November 2011

Why Broadband Is a Basic Human Right: ITU Secretary Hamadoun Touré

International Telecommunication Union Secretary General Hamadoun Touré wants to see to it that every citizen in the world has access to broadband.

Touré explained why his agency’s Broadband Commission declared broadband communications a basic universal human right – on the list now with the right to food, health, and housing. “The right to communicate is a basic human right, and I believe that putting that on every national agenda is very important,” Touré said. Universal broadband access is a crucial step to achieving the Millennium Development Goals to eradicate global poverty by 2015, said the Mali native. “You will not be able to meet the Millennium Development goals in health without e-health, in education without e-education, and government services will not be able to be provided without e-government services,” Toure said. The key to achieving global broadband access, he said, is public-private partnership. Having joined the ITU from a career in the satellite communications industry, Touré calls himself “a private sector guy,” and has succeeded in securing the involvement of more than 700 companies in the ITU initiative to extend broadband access.

Judge dismisses lawsuit against University of Wisconsin broadband

Dane County Circuit Judge Peter Anderson has thrown out a lawsuit challenging a University of Wisconsin System effort to expand broadband capabilities in rural areas.

The system and others won a federal grant for the Building Community Capacity Through Broadband project. The goal is to fund fiber optic cables to provide broadband access for schools, hospitals and emergency services in Eau Claire, Chippewa, Douglas, Dunn, Grant, Marathon and Menominee counties.

Seattle mayor's revised broadband plan still falls short

[Commentary] Seven years after it began pursuing a city broadband network, Seattle's trying again. Sort of.

The plan is to offer city infrastructure to lure phone or cable companies willing to build ultrafast broadband in one or two neighborhoods. More and faster broadband is better, but I'm not sure this is going to result in much change. It's unlikely to help many homes or businesses truly suffering from a lack of fast service, especially since the targeted neighborhoods already have pretty good broadband. Helping a small pocket of the city may be more realistic than pursuing top-notch broadband across the city, but it pushes the true goal farther back.

Broadband project to blanket Massachusetts

If the Massachusetts Broadband Institute fulfills its mission, high-speed, high-volume Internet service will be in every corner of northern Central and Western Massachusetts in the next few years.

Gov Deval Patrick (D-MA) created the agency in 2008 to bring low-cost high-speed Internet access to all homes, businesses and public buildings in the region. The groundwork for a north-to-south underground conduit from the Connecticut state line to Vermont is now complete. MBI Director Judith Dumont said that her agency worked with the state Department of Transportation to lay miles of fiber optic cable along Interstate 91. The network, MassBroadband 123, is being tested now and is expected to be “lit” in December. That network will eventually bring high-speed internet service to more than 120 cities and towns in Western and northern Central Massachusetts.

How Mainstream Media Outlets Use Twitter

For nearly every news organization, Twitter has become a regular part of the daily news outreach. But there are questions about how those organizations actually use the technology: How often do they tweet? What kind of news do they distribute? To what extent is Twitter used as a new reporting tool or as a mechanism for gathering insights from followers?

To answer some of these questions, the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and The George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs collaborated on a study of Twitter feeds from 13 major news organizations. The research, which examined more than 3,600 tweets over the course of a week, reveals that these news organizations use Twitter in limited ways-primarily as an added means to disseminate their own material. Both the sharing of outside content and engagement with followers are rare. The news content posted, moreover, matches closely the news events given priority on the news organizations' legacy platforms.

The news outlets studied varied widely in the number of Twitter feeds or channels offered and in how frequently they posted. On average, the news organizations offered 41 different organizational feeds. The Washington Post, at the top of the list, offered 98, more than twice the average. The Daily Caller, on the other hand, offered a single Twitter feed. The level of activity also ranged widely. While as a group the outlets in the sample averaged 33 tweets a day on their main organizational Twitter feed, that number ranged from close to 100 a day to fewer than 10.
The news organizations were much more similar in the focus of their Twitter activity. The vast majority of the postings promoted the organizations' own work and sent users back to their websites. On the main news feeds studied, fully 93% of the postings over the course of the week offered a link to a news story on the organization's own website.
News organizations were far less likely to use Twitter as a reporting tool or to curate or recommend information that originated elsewhere. Just 2% of the tweets from the main news feed analyzed were information-gathering in nature-seeking views or first-hand accounts from readers. And only 1% of tweets studied were "retweets" that were reposted from a Twitter feed outside the organization.
The news agenda these organizations promoted on Twitter closely matches that of their legacy platforms. A comparison of the top stories across these Twitter feeds and across the same mix of legacy outlets reveals four out of the top five news stories were the same on Twitter as in the legacy outlets. For the week studied, February 14-20, 2011, unrest in Middle East and the U.S. economy topped both lists.
Individual reporters were not much more likely than the news institutions to use Twitter as a reporting tool or as a way to share information produced by those outside their own news organization. An examination of the Twitter feeds of 13 individual journalists-the most followed at each outlet studied-found that 3% of the tweets solicited information, a similar rate as the institutions overall. And 6% of their tweets were retweets of postings from outside entities (compared with 1% on the institutional Twitter feeds).
Researchers also examined the Twitter feeds of one particular news beat-health reporters. These reporters made more use of the reportorial ability of Twitter, though they still produced far more tweets that disseminated their own material. On average, 6% of the health reporters' postings over the course of the week studied solicited information. That is twice that of the most-followed journalists (3%).

Groups Ask FCC to Cast Wary Eye on Joint Station Operations Deals

Small and midsized cable operators, along with Time Warner Cable, Dish, Free Press NABET/CWA and the Newspaper Guild, have asked the Federal Communications Commission to consider what they say are the adverse impact of shared services agreements, local marketing agreements and other joint operations agreements between broadcast television stations in its quadrennial review of its media ownership rules.

The groups, which filed a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski as part of both quadrennial and open retransmission consent rule review, argue that the agreements are an end-run around ownership limits that reduce competition and journalistic independence, cost jobs and boost retrans fees and ad rates, costs that are passed along to viewers. "Regardless of the label and means of coordination, the outcome is often the same: layoffs of station staff, reduced journalistic independence, and diminished competition for audiences, advertisers and multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) that carry these stations through retransmission consent agreements," they argue. "A truly independently owned and operated station does not "outsource" its rights and obligations to its competitors."
The American Cable Association, Time Warner Cable and Free Press, which all signed the letter, are also part of the American Television Alliance, which has been pushing for retrans reform, including making the argument that shared services agreements are a way to exploit the FCC rules to leverage retrans muscle in a market.

How iPads, phones & sensors will redefine our homes

The Biome Smart Terrarium is controlled by an iPad or a smartphone. It is a sensor-based micro world, connected to the network. An artful marriage of physical living and digital worlds, the terrarium could be a precursor for what home and gardens could become in the age of connectedness.

Biome is a flora terrarium that works a little like a live tamagotchi, and it is the brain child of product designer Samuel Wilkinson. It has low-energy lighting built into the terrarium, which also has sensors that are in turn connected to a smartphone or iPad that is used to control its climate, water level and nutrients. It is designed to incorporate different types of environment — tropical, desert, even herb garden — and can be easily controlled by even the least green-fingered of users.

Smartphone sales rise as average cost drops to $135

Smartphone adoption in the U.S. continues to rise as the average cost of such devices is trending down. The NPD Group noted that 59 percent of all U.S. handset sales in the third quarter of 2011 were smartphones; numbers that match what some of the carriers have told us. NPD also says that the smartphone market has shown four consecutive quarters of declining prices, with the average handset purchase now costing $135. Consumers actually plan to spend more, but often end up choosing a lower-cost device. Bear in mind that the up-front cost of a smartphone is typically subsidized by the carrier in return for a contract commitment. However, the data suggests a few interesting trends on smartphone pricing.

First, many of the high-end handsets over the past few years have retailed for $199 with contract, but we’re in the midst of a change. It wasn’t until 2011 — with Verizon’s LTE rollout in particular — that some devices were priced in the $249 to $299 range. The other exception, of course, is Apple’s iPhone: The newest base model has always cost $199, while iPhones with more storage capacity boost the price.

Second is the trend of consumers shopping around for less expensive hardware, because the capabilities of today’s lower-priced handsets are often on par with last year’s high-priced smartphones. NPD says that 64 percent of consumers planning to spend between $200 and $250 on a smartphone end up with buying a cheaper device.

The Web's Crystal Ball Gets an Upgrade

Thousands of people every day use the link-shortening service Bitly to tame unwieldy Web links to share on Twitter and other social media sites. Few realize that they're simultaneously helping the New York company peer into the Web's future.

Bitly analyzes the pages pointed to by the 80 million short links it generates every day to predict changes in the public's attitude toward people and companies. Now Bitly is set to get access to a slew of new data that could make its Web crystal ball even better at forecasting the future. Bitly has reached a data-sharing agreement with VeriSign, based in Dulles, Virginia. VeriSign acts as a kind of telephone directory for the Internet. Any address typed into a browser is sent to servers at VeriSign or one of a handful of other organizations, which help turn that URL into a numerical address that a computer can use to find the Web page it needs. VeriSign looks up over 50 billion URLs every day and, like Bitly, gets a handle on what people are doing online as a result. In particular, VeriSign's data could add an awareness of activity outside the social sites where Bitly links are used. Andrew Cohen, Bitly's general manager, wouldn't give details on what this would make possible, but says he will explore the possibility of using the data to improve his company's reputation-monitoring system. Even without VeriSign's help, Bitly can already predict when a company's reputation is about to take a dive.

Regimes Use U.S. Tech to Censor Citizens, Study Finds

A company whose Internet-filtering servers were recently found to have been used by Syria's regime for censorship is facing a new research report that Myanmar, too, uses its technology -- and that the Syrian use is wider than acknowledged.

The findings released today by the Citizen Lab, an Internet research center at the University of Toronto, are the latest evidence that commercial technology from the West -- in this case from Blue Coat of Sunnyvale, California -- is often used by repressive regimes, says Ron Deibert, the lab's director. "Prior research by our group, and others like it, have highlighted the growing market for censorship, surveillance, and even offensive computer network attack products and services," Deibert says. "It is distressing that many, but not all, of the companies that sell this technology are based in liberal democratic regimes."

Benton

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