TeleFrieden

A provocative, unsponsored assessment of current and future legal, regulatory, marketplace, and cultural issues affecting telecommunications and information policy presented by Rob Frieden, Academy and Emeritus Professor of Telecommunications and Law, Penn State University

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

“Toll Free” Broadband Service: Double Billing Ripoff, or a Better Than Best Efforts Premium Option?

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            Representatives of both AT&T and Verizon have stated that their companies will soon offer “toll free” broadband services. ...
Monday, May 7, 2012

A Shift in the Balance of Power Between Wireless Carriers and Subscribers

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            Today’s Wall Street Journal reports that wireless carriers have begun to reduce the subsidies they offer wireless subscribers. ...
Friday, May 4, 2012

Whining All the Way to the Bank

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             AT&T Chairman and Chief Executive Randall Stephenson complained yesterday that the FCC’s failure to approve AT&T’s acq...
Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Reintermediation—How Cable Incumbents Close Ranks with New Media

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            The Internet has empowered consumers by eliminating middlemen that no longer add value.   I use the following key words to a...
1 comment:
Monday, April 16, 2012

Network Neutrality in a Nutshell

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 Congressional Quarterly has prepared a helpful primer on network neutrality (with a few quotes from yours truly).  See http://libr...
Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Intranets and the Cloud: The Lack of Functional Difference Between Comcast’s Xbox and Regular Broadband Traffic

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             Those clever folks at Comcast want us to believe that there is a functional difference between routing Netflix traffic to an ...

Pricing Power and the Lack of Competition in Broadband and Video

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            Readers of this blog may have inferred that I am sick and tired of bogus claims made by many telecom operators that competition ...
Monday, April 2, 2012

The Antitrust Remedy as a Red Herring

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            With increasing frequency advocates for the most outlandish deregulatory approaches in the telecommunications sector quickly m...
Thursday, March 22, 2012

Cable and Telephone Giants: Embracing, Extending and Extinguishing the Competition

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           You may have heard that the major cable and telecom players have entered into joint venturing agreements that appear to have th...
Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Cable A la Carte and Economic Efficiency

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             In preparing updates to the loose leaf treatise All About Cable and Broadband , I reviewed the FCC’s latest report on cable ...
Saturday, March 10, 2012

Hot Potato Routing and Real or Imagined Congestion

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            Several years ago when the Internet was beginning to grow, the matter of fair sharing of traffic loads arose.   Because ISPs did...
1 comment:
Monday, March 5, 2012

Metered Broadband and the Bellhead Way

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       Leave it to the telephone companies to come up with a way to defeat success.   Rather than work to make smartphones the third scree...
2 comments:
Friday, February 10, 2012

Comcast Anti-consumer Strategies

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      In preparing updates to comprehensive treatise on cable television and broadband (see http://www.lawcatalog.com/product_detail.cfm?p...
Tuesday, February 7, 2012

The Law and Policy of Telecommunications and Plumbing

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      I used to revel in the interdisciplinarity of my chosen research, teaching and outreach agenda.   Throughout my career I thought it a ...
Monday, February 6, 2012

New pub: Assessing the need for More Incentives to Stimulate Next Generation Investment

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    I loath the conversion of nouns into verbs, such as party and incentivize.  Perhaps this  picadillo prompted my latest publication in Vo...
1 comment:
Sunday, January 8, 2012

Lessons From the Deregulation and Re-regulation of Broadcast Volume

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            In 2010 Congress enacted and the President signed into law the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act whose requireme...
1 comment:
Sunday, January 1, 2012

It's Still the Phone Company (cont.)

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            During the holiday lag, what better time for Verizon Wireless to sneak in a multi-million dollar revenue enhancement, called a c...
Friday, December 23, 2011

Swinging for the Fence or Hitting Singles?—How AT&T and Verizon Further Consolidated the Wireless Marketplace While Most Weren’t Looking

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       Before anyone claims victory for the consumer in AT&T’s abandonment of its “swinging for the fence” gambit to buy T-Mobile’s ma...
1 comment:
Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Too Big to Fail Wireless Carriers

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               Few would dispute that spectrum has played a key role in making it possible for AT&T and Verizon to acquire scale econom...
1 comment:
Sunday, December 18, 2011

It’s Still THE Phone Company—Verizon Cuts Off Essential Long Distance Access to My 85 Year Old Mother!!!

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            In the no good deed goes unpunished, consider this classic phone company hassle.                         I’m currently in Norfol...
Thursday, December 8, 2011

Wireless Carriers’ Ambivalence Toward Wi-Fi

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            Perhaps you share my frustration when wireless carriers and their sponsored researchers tell us how benevolent they are: tireles...
Wednesday, November 30, 2011

How Can U.S. Wireless Carriers Have the World’s Highest ARPUs and Some of the Lowest Rates?

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          U.S. wireless carriers, their trade associations and sponsored researchers do not want widespread understanding that the U.S. ma...
Sunday, November 27, 2011

A Wireless Duopoly?

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Recently Cox Communications announced its departure from the wireless telecommunications.   Similarly some speculate whether T-Mobile can su...
Thursday, November 24, 2011

Businessweek Can't Distinguish Bits From Bytes

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The Nov. 21-27, 2011 edition of Bloomberg Businessweek incorrectly inserts the word bytes for bits in not one, but two articles (on Indian ...
Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Holiday Reading Part Two

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Here's a work in progress that considers the middle ground in the network neutrality debate: Do Conduit Neutrality Mandates Promote or H...

Holiday Reading Part One

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In the event you tire of television and run out of written material have I got something for you.  Here's a short piece on IPTV entitled...
Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Being a Busy Academic

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            Sorry for the lack of blog entries.   So much to do, despite the general impression that academics lead a cushy life. In the las...
Tuesday, September 13, 2011

A Fair Estimate of Network Neutrality Costs and Benefits

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           Opponents of network Neutrality allege that imposing such regulation will result in lost jobs and value.   An example of losses i...
1 comment:
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Rob Frieden
Port Matilda, PA, United States
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