Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Lessons From the Hawaii Telcom Bankruptcy

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Hawaii Telcom, the incumbent local exchange telephone company, has filed for bankruptcy protection. Press accounts attribute this outcome t...
2 comments:
Friday, November 21, 2008

Demand Elasticity for ICE Services

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The Wall Street Journal today reported that many electricity utilities in the United States have experienced an unexpected decline in demand...
Monday, November 17, 2008

Voodoo Economic Modeling and Telecom Policy

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In my capacity as a university professor, one of the ways I serve “the academy” involves blind peer review of journal manuscripts. I also ha...
Friday, October 3, 2008

Unlicensed White Space Use as an Airwave “Freeze”

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Professors Tom Hazlett and Vernon Smith have an op ed piece in the Oct. 3rd edition of the Wall Street Journal entitled “Don’t Let Google Fr...
2 comments:
Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Such a Deal: Wireless Service Without a 2 Year Commitment

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Today’s Wall Street Journal (at B5B) reports that Verizon Wireless will now allow subscribers to buy unsubsidized handsets in exchange for w...
1 comment:
Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Broadband Statistics and the Lack of Transparency

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Above is a prepresentative page constituting the sum total of the FCC's broadband statistics compilation. Might the FCC have both the in...
1 comment:
Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Summary of the FCC's Comcast Network Management Order

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By a 3-2 vote, the FCC concluded that Comcast violated the Commission’s 2005 Policy Statement on the Internet and broadband service [1] in ...
2 comments:
Thursday, July 31, 2008

Another Wrong-headed WSJ Editorial

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Those wacky editorial writers at the Wall Street Journal just cannot seem to get the facts straight about network neutrality and what the FC...
8 comments:
Sunday, July 20, 2008

U.S. Wireless: Cutting Edge or Inferior?

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The FCC’s 12th Annual Report to Congress on the Commercial Mobile Radio Service offers an unconditionally upbeat assessment of the wireless ...
2 comments:
Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Consequences of Opt-in Better Than Best Efforts Internet Routing

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While attending the International Telecommunications Society’s 17th bi-annual conference I attended yet another network neutrality session. ...
1 comment:
Tuesday, July 1, 2008

New Journalism Vocabulary Words: Newsprint Trims and Access Points

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My local newspaper has reduced its value proposition by cutting content and pages. Local managers of this McClatchy asset use the term “new...

Maybe We All Should Be Economists

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I recently had the opportunity to attend the 17th biannual conference of the International Telecommunications Society; see http://www.itswor...
Monday, June 23, 2008

Any Link Between Telecom Capacity Swaps and Flipping Oil Contracts?

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Not so long ago employees at Enron and at numerous telecom firms learned a financially lucrative lesson: there was (is?) more money to be ma...
Sunday, June 22, 2008

Grieving Loss of the Filed Rate Doctrine

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In their quest for deregulation wireless carriers in the United States may regret one regulatory feature: the Filed Rate doctrine and more g...
Tuesday, June 10, 2008

The Lack of Imputatation and How It Tilts the Competitive Playing Field

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Some time ago, before the FCC streamlined tariffing regulations for ILECs and eliminated structural separation requirements, the long distan...
Friday, June 6, 2008

Winners and Losers in Yet Another Mega-Billion Dollar Acquisition—Verizon/Alltel

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I’m going out on a very short and sturdy limb here to predict that the FCC will approve Verizon’s acquisition of Alltel with few conditions ...
Friday, May 30, 2008

The Front and Back End of a Two Year Wireless Subscription

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In the United States just about everyone trades off typical consumer rights and handset freedoms in exchange for “ownership” of a subsidized...
Friday, May 2, 2008

Stealth Deregulation

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Wireless carriers in the United States and elsewhere appear to have come up with a clever new strategy to achieve deregulation: assume that ...
2 comments:
Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Wireless Carterfone is Not Overbearing Regulation

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I don't understand why applying Carterfone to wireless is controversial and successfully framed by opponents as an extension of regulati...
3 comments:
Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Who Makes the Any Apps Any Handset Call?

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The Wall Street Journal today reported that FCC Chairman Kevin Martin wants to reject a Petition for Declaratory Ruling filed by Skype that ...
1 comment:
Tuesday, March 25, 2008

What Consultants Generally Do

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You may have heard the rather lame joke about the definition of a consultant: someone who borrows your watch and tells you the time. Consul...
2 comments:
Friday, March 21, 2008

Game, Set and Match: How AT&T and Verizon Will Largely Lock Down the Third Screen

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The results of the 700 MHz spectrum auction solidify the market dominance of AT&T and Verizon by locking up the best additional spectrum...
6 comments:

Slightly Less Deceptive FCC Broadband Statistics Forthcoming

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Recognizing the need for better calibrated broadband statistics, which more closely tracks actual choices available to consumers, the FCC ha...
1 comment:
Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Usage-Based Pricing and a Potential Unanticipated Consequence

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Some Internet Service Providers have begun to experiment with usage-based pricing in lieu of a one-size fits all pricing model. This makes ...
1 comment:
Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Information Service Telecommunications Service Mutual Exclusivity

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The FCC surely has a hard time dealing with convergence and in particular a firm that offers both telecommunications services and informatio...
1 comment:
Monday, February 25, 2008

Network Neutrality Unneeded in a Competitive Broadband Marketplace

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In the Feb 25th edition of the Wall Street Journal former hedge fund manager Andy Kessler strongly suggests that competition would solve any...
3 comments:
Thursday, February 21, 2008

Bulls, Bears and Greed

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As a regular telecommunications conference attendee I marvel at the ability of the hospitality industry to calibrate prices right to the bri...
1 comment:
Monday, February 11, 2008

When the Web Is Not Faster, Better, Smarter …

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It never fails to amaze me that print media subscriptions take three to five weeks to get “processed.” The Internet apparently provides no ...
2 comments:
Friday, February 1, 2008

The Internet’s Weakest Link—Submarine Cableheads

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This week two major transoceanic cables experienced outages that may last several days. See http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id...
1 comment:
Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Boring into Broadband Penetration Statistics

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In preparation for a conference on network neutrality, I am taking a closer look at broadband penetration statistics in the U.S. and in othe...
1 comment:

Recent Presentation and Paper on Wireless Carterfone

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Belatedly the network neutrality debate has begun to address the extent to which wireless subscribers can use their handsets to access any c...
1 comment:
Monday, December 10, 2007

What to Do With Heavy Internet Users?

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Comcast’s heavy handed treatment of its peer-to-peer networking customers made me wonder if these customers deserve to expulsion or a fruit ...
3 comments:

European Assessment of Network Neutrality

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I had the good fortune to participate in a conference on Network Neutrality from a European perspective organized by WIK-Consult GmbH in Bon...
1 comment:
Thursday, November 29, 2007

Who's Behind That Blog?

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An assignment in a Media and Democracy course I teach at Penn State invites students to select a telecommunications advocacy web site for an...
4 comments: