Massachusetts' Wired West 30 August 2010
A well-organized regional group has brought together 24 cities to consider a project to extend the NTIA funded backbone to all their homes. Several senior technical people are involved. Verizon wanted to sell Western Massachusetts and held off deploying even basic DSLAMs until the state got involved. Even before the latest 11,000 layoffs, the state has been holding hearings about poor Verizon service.
I believe most of the NTIA “middle mile” overbuilds are a mistake because there's plenty of fiber already available and little incremental buildout likely. Ones like this and Maine's Three-Ring-Binder may prove an exception. The test is whether they result in local projects like this dramatically improving local broadband. Where competition is working, I'm dubious about getting government involved. Where local service is poor, like Western Mass, Southern Virginia, and much of upper New York State, it's natural to look to government to improve things by whatever means necessary.
New Zealand: Burying Requirements in Fine Print Unacceptable 20 August 2010
Stuart Wallace of the Commerce Commission believes misleading advertising violates the Fair Trade Act.“If there is a requirement to purchase additional products in order to achieve an advertised price, it is important this requirement is stated as part of the main message, not in the fine print.” That guideline should be universal. Everyone in telecom knows about the games being played. Randall Stephenson explained to Wall Street analysts "Ignore our advertised price. It's just to get their attention. Look at the ARPU instead."
Peru: Lowering Termination Rates to Encourage Competition. 20 August 2010
Osiptel has approved a 15% reduction in mobile phone termination rates, Chris King of Stiefel reports.
High termination rates protect incumbents and keep prices high, nearly all economists agree. Competition, even if imperfect, does hold down mobile carriers rates. On termination, they typically have a "monopoly" and can overcharge. (Your carrier generally can't block you from calling whom you want without losing too many customers. So they have to pay the rate requested. You as a consumer however have choices of carriers.)
Viviane Reding made eliminating termination & roaming rates her primary goal in Brussels over massive resistance of the incumbents. She was right on target. The companies had contended lowering termination rates would have little effect on consumers because mobile carriers would raise rates to recover the revenue. Vodafone, France Telecom and others in their comments to analysts said that in fact they had not been able to raise prices to recover the reductions. Consumers saved while company margins were reduced.
New Zealand: Limiting Confidentiality 20 August 2010
Many U.S. proceedings are essentially done without public input because most of the relevant information is considered confidential. This has been particularly abused by NTIA, which refuses even basic information like the number of jobs created by recovery act proposals. New Zealand has a better standard. To get confidentially, the party must describe how and why publication will cause harm, usually with particulars. In addition, revealing the information must "unreasonably" prejudice the commercial position of the person who supplied it. The effective standard in the U.S. is that information can be held back if there's any chance of competitive harm whatsoever; "unreasonable" is a much better standard. Much of what is protected in the U.S. - like which exchanges are covered with broadband - is and should be public knowledge in most other countries. It's easy enough to get most of that information from commercial sources or just by plugging in addresses to the carrier's website and seeing if they are covered. That means any competitor wanting to know can find it easily. The only purpose of most confidentiality is to keep the information from the public discourse.
Eshoo's Broadband Conduit Deployment Act
If broadband matters - and it does - it's almost criminally negligent to build or rebuild a road without including fiber conduit. Including conduit adds less than 1% to the road cost, the New America Foundation calculates in an important paper, http://bit.ly/googoo1. Silicon Valley's Congresswoman, Anna Eshoo, has now proposed a "simple, common sense proposal." |
