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  2. January 2014

January 2014

San Francisco deal on tech-firm buses a helpful step

[Commentary] San Francisco officials and shuttle representatives have reached an agreement. The scores of buses run by some three dozen businesses will use fewer curb spots and pay up to $1.5 million to the city to manage and oversee this private fleet. The modest deal -- which amounts to $1 per bus per stop -- should soothe neighborhood concerns about the buses that stream along Mission, Divisadero and Van Ness during commute hours. The vehicles will be limited to 200 bus stops, down from 230 to 250. The settlement is a positive step. City authorities will study the future effects, not just impose a charge to enlarge their budgets. Aggrieved neighbors will be able to report problems once buses install identifying placards. It's a move that carries symbolic meaning. San Francisco wants to deal with the side effects of an employment boom that has cut the jobless rate in half but also boosted housing costs to new highs. The Google buses are not the cause of the city's growing pains, they are a symptom -- one this new plan should help treat.

Analysis

Principles for a Successful IP Transition: Diversity

In addition to ubiquitous availability, Americans must have the ability to access and distribute content that reflects the country’s diversity of viewpoints. Last month, the Benton Foundation released The New Network Compact: Making the IP Transition Work for Vulnerable Communities. The report, written by Ted Gotsch, includes 10 interrelated principles to help policymakers guide the transition from traditional telephone service to emerging broadband networks.

White House holding NSA gatherings with tech, lawmakers

The White House is planning a series of meetings this week on National Security Agency practices with members of Congress, the intelligence community and the technology industry as it prepares to unveil proposed surveillance reforms.

President Barack Obama is due to meet Jan 9 with lawmakers from the House and Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees and sit down separately Jan 8 with intelligence officials and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, the White House said. Technology companies have also been invited to a White House meeting this week, according to industry sources. That meeting is being billed, according to one tech representative, as a follow-up to Obama’s face-to-face session in December with more than a dozen technology executives. The new round of gatherings comes as President Obama prepares to outline his vision for NSA reforms ahead of his Jan. 28 State of the Union address.

California bill would halt state's assistance to NSA

Lawmakers in California want to block state agencies and universities from assisting the National Security Agency (NSA) in its surveillance of Americans.

Legislation from State Sens. Ted Lieu (D) and Joel Anderson (R) would cut off the spy agency from California utilities, services and other agencies. State Sen Lieu said that the agency's surveillance poses a “direct threat to our liberty and freedom” and is comparable to the US government's internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. “The last time the federal government massively violated the US Constitution, over 100,000 innocent Americans were rounded up and interned,” he said. The legislators’ bill would prevent state agencies and corporations with state contracts from “materially supporting or assisting” the NSA’s surveillance efforts, unless a specific warrant had been issued. It would also prevent information obtained without a warrant by the federal government from being used in a state or local criminal case.

NSA employee will continue to co-chair influential crypto standards group

Kevin Igoe, a senior cryptographer with the National Security Agency’s Commercial Solutions Center, will continue to co-chair an influential group that helps to develop cryptographic standards designed to protect Internet communications, despite calls that he should be removed.

Igoe is one of two co-chairs of the Crypto Forum Research Group (CFRG), which provides cryptographic guidance to working groups that develop widely used standards for the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). On Jan 5, the chair of the group that oversees appointments to the CFRG rejected a recent call that Igoe be removed in light of recent revelations that the NSA has worked to deliberately weaken international encryption standards.

Narrowing the Digital Divide in the Navajo Nation

Spread across the Four Corners region of the American Southwest, the Navajo Nation is home to up to 175,000 members of the Navajo Tribe. Tribal members live scattered across more than 27,000 square miles of land stretching from northeast Arizona to northwest New Mexico to southeast Utah. It’s a place where many roads have never been paved, many buildings don’t have a formal postal address and thousands of families remain cut off from the electrical grid.

At least 60 percent of homes don’t have landline telephone service even though wireless signals are often spotty or nonexistent. The 911 system often cannot track where people are calling from during an emergency. And high-speed Internet access has been almost entirely unavailable. Data from the National Broadband Map, which is maintained by NTIA in collaboration with the Federal Communications Commission, show that less than 4 percent of the population living in Navajo Nation territory has access to even the most basic wireline broadband speeds of 3 megabits per second downstream.

But with a $32 million grant from NTIA’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP), the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority is bringing a modern wireless communications system to a region that has been all too frequently bypassed by amenities that most Americans take for granted.

AT&T is bulking up capacity on its LTE network with spectrum buy

Now that AT&T is nearly done with its initial LTE rollout, it’s shifting its focus from building network coverage to adding more network capacity, just as its archrival Verizon Wireless is doing.

It’s looking to expand into different frequency bands beyond the 700 MHz airwaves its current LTE network resides on, and it’s becoming apparent that it’s targeting the same Advanced Wireless Service (AWS) bands used by T-Mobile and Verizon for that new network. That’s a little surprising since AT&T has lacked key geographic coverage at AWS, and in fact, it was forced to give up a lot of those 1700/2100 MHz airwaves to T-Mobile as a consolation prize when its merger failed. But in the last year, it’s been trying to rebuild its frequency collection. It’s attempting to buy Leap Wireless, a key AWS holder in many cities, and the Aloha deal will bulk up its holdings further. AT&T isn’t focusing on a single spectrum band for the next phase of its LTE rollout, though. It’s already launched LTE in the PCS band – borrowing bandwidth from its older 2G and 3G networks – in Baltimore, Dallas, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington (DC). It also has plans to use 2.3 GHz frequencies and possibly even its original cellular frequencies for 4G as well.

AT&T buoyed in lobbying push against spectrum auction limits

[Commentary] While T-Mobile’s purchase of airwaves from Verizon may help it better compete with bigger wireless carriers, it also may give AT&T -- already among the biggest lobbying forces in Washington -- fodder for convincing regulators not to limit an upcoming spectrum auction.

The $2.4 billion T-Mobile/ Verizon deal gives AT&T another concrete example to cite in its argument against putting limits on how much spectrum it can buy in an auction scheduled for 2015: the wireless market is becoming more competitive as companies like T-Mobile buy more airwaves that allows it to build a better network, and AT&T shouldn’t be hamstrung. That’s the point Joan Marsh, AT&T’s head of its federal regulatory office, made last month when testifying before the Senate’s Commerce Committee prior to T-Mobile’s airwaves purchase.

Sprint just turned its customers into recruiters with its unique spin on the family plan

Sprint unveiled its own unique take on the family plan. Called the “Framily” Plan -- a portmanteau of “friends and family” -- it allows up to 10 people to sign up for a joint account. But instead of sharing data, minutes, or texts, the plan members share a collective discount.

Here’s how it works: A single Framily basic line costs $55 for unlimited talk and text and 1 GB of data, but for every additional member that joins, each plan is discounted by $5 a month up to a maximum discount of $30. So seven members on a single plan could reap the full benefits of a $30 discount per line. Each member, however, is billed separately and can customize their plans with unlimited data for an additional $20 a month. The bottom line is if you can rack up even a small-sized group, these plans are cheap. $55 is already a reasonable price to pay for service with a plan with 1 GB of data, but at the maximum discount, you could pay as low as $25 for 1 GB and $45 for a truly unlimited plan, which puts Sprint in the price range of even the most budget virtual operators.

Silicon Valley's New Spy Satellites

Silicon Valley is making what, in any other decade, we’d call spy satellites. “Google Earth whetted consumers’ appetites for pictures of Earth from space,” said Scott Larsen. But the pictures in our browsers, he said, have now become old and out of date. “[Imagery from] five years ago is great, but how about from last year, last month, last week, yesterday?’” Larsen leads Urthecast. It’s one of a cadre of startups -- three are now out of stealth mode -- tossing cameras out of the atmosphere and trying to turn them into a business. Each of the three is choosing different methods, different kinds of devices, and different orbits. Each is selling something a little different. They are Urthecast, Planet Labs, and Skybox.

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