Wednesday, February 11, 2009

The Non-Lesson From Telecom Frauds

›
Does anyone remember how Worldcom, Qwest, 360 Communications and other telecommunications carriers overstated revenues by booking capacity s...
2 comments:
Monday, February 9, 2009

Regulatory Status of Wireless Information Appliances

›
News of a slimmed down Amazon Kindle electronic book has triggered this question: what regulatory status applies to devices that use wireles...
Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Comcast Letter Hints at the Potential Common Carrier Regulation of VoIP Service

›
While the FCC has classified cable modem and DSL Internet access an information services, the Commission has not specified whether VoIP simi...
4 comments:
Thursday, January 29, 2009

Top Ten List of FCC Regulatory Reforms—Part Two

›
4) Fairly Report the State of an Industry When Reporting to Congress Federal legislation regularly requires the FCC to p...
Friday, January 16, 2009

Top Ten List of FCC Regulatory Reforms—Part One

›
10) Honesty is the best policy. At the risk of anthromorphizing a regulatory agency, at the very least the FCC has not told the complete tru...
Monday, January 12, 2009

Universal Service Reform

›
An increasing number of players—including the incoming Administration—have expressed interest in reforming the process by which the federal ...
Friday, January 9, 2009

Analog Videophiles

›
Just as some audiophiles swear by the virtues of analog audio, I think we soon will have millions of analog videophiles. Despite all the pre...
Thursday, January 1, 2009

Wireless Economies of Scale at the Price of Diminished Competition

›
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

›
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

›
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?

›
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

›
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?

›
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?

›
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

›
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

›
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

›
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

›
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

›
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”

›
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

›
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

›
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

›
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

›
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?

›
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

›
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

›
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

›
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?

›
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

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