues functioning to this day. When he asked if anyone would be interested in formally documenting the principles of the Internet ethos, Internet ecosystem or whatever one might call it, hands shot up all around the room.

Time short to agree on smart grid standards

The first crack at vital smart-grid technical standards are due next year and some companies are already gumming up the works by pushing their own networking technology. The need to hammer out interoperability standards is urgent and the task is extremely complex, said George Arnold, the national coordinator for smart-grid interoperability at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) who gave a presentation at a seminar organized by the IEEE here on Saturday. There will eventually be hundreds of standards covering many areas, from cybersecurity to how meters talk to plug-in cars. "We've never tried anything of this magnitude before," Arnold said. "It's more complicated than the Internet and Internet standards have been evolving for over 20 years." By contrast, smart-grid standards need to be agreed on quickly, with the next phase of a multiyear process due next to begin year. Technical interoperability through standards is supposed to safeguard various players, including consumers and utilities, against technical obsolescence and wasted investment. About $8.1 billion of federal, state, and industry money will be spent on upgrading the electricity grid in the next three years.

Better reporting technology an unexpected byproduct of stimulus

Technology that states have deployed to report how they spent federal stimulus funds is likely to permanently change information exchange across the public and private sector, despite controversy over figures on the number of jobs created and saved, said New York officials, academics and federal leaders. "Data is always problematic; it always can be improved," said Deborah Cunningham, coordinator for educational management services at the New York State Education Department. "This is the first time that I'm aware that the whole country reported at the same time in a 10-day period, and I think it's the way of the future." The mandate to make spending transparent led New York and other states to develop systems for rapidly gathering and reporting information to the federal government. The administration, in turn, used new systems to make the data, in some instances just weeks old, available to the public.

MGMA warns that IT stimulus money could be wasted

Medical Group Management Association CEO William Jessee, in a sharply worded, five-page letter to David Blumenthal, head of HHS' Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, warns of potential dire consequences if the government overreaches in setting up the health IT subsidy program created under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Jessee spoke of deep concerns that a possible "inappropriate definition of meaningful use" and "inefficient administration" of an IT subsidy program under the federal stimulus law could "result in the needless squandering of resources and significant disruption to the nation's healthcare system." To qualify for an estimated $34 billion in federal reimbursements to purchase, install and maintain electronic health-record systems, providers, including physician-led groups, must demonstrate that they not only have the systems up and running, but also that they're being used in a "meaningful manner," and those so-called "meaningful use" criteria be stiffened over time. The stimulus law, however, gives only a partial definition of the term, "meaningful use." A proposed rule from the CMS fleshing out the definition is expected before the end of the year, but an HHS federal policy advisory committee established under the law and reporting to the national coordinator has held a series of meetings on meaningful use and has issued a matrix of recommendations on what should be included as meaningful use criteria. Jessee's letter extensively addresses the upcoming meaningful use criteria, but also calls for specific procedural measures in administration of the subsidy program, such as running a pilot program before the 2011 "payment year" arrives "to ensure that the process of demonstrating meaningful use is achievable and practical."

AT&T offers pay by day, week, month data options

AT&T unveiled on Monday an offering that lets customers using its network for Web-surfing on laptop computers or netbooks avoid the obligation to sign a two-year contract with the operator. Instead of having to commit to paying $60 a month for two years, customers will be able to pay by the day, by the week or by the month. Under the new offer, users could pay $15 for daily access, $30 for weekly access or $50 for monthly access. The catch is that these service plans offer less data downloads than a typical monthly plan and customers who sign up for them could also have to pay more for devices such as netbooks or wireless data cards for laptops.

Smartphone growth to continue strong in 2010

The wireless chip industry expects smartphone market surge to continue, with British microchip designer ARM saying growth would likely even accelerate further next year. The smartphone market slowed drastically in the September quarter, but chip makers -- whose products are sold weeks, if not months, before phones are sold to consumers -- said they were seeing strong market growth, indicating third quarter slowdown was temporary. ARM's designs are in 90 percent of mobile phones, including Apple's iPhone and Nokia's new top-of-the-range model N900.

Free speech is Network Neutrality foreign policy

When President Obama told university students in Shanghai last week that he's a "big supporter of non-censorship," it took 27 minutes for one major Chinese portal to delete that part of his speech. After two-and-a-half hours, almost all portals in the nation took out the comments from news coverage. Despite what appeared to be the Chinese government's clampdown on the controversial issue of online censorship, an explosive exchange about Obama's support for "open Internet use" surfaced on blogs and on Twitter. "That is the optimistic part of the story," said Andrew McLaughlin, the nation's deputy technology officer, recounting the event. In a telecom law conference last Thursday by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln law school, McLaughlin and Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University, talked about how an open Internet, or so-called net neutrality, underlies free speech on the Web. Without it, censorship can occur. "If it bothers you that the China government does it, it should bother you when your cable company does it," McLaughlin said.

Benton

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