July 2013

[Commentary] Broadcast television as we know it now stands on two legs: advertising and retransmission fees from cable providers. With Hopper skipping ads and Aereo allowing for distribution over the Internet without payment, profits might go dark. But the legal cases also seem to defy a kind of common-sense logic: how can insurgents use programming created by someone else to their own ends without sharing revenue? The answer could get very complicated, very fast, but let’s try to make it simple.

[Commentary] On July 19, 2013, the Federal Communications Commission launched a major effort to review and modernize the E-rate program which helps schools and libraries to obtain affordable telecommunications services, broadband Internet access and internal network connections. Created by provisions in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the E-rate is the federal government’s largest education technology program. In 1996, only 14 percent of classrooms had Internet and most schools with Internet access (74 percent) used dial-up Internet access. By 2005, nearly all schools had access to the Internet, and 94 percent of all instructional classrooms had Internet access. Similarly, by 2006, nearly all public libraries were connected to the Internet, and 98 percent of them offered public Internet access. Increasingly, however, schools and libraries require high-capacity broadband connections to take advantage of digital learning technologies that hold the promise of substantially improving educational experiences and expanding opportunity for students, teachers, parents and whole communities. As more and more educators turn to online resources and capabilities, the strain on district networks increases.

A new study suggests the U.S. is losing the race for Internet speed. Akamai, a U.S. company that serves about 20 percent of the world’s Internet traffic, in its 2013 “State of the Internet” report, says America’s Internet speed has slipped to 9th from 8th.

Latvia, the home country of Doctor Doom, is ranked 6th and probably plotting a way to destroy the Fantastic Four even now. The Top 10 countries? South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Netherlands, Latvia, Czech Republic, Sweden, U.S., Denmark. South Korea’s average connection speed in early 2013 was 14.1 megabits per second. The U.S. average is 8.6 Mbps. The global average is 3.1 Mbps.

Industry executives and association leaders including Windstream's Jeff Gardner, COMPTEL's Jerry James, and National Cable and Telecommunications Association's Shirley Bloomfield joined analyst Larry Downes and Public Knowledge's Gigi Sohn to testify in front of the Senate Commerce Committee in a hearing -- the fourth in a series -- on the impending transition off the traditional public switched telephone network (PSTN) to IP technologies.

It was in every way a discussion about what's next for telecommunications. But the biggest issue lay in how much regulation, if any, should be created or revised as providers shift away from the PSTN. While several topics were on the table--technology transition, FCC governance, rural access to voice and Internet services, the cord-cutting trend, and call completion problems -- the question of maintaining competitiveness while continuing to both innovate and provide reliable services stayed at the forefront.