Network management

The lack of cellular phone service in Puerto Rico right now is contributing to the unfolding humanitarian crisis on the island. “We had consumers that were standing outside the mall, plugging in where they found power, and people were lined up to use their phones, our customers’ phones to make calls,” says Issa Asad, the CEO of Q-Link, a wireless cell provider. Q-Link is the third-largest U.S. provider of Lifeline, a Federal Communications Commission program that provides phones and service to low-income users, which means that the company is extending a vital service to some of the most vulnerable victims of these hurricanes. Emergency 911 calls on Q-Link’s Houston network spiked by 900 percent after Harvey, Asad says.

Providing all that free bandwidth comes at a cost for Q-Link, of course. That’s one reason that Asad has proposed that the FCC require Lifeline providers to extend free coverage after disasters—and for the FCC to help out with the costs. “While Q-Link has undertaken these efforts voluntarily, we urge the Commission to consider whether a supplemental allotment of Lifeline support for additional minutes for consumers located in federally declared disaster or emergency areas should be a part of the Commission’s response to future disasters,” reads Asad’s presentation to the FCC, dated September 6. “We feel that the FCC should put a disaster-recovery plan in that enables us to help consumers,” Asad says. “Because right now one doesn’t exist.”

In his ongoing push to get rid of network neutrality rules, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai claimed in Sept that the rules caused capital investment in wireless networks to drop in 2016. But in doing so, Chairman Pai hasn't addressed data from earlier years that doesn't fit his anti-net neutrality narrative.

Chairman Pai beat the drum again this week in the FCC's annual report on wireless competition, which emphasizes the investment drop in 2016. The current net neutrality rules were voted in by the FCC in February 2015 and took effect in June 2015. But investment also dropped between 2013 and 2015, before the current rules were in place, Democratic FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn pointed out. "The discussion of investment in the mobile wireless services industry is fundamentally flawed. By highlighting a decrease in investment between 2015 and 2016, this section was clearly written to support the false narrative that the 2015 Open Internet Order deterred wireless carriers from investing in their networks," Commissioner Clyburn said.

Verizon has had a change of heart regarding a portion of the 8,500 wireless customers whose service it had planned to cancel and will allow certain customers to keep service on plans providing up to 8 gigabytes of data per month. But, according to a Verizon LTE in Rural America partner, important questions remain about the impact of the Verizon rural wireless customer cancellations.

At least some of the Verizon wireless customer cancellations are in areas where Verizon uses a network constructed by a Verizon LTE in Rural America (LRA) partner such as Wireless Partners, which operates a network in rural Maine. The LRA program lets rural wireless carriers build LTE networks using Verizon spectrum and Verizon uses those networks to support service in those areas. Some of the customers who received service cancellation notices from Verizon are in areas where the network was built by Wireless Partners. According to a Wireless Partners spokesperson, the roaming charges that Verizon referenced are actually the charges that Verizon pays Wireless Partners or another LRA partner to use the network constructed using Verizon spectrum.

Verizon is disconnecting another 8,500 rural customers from its wireless network, saying that roaming charges have made certain customer accounts unprofitable for the carrier. The 8,500 customers have 19,000 lines and live in 13 states (Alaska, Idaho, Iowa, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wisconsin), a Verizon Wireless spokesperson said. They received notices of disconnection this month and will lose access to Verizon service on October 17.

"These customers live outside of areas where Verizon operates our own network," Verizon said. "Many of the affected consumer lines use a substantial amount of data while roaming on other providers’ networks and the roaming costs generated by these lines exceed what these consumers pay us each month." "We sent these notices in advance so customers have plenty of time to choose another wireless provider," Verizon also said. We wrote about an earlier wave of disconnections in June. The affected customers are supported by Verizon’s LTE in Rural America (LRA) program, which relies on a partnership between Verizon and small rural carriers who lease Verizon spectrum in order to build their own networks.

Two bureaucrats, FCC Commissioners Michael O'Rielly and Mignon Clyburn, tangling over the intricacies of wireless networks may not seem like the stuff of headlines, but this week’s debate at Mobile World Congress Americas could shape the future of how we use our smartphones for decades to come. Having battled over topics like network neutrality and cable boxes, they now groused about the FCC’s latest dull-but-important controversy: the placement of transmitters for the new 5G wireless networks arriving in two or three years.

Installing up to 300,000 cellular antennas—double what the US currently has—in so little time is leading to a clash between overwhelmed local zoning officials and impatient industry and Trump administration officials, with Clyburn and O’Rielly fighting for each side. With 5G, the isolated fights that pop up over an individual cell tower site will multiply and merge into a national phenomenon, especially in urban areas where small cells wind up encrusted all over the landscape. Whether they get installed quickly or extra carefully some constituency will get angry. In fact, the same people may get angry whichever way it goes.

Proponents and opponents of data caps make conflicting claims about the effect of data caps on prices, network capacity and speeds, subscription, congestion, and consumer surplus. In this paper, we survey the academic literature on data caps and analyze the relationship between the characteristics of each paper's model or data and the paper's results.

We find that model or data assumptions about service differentiation, purpose of the data cap, and amount of competition strongly influence each paper's results. Consequently, conclusions about the effect of data caps are often limited to certain types of service providers (fixed or mobile) and/or to certain types of data caps (heavy-users or profit-maximizing). We find that most proponents' claims about data caps in fixed broadband service are incorrect, and that most proponents' claims about data caps in mobile broadband service are likely to be correct if and only if data caps increase competition. We also discuss how data caps may be evaluated under the FCC's 2015 Open Internet Order. We find that heavy-users caps on mobile broadband service are likely to satisfy the Order's rules, that profit-maximizing caps on mobile broadband service may or may not satisfy the rules, and that caps on fixed broadband service are unlikely to satisfy the rules.

[Scott Jordan is associated with the University of California, Irvine]

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has put the 20th Wireless Competition Report on the agenda for the FCC’s September Open Meeting. Technically, the Wireless Competition Report is a non-rulemaking agency report to Congress, similar to the many reports the FCC does on everything from the prices paid for cable services to the state of the Satellite industry. But the Wireless Competition Report has become something of a big deal in recent years, owing to the refusal of the FCC since 2010 to find whether or not there is “effective competition” in the wireless industry.

Chairman Pai is now putting it back at the Commission level and the Report is once again finding that we have “effective competition” — whatever that means. So it seems like a good time to run through the Wireless Competition Report, what it is, what it means, what it doesn’t mean, and how it gets used and/or abused. And, of course, how it relates to network neutrality, since everything in the world relates to net neutrality these days.

Today, we find ourselves nearing another possible hinge moment. We’ve seen remarkable progress, but it feels like we’re still waiting for another huge breakthrough. Well, 5G could well be what we’re waiting for.

Going from 2G to 3G was the mobile equivalent of switching from dial-up to broadband. Similarly, the transition from 4G to 5G promises to be more than just incremental change— we could see dramatic improvements in network speed, capacity, and responsiveness that will make the impossible possible. One analysis by CTIA suggests that 5G could create three million jobs and over $500 billion in additional GDP growth over seven years in the United States.

[Commentary] It’s time to stop the regulatory foot-dragging and require the mobile phone industry to use its technology’s capabilities to deliver safety alerts with the same accuracy that delivers a taxi and the same functionality that delivers video. Immediately after the installation of the Trump Federal Communications Commission, the mobile carriers filed a petition to stop the implementation of the earlier decision on Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) improvements that were strongly advocated by the Center for Missing and Exploited Children as well as public safety managers across the country. The Trump FCC magnified the failure of the current system by not acting on the WEA improvements proposed last September. The new FCC majority even removed wireless alerts form the charter of the public safety and industry working group that made the original recommendations.

If the Obama FCC regulations and recommendations were in effect, geo-targeting could deliver the precise message to specific audiences; those messages could contain links to maps and other important information; and the ability to link with users would allow the collection of information from victims, providing a rapid triage among survivors and targeting the delivery of rescue and other services. Instead, in Houston, victims overloaded the 911 system and public safety officials had to resort to social media. The FCC must learn from what happened in Hurricane Harvey.

[Tom Wheeler is a visiting fellow with the Governance Studies, Center for Technology Innovation, and former Chairman to the FCC.]

Delaware became the latest state to pass legislation aimed at streamlining policies for the siting and deployment of small cells. And unlike some other states, Delaware’s effort apparently didn’t face much vocal opposition.

As expected, Gov John Carney (D-DE) signed House Bill 189—dubbed the Advanced Wireless Infrastructure Investment Act—which enables carriers and their partners to apply to place small cells on public rights-of-way directly through the state’s department of transportation. The bill passed the Delaware General Assembly in July unanimously, according to The Coastal Point, a local media outlet. Naturally, the wireless industry was quick to praise the move.