December 2012

Adelstein Saluted for Commitment to Rural Telecom

Former Federal Communications Commission member and Rural Utilities Service director Jonathan Adelstein has been named the Rural Broadband Alliance's first American Rural Champion. The coalition of rural telecom carriers singled Adelstein out for helping incorporate rural issues in the 1996 Telecom Act while a Senate staffer and championing rural broadband as an FCC commissioner as well as heading up the RUS' broadband stimulus loan program since being named to head RUS in 2009.

AT&T Wins FCC Permission to Buy Airwaves From Comcast

AT&T won permission from the Federal Communications Commission to acquire airwaves from four companies: Comcast, San Diego Gas & Electric Co, Horizon Wi-Com LLC and NextWave Wireless.

AT&T, the second-largest U.S. wireless operator, has proposed at least 24 deals this year to acquire frequencies as it seeks to catch up with top mobile carrier Verizon Wireless, which is ahead in the race to stockpile the industry’s most precious asset. The companies involved told the FCC the spectrum is currently underutilized, the agency said. Transferring the airwaves to Dallas-based AT&T will help boost mobile high-speed Internet use, the FCC said in its order. San Diego Gas & Electric had acquired the airwaves for smart grid use, the agency said.

GigaOm reports that the licenses cover 82 percent of the U.S. population in the contiguous 48 states, and, combined with AT&T’s current extensive WCS holdings, would give AT&T control over most of the band. There are only a handful of other WCS holders of any note – Sprint being one – but you can expect AT&T to approach those operators in coming months because gaining complete control of the band is core to AT&T’s plans.

No Stiff Upper Lip as Brits Cry Foul Over Ads

‘Tis the season to complain -- in the U.K., at least. The Advertising Standards Authority, Britain's independent industry regulatory body, has over the past month fielded grievances regarding ads that suggest mothers (and not fathers) do Christmas shopping and car ads that promote reckless driving. The objections, however ridiculous they might seem, indicate a broader trend in Britain: complaints about ads are on the rise.

In 2011, the ASA received and dealt with a record-breaking 31,000 complaints and handled more than 22,000 cases -- a 25% bump from 2010. Of those, it investigated 4,417 cases, either through informal resolution or an actual investigative process. And in the first three quarters of 2012, it has put away almost 24,000 complaints, which means 2012 could top even 2011 by the time it's over. What's with the spike in Britons' issues with advertising? One explanation is that the ASA recently expanded its realm to include the digital and online space. However, complaints in non-online categories are also rising.

2013 Telecom Predictions from Analysys Mason: LTE Limited, Social Media Shakeup of Instant Messaging, Slower Smartphone Growth

[Commentary] In 2013, roll-out of LTE services will have limited immediate economic impact, social media giants look set to stir up IP-based messaging services and smartphone penetration growth rates will slow considerably, according to Analysys Mason’s top telecoms predictions for the next 12 months. The technology, media and telecommunications consulting and research company also predicts that Apple will continue to lose market share in the tablet space and the VoLTE investment case will come into the spotlight for operators.

LTE arrives, but with limited immediate impact:
The ‘big switch-off’ will accelerate
Social media giants to further shake up IP-based messaging
VoLTE investment case to come into the spotlight
Smartphone penetration growth rate to slow markedly
Apple to fall below 50% market share for tablet sales
Multi-device subscription pricing to emerge
Traditional TV under more pressure
Wi-Fi to the rescue
Operators in emerging markets come of age

ILECs Ask FCC to Deregulate Voice Service

Telephone companies say they are no longer your father's monopoly and have asked to get out from under decades of voice service regulations. USTelecom asked the Federal Communications Commission for a declaratory ruling that incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) are no longer the dominant providers by virtue of their switched-access services, pointing to new IP nets and service provided by competitors, like cable operators now bundling voice service into their offerings. Such a determination would get them out from under tariffs but not obligations like 911, privacy and disability access they point out in the filing. USTelecom president Walter McCormick said the petition was meant to be the beginning of a dialog about moving his industry closer to parity with its competition.

Twitter Officially Opens Your Archive

The honchos at Twitter have made good on a promise to let users tap into their tweets from long ago. Twitter explained that users who go to the “settings” tab will find instructions on how to download their archive. So, what does it mean to unlock babble from long ago? For now, the Twitter archive is a way to indulge in personal nostalgia much like Facebook’s Timeline. But in the long term, these archives will come to be indispensable tools for scholars, statisticians and cultural historians — consider how Twitter feeds have already become analogous to newspapers and diaries.

Who’s to Blame for the Instagram Debacle? Take a Look in the Mirror

Amid the virtual gallons of digital ink that have been spilled about Instagram’s changes to its terms of service, there seem to be two dominant strains of thought: one is that the photo-sharing service has been infected by the same nefarious privacy virus that Facebook is notorious for, and only eternal vigilance will stop it from doing something horrible with our photos. The second is that this kind of evil behavior is a natural outcome of an ad-supported user-generated-content model, and therefore this model is broken and/or bad. But is it really that simple? Not even close.

In case you missed the brouhaha, my colleague Eliza Kern has covered the details of the original changes — which many bloggers and Instagram users took to mean that the service was planning to sell their photos without their permission — as well as the company’s follow-up blog post, in which it apologized for the misunderstanding and rolled back some of the wording in its TOS. Despite the apology or clarification, however, it seems that some users have no intention of trusting Instagram again, and have deleted their accounts and exported all of their photos. As it does in almost every case like this — and there have been many over the past few years, involving everyone from Facebook and Google to Dropbox and Twitpic — the phrase “if you don’t pay for it, then you are the product” often gets used, in a finger-wagging sort of way that implies you should have seen this coming. And there’s some truth to that: after all, how did you think Instagram was going to pay for the server space and bandwidth to host all of your precious photos? And how did you think Facebook was going to justify paying almost $1 billion for the company?

Ke$ha Apologizes For 'Die Young' After Newtown Shooting, Claims She Was Forced To Sing It

Following reports that radio stations had pulled Ke$ha's hit single "Die Young" from rotation in the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary, the singer has responded with not just an apology, but the admission that she never wanted to record the song in the first place.

'Pumped Up Kicks' & Newtown: Foster The People's Song Pulled From Radio After School Shooting

In light of the Dec. 14 school shooting in Newtown (CT), Foster The People's 2011 summer hit, "Pumped Up Kicks," has been pulled from some radio stations. TMZ reports that L.A. radio station KIIS-FM has taken the song out of rotation entirely. "Pumped Up Kicks," as poppy and upbeat as it is, chronicles the tale of a school shooter. The lyrics of the song read: "Yeah! He found a six-shooter gun / in his dad's closet, with the box of fun things. I don't even know what, but he's coming for you. Yeah, He's coming for you!" The song quickly turns into the dark chorus of, "All the other kids with the pumped up kicks / You better run, better run, outrun my gun. All the other kids with the pumped up kicks / You better run, better run, faster than my bullet."

Nielsen/Arbitron Deal Sparks Concerns Over Competition, Supply Of Ad Market 'Currencies'

Nielsen’s $1.26 billion deal to acquire Arbitron would make the world’s largest supplier of media and marketing research even bigger, giving it not just greater dominance over another medium, but yet another one of Madison Avenue’s so-called market “currencies,” and constricting the supply chain of media ratings that advertisers and agencies use as the basis of hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of media buys.

The timing of the deal is ironic, coming nearly two decades after Dec. 31, 1993, when Arbitron officially shut down its television ratings business -- making Nielsen the de facto monopoly supplier of television ratings, and putting it in a position to dominate the rest of the advertising food chain for decades to come. The deal also comes as Nielsen executives claim to have reached the “tipping point” for becoming the ad industry’s trading currency for another key medium -- online -- following an especially rapid and aggressive push to make its Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings service Madison Avenue’s standard for Internet advertising, including essentially giving the service away for free to some of its biggest customers until it achieves a critical mass of penetration among big online advertisers. In other words, if regulators approve Nielsen’s acquisition of Arbitron, the consolidated company will not simply be a supplier of media audience estimates and consumer marketing insights, but will be the sole supplier of advertising trading currency for three major media: TV, online and radio. "It makes Nielsen the currency for $85 billion in advertising -- $68 billion for TV and $17 billion for radio,” Brad Adgate, senior vice president-director of research at Horizon Media, estimates of just the TV and radio portion of Nielsen’s market position.

Benton

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