October 2011

Broadband, Broadband – How Do We Get Broadband Everywhere?

A closer look at the Federal Communications Commission’s Universal Service Fund reform decision and how it fits into the National Broadband Plan and global efforts to ensure that citizens can be full participants in the increasingly broadband-enabled "emerging knowledge societies."

Obama Administration Announces Two Steps to Help Businesses Create Jobs, Strengthen Competitiveness

The Obama Administration announced it is taking two important steps to help U.S businesses create jobs and strengthen their competitiveness in a global economy. Through two Presidential Memoranda issued today, the Obama Administration will take steps to speed up the transfer of federal research and development from the laboratory to the marketplace, and it will create BusinessUSA, a one-stop, central online platform where small businesses and businesses of all sizes that want to begin or increase exporting can access information about available federal programs without having to waste time navigating the federal bureaucracy. These announcements are part of a series of executive actions to put Americans back to work and strengthen the economy because we can’t wait for Congressional Republicans to act.

The first Presidential Memorandum directs all federal agencies with research facilities to accelerate this timeline in three key ways:

  • It directs agencies to streamline and accelerate the process for private-public research partnerships, small business research and development grants, and university-startup collaborations. This will result in grants to startups being made 50% faster.
  • It gives agencies more flexibility to partner with industry, encouraging them to create new partnerships with local communities, support the growth of regional innovation clusters, and share laboratory facilities with local businesses, among others.
  • It will institute more accountability by directing agencies to develop a five-year plan with concrete goals and metrics to measure progress, including keeping track of how many patents each lab is generating.

The second Presidential Memorandum directs the Administration to create within 90 days BusinessUSA, a one-stop shop for information regarding federal programs and services relevant to small businesses and businesses of all sizes that want to begin or increase exporting.

BusinessUSA will implement a “No Wrong Door” policy for small businesses and exporters by using technology to quickly connect businesses to the services and information relevant to them, regardless of where the information is located or which agency’s website, call center, or office they go to for help. And the more federal agencies continue to add content to BusinessUSA to encompass the full range of business programs and services, the more we will be able to reduce the confusing array of websites that exist today. To ensure that it is oriented towards the needs of the customer, BusinessUSA will be designed, tested, and built with the active feedback of U.S. businesses and relevant online communities and, to the extent possible, will integrate related state and local government services, as well as those of private sector partners.

The Time is Ripe for Cybersecurity Legislation

To address cybersecurity gaps, and at the invitation of Congressional leaders, the Administration delivered a major cybersecurity legislative proposal on May 12, 2011.

This proposal incorporates many of the ideas of Senate and House leaders. It includes national requirements for consumer notification after data security breaches to help Americans take steps to protect themselves and hold companies accountable. It also gives companies a defined process so they can build their internal response plans. It provides for new authorities for the Secretary of Homeland Security to ensure government networks remain safe and reliable, and a unique framework to protect privacy and civil liberties. It would encourage critical infrastructure owners and operators to make the necessary investments to limit the current surge of cyber intrusions, and would set clear expectations for companies to let the Federal government know promptly if intrusions do occur – essential information that can help us stop an incident from turning into a crisis. Unfortunately, time is not on our side. Since the White House delivered the Administration’s proposal to Congress, a number of new security breaches have been reported. We need Congressional leaders to move forward with a cross-committee and bipartisan approach. Some good news: just last week, we had a very encouraging meeting with a bipartisan group of Senators that ended with agreement to work together to enact cybersecurity legislation as soon as possible. The time is ripe to make proposal into law, and give the government and private sector the extra tools needed to fight those who would harm us.

[Schmidt is the Cybersecurity Coordinator and Special Assistant to the President]

White House grading agency cyber progress

The Obama administration is turning up the pressure on agencies to accomplish four specific cybersecurity goals.

The Office of Management and Budget, the Homeland Security Department and the White House cyber coordinator's office gave deputy secretaries a high-level scorecard highlighting their agency's current status against goals for Trusted Internet Connections, implementing continuous monitoring and using secured identity cards to log on to computer networks. Howard Schmidt, the White House cyber coordinator, said DHS developed the scorecard from the CyberStat sessions that have been held with agencies. During the sessions, DHS, OMB and Schmidt's office reviewed agency progress in securing computers and networks.

The four areas of the report card:
Continuous monitoring: How agencies are prepared to do it? Do they have an update-to-date IT inventory? Can they do configuration scans and vulnerability scans?
Trusted Internet Connections initiative:
What percentage of the agency's network traffic is going through the TIC?
What percentage of the TIC reference architecture is in place?

HSPD-12 or secure identity cards: What percentage of the agency's employees are using the secure identity card to log on to the computer network?

SocialVibe's Voluntary Ads Aim To Make The Internet Free

SocialVibe has ambitious plans to make much of the Internet completely free, from FarmVille credits and Internet Wi-Fi, to unlimited Pandora streaming. Their method is to offer users an otherwise paid service in exchange for lengthy, interactive advertisements. Consumers appreciate the brand for saving them cash, the brands finally get enough attention to display informative and creative ads, and service providers rake in more users for premium services.

Federal grant for broadband access in rural Louisiana rescinded

The Commerce Department rescinded an $80 million grant to Louisiana to spread broadband in rural central and northeastern parts of the state, complaining that the Board of Regents' implementation plan was way behind schedule, incomplete and unresponsive to repeated requests for additional information.

"Furthermore," the rescission letter says, "the pattern of schedule delays, uncertainties and contingencies demonstrated a lack of management ability and control by Louisiana to get this project built on schedule and on budget." The letter, signed by Arlene Simpson Porter, director of grants management for Commerce's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, also said that had the revised plan been its original plan, the project would never have been recommended for approval.

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) placed the blame squarely on the state. "Despite receiving the green light for more than $80 million in federal funds, the state fumbled the ball and was either unable or unwilling to complete the project, which could have been a tremendous boost to central and northeast Louisiana," Landrieu said. "This is yet another missed opportunity to improve the lives of Louisiana residents, particularly rural Louisianians who are often left out of such initiatives. If the state of Louisiana is unable to carry out these types of transformative projects across our state, then I will work even harder to partner with interested local officials, nonprofits and businesses to accomplish the same goals."

But, while noting that it was the Board of Regents that applied for the grant, Commissioner of Administration Paul Rainwater said that, "from the start, we've always said there were implementation and sustainability problems in the grant that had to do with a top-down, government-heavy approach that would compete with and undermine, rather than partner with, the private sector and locals."

How to revive the feds' lifeless 'cloud first' policy

[Commentary] Remember the federal government's "cloud first" policy? A year ago, the Washington Post reported, "The [General Services Administration, the main procurement agency] is the first federal agency to make the Internet switch, and its decision follows the Office of Management and Budget's declaration last month that the government is now operating under a 'cloud-first' policy, meaning agencies must give priority to Web-based applications and services." Almost a year later, we're still waiting for cloud computing to show up in most government agencies. There are many reasons for the slow adoption of cloud computing in the federal government: the huge size of government IT, the long procurement cycles, and the lack of cloud computing talent in both government IT and its array of contractors.

The solution to this problem takes three steps:

  1. Provide funding. You can't get to the value without change, and change costs money.
  2. Work on changing the cultures in government IT. Perhaps this is an impossible task, but if the cultures of server ownership and IT fiefdoms don't fall by the wayside, cloud computing won't have much of a chance.
  3. Set and hold to deadlines. There are cloud mandates in place now; make sure they are enforced.

FCC's Broadband Plan: What Would Steve Jobs Think?

[Commentary] Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski hailed the commission's latest plan for rural broadband as "taking a system designed for the Alexander Graham Bell era of rotary telephones and modernizing it for the era of Steve Jobs and the Internet future he imagined." It's easy to capitalize on someone's reputation once they're no longer around to object. But would Steve Jobs, famous for bucking the big mobile carriers' modus operandi, brand a plan that is largely supported by big telecom and features old technologies as a think different moment?

The big news is that the FCC is dissolving the Universal Service Fund, created by the charge on your phone bill that subsidizes phone service in rural areas, in favor of creating a fund that subsidizes broadband. "As part of this reform, some consumers may pay, on average, an additional 10 to 15 cents a month on their bills; but for every dollar in cost, reform will provide $3 in benefits for consumers." Wow, does this sound like "Hi, we're from the government, we're here to help," or what? There's no doubt that any move away from telecom-based infrastructure and towards modern IP-based infrastructure is a good move. But will the FCC's new plan cost you? More to the point, will it preserve the "big brother" status of incumbent telecoms, or is it really a bold, new move, the equivalent of Steve Jobs' runner throwing the hammer into the screen in the famous "1984" Macintosh commercial?

My overall take is that it's not really a Steve Jobs moment when we're encouraging carriers to build a whopping 4 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream. Can I get a Pentium Pro PC with a 100-MB hard drive to go with that? Oh, wait, carriers can apply for a waiver if it's a hardship to build out 1 Mbps. Maybe that comes with a 486SX with 4 MB of RAM.

Dave Burstein, an industry analyst, is also full of sunshine about the plan, saying that the FCC "gave the big telcos a fat subsidy for what they already have while cutting the small telcos and rural competitors. It's mostly a switch in subsidies between carriers disguised as a broadband effort." It is troubling that, according to his analysis, "Verizon and AT&T claimed they would have to abandon 5-10 million lines that already get broadband because the costs were too high," due to a phony model that claimed $80 per month in costs to serve those lines. He adds that 2 million to 5 million homes will not be reached by this effort, as they're deemed too expensive.

Schools and Libraries Still Living in Dial-Up Age

Remember the agony of waiting for a Web site to load, before broadband was widely available? According to a recent survey, a lot of American schools and libraries are still living in that era.

Only 35% of public libraries have broadband speeds between 1.5 Mbps and 10 Mbps (a rather broad range); 34.7% have speeds lower than 1.5 Mbps, and only 24.9% have broadband speeds higher than 10 Mbps, according to data from the American Library Association’s Public Library Funding & Technology Access Survey (PDF). As a comparison, Netflix says that an Internet connection of at least 1.5 Mbps is necessary to stream videos at the lowest possible quality. But keeping up with the requisite Internet speed isn’t the only challenge that schools and libraries face. With the increasing demands for data, there are also challenges of bandwidth. Multiple users on multiple machines — whether accessing the Internet through hardwire or wireless — put additional strains on resources, so that even if a library or school has high-speed broadband, a user experiences dial-up-like speeds. The FCC has made broadband access the focus of some of its efforts over the last few years, arguing for its importance to the U.S. economy and education. It’s pushing for better access across the board, but also recognizing the importance of high-speed Internet specifically at schools and libraries.

War of words breaks out over Silicon Valley diversity debate

Weeks ahead of the premiere of a CNN documentary focusing on diversity in the tech industry, the charged issue is already generating sparks.

A heated debate broke out on Twitter after a preview screening of Black in America 4. Blogger-turned-investor Michael Arrington ignited a controversy with his comments about the visibility of minority-led companies. In the documentary, which airs November 13, Arrington talked about his difficulties finding African-American entrepreneurs to launch their ventures at his TechCrunch Disrupt conference -- and suggested he would accept almost any black entrepreneur, regardless of merit. "There's a guy, actually, his last company just launched at our event, and he's African-American. When he asked to launch -- actually, I think it was the other way around. I think I begged him," Arrington told CNN's Soledad O'Brien. "His startup's really cool. But he could've launched a clown show on stage, and I would've put him up there, absolutely," Arrington said. "I think it's the first time we've had an African-American [be] the sole founder."

It's a remark that didn't sit well with some in the tech community. Female and black entrepreneurs fired off tweets saying they didn't want to be treated any differently because of their skin color or gender.