February 2014

AT&T Picks Two Areas for Advanced-Services Test

AT&T proposed offering digital-only telephone service in towns in Alabama and Florida as it moves toward abandoning its aging copper-wire network and escaping the US regulation that goes with it. The regional experiments will help regulators decide whether AT&T and other telephone companies will be allowed to stop offering traditional wired phone service as customers migrate to wireless and Internet-based communications.

The experiments are to take place in West Delray Beach, Florida, and Carbon Hill, Alabama. In rural Carbon Hill, which began as a coal-mining community, about 55 percent of subscribers will be offered only a wireless system, according to AT&T documents. All customers in suburban West Delray Beach trial are to be offered wired and wireless services, the company said. AT&T chose Carbon Hill, where 21 percent of households have income below the poverty line, in part to address challenges of changing systems in a poor, rural area. AT&T initially will ask customers in the test areas to switch to the new technologies. In a separate phase that would require US approval, the company would stop offering plain old telephone service to new customers, said Hank Hultquist, AT&T vice president-federal regulatory. “We want to make sure our customers are comfortable with the new services,” Hultquist said. Later, the company wants to switch all customers to the newer technologies, he said.

Telecom Giants Paid Millions To 'Honor' Minority Lawmakers Before The Merger

Comcast and Time Warner Cable are heading into the lobbying stage of their proposed merger with a strong hand. They boast large teams of lobbyists, a history of massive campaign contributions to members of both political parties and close ties to the White House. Over the last several years, the two telecom giants have also contributed millions of dollars to "honor" members of Congress and congressional caucuses.

The biggest recipients of this money have been nonprofits linked to minority lawmakers, traditionally some of the most progressive members of Congress. Disclosure of so-called honorary contributions -- ostensibly philanthropic gifts that go to organizations tied to congressional lawmakers or events designed to honor politicians -- became mandatory starting in 2008. Since 2008, Comcast and Time Warner Cable have contributed more than $990,000 to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, more than $180,000 to the Congressional Hispanic Leadership Institute, nearly $800,000 to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, $135,000 to the Congressional Black Caucus Policy and Leadership Institute, and $281,000 to the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies. In the years since, Comcast and Time Warner Cable have directed more than $3.7 million to celebrate lawmakers. Nonprofits affiliated with the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus have benefited the most.

New E-Rate Funding Will Take Time to Reach Schools

The pressure on school districts to upgrade their technology is growing, as the financial support to make those changes is limited. States are scheduled to begin giving online tests aligned to the Common Core State Standards in a year -- exams that many district officials say will greatly tax their bandwidth and their ability to give tests with their current stock of laptops, desktops, and other devices. Meanwhile, schools' demand for bandwidth is also rising because of the growth of technology-enhanced lessons in classrooms, as well as students' increasing reliance on mobile devices and other new technologies.

The Federal Communications Commission, the agency that oversees the E-rate, announced a series of steps that officials said would not only put more broadband funding into the program over the next two years, but also redirect the funding to pay for the most in-demand technologies, such as broadband. Yet most of the tangible benefits of the new money for broadband will not be felt in districts for a while, a number of observers predict. They cite a variety of reasons, including the fact that the E-rate application process for 2014 is already far along, as well as the limits on how quickly districts can arrange to make technology upgrades.

What Does 21st Century Connectivity Look Like… and Are We There Yet?

[Commentary] “In a country where we expect free Wi-Fi with our coffee, we should definitely demand it in our schools.” That’s a nice sentiment, Mr. President, but it’s going to take a lot to get there.

The Federal Communications Commission’s E-rate Program serves a key policy lever to build out high-speed connectivity to schools and libraries, but to achieve that goal the program is in desperate need of reform. New America’s Education Policy Program and Open Technology Institute released a brief, Connected Communities in an Age of Digital Learning, which highlights our recommendations for program reform, also including a timeline for E-rate reform efforts. Experts across the fields of education, library sciences, and technology weighed in on how far we still have to go, and why we’re driving there in the first place.

TV Is Dead. Now What?

[Commentary] In mid-century America, with the entire country tuned in to the same three networks -- and with social and economic pressures keeping ABC, CBS and NBC all in a zone of centrist consensus -- broadcast television put the mass in mass media. Naturally, this made it a tremendous platform for political campaigns to reach an enormous audience with one message. Today, though, the mass audience is dwindling, TV audiences are shrinking by the day, and the result is an upheaval for those in the business of winning elections using ads no less subtle than Johnson’s. But as the utility of TV wanes, savvy campaigns are adapting in a way that’s transforming their relationship to voters -- they’re treating supporters less like targets and more like participants. The fragmenting that disrupted broadcast television is now happening to cable TV. Committed voters, the ones who didn’t turn off TV news and read the political Internet avidly, used to be the ones a campaign could take for granted. They would always show up and always vote the party line. Now, though, they are becoming a critical media asset, a way to reach the ones -- and there are more every year -- who ignore the news in favor of the latest YouTube viral hit and never ever watch the ads now that they don’t have to.

[Shirky is professor of new media at New York University]

A Short History of the Next Campaign

[Commentary] Campaigning is a brutal business, with winners, losers -- and a fickle American public making the choice. In the age of Moneyball, it’s getting even tougher. In the old days, media teams had one main job: to make TV ads and buy time on the networks. But there’s no such thing as a “TV ad” anymore; video needs to find voters on their laptops and phones, too. On a fast-changing campaign, analytics have to be continually updated to keep pace. It’s conceivable that, in the future, yard signs and billboards will be able to measure how many cars pass by. T-shirts and other campaign gear worn by field workers could automatically tally how many doors are knocked on and transmit this data back to a campaign’s central hub. We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.” Polling -- a kind of science built on sampling and models -- is about to become obsolete.

[Mele, lecturer, Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government]

Carriers say they support mobile kill switch effort

Executives with three US mobile carriers have voiced support for an effort in the US Congress to encourage mobile carriers to offer services to customers that would render smartphones and tablets inoperable if they're stolen. Executives with Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile USA and C Spire Wireless all said they're taking steps to offer kill switches on mobile devices they sell to consumers, although they stopped short of endorsing a bill that would require mobile carriers to offer kill switch services.

Obama's Trauma Team

This is the story of a team of coders and troubleshooters in elite technology circles who dropped what they were doing in various enterprises across the country and came together in mid-October to save Healthcare.gov. In about a tenth of the time that a crew of usual-suspect, Washington contractors had spent over $300 million building a site that didn't work, this ad hoc team rescued it and, arguably, President Barack Obama's chance at a health-reform legacy.

Which is better: Ignorance or Knowledge?

Federal Communications Commission Chair Tom Wheeler concluded that he was not comfortable with part of a comprehensive study of the media marketplace and decided to eliminate the portion of the study that gave him concern. The truth of the matter is that conservative activists scored a victory in favor of ignorance over facts.

This so-called controversy has a lot in common with the false debate over whether greenhouse gas causes climate change or whether smoking causes cancer. It is entirely possible we'll hear accusations that the studies are really all about affirmative action or voting fraud or some other conservative lightening rod. This lack of knowledge has been a real problem for the FCC. In fact, a number of policies that many of the critics presumably support have been overturned in court because the FCC did not have the facts and analysis to support its decisions. And what of the so-called secret army of "media monitors" spreading out across the country to intimidate journalists into giving the "right" answers and covering the "right" stories? They don't exist. What we did have government-funded researchers conducting a voluntary, anonymous series of questions to understand better the decision-making process in newsrooms generally.

Senators blast NSA for webcam spying

Sens Ron Wyden (D-OR), Martin Heinrich (D-NM) and Mark Udall (D-CO) slammed the National Security Agency after reports that its surveillance program capture images from users’ webcams.

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