Spectrum of Greed

This is the REAL Economic Stimulus, right here baby!

If you haven’t been there yet, you need to stop by a website called Internet for Everyone.  My post headline is their theme.  This site was launched by several people, including an FCC member (Jonathan Adelstein).  Larry Lessig, shown in the YouTube video in my previous post, along with Vint Cerf of  Google mythology are supporters of this organization.

Why should you go there, you ask?  Let me count the ways…   we have less than 15% of our entire country using wireless internet, our current government thinks 200k is broadband, we have slipped past #16 in connected countries, most major parts of our country are lucky if they have 3 choices of internet providers, when you do get mobile internet it is going to be an add on to your phone rather than a service you can buy separately, you don’t have any choice of what phone you want to use with which carrier, (pause for breath). (continue reading…)

Managing Dark Fiber - an economic stimulus opportunity.

Does anyone remember the term ‘Dark Fiber‘?  No, it isn’t an action movie starring Christian Slater and Heath Ledger.  It was a term coined in the telecom industry describing the results of unchecked capitalism during the initial heady gold rush to the internet in 1999 & 2000.  Several telecom vendors went out and each built what they considered to be the one best fiber network in the country, connecting cities all over the country and providing the potential for exponentially more bandwidth for the rapidly expanding internet economy.  But when the bubble burst in 2000, in the vernacular of the industry, many of those fiber lines didn’t get ‘lit up’, because with several vendors all connecting the same places, they overbuilt.  To make it worse, because technology’s nature is to get better, faster and cheaper over time, before all the fiber was even buried, technology had been created to make each strand of fiber 100 times as productive as it had been just a few short years earlier.  The result?  Dark Fiber, or fiber that was never lit, because it was never needed.  Much of this unused capacity still exists today and is resold and marketed to private industry and telecoms, but vastly under utilized. (continue reading…)

In a detailed industry report on the global and US wireless economy, Chetan Sharma points out many positive things about the wireless industries ability to generate revenue in even these difficult economic times.  Reading between the lines of the many industry sound bites provides an interesting set of facts related to mobile broadband.  The mobile equivalent of broadband today is the flat rate data plan.  By anyone’s measure, this is a poor substitute for land line broadband, but in our inbred wireless economy, this is as good as it gets.  As of the 3rd quarter of 2008, how many subscribers have a flat rate data plan you ask?  Why a whopping 13%.  Verizon has finally broken the barrier for data revenue exceeding 25% of their total revenue stream.  Of course, 40 to 50% of that revenue is generated from messaging related services, the fastest growing portion of the data market.  (continue reading…)

Kevin Martin announced his retirement yesterday, well timed considering the Obama administration’s announcement of his successor a couple of days earlier.  Better to not let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.  No one can blame him for sticking around in case his job really wasn’t in jeopardy after all, but that has been resolved.  In his speech recognizing Mr. Martin’s many accomplishments while serving as the FCC Chair, Mike Copps made a remark I found astonishing;

“We should also remember that those High Noon moments at the Commission, when the cameras pack this room, the media is hanging on every uttered word and perceived nuance, and everyone is waiting to see who is going to draw their Colt 45 first, are not the daily norm here.  Probably 90 per cent or more of what the Commission decides is decided through consensus.  Our discussions are not duels in the sun, but more often searches for understanding the facts of a case, the meaning of a statute, or the arcania of legislative history.”  (continue reading…)