Thursday, January 1, 2009

Wireless Economies of Scale at the Price of Diminished Competition

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In 2001 the FCC eliminated a cap on the amount of bandwidth a single wireless carrier could control. With nothing coming close to quantifiab...
Monday, December 29, 2008

Fuzzy Math in Calculating the Cost and Profit in Wireless Text Messaging

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The New York Times recently addressed the issue of wireless texting cost and strongly implied that carriers make a lot of money from this se...
115 comments:

Deconstructing AT&T’s Claims About the iPhone

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Unlike the other wireless carriers, which primarily use advertisements to claim how well their networks work, AT&T pitches both reliabil...
158 comments:
Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Do Transparency and Non-Discrimination Requirements Impose De facto Common Carriage Duties?

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Birtelcom has asked whether a Network Neutrality requirement of transparency and nondiscrimination in effect imposes a common carrier respon...
5 comments:
Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Wall Street Journal 100% Record Sustained—Deliberately Getting it Wrong on Network Neutrality

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Month after month the Wall Street Journal (“WSJ”) pursues what appears to be a deliberate strategy of misinformation on the issue of Network...
50 comments:
Sunday, December 21, 2008

No Way to Put the Public Back in Public Utilities?

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Several years ago many state legislatures embraced the concept that technological innovations would stimulate robust competition in previous...
2 comments:
Thursday, December 18, 2008

Apple iPhone Apps Store—Refreshing Openness or Walled Garden?

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Apple Computer has received high praise for the diversity of applications available for the iPhone. The company shows great willingness to a...
Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Edge Caching and Better Than Best Efforts Routing

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A recent WSJ article has caused a tempest in a teapot over the possibility that standard bearers for network neutrality, such as Google, hav...
1 comment:
Friday, December 12, 2008

The Downsides in Maximizing Spectrum Auction Proceeds

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My classical economics training suggests that when governments maximize spectrum auctions—or the award of any franchise—the nation “wins” by...
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: