October 2013

Verizon Wireless keeps on growing, adding 1.1 million new subscribers

Verizon Wireless kicked off the mobile industry’s earnings season with some positive results. It reported 1.1 million new retail connections in the third quarter, 927,000 of which were contract subscribers. In total, Verizon now hosts 101.2 million mobile connections. As has been typical in the last several years, much of that growth was driven by new smartphone sales. It activated 7.6 smartphones, accounting for three-quarters of its total activations. Smartphones now account for 67 percent of all Verizon’s subscriptions. In addition, it brought 6.8 million new LTE phones, tablets and modems to its networks. It now has 36 million LTE connections, about 34 percent of its total retail contract user base.

Antitrust: Commission consults on commitments offered by Samsung Electronics regarding use of standard essential patents

The European Commission invites comments from interested parties on commitments offered by Samsung Electronics in relation to the enforcement of the standard essential patents (SEPs) it owns in the field of mobile communications.

The Commission has concerns that Samsung’s seeking of injunctions against Apple in the European Economic Area (EEA) on the basis of its mobile SEPs may have amounted to an abuse of a dominant position prohibited by EU antitrust rules. To remedy these concerns, Samsung has offered to abstain from seeking injunctions for mobile SEPs for a period of five years against any company that agrees to a particular licensing framework. Interested parties can now submit their comments within one month. If the Commission concludes, in light of the comments received, that the commitments address the competition concerns, it may decide to make them legally binding on Samsung.

Why Samsung’s EU antitrust settlement proposal stinks

[Commentary] Europe’s antitrust chief said that Samsung had submitted proposals for settling its patent-related antitrust case, and now the European Commission has published them for a one-month public consultation. In a nutshell, Samsung has proposed not abusing its so-called standards-essential patents (SEPs) in the mobile arena for the next five years. The big problem with Samsung’s settlement proposal is its five-year term.

Now, this length of term is hardly unprecedented when it comes to antitrust settlements; for instance, the Microsoft’s browser-bundling anti-trust case in 2009. But the SEPs affair is quite different. It is not a matter of giving competitors their chance to shine; it is about letting those competitors play in the mobile space in the first place. And it’s not a situation that will fundamentally change in five years’ time. When Google settled with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) earlier in 2013 over its own SEPs antitrust case, the FTC didn’t say it would be OK for Google to go back to breaking its commitments after a set period of time. The European Commission should take a similarly long-sighted view, at least adding a proviso that would allow it to swiftly reinstate a harness on Samsung if it goes back to its bad old ways. The question there is which forum will suffice -- the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has been moaning about SEPs abuse for ages, though it doesn’t really have the teeth to do something about it – but either way, someone needs to define what fair and reasonable really means, for once and for all. Nobody benefits from this mess but patent lawyers.

Home of Texas A&M Seeks Fiber Network with Speeds Up to 100 Gbps

Another university community is seeking a gigabit network -- and those spearheading the idea are aiming high. The Research Valley Technology Council (RVTC), an economic development organization for the Bryan and College Station (TX) metro area issued a request for information inviting network operators to build a gigabit residential network and to offer data rates as high as 100 Gbps to local businesses. The metro area, home of Texas A&M University, has a population between 200,000 and 250,000, said James Benham, council member for the City of College Station. Benham expects to see significant interest from network operators. “We have had a handful reach out and have discussions with us,” he said. “They have been receptive.”

Underwater Wi-Fi Could Help Detect Tsunamis

Here's the thing with Wi-Fi: It uses radio waves, which work great pretty much everywhere. Underwater, however, it's a different story. So yes, you can dive into your swimming pool with your iPhone in a waterproof case. But no, you can't stream Spotify in there. A team of researchers from the University of Buffalo, New York, is about to change that (although its goal is something much bigger than underwater Spotify streaming). The team has tested an "underwater Wi-Fi" system in the depths of Lake Erie to create a "deep-sea Internet" that could help detect tsunamis, collect oceanographic data, and monitor pollution. Their technology uses sound waves that work much better underwater than radio waves.

Indonesia Rising: China Is No Longer #1 For Cybercrime

Congratulations, Indonesian organized crime, hackers, and cyberspies: You've made your country number one in cybercrime. A new Akamai study found that Indonesia has edged China out to become the world's top originating country for Internet attacks. In the company's quarterly State of the Internet Report, it was revealed that Indonesian cybercrime is growing by leaps and bounds.

Can E-Books Save The Neighborhood Bookstore?

While no one in the publishing world wants to halt the march of digital distribution, many would like to ensure the neighborhood bookstore doesn’t go the way of the record store. That’s why there are a growing number of people in the industry who are looking to disrupt the disruptors and show Apple, Amazon, and Google how to do digital publishing right -- by embracing the new while keeping the best of the old. One of those people is Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife -- one of the most popular debut novels of the last decade. She’s recently become involved with, and invested in, a new digital publishing startup called Zola Books -- an e-bookstore that, among other things, aims to help physical bookstores thrive in a digital age.

Africa’s future is clear: Youth, Technology & Broadband

[Commentary] Technology is not an end unto itself. While it needs to reward shareholders and management, it has to address the improvement of human well-being. Only then will it drive a revolution of ethics and morality that resolve the grand challenge of development in Africa and the world.

I remember in the mid-90s as Minister of Communications in the Mandela Cabinet that there were 600,000 mobile phones in sub-Saharan Africa. Today it exceeds 750 million and is one of the fastest growing markets. We can build on the incredible talent coming out of the technology hubs in Africa. In Nairobi, one of the cutting edges of new technology, public innovation, has produced some of the most successful applications. It is estimated that anywhere up to 20% of the Kenyan GDP is circulating on the back of mobile platforms like M-pesa, putting effective financial services into the hands of the previously unbanked. Over 17 million customers can deposit, withdraw and transfer money, pay bills, buy airtime from a network of agents that includes airtime resellers and retail outlets. We can use technology to drive education content and teaching and to deliver telemedicine.

To do this we need:

Governments to lead through clear policies and regulations
Each country needs a broadband rollout plan
Clear policy and regulations that drive competition, attract private sector investment and drive down tariffs
Introduce financial incentives that support entrepreneurs in public innovation
Universal service obligations to subsidize education and rural Internet access
Local governments to drive connectivity and increase citizen access to public services and information
Define incentives for operators and stakeholders in the broadband value chain
While there is no single recipe that is likely to work for all countries – instead, countries need to relate the options they choose for universalizing broadband to their market needs.

[Jay Naidoo is a member of the UN Broadband Commission]

Samsung edged out Apple in US phone sales last quarter

Samsung overtook the iPhone on Apple's home turf in the quarter that ended Sept. 30, 2013 according to a Consumer Intelligence Research Partners' report obtained by Fortune. In CIRP's survey, Samsung accounted for 38% of US mobile phone sales in Q3 2013 compared with 34% for Apple.

Here's exactly how a cyberattack will bring down your utility

The National Electric Sector Cybersecurity Organization Resource (NESCOR) has published three cyber security failure scenario and impact analyses documents for the electric sector. NESCOR is a Department of Energy-funded public-private partnership that is led by Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). A cybersecurity failure scenario is a realistic event in which the failure to maintain confidentiality, integrity, and/or availability of sector cyber assets creates a negative impact on the generation, transmission, and/or delivery of power.

These documents include:

How a utility may use the documents
Identification of threat agents
Criteria, methods, and results of prioritization of the failure scenarios
A list of failure scenarios using common terminology for mitigations
An analysis of the frequency of use of common mitigations to identify the greatest potential for benefit across multiple scenarios
Here are some key takeaways from these documents:
The information about potential cyber security failure scenarios is intended to be useful to utilities for risk assessment, planning, procurement, training, tabletop exercises and security testing.
The failure scenarios were developed and revised based on input from many utilities – to ensure the content was realistic.
The list of common mitigations may be used by utilities as they assess the cyber security of their control systems.

Benton

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