June 2014

More Airports Adopt Free Wi-Fi

The roll call of free Wi-Fi arrangements -- entirely at some airports, in combination with premium-paid levels at others -- is growing, both domestically and abroad.

As airlines tack on fees for ever-fading courtesies, from checked baggage to advance seat selection, airports are headed in the opposite philosophical direction when it comes to Wi-Fi. Of the nation’s 30 busiest airports, 12 offer all-free Internet, up from nine in 2007, according to Boingo Wireless, a leading provider of airport wireless services. A dozen others opt for a tiered plan, with some free access. The shift is also playing out at smaller locations, where the financial and operational challenges are less daunting.

If Sprint buys T-Mobile, it may have to slash prices: analysts

If Sprint Corp acquires T-Mobile US, it could save up to $6.6 billion on network, equipment and operating costs, but it will have to slash its prices to match the target company's steep discounts, analysts said. Sprint, under Chairman Masayoshi Son, has been hesitant to join other carriers in cutting fees because a decline in revenue would hurt its stock price, analysts say.

Its shares have risen 8 percent since Dec. 12 on speculation it was looking to acquire T-Mobile from Deutsche Telecom AG.

"I think he's realized he's between a rock and a hard place. Sprint’s prices are much too high, but if Sprint cuts prices, its stock will fall," said Craig Moffett, lead analyst at MoffettNathanson. "They don't come close to justifying their stock price."

The price differential is just one hurdle that Sprint, which is 80 percent owned by Japan's SoftBank Corp, would face if it pursues a deal to buy T-Mobile.

Unease about whether Sprint can overcome regulatory hurdles sent its stock down 9.3 percent to $8.77 since details emerged of a potential bid. Sprint customers spend an average of $62 a month, compared with $50 for T-Mobile. "It is not a sustainable situation. If the companies merge, they will need uniform pricing across the company," said Michael McCormack, a lead analyst at Jefferies.

Tech group calls on feds to block Comcast merger

A group representing tech industry giants is calling on regulators to block the proposed merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable. Responding to questions from Sen Al Franken (D-MN), who has vocally opposed the merger, the Computer and Communications Industry Association encouraged regulators and lawmakers to oppose the merger.

“Regulators should block this merger, not only for the good of innovation, the Internet industry and of consumers; but also for the sanctity of antitrust law itself,” Ed Black, president of the CCIA, wrote.

The CCIA represents companies in the tech and telecom sectors, including Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, TiVo, Aereo, T-Mobile and Sprint. Black said his group opposes the merger between two of the country’s largest cable companies and Internet providers because it would increase the company’s “bottleneck market power,” giving it too much leverage when dealing with Internet users and websites.

The CCIA “is concerned that this merger poses a significant threat to innovation and competition in many parts of the marketplace, including ... the websites, platforms and online services that the vast majority of Americans use everyday,” the letter said.

FCC Chairman Wheeler Honors Innovators In Accessibility Communications Technology With Annual Awards

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler announced winners of the third annual Awards for Advancement in Accessibility (Chairman's AAA), which honors innovators who develop communications technology for people with disabilities.

The Chairman presented the awards at a ceremony on June 9, 2014 at the M-Enabling Summit in Arlington (VA), where the award- winning technology was displayed. The Chairman’s AAA, a project of the FCC’s Accessibility and Innovation Initiative (A&I Initiative), recognizes outstanding private and public sector ventures in communications technology accessibility and innovation.

Part of the A&I Initiative’s goal to facilitate ongoing exchanges among industry, assistive technology companies, app developers, government representatives and consumers to share best practices and solutions for accessible communications technologies.

“The potential of broadband-enabled technology to improve the lives of Americans living with disabilities is almost limitless -- but only if that technology is accessible,” said Chairman Wheeler. “I’m glad that these awards can help spark the development of new and creative technologies that furthers the important goal of making communications accessible for all Americans.”

Winners were chosen for seven categories: Advanced Communication Services (ACS), Employment Opportunities, Closed Captions, Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, Mobile Web Browsers, Social Media and Video Description.

Netflix ISP Speed Index for May

We have just added May data to the Netflix ISP Speed Index, our monthly update on which Internet Service Providers (ISPs) provide the best prime time Netflix streaming experience.

The Netflix ISP Speed Index aims to provide transparency and help consumers understand the Internet access they’re actually getting from their ISP. The average Netflix stream is about 2 Mbps (with most streams ranging from 256Kbps to 5.8Mbps), a fraction of the bandwidth most consumers purchase from their broadband provider. Still, in some cases, people are unable to enjoy a high quality Netflix experience.

As part of this transparency campaign, we started a small scale test in early May that lets consumers know, while they’re watching Netflix, that their experience is degraded due to a lack of capacity into their broadband provider’s network. We are testing this across the US wherever there is significant and persistent network congestion. This test is scheduled to end on June 16.

Some broadband providers argue that our actions, and not theirs, are causing a degraded Netflix experience. Netflix does not purposely select congested routes. We pay some of the world’s largest transit networks to deliver Netflix video right to the front door of an ISP. Where the problem occurs is at that door -- the interconnection point -- when the broadband provider hasn’t provided enough capacity to accommodate the traffic their customer requested.

[Evers is part of the communications team at Netflix]

The FCC's Sisyphean Task

[Commentary] Sisyphus, you may recall from high school days, was sentenced to an eternity of rolling a boulder uphill only to watch it roll back down. Section 202(h) of the 1996 Telecommunications Act gave the Federal Communications Commission the Sisyphean task of reviewing all of its broadcast ownership rules every two years (later extended to four) and determining whether each of them continue to be "necessary in the public interest."

On April 15, the FCC voted to start the latest Section 202(h) proceeding by issuing an order initiating the 2014 Quadrennial Review. Even though the FCC has attempted to wrap the last Quadrennial Review into the new one, the Commission has already been hauled into court, and more judicial proceedings will take place even as the FCC receives and considers comments from interested parties.

From a public interest perspective, there are positive and negative aspects to what the FCC did, and didn’t do, in starting the 2014 Quadrennial Review. This post focuses on those aspects of the FCC’s action and related matters along the way.

The most complicated part of all this is just beginning. Whenever the FCC does anything important, somebody takes it to court. Three appeals (technically, they are “petitions for review”) have been filed with respect to the April 15 decision in the District of Columbia. Once it is finally determined which court or courts will hear the appeals, briefs will be filed, probably by early fall.

Then there will be an oral argument, perhaps by the end of the year or early next year. Meanwhile, the FCC will be accepting comments on the 2014 Quadrennial Review, with a decision also likely early 2015. Then, depending on what has already happened in the courts, everyone will appeal that decision. After that, everyone can look forward to the 2018 Quadrennial Review, when it starts all over again.

Report Finds Average Wi-Fi Offload Speed (for Cellular) at 5.3 Mbps

Offloading of cellular network traffic to Wi-Fi networks is on the rise, with Wi-Fi offloading now taking place in nearly 80 percent of all US states in 1Q 2014, a 2-3 percent sequential quarterly increase, according to the latest “Quarterly WiFi Analytics Report” from Wi-Fi network management vendor Wefi.

As Wefi highlights in a press release:

Most states, with the exception of Connecticut and Florida, averaged above 92 percent in Wi-Fi offloading.
Wi-Fi offloading increased by 90 percent from 4 states in the first quarter of 2013 to 41 states in the first quarter of 2014 -- with an average of 94 percent Wi-Fi offloading in these 41 states.
In the first quarter of 2014, Wefi found Snapchat speeds blew past Facebook on every metric, including per state and in-state comparisons. For example, in Manhattan, users of Snapchat experienced a nearly 106 percent increase in Mbps whereas Facebook user speeds fell by nearly 81 percent.

Drilling down into the data, Wefi found that streaming video and social media apps, such as Netflix, Vine, Spotify, ESPN and Instagram account for the highest volumes of data use. Better performance “coupled with devices that automatically sense and log users into Wi-Fi networks when they are present,” is leading carriers to offload growing volumes of data on to Wi-Fi networks, a growth trend Wefi sees continuing nationwide.

Yahoo's mobile chief: Acquisition spree about playing 'catch-up'

When Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer took Adam Cahan aside almost two years ago and asked him to start a new mobile division, he wasn't sure it was the right idea.

It's not that he disagreed with Mayer's plan to transform the desktop-centric Yahoo into a mobile company. But Cahan, who joined Yahoo just a year before its new CEO, says he wasn't convinced that having a mobile-specific group was the right way to go about that transformation.

"If mobile is going to be big, everybody should be focused on mobile," he said. "Why would we have an independent organization?"

Almost 40 acquisitions later, Cahan, a 42-year-old with salt-and-pepper hair, says he's now a believer in the mobile division. Since forming the unit in October 2012, Yahoo has refreshed most of the company's existing properties, including Weather, Finance and the photo-storing service Flickr, so they work well on smartphones and tablets.

Yahoo also added a new mobile product called News Digest, which takes the day's top news stories and boils them down to short summaries.

The goal is to lure users away from the rival services of formidable competitors like Google and Facebook, who have increasingly seen advertising dollars moving from desktop computers to smartphones and tablets.

Text Messaging Program Helps Smokers Fight the Urge to Light Up

More than 11 percent of smokers who used a text- messaging program to help them quit did so and remained smoke free at the end of a six- month study as compared to just 5 percent of controls, according to a new report by researchers at Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University.

“Text messages seem to give smokers the constant reminders they need to stay focused on quitting,” says Lorien C. Abroms, ScD, MA, an associate professor of prevention and community health at Milken Institute SPH and the lead author of the study. “However, additional studies must be done to confirm this result and to look at how these programs work when coupled with other established anti-smoking therapies.”

Despite the widespread use of anti-smoking apps and texting programs, there had been no long-term studies of such programs in the United States. Abroms and her colleagues decided to carry out a large, randomized trial of a text-messaging program.

They recruited 503 smokers on the internet and randomized them to receive either a text-messaging program called Text2Quit or self-help material aimed at getting smokers to quit. The text messages in the Text2Quit program are interactive and give smokers advice but they also allow participants to ask for more help or to reset a quit date if they need more time. Smokers who have trouble fighting off an urge can text in and get a tip or a game that might help distract them until the craving goes away, Abroms said.

Netflix got worse on Verizon even after Netflix agreed to pay Verizon

When Netflix agreed to pay Comcast for a direct connection to the ISP's network, video performance improved immediately. Verizon subscribers aren't so lucky.

Although Netflix and Verizon confirmed on April 28 that they had struck a paid peering deal, performance continued to drop in May and could remain poor for months while the companies upgrade infrastructure.

"Verizon FiOS is down two slots and now ranks behind DSL providers Frontier and Windstream," Netflix wrote after releasing its monthly speed index.

In the US, Netflix performance on Verizon FiOS dropped from 1.99Mbps in April to 1.90Mbps in May, and performance on Verizon DSL dropped from 1.08Mbps to 1.05Mbps. This is the average performance of all Netflix streams on each ISP's network. The drops are small, but they show that the paid peering deal didn't make any immediate impact.

Benton

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