Verizon

A magistrate judge in New York recently ruled that the United States government could use a search warrant to obtain an individual customer’s emails that Microsoft stored in Dublin, Ireland. The decision is contrary to well-accepted law that US courts are not empowered to issue warrants for foreign searches.

As important, the decision failed to take into account substantial international commerce and policy implications of an “extra-territorial” warrant.

It is worth noting that the consumer Internet-based email services at issue in the case before this magistrate judge are quite different from cloud computing and hosting services offered to business customers. We do not believe the magistrate judge’s decision would apply to Verizon’s non-US cloud services, where these overseas business customers process and/or store their data directly on servers outside the US.

[Commentary] The Minority Media & Telecommunications Council recently released a white paper, “Digital Déjà Vu: A Road Map for Promoting Minority Ownership in the Wireless Industry,” that calls on the Federal Communications Commission to reform its “designated entity” rules.

“Designated entities” (DE) are the collective term used for women- and minority-owned businesses, and the paper calls for the Federal Communications Commission to increase opportunities for women and minority-owned enterprises to participate in spectrum auctions by reforming its “designated entity” rules.

We agree that this issue deserves FCC review. As a company that is committed to diversity and inclusion, Verizon supports efforts to create opportunities for greater inclusion and participation.

While we do not agree with every recommendation in the MMTC white paper, we support MMTC’s overall goal to increase participation of diverse communities in the communications space.

We also agree with MMTC that the FCC should examine appropriate ways to reform the current “designated entity” rules to maximize opportunities for small, women and minority-owned businesses to participate in spectrum auctions.

[Commentary] Recently, the New York Times had a story about the benefits of fiber, entitled “For the Tech-Savvy with a Need for Speed, a Limited Choice of Towns With Fiber.”

The article correctly identifies the superiority of all-fiber networks over older copper-based technologies, as demonstrated by an accompanying graphic from Ookla showing that, nationwide, Verizon FiOS is providing the fastest connections and that 8 of the top 10 states are states where FiOS has been deployed. Fortunately, for thousands of towns -- and major metropolitan areas, such as New York and Washington, DC -- throughout Verizon’s footprint, and for millions of our landline customers, the transition to fiber is already well underway. Fiber-based services from Verizon are available to more than 16 million homes, and soon, about 70 percent of our footprint will be fiberized.

In contrast, fewer than 1 million (about 6%) of the homes in those areas are still getting service over copper lines. While that small percentage (and shrinking every day) is on the copper network, keeping that network up and running still generates 100 percent of its costs. There are also hidden costs, such as environmental impacts, given that it takes much more power to run the copper network than a fiber network. Unfortunately, there are some who for a variety of reasons are trying to put the brakes on fiber upgrades, and by extension, fiber deployment. They think that the old copper networks should be kept indefinitely.

Needless to say, no existing telephone company will be able to make the investment necessary to build a new fiber network if it is forced to keep the old, redundant, and costly copper network running, too. Policymakers at all levels of government must recognize that the upgrade from copper to fiber provides significant benefits for consumers and for the communities where this takes place. The social benefits of a transition to fiber must outweigh the preference that a few holdouts might have for a more familiar technology.

Policy makers must be courageous and enable the upgrade to fiber to proceed. Getting the fiber networks that are critical for the future of their communities will not happen as long as a small minority of residents are clinging to the copper networks of the past.

Many parties, including Verizon and Sprint, have been arguing that the Federal Communications Commission must update the spectrum screen to reflect current wireless marketplace realities.

Now, on the eve of the FCC adopting rules that will govern two spectrum auctions, Sprint has proposed a new, allegedly “easy to implement,” spectrum screen that continues to ignore the biggest defect in the Commission’s application of the spectrum screen: the exclusion of 138 MHz of 2.5 GHz spectrum, which is available and used for mobile broadband.

Instead, Sprint proposes to apply complicated calculations to various spectrum bands on an urban, suburban, and rural basis to create a “weighted” spectrum screen that, unsurprisingly, decreases the weight of Sprint’s 147 MHz of 2.5 GHz spectrum holdings to 11.1 MHz, at most. Our latest ex parte filing makes the case that the FCC should reject Sprint’s self-serving and short-sighted proposal and instead fix the spectrum screen by updating it to include all spectrum that is suitable and available for commercial mobile use.

[March 10]

[Commentary] Verizon’s fiber to the home high-speed broadband network, FiOS, doesn’t cap usage in any way. But I note that, in general, the usage-based pricing model already is in use nowadays. As an example, I note: “But as you know, wireless customers already pay for the data they use. Some who stream a lot of movies and use data-intensive applications may pay a bit more, those who don’t pay less.”