Posts Tagged ‘telecom’

The NBP and ISP competition: this fight’s just beginning

// March 18th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

For a plan that puts “competition” as its number one goal, the National Broadband Plan is remarkably light on policies that will produce much of it in the wireline space. Talk of competition is everywhere, but all suggestions are remarkably general or terribly banal: “more data collection” and “future policy reviews” are everywhere. Suggestions about how such reviews should turn out is lacking. But the reviews will still be held, and at some point the consensus-building NBP will devolve into ugly battles of wholesale access, special access (middle-mile connections), and ISP disclosure. The FCC commissioners know it, and they’re already gearing up for the fights ahead. Read the comments on this post

After Google dustup, should the US ban Chinese computers?

// March 17th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Should the Google/China spat over censorship start a trade war that puts an end to Chinese-made computers? One international trade lawyer argues that it should: “If China shuts out our Internet companies, we need to shut out their hardware that the Internet runs on.” The sentiment comes from Gil Kaplan, a former Commerce Department official who is now in private practice . Writing Tuesday at The Huffington Post , Kaplan argued that free trade deals are all about reciprocity—and that the US has opened its markets while China has not. Read the comments on this post

NBP: Time for a new copyright notice!

// March 17th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Critics of the National Broadband Plan released yesterday by the FCC are already complaining that the document goes far beyond its broadband mandate. They may have a point; we’re not quite sure how the NBP wandered its way into Copyright Town, but the Plan does make several suggestions for US copyright law, including a new copyright label for educational use. The good news is that the Plan refuses to indulge in discussions of ISP filtering and graduated response schemes to address digital copyright infringement. We’ll see if the FCC’s network neutrality proceeding can display the same discipline in light of intense lobbying on the subject from major copyright holders, who want the agency to “encourage” ISPs to start filtering traffic somehow . Read the comments on this post

‘Net addiction at a new level: users update from bed, dinner

// March 17th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Nearly half of Internet users check for or post updates to Twitter and Facebook after they have already gotten themselves tucked into bed, during the night, or first thing when they wake up, according to a new report from Retrevo . The study asked more than a thousand Internet users about their own behaviors when it came to social media and gadget usage, and discovered that many of us are just flat out addicted. According to Retrevo, 55 percent of users over the age of 25 must check Facebook at least once a day. That’s not that freakish—yet. Eleven percent said they can’t even go more than a couple of hours before popping onto their favorite social network, and when users under 25 are taken into consideration, that number went up to 18 percent. People are fine with being interrupted by electronic messages, too. Almost half of those under 25 said they’re cool with being interrupted during a meal and 11 percent said they’re fine with it during sex (those over 25 were less OK with these things, at 27 percent and six percent respectively). Whether Internet (and subsequently social media) addiction actually exists is a topic that remains under debate. Still, for those of us who find ourselves tapping out messages in the middle of the night, there’s no question that we could benefit from cutting back a bit. Read the comments on this post

NBP: inside the FCC’s spectrum revolution (and its problems)

// March 16th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

In the months preceding the release of the Federal Communications Commission’s National Broadband Plan , the agency made clear that it wants to broker a huge transfer of licensed spectrum away from the television broadcasting sector and toward the wireless phone/broadband industry. FCC Chair Julius Genachowski has long called for 500MHz of bandwidth to be found in the TV bands and elsewhere, then moved to the wireless sector over the next decade. In fact, the NBP calls for freeing up 300MHz starting just below the UHF zone (300MHz to 3GHz) to be made “newly available for mobile use within five years.” On top of that, the Plan wants to open up 20MHz of licensed space in the little-known 2.3GHz Wireless Communications Service (WCS) band for mobile broadband use. Read the comments on this post

House of Lords gives thumbs up to 3 strikes, site takedown

// March 16th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

The UK’s House of Lords has passed a version of the Digital Economy Bill that eliminated one controversial anti-piracy measure but added a new one in its place. The bill, which includes a three-strikes provision that will suspend the service of repeat copyright infringers, will now be considered by the Commons. There are promises that a provision that would require ISPs to block access to sites used for infringement will be revised during the process, but the rush to complete work on the law ahead of the UK’s coming elections has left a number of advocacy groups feeling that major changes to copyright enforcement are being rushed through Parliament without proper consideration. The Digital Economy Bill was first introduced last November , at which point attention focused on a provision that some claimed would turn the UK’s Secretary of state into a “Pirate Finder General.” Although the government wouldn’t specify anti-piracy measures in the bill proper, it reserved the power for the Secretary of State to take unnamed actions in the future, if those actions were likely to reduce infringement. Read the comments on this post

Windows Phone 7 Series in the Enterprise: not all good news

// March 16th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Microsoft has been quite explicit on the matter: Windows Phone 7 Series is being designed first and foremost for the consumer market. The result is the emphasis on a strong, consistent, effective user interface, possibly at the expense of functionality; Microsoft wants to have this thing out in time for the “holiday season” this year, so there’s a limited window for further development, at least for the initial release. That said, the phone does have features aimed at the enterprise market. Obviously, there’s Exchange support, with ActiveSync, providing push mail, address book sync, and all those features that we know and love. In common with Outlook 2010, Windows Phone 7 Series also seems to support multiple Exchange servers concurrently. I say “seems” because it didn’t quite work when we tried, but that seemed to be due to a bad password rather than any fundamental flaw—the phone was happy to accept the configuration and created two distinct Outlook Tiles on the Start page, so it looked like it was doing the right thing. Read the comments on this post

Intel goes to Gulftown, launches 6-core Xeons

// March 16th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Intel has launched its next-generation Xeon 5600 line, the 32nm “Westmere-EP.” The new lineup brings more cores, more threads, Turbo Boost, and more instructions, all in the same socket format and thermal/power envelope as the older Xeon 5500 line. At the top end of the 5600 family is the six-core, 3.33GHz X5680, and at the bottom end is the quad-core, 2.40GHz E5620. All of the parts in the 5600 range are hyperthreaded, have 12MB of cache, and support Intel Turbo Boost, the AES new instructions (AES-NI), and Trusted Execution Technology (TXT). Let’s take each of these features in turn. Read the comments on this post

Congress wants big NatSec exemptions for spectrum inventory

// March 11th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

A newly revised version of a House bill requiring the government to inventory the nation’s radio spectrum would give Federal agencies and private license owners a national security pass on publicly disclosing information about their spectrum holdings or related data. The proposed bill, as now amended by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce , would let government agencies duck out on releasing such intel if they can prove that doing otherwise “would reveal classified national security information or other information for which there is a legal basis for non-disclosure and such public disclosure would be detrimental to national security, homeland security, or public safety.” Read the comments on this post

80% say ‘Net access fundamental right, split on regulation

// March 8th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Access to the Internet is a fundamental right to nearly four out of five adults across the globe, and those in South Korea, Mexico, and China seem to have the strongest feelings on the topic. This is according to a  report (PDF) by the BBC World Service, which polled 27,973 adults on their feelings about, usage of, and concerns about the Internet. Although users are somewhat divided on whether the Internet should be regulated, they are in agreement on its usefulness for learning and information discovery. Across all 26 countries, 79 percent of Internet and non-Internet users said that they felt that Internet access should be “the fundamental right of all people.” When isolated for people who already use the Internet, that number went up to 87 percent. Almost universally (90 percent), respondents said that the Internet was a good place to learn and almost 80 percent said the Internet brought them greater freedom. Read the comments on this post

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