June 2014

One out of every three LTE smartphones shipped globally in the first quarter came to the United States, according to a new research report, another indication of the country's continued leadership in the LTE market.

According to Counterpoint's Market Monitor, the US led in the LTE smartphone market, which grew 91 percent year-over-year in the first quarter. According to Counterpoint's Neil Shah, LTE smartphones reached their highest ever first-quarter shipments, contributing to more than a fourth of the total smartphones shipments globally in the period.

All bits running over the Internet are not equal and should not be treated that way by broadband providers, despite network neutrality advocates' calls for traffic neutral regulations, Cisco Systems said.

A huge number of Internet-connected devices with a wide variety of traffic requirements, including billions of machine-to-machine connections, will come online over the next four years, Cisco predicted in its Visual Networking Index Global Forecast and Service Adoption.

Some Web-based applications, including rapidly growing video services, home health monitoring and public safety apps, will demand priority access to the network, while others, like most Web browsing and email, may live with slight delays, said Jeff Campbell, Cisco's vice president for government and community relations.

“We really have a multiplicity of applications and services that are now running across the network, some of which require dramatically different treatment than others," he said.

Some network neutrality advocates have objected to US Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler's proposed rules that would allow broadband providers to engage in "commercially reasonable" traffic management. It's important that the FCC ensure an open Internet, but it's also important that "we have a robust network," Campbell said. The FCC should allow broadband providers to maintain quality of service "to ensure that some applications will run properly and effectively on the Internet," Campbell said. "That means using the intelligence of the network to ensure that those bits receive the quality of service they need."

The Federal Communications Commission should consider including pay TV (cable, satellite, telecommunications) and online video as relevant local market competitors to broadcasting.

That is according to media analyst David Bank, a managing director at RBC Capital Markets, in prepared testimony for the June 11 media ownership hearing in the House Communications Subcommittee. He says that with broadcast TV controlling only about a third of the primetime audience, "it’s clear to us that broadcast TV regulation should probably consider a framework in which pay-TV in total as an ecosystem is a competitor to Broadcasting. This is the case in small and big markets alike."

Then there is the Internet. "[T]he current regulatory framework was constructed in a media ecosystem that basically didn’t include the Internet. While it may have contemplated a broad PC-based Internet consumption environment, it certainly didn’t contemplate a Mobile application based ecosystem," he says.

Unlocking government data is no easy feat, and according to recent survey data gathered by the Government Business Council, the chief obstacles to a more open government are familiar problems in the IT world.

The survey tallied responses from 75 civilian and military IT leaders (GS-14 or higher), and respondents identified concerns over data sensitivity (68 percent), a perceived lack of funding (62.5 percent), privacy (61.1 percent), and unstandardized data (59.7 percent) as the chief challenges to more open data in government.

GBC conducted the survey in part to ascertain how the government would act to Congress’ passing of the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, which mandates the executive branch publish US federal spending in open, standardized datasets readily available to the public. The DATA Act gives agencies more incentive to push appropriate data into the public eye, and it was preceded by a May 2013 executive order that spurred agency efforts to lay the groundwork for making open, machine-readable datasets the default in government.

The GBC survey suggests agencies may have made strides on some of the steps outlined on the Open Government Dashboard, and less on others one would think should have come first.