July 2012

American Tower and Crown Castle International, whose shares have reached records this month, are in a sweet spot: handling a surge in cellular traffic as wireless companies upgrade for a new generation of bandwidth-hungry smartphones and tablets.

As more wireless carriers convert to faster long-term evolution technology, known as LTE, worldwide mobile data traffic will soar 18-fold by 2016, according to Cisco Systems. At the end of last year, 54 service providers offered LTE, according to researcher Maravedis, and about 224 more plan upgrades to the technology. By 2016, 469 million subscribers worldwide could be using LTE networks. That new traffic translates into soaring growth prospects for tower operators, the companies that lease space to the networks for the growing panoply of antennas they require to move all that data around.

Industry representatives warned the Judiciary Intellectual Property, Competition, and the Internet Subcommittee that barriers being imposed by foreign governments could stifle the growth of U.S. cloud computing providers.

U.S. companies including Amazon and Google are moving aggressively to offer cloud services around the world, which involves the use of hosted services via the Internet. But they worry that new policies imposed by some foreign governments could hamper the ability of U.S providers to market their services abroad. Cloud computing has been touted as a way to provide its users with access to more computer power at lower costs by relying on a third-party to buy and operate expensive computer networks. "Countries around the world desperately hope to copy the model of technology-driven economic growth that powers the US economy," said Business Software Alliance President and CEO Robert Holleyman in his written testimony. "Far too often they would do so by throwing up protectionist barriers aimed to hurt international cloud providers and by adopting policies that would chop the cloud into country-sized pieces." "Strong U.S. leadership is needed to combat trade practices that other countries are using to block foreign competitors," Daniel Castro, a senior analyst with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, said.

One of the promises of health information technology is to provide patients easier access to their health information.

This is a focus of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology’s consumer e-health efforts and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ meaningful use regulations. But this isn’t a new policy for the Department of Health and Human Services. In fact, we have ensured that patients have had a right to access their health information since 2002. The policy regarding patients and their medical records has been shifting over the years. To help folks understand the evolving policy developments and to understand some of the open discussions, ONC has posted a policy issue brief that focuses on patient access to their health information.

A comScore study of first-time U.S. smartphone owners found that nearly half of feature phone subscribers who acquired a device during April 2012 switched to a smartphone, an increase of 9.5 percentage points from the previous year, as smartphone adoption continues its upward climb in the U.S.

Among this audience, 61.5 percent of consumers acquired devices running the Google Android platform, with 25.2 percent choosing Apple devices and 7.1 percent opting for Microsoft smartphones. Among those feature phone subscribers that acquired a smartphone device in the past month, 61.5 percent chose a Google Android device, while 25.2 percent acquired an Apple device. Devices operating on the Microsoft platform accounted for 7.1 percent of acquired smartphones, while RIM represented 4.8 percent. In comparison, among existing smartphone subscribers that acquired a new smartphone device in the past month, 54.2 percent chose Android devices while 33.5 percent preferred Apple devices. RIM accounted for 9.6 percent of acquired devices, while Microsoft represented 3.0 percent.