Return With Us to the Thrilling Days Of Yesteryear -- Via the Internet
Radio drama thrived for 40 years in America. It was all but gone by the 1960s, killed off by television. Now, the Internet has given radio drama a whisper of new life.
February 2010
Mobile Broadband: A 21st Century Plan for U.S. Competitiveness, Innovation and Job Creation
At a new America Foundation event Feb 24, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski outlined spectrum-related recommendations for the National Broadband Plan. The goal, he said: To benefit all Americans and promote our global competitiveness, the U.S. must have the fastest, most robust, and most extensive mobile broadband networks, and the most innovative mobile broadband marketplace in the world. The plan, then, will be to accelerate the broad deployment of mobile broadband by moving to recover and reallocate spectrum; update our 20th century spectrum policies to reflect 21st century technologies and opportunities; remove barriers to broadband buildout, lower the cost of deployment, and promote competition.
The Broadband Plan will represent the first important step in what FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker has called "an ongoing strategic planning process on spectrum policy -- to ensure that the agency's stewardship of the public's airwaves is smart, future-oriented, and serves as an ongoing engine of innovation and investment." The National Broadband Plan will set a goal of freeing up 500 Megahertz of spectrum over the next decade.
The plan will propose a "Mobile Future Auction" -- an auction permitting existing spectrum licensees, such as television broadcasters in spectrum-starved markets, to voluntarily relinquish spectrum in exchange for a share of auction proceeds, and allow spectrum sharing and other spectrum efficiency measures. The plan will also recommend applying a flexible approach to other frequency bands, where our rules-technical rules, service rules-may be holding back the broadband potential of large swaths of spectrum.
The Plan proposes resolving longstanding debates about how to maximize the value of spectrum in bands such as the Mobile Satellite Service (MSS) or Wireless Communications Service (WCS) by giving licensees the option of new flexibility to put the spectrum toward mobile broadband use-or the option of voluntarily transferring the license to someone else who will.
In addition, the National Broadband Plan will encourage innovative ways of using of spectrum, including what some call "opportunistic" uses, to encourage the development of new technologies and new spectrum policy models. The plan will also include a recommendation that we invest a sufficient amount in R&D to ensure that the science underpinning spectrum use continues to advance.
Finally, and critically, to improve mobile communications for our first responders, we will develop the 700 MHz public safety broadband network to achieve long overdue interoperability. The plan will also recommend that we establish and fund an Emergency Response Interoperability Center (ERIC) within the FCC to develop common technical standards for interoperability on the public safety broadband network from the start, and to update these standards periodically as broadband technology evolves.
Donovan: Broadcasters Already Using Spectrum Efficiently
Broadcasters' top spectrum policy lobbyist said Wednesday (Feb. 24) that broadcasters are already using their spectrum efficiently and have only a fraction of the beachfront spectrum wireless broadband providers are eyeing.
In a statement responding to the Federal Communications Commission's announced plan for a voluntary reclamation of TV spectrum, David Donovan, president of the Association For Maximum Service Television, said that he was "struck" by the "apparent focus" of the plan on broadcast spectrum. "We have exclusive use of only 5.1% of the so-called beachfront spectrum that broadband services desire," said Donovan. "To this end, we have supported a spectrum inventory to assess spectrum use and demand by all entities using spectrum," he said. Donovan said MSTV would examine the "voluntary" plan (his quotes) closely, and would work with the commission to help "facilitate the broadband plan."
Why the FCC's Plan to Provide Enough Mobile Spectrum Falls Short
[Commentary] A mobile future auction may not actually free up much spectrum. The plan might be effective in rural areas, where carriers don't need more bandwidth anyway; meanwhile most broadcasters have already indicated they'll balk at selling spectrum they use to reach over-the-air viewers in urban areas. And even if such a plan were successful, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Genachowski's goal of delivering 500 MHz of new spectrum falls far short of the 800 MHz mobile network operators say they'll need to meet increasing demand for data by the end of this year. So while both the mobile industry and the FCC agree that the National Broadband Plan must make new spectrum a priority, the FCC's efforts as revealed so far won't meet the industry's needs.
How the National Broadband Plan Will Encourage Investment
The National Broadband Plan will increase demand and impact supply in every part of the ecosystem in the long-term in a few ways.
First, the plan will accelerate the move of certain sectors from processes designed and optimized for the technology of the past to more efficient processes enabled by broadband.
Another way the plan could affect demand is by accelerating adoption. Right now, over 100 million Americans have not adopted broadband. About 14 million can't adopt because there is no affordable broadband available where they live. For these Americans, the universal service fund-the reform of which is discussed below-will play a critical role.
Another big issue affecting investment is spectrum. From the perspective of economic growth, the worst use of spectrum is to leave it unused. Spectrum that lies fallow is a drag on the economy and does not foster the public interest. And there is no upside to letting it sit: unlike, say, oil, spectrum is a natural resource whose use today does not diminish its usefulness tomorrow.
The plan will provide an opportunity for the Commission to, for the first time, articulate how it will meet the Congressional directive that all people in the United States should have access to broadband. As part of that, the plan will lay out a staged approach so that, over time, universal service support will go to broadband services that include voice, rather than voice-only services. Intercarrier compensation is another complicated policy in which carriers charge each other for origination, transport and termination of traffic. The current system has long been criticized for distorting investment.
The plan will also make a series of recommendations designed to eliminate those distortions and regulatory arbitrage. Like the universal service recommendations, the plan will provide an opportunity for the Commission--again, for the first time--to lay out a staged approach so that intercarrier compensation reflects how companies will exchange traffic in an IP-based broadband world.
Making the Nation Ready for Broadband
[Commentary] At last week's open Commission meeting, I explained how writing a National Broadband Plan is like solving a mystery. The mystery involves why some parts of the economy have embraced modern communications to greatly improve their performance while others lag far behind.
A recent book -- Wired for Innovation -- offers some clues. In researching why certain companies benefit from the use of information technology while others, similarly situated, do not, the authors found the benefits of the technology only come to life if the companies also change their fundamental processes and develop what the authors refer to as a digital culture. Having technology is not enough.
Similar clues can be found in the 1990 paper, "The Dynamo and the Computer", which explored why major innovations in microelectronics, fiber optic communications and computing had not yet shown up in productivity statistics. Part of the answer turns out to be diffusion lag---it takes time for one technical system to replace another. The author points out in the early 1900's factories didn't reach 50% electrification until four decades after the first central power station opened. One cause of that diffusion lag was the unprofitability of replacing "production technologies adapted to the old regime of mechanical power derived from water and steam." The problem was not just getting the electricity. It was the cost of completely reengineering factories to benefit from electric power over the tried and embedded techniques of an earlier time.
So today, some sectors of our economy have a diffusion lag in adopting their processes to take advantage of the modern communications era. But why? Solving the mystery of today's diffusion lag turns out to be critical to what Congress asked us to do in directing us to give our country a plan for utilizing broadband to advance national goals.
Strickling: Government Needs To Be Involved In Net Policy
National Telecommunications & Information Administration (NTIA) head Lawrence Strickling says the government should definitely be involved in sorting out the policy tensions -- like network neutrality -- between competing interests on the Internet in order to insure it remains an open and innovative platform that can be trusted by its users.
"I answer the question whether the government should be involved with an emphatic 'yes,'" he said, adding immediately that that role does not have to be as a heavy-handed regulator, saying the current regulatory regime is "too slow, backward looking and political," to be effective.
Strickling said that despite the currency of the "broadband ecosystem" metaphor, the Internet is not "a natural park or wilderness area that can be left to nature." He said he didn't believe that anyone in the Media Institute audience believed the government should leave the Internet alone. He said that hands off was the right policy when the Internet was first developed, but that this was a new century, with an Internet that had morphed into the "central nervous system" of the economy and society. He called the Internet a large and growing organization with "no natural self-regulatory equilibrium...The cacophony of human actors demands that there be rules or laws created to protect our interests," he said.
Mark March 16 "National Broadband Plan Day"
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski announced that the following items will be on the tentative agenda for the next open meeting scheduled for Tuesday, March 16, 2010:
1) National Broadband Plan Presentation: Commission staff will present the National Broadband Plan.
2) Broadband Mission Statement: The Commission will vote on a Broadband Mission Statement, containing goals for U.S. broadband policy.
Broadband Fans, We Have an Innovation Problem
[Commentary] Wired broadband is in trouble. And it's the fault of Internet service providers and Silicon Valley.
Despite a rollout of faster technology from some cable providers, and Verizon's continued fiber-to-the-home buildout, the wired broadband world isn't looking terribly exciting outside Google's testbed project. A close inspection of the long-range Federal Communications Commission's National broadband Plan doesn't have me overly inspired, especially as other areas of the world invest in 1 Gbps networks today.
Meanwhile, in the same two-week period as recent wired broadband news, the mobile industry's largest trade show, Mobile World Congress, took place. It was chock-full of the usual mobile players as well as a who's who of anyone in the tech scene. And issues associated with mobile broadband, from new networks to spectrum shortages and how to build applications for mobile handsets, were all anyone could talk about. Wired was tired, and mobile was basking in the glow of the spotlight and investment.
Mobile Broadband Making Inroads
While the report that 35% of Americans don't have access to high-speed Internet in the home created many headlines over the past week, what hasn't attracted as much attention is the finding that 15% of the country's adult population now uses mobile wireless broadband on laptops.
The statistics were published in a survey released by the FCC as it prepares to submit its National Broadband Plan to Congress. Mobile broadband, for which users must pay a fee, is relatively new, so the 15% usage figures indicate that the wireless phenomenon is catching on and is likely to increase rapidly as more robust 4G networks are deployed. Survey respondents were asked whether they used "a service with your laptop computer that is called wireless broadband, allowing you to access the Internet virtually anywhere? This is usually a service that you have to pay a monthly fee for, either by itself or as part of another communications bill. This is NOT what is called Wi-Fi." With 4G wireless broadband increasingly being deployed, the 15% usage figure will surely grow as Sprint-Nextel steps up rollout of its WiMax network and Verizon Wireless prepares to deploy its LTE network later this year. Sprint, which is deploying its 4G network through its majority-owned Clearwire carrier, is already offering broadband wireless via data cards. Verizon Wireless will begin offering data cards later this year when it debuts the LTE service in 25-30 markets.