June 2015

Millions of young people have switched off television news bulletins, and turned instead to online sources, according to a survey of the news industry in several major markets.

The shift raises questions about the business models of broadcasters such as CNN, MSNBC and Sky News, and underlines the growing importance of Facebook and others as the gateways to content. “Not only do young people prefer online, our data show that a significant proportion are abandoning television news completely,” concluded the report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. The US saw one of the biggest shifts: the proportion of under-35s who said they watched a TV news bulletin in the past week dropped from 37 percent in 2013 to 24 percent in 2015.

The Federal Communications Commission announced that the Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council (or “CSRIC”) has been re-chartered for two more years and also announced the members of the new CSRIC. CSRIC is a federal advisory committee that provides recommendations to the FCC on actions the Commission can take to help ensure the security and reliability of communications systems. CSRIC members are a diverse group of expert stakeholders from the public and private sectors.

John Schanz, Executive Vice President and Chief Network Officer for Comcast Cable, will be the Chair of the CSRIC, and we are very happy that he will be steering this effort. Schanz, one of the nation’s leaders in securing commercial communications networks, brings invaluable expertise to this role at a time when both the challenges and opportunities presented by evolving technologies are greater than ever. CSRIC V, named so because this is the fifth re-chartering of the council, will hold its first public meeting on June 24.

Transit provider Cogent said it has not yet filed any interconnection-related network neutrality complaints and is still trying to negotiate with the remaining, "offending," Internet service providers, though its CEO signaled those negotiations have improved since the Federal Communications Commission signaled its new rules would include interconnection. Cogent is one of the companies -- Netflix is another -- that cable operators are expecting could file complaints under the new network neutrality rules, which went into effect June 12 and, for the first time, included interconnections issues as potential net neutrality violations.

Initially, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler had signaled that middle-mile interconnection issues were separate from those involving the customer-facing, last-mile ISP connections, but that changed last fall along with the original plan not to reclassify ISPs under Title II common-carrier regulations. Cogent had signaled it could be filing complaints once the new rules went into effect, and still could. But Cogent CEO Dave Schaefer said that the FCC's order, adopted back in February, had accelerated interconnection agreement talks -- Verizon Communications and AT&T have both struck deals Cogent was happy with, and that negotiations with Comcast, Time Warner Cable and CenturyLink were ongoing.

[Commentary] The ever colorful tweets from T-Mobile CEO John Legere made for interesting reading after his DC tour in support of T-Mobile’s quest to expand the 600 MHz spectrum reserve. T-Mobile has long alleged that an expanded reserve is essential to competition in rural America. But, the fact is that the reserve framework will have very little impact on wireless service or deployment in rural America. In many rural areas, AT&T’s low-band portfolio is simply not sufficient to trigger the auction restrictions so our bidding in most rural areas will not be restricted, regardless of the size of the reserve. What the restrictions are actually designed to do is protect T-Mobile from bidding competition in urban markets - even though T-Mobile itself argues that 92 percent of non-rural Americans have access to four or more mobile broadband providers. Only 40 percent of rural Americans, T-Mobile argues, enjoy the same and thus T-Mobile tries to build a case for expanding the restrictions to support deployment in rural America.

T-Mobile is misleading policymakers when it advocates for a bigger spectrum set aside in the name of rural competition. Instead of falling for that magenta herring, policymakers should be inviting all bidders to compete for rural licenses that come with stringent build requirements. That would ensure that the spectrum goes to the bidders most likely to make the capital commitments necessary to deploy rural services. That approach would be a far better and more direct way of encouraging broadband deployment in rural America.