June 2015

Sidewalk Labs, the Google-backed urban innovation startup unveiled in June, has picked its first project -- bringing free, fast Wi-Fi to cities around the world. It announced it is leading a group of investors acquiring Control Group and Titan, among the companies working on the LinkNYC network to blanket New York City with free, superfast Wi-Fi. The two have merged to form Intersection, which will oversee the rollout of LinkNYC this fall and then seek to install similar technology in other cities. Come September, tall, thin pillars with digital tablet interfaces and large ads slapped on the sides will begin to replace New York's derelict pay phone booths.

In addition to offering free wireless Internet access to anyone in a 150-foot radius, they will include amenities like free phone charging, phone calling, Internet browsing, and access to local services and information. Through Titan's advertising network, Link could bring $500 million in ad revenue to the city over the next 12 years, according to Mayor Bill de Blasio's office. Sidewalk Labs declined to disclose its share of the revenue. Sidewalk is targeting issues of modern cities such as pollution, energy, traffic, communications, and cost of living. "It was formed to look at the confluence of the physical and digital world to solve urban problems," Chief Executive Officer Dan Doctoroff said. He wouldn't say which cities he has in mind for the Wi-Fi push but predicted the technology will go global. "There are certainly places that it's immediately replicable," he said, adding that the idea is to "use technology not to make cities all the same, but enhance what makes them unique and individual."

[Commentary] On June 22, a number of media outlets ran stories purportedly about “net neutrality violations” by major US Internet service providers, notably AT&T. This would be important news if true. But the core of the story is about a completely different topic.

The story is not at all about how AT&T operates its network. Instead, it’s about the conditions under which AT&T connects its network to other networks, known as interconnection. The site being “slowed” by AT&T is a content distribution network named GTT. The reason GTT traffic is slow for AT&T customers is not that AT&T is slowing the traffic within the AT&T network. Rather, the problem is that there is only a limited and slow connection between GTT and AT&T, and AT&T expects GTT to pay to enhance it. That is, the performance problem is not that AT&T is slowing the Internet, it’s that GTT expects to have a fast connection to AT&T users, without paying for it. Every content provider would like to have free high-speed connections to their customers. But somebody has to pay. There is no legal or technical reason why content providers should get free connectivity, while the full costs fall on consumers. This is not “neutral.” This is corporate favoritism with a misleading slogan. Far from advocating for consumers or for an open internet, BattlefortheNet is implicitly asking the FCC to shift network costs around willy-nilly, based on which companies have the best public image. The FCC should decline the invitation.

[Ariel Rabkin is a professional software engineer who received his PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkely in May 2012]

Amazon Prime has announced that it is now offering episodes of its original series in high dynamic range. HDR is considered the next step after 4K images in improving video quality. High dynamic range on 4K sets offers improved color quality, better blacks and highlights, providing a more vivid, bright and lifelike image. The first series to be made available in HDR is the first season of Amazon’s "Mozart in the Jungle". The provider says that more series will be “coming soon.” Amazon is not charging Prime Members any extra for the HDR but users must have a TV capable of displaying the HDR images. Starting June 24, HDR is available through the Amazon Video app on Samsung SUHD TVs.

[Commentary] Recently, the CEO of T-Mobile sat down in front of a camera and tried to get people riled up about spectrum. The world of wireless spectrum can be dense and confusing, and unless you really need to, you probably wouldn't try to get people talking about it. But T-Mobile really needs to do it: the difference between getting spectrum and not getting spectrum could be the difference between competing with AT&T and Verizon and wasting away in third place. When T-Mobile talks about spectrum, it's talking about the airwaves used to connect your phone to its network. Broadly speaking, the more spectrum a carrier has, the better its network can be. Some spectrum is much, much better than other spectrum. "Sprint has all of this spectrum, but ... it doesn't travel very far and it gets stopped by wet leaves. Literally wet leaves," says Harold Feld, senior vice president of the advocacy group Public Knowledge.

T-Mobile wants to get people riled up because it and other carriers are going to have another chance to get more spectrum very soon. And not just any spectrum. The kind of spectrum you get once in a lifetime. The kind of spectrum you'd shell out huge sums of money for. An auction for this spectrum is scheduled to begin in the first quarter of 2016, but the rules for the auction will likely be finalized in July by the Federal Communications Commission. And that's why T-Mobile's CEO sat down to record a video. His company wants the FCC to make a big change before the rules are finalized. Right now, the FCC is setting aside a block, at most 30MHz in size, for companies that don't already own a large portion of good low-band spectrum in any given market — it's basically a safe haven from AT&T and Verizon. But T-Mobile, as well as a group of others including Sprint, Dish, and Public Knowledge, argue that 30MHz is too small.