Chairman or strawman? Wheeler's FCC manifesto takes both sides

8 December 2013 by Steve Blum
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Of course, some people do go both ways.

There are two ways to remain a mystery in public life: keep your mouth shut or unleash a flood of comments that have a profound ring, but make sure that half those statements contradict the other half. The chairman of the FCC, Tom Wheeler, has chosen the latter path.

In his maiden policy speech – given at his alma mater, Ohio State – and in subsequent conversation, Wheeler managed to be for and against network neutrality and came out in favor of competition, sort of.… More

Mom and pop store bashing earns patent trolls a whack from congress

7 December 2013 by Steve Blum
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Which way to the senate?

Patent trolls aren’t on the run yet, but life could get bleaker for them if a bill passed this week by a bipartisan majority – 325 to 91– in the U.S. house of representatives is approved by the senate. Called the Innovation Act, the legislation would make it harder for the predatory bar to weave dubious theories about why stockpiled patents apply to common, everyday products and business practices, and then try to intimidate small businesses into coughing up cash to avoid a court battle.… More

Almost heaven is broadband hell

6 December 2013 by Steve Blum
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Is it half empty or half full? Oops.

I love red meat on a Friday night (h/t to the Baller Herbst List for the heads up). Broadband/DSLreports.com has a delicious post detailing the public meltdown of a Frontier Communications executive when pressed on the highly technical question of “just how freaking fast is your DSL in West Virginia?”…

‘I’ll have an engineer talk to you about the technology we use on that,’ said [Dana] Waldo, senior vice president and general manager of Frontier’s West Virginia operations.

… More

CPUC debates fairness of giving big broadband subsidies to tiny communities

5 December 2013 by Steve Blum
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Is anyone home? (Click to download today’s staff presentation).

“It’s a little frustrating that this would be one of the last places you’d expect high quality internet service, yet you have communities like Point Arena and Gualala that don’t have service at all,” said commissioner Michel Florio this morning, as the California Public Utilities Commission discussed a proposal to give a $1.8 million subsidy to Ponderosa Telephone Company to build a fiber-to-the-home system in the remote Madera County communities of Beasore and Central Camp.… More

There's broadband meat behind the drone delivery sizzle

4 December 2013 by Steve Blum
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Looks like someone ordered a barbeque.

Amazon’s PR people deserve a hearty round of applause. They dropped the perfect Cyber Monday story this Sunday evening when Jeff Bezos teased plans to build a fleet of drone helicopters that will deliver five pound packages in half an hour.

But assuming it has some remote connection to reality, the real news is what it implies about Amazon’s roadmap for expansion. Those drones are not supersonic. Even with zero time to process and pick an order, a half hour service radius of 50 kilometers would probably be an overly optimistic guess – Bezos talked about a 10 mile range.… More

Broadband, business and jobs come together in Montery County

3 December 2013 by Steve Blum
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Distance and location matter. The Internet isn’t free.

Kish Rajan, the head of California governor Jerry Brown’s business and economic development office, met with Monterey County officials this afternoon in Gonzales, to talk about broadband and high tech help for attracting new businesses and jobs to the area.

Peter Koht, the CEO of Santa Cruz start-up OpenCounter, gave an update on the rapid adoption by local governments of the e-government platform developed by his company.… More

Santa Clara finds muni WiFi success by matching expectations to reality

2 December 2013 by Steve Blum
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If the City of Santa Clara had promised residents a free all singing, all dancing WiFi broadband service, it would be getting slammed as a failure right about now. The service it launched earlier this year has trouble with throughput to mobile devices and it really doesn’t do a very good job with streaming video.

Instead, the city is trumpeting its success. And deservedly so. According to its recent press release…

“The system is getting over a thousand more users per day than we expected during peak periods,” said John Roukema.

… More

Rich countries bid up the price of Internet freedom


Assume perfect information.

The richer the country, the greater the impact and accessibility of the web, but the more intrusive governments become. The annual Web Index, compiled by the World Wide Web foundation, shows a strong correlation between high GDP and high scores on the attributes it measures. Even amid warnings from Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web and the man behind the foundation, that “a growing tide of
surveillance and censorship now threatens the future of democracy”, it’s people in rich countries that are better able to improve their lives and affect the course of government via the Internet.… More

HTML5 pace set by carrier dog days, not developer dog years

30 November 2013 by Steve Blum
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Puppies for a while longer.

The Firefox OS is built to run thin client HTML5 applications, which depend heavily on network connections to store data and offload processing. So far, the available applications are a promising mixed bag, at least judging by performance on the first readily available Firefox phone, the ZTE Open.

Both the Facebook and, particularly, the Twitter apps are consumer-ready, but most of the other available apps are little more than browser bookmarks that take you to a website.… More

Firefox OS performing as well as it can on ZTE Open SDK

29 November 2013 by Steve Blum
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Twitter top pick on Firefox app store.

The Firefox mobile operating system is clearly a work in progress, but that said, it works well enough already. I’ve been using a ZTE Open Firefox phone for three months, and can do most of the things I need to do and, as time goes on and software is released, more of the things I’d like to do.

The OS performs better than Bada, which I used for about a year on a Samsung handset.… More