Posts Tagged ‘National Broadband Plan’
Free Wireless Broadband Plan Is Dj Vu All Over Again
As part of the grand hoopla-fest building up to the release of the Federal Communications Commission’s National Broadband Plan this month, the agency hosted a Digital Inclusion Summit at Washington, DC’s Newseum on Tuesday. Co-sponsored with the Knight Foundation, during the course of the event the FCC disclosed more components of The Plan. These include recommending the creation of a Digital Literacy Corps “to conduct skills training and outreach in communities with low rates of adoption,” and tapping into the agency’s Universal Service Fund to subsidize broadband for low income people.
But what really got our attention was this: the NBP will ask the government to “consider use of spectrum for a free or very low cost wireless broadband service.”
That’s odd, we thought, since the FCC and Congress have been considering such an idea for years.
M2Z
Between 2006 and early 2009, the agency actively vetted a proposal by M2Z Networks to provide a free, wireless broadband across the United States. The FCC would lease a national spectrum license to M2Z
in the Advanced Wireless Services-3 (AWS-3) band area (2155-2175MHz), and the company would offer a free, advertising-funded, 512Kpbs broadband service that filtered out indecent content. Consumers would be able to access the band area via an attachment device on their computer. The firm would also offer a faster, unfiltered premium service and pay the government 5 percent each year from its gross revenues. Once granted this band, M2Z would commit to rolling out the smut-free network to 95 percent of the US population over the course of a decade.
M2Z launched a spirited campaign to generate public interest in its proposal, which came complete with a small battalion of endorsers.
“I know many Utahns would welcome the opportunity to provide their children with the educational and economic opportunity which broadband access can provide without having to become software engineers in order to protect their children,” Senator Orin Hatch (R-UT) wrote to the FCC in 2007.
But while the idea received lots of shout-outs from family advocacy groups and members of Congress, the FCC rejected just granting the spectrum to a chosen entity. Then in 2008, agency chair and values voter Republican Kevin Martin came up with analternative proposal to run an auction of that license zonethe winning bidder promising to abide by M2Z’s commitments and rules.
Auction skewing
Various groups and companies quickly launched counter campaigns to stop or modify the Martin/M2Z plan. T-Mobile insisted that the service would interfere with spectrum it owned in a nearby band. And the wireless industry in general, led by CTIA – The Wireless Association, charged that the scheme would
“skew an auction to the benefit of one entity or business model.” Ironically, Key Republicans on Capitol Hill quickly took sides with big wireless, while Democrats backed Martinwith Rep. Anna Eschoo
(D-CA) submitting a bill to the House that pretty much echoed what Martin proposed.
Meanwhile civil liberties groups and bookseller/publisher trade associations opposed the plan on different grounds.
The service “would censor content far beyond anything ever upheld by any court for any medium,” warned a coalition of 22 public interest groups in July of 2008. “This prohibition would plainly infringe on the rights of adults to access broad categories of lawful speech,” they wrote.
In response to T-Mobile’s concerns, the FCC’s Office of Engineering Technology ran a battery of interference tests in Seattle that concluded that peaceful coexistence with T-Mobile’s licenses was doable. As for the civil liberties concerns, to our delight, in December of that year Martin called Ars to announce that he was dropping the porn-filtering part of the plan from his proposal (Julius Genachowski, the present chair of the agency, should feel free to emulate this fine example by contacting us at his convenience).
None of these gestures did the cause much good, however. Wireless companies challenged the FCC’s engineering report. And while those public interest groups were presumably assuaged by Martin’s announcement, it’s not as if they suddenly became big supporters of the plan overnight.
When Martin called us, we asked him what the prospects for the proposal now looked like.
“This is an item that has been pending at the Commission for several years, that the Commissioners were originally critical of not having moved forward faster,” he lamented. “Other commissioners said, ‘We’re overdue; we’ve got to do this.’ But when an actual item is put forth where you have to make a hard decision, they say, ‘Well, I’m not so sure what I want to do anymore.’”
In the end, the Commission never weighed in on the plan. Martin quit the agency the following year. To this day, the FCC has not voted on whether to launch the auction or not.
An open question
We contacted M2Z CEO John Muletta to ask him what he thought of the FCC’s latest proposal for a free wireless service. His response was pretty magnanimous, given his recent fortunes with the agency.
“I think this a victory for Chairman Genachowski’s data-driven process,” Muletta told us, “which has independently confirmed that we have low broadband adoption in this country largely because broadband is too expensive.Certainly a free service would go a long way to addressing that issue.”
But “since the FCC has yet to take action on the AWS-3 rulemaking, it’s an open question as to whether the incumbent carriers will eventually hijack the process that is supposed to follow the National Broadband Plan and somehow delay the quick auction of the AWS-3 band (in the face of a spectrum crisis and drought).”
There is also some irony in the fact that the same wireless industry that once objected to skewing auctions for a single business model is now, in the name of a looming spectrum crisis, asking the FCC to coordinate the massive transfer of television license spectrum to wireless sectoressentially on the grounds that wireless broadband providers could more productively use those licenses than TV broadcasters. And where were all those Orin Hatch style Republicans once big wireless cried foul over Martin’s smutless free broadband plan?
As the M2Z story indicates, anyone who proposes setting aside spectrum “for a free or very low cost wireless broadband service” could quickly find themselves on very uncertain terrain, with positions shifting overnight, and supposedly solid allies disappearing at the last minute. We are talking, after all, about a service that consumers could get for free rather than buying it from AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, or Sprint. So here’s some free advice: whoever launches the crusade at the FCC this time around better make sure they’ve really got the votes.
Source: arstechnica.com
Free Wireless Broadband Plan Is Dj Vu All Over Again
As part of the grand hoopla-fest building up to the release of the Federal Communications Commission’s National Broadband Plan this month, the agency hosted a Digital Inclusion Summit at Washington, DC’s Newseum on Tuesday. Co-sponsored with the Knight Foundation, during the course of the event the FCC disclosed more components of The Plan. These include recommending the creation of a Digital Literacy Corps “to conduct skills training and outreach in communities with low rates of adoption,” and tapping into the agency’s Universal Service Fund to subsidize broadband for low income people.
But what really got our attention was this: the NBP will ask the government to “consider use of spectrum for a free or very low cost wireless broadband service.”
That’s odd, we thought, since the FCC and Congress have been considering such an idea for years.
M2Z
Between 2006 and early 2009, the agency actively vetted a proposal by M2Z Networks to provide a free, wireless broadband across the United States. The FCC would lease a national spectrum license to M2Z
in the Advanced Wireless Services-3 (AWS-3) band area (2155-2175MHz), and the company would offer a free, advertising-funded, 512Kpbs broadband service that filtered out indecent content. Consumers would be able to access the band area via an attachment device on their computer. The firm would also offer a faster, unfiltered premium service and pay the government 5 percent each year from its gross revenues. Once granted this band, M2Z would commit to rolling out the smut-free network to 95 percent of the US population over the course of a decade.
M2Z launched a spirited campaign to generate public interest in its proposal, which came complete with a small battalion of endorsers.
“I know many Utahns would welcome the opportunity to provide their children with the educational and economic opportunity which broadband access can provide without having to become software engineers in order to protect their children,” Senator Orin Hatch (R-UT) wrote to the FCC in 2007.
But while the idea received lots of shout-outs from family advocacy groups and members of Congress, the FCC rejected just granting the spectrum to a chosen entity. Then in 2008, agency chair and values voter Republican Kevin Martin came up with analternative proposal to run an auction of that license zonethe winning bidder promising to abide by M2Z’s commitments and rules.
Auction skewing
Various groups and companies quickly launched counter campaigns to stop or modify the Martin/M2Z plan. T-Mobile insisted that the service would interfere with spectrum it owned in a nearby band. And the wireless industry in general, led by CTIA – The Wireless Association, charged that the scheme would
“skew an auction to the benefit of one entity or business model.” Ironically, Key Republicans on Capitol Hill quickly took sides with big wireless, while Democrats backed Martinwith Rep. Anna Eschoo
(D-CA) submitting a bill to the House that pretty much echoed what Martin proposed.
Meanwhile civil liberties groups and bookseller/publisher trade associations opposed the plan on different grounds.
The service “would censor content far beyond anything ever upheld by any court for any medium,” warned a coalition of 22 public interest groups in July of 2008. “This prohibition would plainly infringe on the rights of adults to access broad categories of lawful speech,” they wrote.
In response to T-Mobile’s concerns, the FCC’s Office of Engineering Technology ran a battery of interference tests in Seattle that concluded that peaceful coexistence with T-Mobile’s licenses was doable. As for the civil liberties concerns, to our delight, in December of that year Martin called Ars to announce that he was dropping the porn-filtering part of the plan from his proposal (Julius Genachowski, the present chair of the agency, should feel free to emulate this fine example by contacting us at his convenience).
None of these gestures did the cause much good, however. Wireless companies challenged the FCC’s engineering report. And while those public interest groups were presumably assuaged by Martin’s announcement, it’s not as if they suddenly became big supporters of the plan overnight.
When Martin called us, we asked him what the prospects for the proposal now looked like.
“This is an item that has been pending at the Commission for several years, that the Commissioners were originally critical of not having moved forward faster,” he lamented. “Other commissioners said, ‘We’re overdue; we’ve got to do this.’ But when an actual item is put forth where you have to make a hard decision, they say, ‘Well, I’m not so sure what I want to do anymore.’”
In the end, the Commission never weighed in on the plan. Martin quit the agency the following year. To this day, the FCC has not voted on whether to launch the auction or not.
An open question
We contacted M2Z CEO John Muletta to ask him what he thought of the FCC’s latest proposal for a free wireless service. His response was pretty magnanimous, given his recent fortunes with the agency.
“I think this a victory for Chairman Genachowski’s data-driven process,” Muletta told us, “which has independently confirmed that we have low broadband adoption in this country largely because broadband is too expensive.Certainly a free service would go a long way to addressing that issue.”
But “since the FCC has yet to take action on the AWS-3 rulemaking, it’s an open question as to whether the incumbent carriers will eventually hijack the process that is supposed to follow the National Broadband Plan and somehow delay the quick auction of the AWS-3 band (in the face of a spectrum crisis and drought).”
There is also some irony in the fact that the same wireless industry that once objected to skewing auctions for a single business model is now, in the name of a looming spectrum crisis, asking the FCC to coordinate the massive transfer of television license spectrum to wireless sectoressentially on the grounds that wireless broadband providers could more productively use those licenses than TV broadcasters. And where were all those Orin Hatch style Republicans once big wireless cried foul over Martin’s smutless free broadband plan?
As the M2Z story indicates, anyone who proposes setting aside spectrum “for a free or very low cost wireless broadband service” could quickly find themselves on very uncertain terrain, with positions shifting overnight, and supposedly solid allies disappearing at the last minute. We are talking, after all, about a service that consumers could get for free rather than buying it from AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, or Sprint. So here’s some free advice: whoever launches the crusade at the FCC this time around better make sure they’ve really got the votes.
Source: arstechnica.com
60 Million Americans Don’T Use The Interwebs
A new study from the US Federal Communications Commission says that 93 million Americans don’t have broadband internet access at home.
Most non-adopters cite “affordability and lack of digital skills” as the reasons for not steering themselves into the fast lane of the information superhighway, but many fear or are disgusted by the web. And millions just don’t care.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski isn’t happy with these numbers. “In the 21st century, a digital divide is an opportunity divide,” he said in a statement (PDF). “To bolster American competitiveness abroad and create the jobs of the future here at home, we need to make sure that all Americans have the skills and means to fully participate in the digital economy.”
The study says that 15 million Americans think that broadband access is irrelevant, calling the internet “a waste of time” and saying there’s no content of interest to them or that they’re satisfied with dial-up.
These findings are detailed in a 51-page report (PDF), “Broadband Adoption and Use in America,” based on a survey (PDF) of 5,005 American conducted last October and November. The survey was authorized by the Broadband Data Improvement Act signed into law by George W. Bush in October 2008.
Of the roughly 60 million adult Americans who don’t use the internet at all, 47 per cent cited cost and complexity and 45 per cent agreed with the survey statement that “I am worried about all the bad things that can happen if I use the Internet.” Thirty-five percent were of the opinion that “There is nothing on the Internet I want to see or use,” and one third thought “The Internet is just a waste of time.”
Of all respondents who told the FCC that they don’t have broadband – both dial-up and non-internet users – only 4 per cent said that the reason was lack of availability. More important to them was “too much pornography and offensive material” (65 per cent) and their belief that it’s “too easy for my personal information to be stolen online” (57 per cent).”
The survey is part of the run-up to the FCC’s National Broadband Plan, which will be delivered to Congress on March 17. According to the FCC’s statement, this plan “details a strategy for connecting the country to affordable, world-class broadband.”
Of course, “affordable” means different things to different people. Of those who currently have broadband, the average cost is a bit over $40 per month. Those who don’t have broadband said they’d be willing to pay, on average, around $25 per month. And 20 per cent said they wouldn’t pay anything.
It’s not that those Americans without broadband are technophobes: 80 percent have either satellite or cable television, 70 per cent have cell phones, and 42 per cent have at least one working computer at home.
It appears that the FCC has its work cut out for it to achieve its goal of achieving “US global leadership in high-speed Internet to create jobs and spur economic growth; to unleash new waves of innovation and investment; and to improve education, health care, energy efficiency, public safety, and the vibrancy of our democracy.”
Millions of Americans don’t care, don’t want broadband, don’t want to pay for it, and find the internet either offensive or dangerous.
Source: www.theregister.co.uk