I will be speaking on another panel about net neutrality issues on Monday. The forum is called “The Future of Content & Control”, the organizers are a public interest group called the Media Access Project, and the venue is eBay’s campus in San Jose.
No major carrier accepted an invitation to last month’s FCC hearing at Stanford, but this time my panel includes Jeff Brueggeman, Vice President for Regulatory Planning & Policy at AT&T. More details at the MAP web site; I hope to see you there.
Yesterday all five FCC Commissioners came to Stanford and listened to seven hours of testimony about network neutrality, including two hours of comments from members of the public. The focus was on Comcast and how they allegedly block some P2P traffic (I say allegedly because they still refuse to say exactly what they were doing). Sadly, Comcast refused to show up, as did every other network operator invited, except for Brett Glass from Lariat, a small ISP in Laramie, Wyoming. (more…)
I’m honored to have been invited to testify at the FCC Hearing at Stanford later this week. It’s very rare for all five FCC Commissioners to meet outside DC, much less on the west coast, so come along if you have any interest in how public policy will affect the future of the Internet. The focus is ‘broadband network management practices’ like Comcast’s efforts to curb BitTorrent, but public interest groups and policy makers have started to realize that many people access the Internet from their cell phones, and the cell phone companies place far more restrictions on your use of the Internet than any cable company does.
For our thoughts, read our previous posts on public policy.
If you thought that the debate about open access was over, it’s really just begun.
Last week the FCC announced that Verizon and AT&T were the big winners in the 700 MHz auction, as expected. In particular Verizon won the ‘C’ block, the nationwide license to which open access conditions apply.
Now the regulators have to decide what the open access provisions really mean, and how they’re going to be enforced.
For most of us, open access means ‘any application on any device’: you can attach any compatible device to the network and run any application that the device is capable of running. Verizon used similar language last year when the company announced that it was going to open up its existing network to ‘any application, any device.’ (more…)
zzzPhone is a brave attempt to take the build-to-order model pioneered by Dell for PCs and apply it to the cell phone market. Several blogs have covered them and the New York Times picked up the story today.
This is the kind of innovation that open access makes possible. The market for the zzzPhone today is probably no more than a few tens of thousands of units worldwide, so it wouldn’t make sense for a major carrier to do a deal with them. But zzzPhone doesn’t need permission from a cell phone company to launch; their phones will work on any GSM network, including AT&T and T-Mobile in the US.
But even with open access, there are big challenges ahead for zzzPhone. PCs are not like cell phones and the Dell model may not succeed.
Verizon Wireless has announced that by the end of next year consumers will be able to bring any CDMA device to its network, provided it meets some minimal technical requirements, and to run any application on that device. Since Verizon has maintained tighter control over their network and devices than any other US cell phone company - perhaps any cell phone company in the world - my initial reaction was a mixture of shock and delight.
But there is less to this than meets the eye. Verizon has taken an unprecedented step - for Verizon. With respect to open access, Verizon is still several steps behind every other carrier in the US.
Who benefits from today’s announcement?
Affluent consumers who want high-end phones will have more choices. Discussions about open access usually focus on these people, but there aren’t very many of them.
Following a class-action lawsuit, Sprint Nextel has agreed to unlock customers’ phones at the end of their contracts and to activate non-Sprint phones on the network. This will allow consumers to take their handsets from one CDMA network to another. Sprint and Verizon Wireless are the big ones in the US, but Alltel, MetroPCS, and Leap have almost 20 million subscribers between them who are also affected by this — assuming the phone operates on the right frequency bands and that the new carrier agrees to activate the phone (MetroPCS and Leap definitely will).
If true, this is a big departure for Sprint, which had the most restrictions until now. But if Sprint agrees to activate any CDMA handset on its network going forward and Verizon Wireless continues to hold the line, Sprint could benefit from this change, in net adds and lower CPGA.
Data services may not work, but those looking for the cheapest option in the market won’t care that they can’t subscribe to VCast.
Two of us just received a notice from Verizon Wireless about CPNI. CPNI stands for Customer Proprietary Network Information: our call records, essentially. What numbers we called, how often, how long we spent on the phone, and how much it cost us. (It does not include our own names, numbers, or addresses.)
Verizon wants to share this data with third parties, and of course they need our permission: “you have a right, and we have a duty, under federal and state law, to protect the confidentiality of your CPNI.”
But that duty only goes so far: “Unless you provide us [Verizon Wireless] with notice that you wish to opt out within 30 days of receiving this letter, we will assume that you give the Verizon Companies the right to share your CPNI with the authorized companies as described above.”
Last week was an interesting week for open access. Sprint re-affirmed that their new WiMax network will support any device and that customers will not be forced into long-term contracts. Sprint shared location information with a third-party mobile web site for the first time. (There would be many more location-based services in the US if cell phone companies allowed developers to get at the data.) And Cubic Telecom, an Irish startup, launched a low-cost international dialing service that would not be possible without open access.
But while the fanboys devoted all their attention to the iPhone again, I believe that the most important story last week was about a simple text messaging campaign on Verizon Wireless.
Posted by: Jason
