February 2011

Estimated Impact of ARRA on Employment and Economic Output From October 2010 Through December 2010

The Congressional Budget Office now estimates that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), also known as the economic stimulus package, will increase budget deficits over the 2009-2019 period by $821 billion -- $7 billion more than what it estimated in its November report. By CBO’s estimate, close to half of that total impact occurred in fiscal year 2010, and about 70 percent of ARRA’s budgetary impact was realized by the close of that fiscal year. CBO also has estimated the law’s impact on employment and economic output using evidence about the effects of previous similar policies and drawing on various mathematical models that represent the workings of the economy. CBO estimates that ARRA’s policies had the following effects in the fourth quarter of calendar year 2010:

They raised real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product by between 1.1 percent and 3.5 percent,
Lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 percentage points and 1.9 percentage points,
Increased the number of people employed by between 1.3 million and 3.5 million, and
Increased the number of full-time-equivalent (FTE) jobs by 1.8 million to 5.0 million compared with what would have occurred otherwise. (Increases in FTE jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time work or overtime and are thus generally larger than increases in the number of employed workers).

$300 Million And All I Got Was This Lousy Broadband Map

[Commentary] Daily's take on the National Broadband Map: A pretty map with some basic features that falls way short of what our country needs.

When he types in his address in Lafayette the results he gets raise questions. For example, they cite "Lafayette City Parish Consolidated Government" as a provider (when it should be LUSFiber) but the only services they cite are 100Mbps-1Gbps. In actuality, the highest residential service LUSFiber offers is 50Mbps, though you can get a 100Mbps service, and the only 1Gbps service they offer is on their dedicated carrier-class network, not their shared residential network. So here's a specific example of how the map seems to be confusing business vs. residential broadband. One of the most upsetting things about these results is that they bury information about upload capacity. The main results page doesn't even acknowledge that there's a distinction to be made. It's only once you click on a provider you get to see what that upload capacity is. It's as if they don't think upload capacity is all that important. And yet again I'm finding inconsistencies between the data in this map and that available on providers' public websites. Another missing piece of information is something that many others have already pointed out, namely the lack of any data about the price of service. The map's tagline is "How connected is my community?" but you can't answer that question fully without knowing how expensive service is. Some providers could claim they offer 1Gbps to every building, but if the service is too expensive for anyone to afford can we really claim that community's connected? And, not surprisingly given the many other missing data points, there's no mention of usage restrictions or bandwidth caps with any of these services, which can make a dramatic difference as to how consumers can actually use these pipes.

The need to protect the Internet from 'astroturfing' grows ever more urgent

[Commentary] Every month more evidence piles up, suggesting that online comment threads and forums are being hijacked by people who aren't what they seem.

The anonymity of the web gives companies and governments golden opportunities to run astroturf operations: fake grassroots campaigns that create the impression that large numbers of people are demanding or opposing particular policies. This deception is most likely to occur where the interests of companies or governments come into conflict with the interests of the public. For example, there's a long history of tobacco companies creating astroturf groups to fight attempts to regulate them. After I wrote about online astroturfing in December, I was contacted by a whistleblower. He was part of a commercial team employed to infest Internet forums and comment threads on behalf of corporate clients, promoting their causes and arguing with anyone who opposed them. Like the other members of the team, he posed as a disinterested member of the public. Or, to be more accurate, as a crowd of disinterested members of the public: he used 70 personas, both to avoid detection and to create the impression there was widespread support for his pro-corporate arguments.

NAB Hosting Hill Meetings On Broadband/Broadcast Coexistence

The National Association of Broadcasters is hosting congressional staffers for a tutorial on broadband/broadcast co-existence and the continued value of the over-the-air medium.

NAB spokesman Dennis Wharton said the tutorial will feature Covington & Blake lawyer Jonathan Blake; Open Mobile Video Coalition Executive director Anne Schelle, and NAB Senior VP, Science and Technology, Lynn Claudy. The coalition is an alliance of TV stations, promoting the deployment of mobile DTV. Broadcasters are under pressure to give up as much as 120 Mhz of spectrum so it can be auctioned for wireless broadband in service of an exploding number of apps. That spectrum reclamation was part of the FCC's National Broadband Plan to boost broadband deployment and adoption.

FCC Releases Broadcast Ownership Data

The Federal Communications Commission's Media Bureau released a separate data set comprised of all ownership reports filed in response to the 2009 biennial ownership filing requirement.

These data are the first available that reflect the significant revisions to the ownership reporting form, FCC Form 323, intended to substantially improve the completeness, accuracy, reliability and usability of ownership data. This data set also represents the first "snapshot" of broadcast ownership data in a series of planned, biennial "snapshots" that should collectively provide a reliable basis for analyzing ownership trends in the industry, including ownership by minorities and women. The revised form and data collection respond to the Commission's May 2009 323 Order, which sought to improve the availability of ownership information related to diversity. The revised FCC Form 323 enlarged the class of stations obligated to file biennially by requiring all full power commercial broadcast stations and all lower power television stations, including Class A stations, to file. The new form also eliminated the exemption from the biennial reporting requirement that applied to sole proprietorships and partnerships of natural persons that are licensees of commercial broadcast stations. It also established a single, uniform filing date, and required all attributable interest holders to obtain unique FCC Registration Numbers to facilitate cross-referencing of ownership interests. This first data set reflects ownership interests as of November 1, 2009.

FCC Seeks Comment on Rural Health Care Waiver Requests

The Federal Communications Commission Wireline Competition Bureau issued a Public Notice seeking comment on requests for waiver of the Rural Health Care Pilot Program’s five year invoicing deadline. Requests were filed by the Kentucky Behavioral Telehealth Network, New England Telehealth Consortium, California Telehealth Network, Pacific Basin Telehealth Demonstration Project, Virginia Telehealth Network, West Virginia Telehealth Alliance, Arkansas Telehealth Network, Health Information Exchange of Montana, Indiana Telehealth Network, and Western Regional New York Area Health Education Network.

(WC Docket No. 02-60) Comments are due Mar. 24; replies are due Apr. 8.

Sens Kerry, Wyden, Cantwell, Franken Fight to Protect Network Neutrality

Senator John Kerry (D-MA) -- chairman of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet -- along with Sens Ron Wyden (D-OR), Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Al Franken (D-MN) sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) opposing any efforts to use the appropriations process or the Congressional Review Act to keep the Federal Communications Commission from doing its job and implementing these network neutrality rules.

“The final network neutrality rules, to the credit of Chairman Genachowski, are built on things everyone should support – transparency of broadband service operations, no blocking of legal content and websites, and nondiscrimination against or for specific firms or people trying to communicate and compete over the Internet. Unfortunately, the House has decided that it knows better what is good for the Internet than the people who use, fund, and work on it. They claim to stand for freedom. But the only freedom they are providing for is the freedom of telephone and cable companies to determine the future of the Internet, where you can go on it, what you can attach to it, and which services will win or lose on it,” the Senators wrote.

Broadband rising on Native agenda

Native Public Media, a minority consortium incubated within the National Federation of Community Broadcasters for seven years, is striking out on its own, establishing itself as an independent nonprofit and pursuing big new opportunities to expand media access for Native Tribes through broadband and mobile technologies.

With the realignment, the Native group strengthens its ties with the New America Foundation, its partner for the last several years in research, policy analysis and advocacy to redress huge and historic shortcomings in access to new and older means of communication for Native tribes. Among the collaboration’s most significant achievements so far is last year’s FCC ruling giving tribes higher priority in competitions for radio channels near Indian lands — a policy that the FCC looks to expand on broadband and wireless platforms. The FCC intends to unveil new initiatives during its meeting on March 3, which it designated “Native Nations Day.” According to a tentative agenda, the FCC will discuss options for lowering barriers to communications services and expanding wireless Internet on Native lands, and expanding Native radio under the new tribal priority.

Budget sets $126M for next-generation supercomputing

President Barack Obama has included funding in his 2012 budget proposal for development of the next generation of supercomputers, an exascale system. The money is going to the Department of Energy, which has led in developing the world's fastest computers. If Congress approves Obama's request, DOE will get $126 million for exascale development, with about $91 million for the DOE's Office of Science and $36 million of it for the National Nuclear Security Administration. In seeking this funding, the Obama administration made a little history. A DOE spokesman said it marked the first time that the budget explicitly references "exascale." The DOE budget had budgeted just over $24 million in 2011, but this was in context of "extreme scale" computing. Exascale systems are 1,000 times more powerful than the Tianhe-1A, the Chinese supercomputer that was recently ranked as the world's fastest.

We Will Soon Live in a 100 Gbps World

Thanks to iPhones, tablets and Netflix, the demand for bandwidth is back, and that’s drumming up interest in expanding and building out fiber networks. Today we think 1 Gbps fiber networks are enough, but soon we'll need 100 Gbps, and a host of infrastructure companies are gearing up to provide it.

Unnoticed by Silicon Valley, telecom is on the move again. Equipment and network companies such as Ciena and Adtran are reaping the rewards in their stock prices: Ciena’s stock has risen more than $14.74, or 117 percent in the last six months, while Adtran’s has risen by $14.46 — or 47 percent. Other industry players such as Infinera and Tellabs, however, have seen their stock prices fall. But Infinera is about to announce new products aimed at ushering in “The Terabit Age,” which may offer a boost. Corning, which provides the actual glass that goes into the ground for fiber networks, has seen its share prices rise by $6.70, or almost 42 percent, in the last six months. Meanwhile, cloud computing and connecting data centers to faster and fatter networks has led to a new round of investment in fiber providers. From Allied Fiber –which launched last year — building a new type of network that combines the pipe with the processing capacity at data centers along the fiber pathways, to GE Capital providing $230 million in available credit to Lightower Fiber Networks, a dark fiber provider that has purchased three different fiber companies in the last six months.

Benton

Search