June 2014

Talking WISP Consolidation with JAB Broadband Co-Founder

“A lot of people don’t know how healthy these companies are,” commented Jeff Kohler, co-founder and chief development officer for JAB Broadband. Kohler was referring to the 101 wireless Internet service providers that JAB Broadband has acquired since its founding in 2006.

Kohler has 20 years of experience in telecom with an emphasis on the wireless and financial aspects of the business, and he became attracted to broadband wireless because, with few exceptions, he found that companies in this business were “all good solid businesses,” he said.

JAB now has 170,000 subscribers in 14 states in the Midwest, the Rocky Mountain and the Southwest. Kohlerbelieves that makes JAB the largest wireless Internet service provider (WISP) in the US by a wide margin. In total he estimates there are about 2,500 WISPs nationwide, serving about 3 million subscribers. JAB serves primarily rural areas and suburbs that are distant from core metro areas.

Using the doughnut-and-hole analogy, Kohler said JAB serves the doughnut, but stays out of the hole. About 70% of the locations in JAB’s coverage area can get DSL and about 40% have a cable competitor. JAB mostly uses unlicensed spectrum, but it does have some 2.5 GHz licenses.

President Obama's Destructive War on the Media

[Commentary] Few presidential candidates enjoyed better press than Barack Obama in 2008. He reciprocated by promising unprecedented "openness in government" and a new era of transparency. He has fallen far short of the promise.

This administration has prosecuted more whistle-blowers for leaks and gone after more journalists than any of its predecessors.

The issue was crystallized anew recently when the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from New York Times reporter James Risen, who has been ordered to testify in the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former Central Intelligence Agency official.

Sterling is charged with giving Risen classified information about an attempt to sabotage Iran's nuclear program. The Justice Department has relentlessly pursued Risen, and he could face jail time for failing to comply with the subpoena. Similar claims about protecting national security are being made about Sterling, who proclaims his innocence. A federal judge dismissed the proceedings against Risen, but the Obama administration successfully appealed the decision. On the federal level, much depends on an administration's attitude.

As it stands, in the US, the news media has considerable protections when it comes to censorship or libel, but they don't apply to news gathering. Attorney General Eric Holder has vowed in private meetings and some public pronouncements to change this approach. With the decision by the Supreme Court, the Risen case offers the opportunity to do so.

Two-thirds of the world’s mobiles are dumb phones. Meet the company getting them online

U2opia mobile, a Singapore-based company founded by Indian entrepreneurs, has catapulted to 17 million users in 36 countries as a result. To understand why, you have to unlearn Facebook—its blue background, viral videos, photo uploads -- as you know it.

And put yourself in the position of someone who has never been on the Internet before.

U2opia takes dumb phones and uses the so-called Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) protocol to allow such phones to connect to specific Internet services such as Twitter and Facebook tailored for the small screen and text-only functionality. This is done through the company’s proprietary platform Fonetwish, which has signed agreements with Facebook and Twitter.

An estimated 62% of the phones used in the world are dumb phones, officially called “feature phones” by manufacturers and networks. Their market share is much higher in emerging markers. Since its launch in 2011, the platform has steadily acquired users on 53 operator networks in 36 countries. They’re in places as far apart as Senegal, Somalia, South Sudan, Chad, Niger, Haiti, Honduras, Columbia, El Salvador, Cambodia, Palestine, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India and Mauritania, among others. U2opia’s real achievement is not in making Facebook available on feature phones. It is that it used the global lure of Facebook and Twitter to build an emerging markets user base that is of interest and value to all manner of clients.

Netflix: We’ll drop the anti-Verizon error messages. For now.

Netflix says it will stop pinning the blame for laggy streaming speeds on Verizon and other Internet providers, potentially putting an end to a weeklong dispute between broadband companies and the streaming video service.

The error messages, which began popping up for some users as part of a trial in May, told subscribers that their stuttering connections were the result of congestion on their ISP networks. The claim led Verizon to fire back with a cease-and-desist letter demanding that the notices stop. Netflix will suspend the messages on June 16, according to a company blog post.

But spokesman Joris Evers denied that the decision had anything specific to do with Verizon's complaint. "We do tests of different lengths," said Evers. "That doesn’t mean there won’t be another one, and it doesn't mean there won’t be multiple ones that run in concert after this."

Netflix will examine the results of the current test to see whether users called customer service more or less often and whether they watched more or less video, among other things.

Verizon vs. Netflix: What's this really about?

A Q&A with Verizon's vice president David Young. Netflix has been accusing Verizon and other Internet service providers, such as Comcast, of not providing enough network capacity to handle an increase in demand for its video streaming service, citing this as a cause for the poor performance of its service.

The standoff between the companies is curious given that Verizon and Netflix actually signed a commercial arrangement in April, which should improve Netflix performance on Verizon's network. Apparently, Netflix is still unhappy about the outcome of that deal.

Young denied that Verizon is throttling Netflix.

“What seems to be occurring is that there is congestion on the connection between Netflix and our network, which is what is causing the video to buffer for some Verizon FiOS subscribers,” he said. Rather than throttling, he said the congestion was simply caused by the high demand of customers trying to utilize the network. He said it was not Verizon’s responsibility to provide another company like Netflix free upgrades to the service.

GOP: FCC Rules Hamper Broadcast Ability To Compete

The House Communications Subcommittee Republican majority is clearly looking to deregulate broadcasters they see as competitively disadvantaged on the regulatory front.

That is according to a copy of the majority staff memo for the hearing on "Media Ownership in the 21st Century." "As broadcasters -- and newspapers -- face increasing competition for Americans’ attention, additional regulatory flexibility will permit them to increase efficiencies and compete against unregulated competitors," said the majority staff in the memo.

Among the topics of conversation will be the Federal Communications Commission's continued newspaper/broadcast crossownership ban. Among the ownership rules the memo suggests are on the table for discussion at the June 11 hearing are, in addition to the newspaper/broadcast crossownership ban: Local TV ownership limits (the duopoly rule); local radio ownership limits; the national cap (39%) on one TV station group’s percentage of households; diversity issues radio/TV crossownership rules, prohibitions on owning more than one broadcast network.

Some Republicans joined broadcasters in their unhappiness with FCC decisions to make most TV station joint sales agreements (JSAs, those over 15% of weekly ad sales) attributable as ownership interest, and the Media Bureau's guidance on how it will view sharing agreements with associated financial arrangements.

Technology needs continued innovation not constraining regulation

[Commentary] Developers do not typically create software based on regulatory requirements; rather, they orient their efforts towards solving a specific problem or providing functionality not otherwise available to consumers. So why should regulation created for an industry built decades ago govern their designs?

Allowing regulations to dictate how new programs will operate and be delivered runs counter to the principles of technological innovation. Requiring the developers of the innovation economy to adhere to decades old telephone company regulations is a large step in the wrong direction for technology advancement.

Potential obligations to regulatory burdens like federal, state, and local reporting requirements, service level agreements, direct consent agreements, and privacy regulations could be an expensive and cumbersome burden to both large and small start-up technologies. Not to mention the deleterious effects of subjecting innovative businesses to the tariff regimes of an analog business model that is struggling to move forward into a digital world.

[Tews is also the Chief Policy Officer at 463 Communications]

Major Policy Shifts, Economic Forces Shape the Ed-Tech Market

[Commentary] The multibillion-dollar market for educational technology is in one sense being shaped from the top down -- through major policies and economic forces influencing spending across states and school districts.

But it's also being fueled from the ground up -- by a belief among school leaders and entrepreneurs, that digital tools will give schools the power to customize learning to meet individual students' needs. Researchers and industry groups studying the market say they now see a growing demand for ed-tech products, an uptick that has followed a prolonged period of lean budgets at the state and local levels.

First Response won’t use FirstNet

[Commentary] The First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet) is designing a nationwide wireless broadband LTE network for use by public safety. “Public safety” specifically includes traditional first responders -- law enforcement, firefighting and emergency medical response. But “public safety” also includes other services such as electrical and water utilities, transportation and even building inspectors --having structures built to withstand hurricanes and earthquakes is definitely a “public safety” issue! In the FirstNet design process, we emphasize “first response”.

We’ve developed a number of scenarios for such responses, for example school shootings, SWAT team actions, home and apartment fires, automobile accidents with injuries, and so forth. We think about scenarios where first responders are racing to a scene, lights flashing and sirens blaring, and what information they’ll be pulling down wirelessly to their smartphones or tablet computers to support the response. While most of the first responders to such incidents use a public safety wireless network only sparingly, if at all, responders will make considerable use of FirstNet once the initial situation on the scene is stabilized. In the aftermath, 4G LTE networks, including FirstNet, will be invaluable to dispatch centers and incident commanders.

[Schrier is a former CTO City of Seattle now with Office of the Chief Information Office, State of Washington]

Amtrak wants better Wi-Fi

Amtrak is looking to upgrade the wireless Internet it offers along the 457-mile Northeast corridor. The train line has offered Wi-Fi to riders from Washington to Boston for a handful of years, but the service has been frustratingly slow and often cuts out at points through the trip on a crowded train. For some regular commuters, the poor service has become something of a recurring joke. Amtrak wants that to change.

The Wi-Fi connection along the popular route is currently 10 Mbps, but the company is looking for bids to boost that to at least 25 Mbps, which would be a significant upgrade. Web speeds could rise even further in the future, as technology permits, Amtrak said. Additionally, Amtrak would drop current restrictions that prevent riders from downloading large files and streaming music and video, which would allow people along the Northeast corridor to watch movies on Netflix and Hulu and stream songs on Spotify.

Amtrak has asked for a $260 million bump in federal money from Congress to deal with a surge of riders, especially along the popular Northeast corridor.

Benton

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