April 2013

While the Senate considered an overhaul of a sweeping quarter-century-old law governing e-mail privacy, a House Judiciary Committee panel received dueling arguments over when and how police can track the location of Americans carrying a cellphone.

For investigators, knowing where a suspect is and at what time can be crucial to an investigation. Cellphones have become a powerful tool for establishing those facts — one detective scheduled to testify on Capitol Hill described them in prepared remarks as a “witness” to a crime. Less clear is the law on how authorities can extract that information from cellphones. Law enforcement officials say procuring a search warrant, based on probable cause, is too time-consuming and slows down an investigation. The law is vague on what information cellphone carriers must turn over to law enforcement and whether the officials require judicial review. Under what circumstances can police obtain a “tower dump,” meaning identify cellphone users whose devices pinged off a particular cellphone tower? Should a warrant be required to monitor the location of an individual with whom a known suspect is communicating? Should a warrant be required for specific location information of a known suspect? There is no consensus in the law on these questions.

The Federal Communications Commission’s Wireline Competition Bureau hereby announces the results of the 2012 Lifeline annual recertification process.

In the Lifeline Reform Order, the FCC required that each eligible telecommunications carrier (ETC) and, where applicable, state Lifeline administrators, a state agency or an agent of the state (collectively, “state agency”) recertify the eligibility of each ETC’s subscriber base as of June 1, 2012 by the end of 2012, and report the results to the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC) on FCC Form 555 by January 31, 2013.2 Subscribers that are no longer eligible or who do not respond to attempts to recertify their eligibility must be de-enrolled from the program. Based on results from the FCC Forms 555 submitted by ETCs, and analysis from USAC, the Bureau reports that 29 percent of all subscribers that were enrolled in the program in June 2012 have been de-enrolled from the program.

The Provo (UT) city council formally approved the transfer of its iProvo fiber network to Google, making the city the third metro area to gain that sweet, sweet gigabit service. Google is only paying $1 for the network, but in return it will have to provide a “basic five-megabit” connection to all residents for seven years and provide free gigabit service to 25 public institutions. As it turns out, though, it’s as good of a deal as it might seem.

According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Provo Mayor John Curtis revealed Tuesday that the city now owes an additional $1.7 million to keep those fiber-optic lights on. The city must also pay “about $500,000 to a civil engineering firm to determine exactly where the fiber optic cables are buried, a requirement by Google," the Tribune reported. "Curtis admitted that the construction company that installed the fiber cables underground did not keep records of where they buried all of them.”

As Google expands its commitment to bringing fiber-to-the-home gigabit connections to more places, I wondered exactly how many people actually have gigabit connections. So I asked Ookla, the company that operates the Speedtest.net service for its data.

Turns out, there’s no real way to calculate who has a gig, but the numbers we do have indicate that not too many people are living in the future when it comes to connectivity. It turns out that between the first of this year and April 8 (when I got the data from Ookla) roughly one in 10,000 devices in the U.S. are surfing at gigabit speeds and roughly 1 in 5,000 homes worldwide can match them. Ookla runs the popular Speedtest.Net service and got this data from users who tested their connections during that time period. Ookla actually measure customers with speeds of above 800 Mbps, which is what it classifies as a gigabit. In the U.S. only 4,110 people have test results at that speed out of 45,468,731 people who used the Ookla tests. Globally, 34,721 users have speeds that high out of 224,404,945 tests. But, clearly not every broadband user is running Speedtest.net or has the right equipment.