December 2011

The federal E-Rate program, which helps schools and libraries connect to the internet, should receive more funding so that more schools and libraries can serve not only students, but community members as well, E-Rate compliance firm Funds For Learning wrote in a letter to the Federal Communications Commission.

In an open letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, John Harrington, CEO of Funds For Learning, requests that the commission increase the available funding in the E-Rate program and invites E-Rate stakeholders and supporters to sign the online petition before it is delivered to the FCC in early 2012. In the letter, Harrington explains that schools and libraries, especially those in the nation’s poorer communities, rely on the E-Rate program as “the financial backbone that enables them to keep their sophisticated and expensive telecommunications networks up and running.”

The DC Circuit Court of Appeals decided to take action on a request asking the court to force the Federal Communications Commission to get moving on the issue of how much mobile and rural operators pay for access to the Internet.

If the potential court order from Monday prompts the FCC to take action, the big wireline phone companies might see regulations capping how much they can charge others for access to their middle-mile pipes. NoChokePoints, an organization funded by those affected by high special access charges (this includes businesses), filed a petition in July asking the court to issue a writ of mandamus forcing the FCC to decide the issue within the next six months. On Dec 19 the court ordered expedited briefings ending Feb. 10, 2012, and told its clerk to set oral argument “at the first appropriate date.” (A mandamus petition is a request to a higher court asking a lower court or agency to rethink a decision, and most mandamus petitions go nowhere, so analysts and public interest organizations think the court’s action is noteworthy.)

[Commentary] The business model for standalone wholesale wireless network operators, such as LightSquared or what Clearwire hoped to be, is broken. But in the coming year, a new and ultimately more successful model is poised to emerge, one that will transform the entire communications landscape as we know it, and pit Verizon and cable TV on one side against AT&T and satellite TV on the other.

Verizon’s purchase of SpectrumCo was the first indicator of this new model, with the cable companies being granted wholesale access to Verizon’s LTE network in four years’ time so they can offer their own wireless services. Now, after the collapse of the proposed AT&T/T-Mobile merger, all eyes are focused on AT&T’s potential purchase of DISH Network, which could enable the buildout of an LTE Advanced network across 52MHz of spectrum. Such a deal would also have to address the way forward for T-Mobile, which admittedly does not have a clear route to LTE. Thus it seems very likely that T-Mobile would be granted wholesale access to this new 4G network to complement its 3G roaming agreement with AT&T. Of course, while worries about monopolies will be ever-present, we can expect both Verizon and AT&T to commit to a very extensive and rapid LTE network buildout, bringing 4G wireless to 97 percent or 98 percent of the population in line with the objective set out by President Obama in his State of the Union address last February.

In this new environment, the FCC and DoJ will have to emphasize retail competition instead of the facilities-based competition that has been the focus of FCC policy ever since the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The only way to do that will be through making the initial wholesale commitments ventured by Verizon and (I assume) AT&T into a much broader framework for supplying wholesale LTE network access to other wireless providers.

[Tim Farrar is President of Telecom, Media and Finance Associates, a consulting and research firm which specializes in technical and financial analysis across the satellite and telecom sectors]

Reading about the Chinese hackers hitting the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington, D.C. I was struck by the last two paragraphs, which detailed how the hackers accessed the IP address of a thermostat — as well as the overall tone of resignation around preventing such attacks — and I wondered, how will we secure the web of things? And do we need to give up on the idea of perimeter based security on the web?