July 2015

The Federal Communications Commission appears to have a wary eye out for cable-operator efforts to show subscribers where their money is going on those oft-criticized bills. That’s according to the FCC Media Bureau’s latest request for comment and data for its next video competition report. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has made it a point to say communications providers must deliver on their advertised promises. That missive has been aimed mostly at broadband speeds, but the FCC document suggests the idea could be extended to video service. (Cable operators have argued that fee breakouts serve as transparency.) “Some [multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs)] have added various video-related fees to monthly billing statements,” the Media Bureau said. “Such fees include, for instance, a broadcast fee to partially recoup retransmission-consent fees charged by local broadcast stations and a sports fee to defray the cost of sports programming.”

Retransmission-consent costs and the price of channels, such as ESPN, are often cited by cable operators as big drivers of the cable pricing at which Chairman Wheeler likes to take aim. But “some MVPDs may raise subscribers’ total monthly bills using these fees without raising the advertised package prices,” the FCC said. That could run into transparency issues with the Chairman Wheeler mantra of delivering on promises. “We seek comment on the competitive strategy associated with adding video-related fees as opposed to raising monthly subscription prices,” said the commission, seeking to make its interest crystal-clear. “Do video-related fees cause consumers to pay prices higher than some MVPDs advertised rate for video services?” the FCC asked. “How are such fees disclosed to consumers prior to becoming a customer or prior to the inclusion of a new fee on a consumer’s bill?” Cable operators have until Sept. 21 to make their case.

The American Cable Association says the Federal Communications Commission is lowballing the impact of expanded transparency requirements in its new network neutrality rules. That came in comments to the FCC per the Paperwork Reduction Act, which requires an agency to justify any new reporting obligations associated with new regulations and minimize reporting burdens, especially on small businesses ACA points out (ACA represents smaller and medium-sized broadband providers). The transparency rule -- dating from the FCC's 2010 Open Internet order, requires Internet service providers to publicly disclose network management practices, performance and pricing and privacy policies, among other things. The new rules require more granular data.

The FCC estimated that the new reporting requirements will take providers an additional 4.5 hours per year to respond. ACA said that "significantly understates the amount of time that BIAS [broadband Internet access service] providers expect to spend to effectively and accurately collect and disclose additional information about network practices, and to inform customers directly 'if their individual use of a network will trigger a network practice, based on their demand prior to the period of congestion, that is likely to have a significant impact on the end user’s use of the service,'" one of the new rules new requirements. ACA says the new requirement will likely require and average 16-24 hours annually just to draft the disclosures, and that to inform customers when their actions trigger a network practice and answer questions about those notices could take as much as 100 hours per month for a member with 100,000 subs.

Telecommunications providers continue to be challenged as a result of rapid, ongoing growth in data demand originating from a growing range of connected devices, particularly mobile devices. That’s adding impetus to next-generation 5G wireless broadband research and development. New market research from Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) reveals what mobile network operators expect from 5G wireless technology, which could see limited deployment as soon as 2018.

Three-quarters of survey respondents said prospects of enhanced mobile broadband capacity (76 percent) and supporting growth and development of the Internet of Things (IoT) are 5G R&D’s two primary drivers, according to TIA’s white paper, ¨5G Operator Survey 2015.¨ When it comes to actual deployments, one-third of network operator employees surveyed said their companies would launch commercial 5G services prior to 2021. Most don´t expect that will occur until after 2022. Sponsored by TIA and InterDigital and produced by Heavy Reading, report authors point out that SK Telecom plans to demonstrate a 5G network at the 2018 Winter Olympics. Japan’s DoCoMo intends to launch a 5G network at the 2020 Summer Olympics.

Advertising is the basic business model of the Internet. It's one reason we can view online content free of charge. Millions of Web surfers already download software to block ads online, and that number is growing. Soon, Apple could be making mobile ad blocking easier. As you can well imagine, that doesn't sit well with sites that sell online advertising. Google gets 90 percent of its revenue from online ads, and mobile ads make up 73 percent of Facebook's ad revenue. So, how is the freedom to choose not to see ads faring in the Web economy? And how are publishers fighting back? To gauge what blocking ads could mean for the online advertising industry, NPR's Robert Siegel spoke with Business Insider's global advertising editor Lara O'Reilly; Tim Schumacher, chairman of Adblock Plus; and Ben Barokas of Sourcepoint, a firm trying to counter ad blockers.

Ben Barokas, who has worked in the world of online advertising since the 1990s -- most recently for Google -- wants to counter the trend toward ad blocking. His company, Sourcepoint, is a "content compensation platform" that gives the user less of an all-or-nothing ad viewing option. "We believe that any user has a choice of whether or not they want to consume advertising, or that they're able to subscribe," Barokas says. "We believe that users would love to surf from site to site, device to device without hitting pay walls and consuming unnecessary ads." Barokas says the "acceptable" ads distinction in Adblock Plus should be a consumer choice. "I would say, one person's trash is another person's treasure," he says. "Some people would rather watch a one-minute video ad once a day; others are OK with banners and buttons. But that's something that an individual user can decide and not a company like Adblock Plus."