The U.S. broadband problem is adoption, not deployment of facilities, said U.S. Internet Industry Association President David McClure Tuesday as his group issued a report on rural broadband. The study mainly used secondary data, such as listings from state development bodies and telecom groups. Deployment is moving at a “pretty remarkable pace” considering the nation’s size and geography, McClure said. Broadband has seen faster deployment than any major technology in “human history,” he said. But there has always been “significant lag” between deployment and adoption, McClure said. Educational programs promoting broadband adoption could “give us as much or better return on investment” than those on deployment, he said. “Regulation of the Internet of almost any kind isn’t going to stimulate adoption,” he said. Regulation won’t address issues slowing adoption including income, education, and “the viability of the Internet in the lives of individual consumers,” he said. Penetration is the “real conundrum,” agreed David Freet, USIIA board member and Pennsylvania Telephone Association president. Pennsylvania’s greatest broadband challenge has been explaining why consumers should buy it, he said.
Adam Bender
Adam Bender, Deputy Managing Editor for Privacy Daily. Bender leads a team of journalists and reports on state privacy legislation, rulemaking and litigation. In previous roles at Communications Daily, he covered telecom and internet policy in the states, Congress and at the FCC. He has won awards for his reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), Specialized Information Publishers Association (SIPA) and the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing (SABEW). Bender studied print journalism at American University and is the author of multiple dystopian sci-fi novels. Keep up to date with Bender by reading his blog and following him on social media including Bluesky, Mastodon and LinkedIn.
Sprint Nextel will sell an unlimited voice and data plan for $99.99 as it tries to rebuild the company, CEO Dan Hesse said as the carrier released dismal Q4 results. Sprint hopes the new plan will highlight its data strengths and be a step toward repositioning the brand, Hesse said. “Data will be the next battleground.”
NASHVILLE -- CompTel plans to amplify its regulatory influence in 2008, the CLEC association’s leaders said in an interview. Momentum from last year’s FCC denial of Verizon’s forbearance petition is giving CompTel members “more incentive to participate,” said CEO Jerry James. Under a new dual leadership, “we intend to take it to the next level,” said President Matthew Salmon.
NASHVILLE -- It will be “tough” for Verizon to win an appeal of last year’s FCC decision denying it forbearance in six cities but nothing is certain, speakers at a CompTel forbearance roundtable said Tuesday. Verizon will likely “go right down the middle,” arguing that the FCC had enough data on facilities-based competition to justify granting forbearance and so it was “arbitrary and capricious” to deny, said lawyer Thomas Jones. Verizon likely will also reference a previous FCC decision to grant-in-part forbearance in Omaha and Anchorage, he said.
NASHVILLE -- CLECs must stay active on regulatory issues, executives told a CompTel panel late Monday. “Nothing could be more damaging to the Wall Street perspective of this industry” than a negative regulatory action, said Deltacom CEO Randy Curran. CIMCO CEO Bill Capraro agreed: “I love the saying, ‘Only the paranoid survive.'”
NASHVILLE -- The FCC should give states clear jurisdiction to set rates for unbundled network elements provided under section 271 of the Telecom Act, state regulators said on a CompTel panel Tuesday. States are the “most capable government entities to protect consumers,” said Arizona Corporation Commissioner Kris Mayes. States are closer to the people and know the competitive environment within their boundaries better than the FCC, agreed Tennessee Regulatory Authority Chairman Eddie Roberson. “I understand the justification for [federal] preemption, and maybe in some cases it’s appropriate, but I think that we need to go very slowly in that area.”
The economy is slowing, but telecom still will “see a healthy uptick at home and abroad” the next three years, said Telecommunications Industry Association president Grant Seiffert as TIA released its 2008 Telecommunications Market Review & Forecast. TIA expects the global telecom market to grow 9.2 percent yearly, hitting $4.9 trillion in 2011, said Seiffert. Of that, the U.S. will contribute $1.3 trillion, with revenue growing 7.2 percent annually between now and then, he said.
A federal court denied an AT&T motion to invalidate a patent ring-back tone developer Ring Plus said AT&T infringed, Ring Plus said Friday. The court denied the motion Feb. 13, saying AT&T didn’t provide clear and convincing evidence the patent wasn’t properly authenticated, the company said in a news release. The court also denied a Ring Plus cross-motion for summary judgement. Ring Plus failed to prove that no reasonable jury could find that Ring Plus’s patent included all elements of the allegedly infringing AT&T patent. Ring Plus filed the original complaint against Cingular in U.S. District Court in Marshall, Texas, in 2006. “We continue to believe the patent is invalid, and that will be an issue at trial,” an AT&T spokesman said. A Ring Plus motion to disqualify an AT&T lawyer is pending (CD Jan 7 p10). That motion “lacks merit,” the AT&T spokesman said.
Tight budgets, fewer federal workers and more resistance to supplementing staffs with contractors constrain federal network decision makers, Suss Consulting President Warren Suss said Wednesday at the Telemetrics Federal Networks conference. But service-oriented architecture and other cost-saving new technologies could provide a solution, he said in a keynote.
Major U.S. carriers are adding unlimited wireless minutes to their set of plan options. Hours after a Verizon Wireless announcement this morning saying such a plan was available yesterday (Tuesday), AT&T said it would match the offer starting Friday. About two hours later, T-Mobile said it too would sell unlimited minutes, but raised the $99.99 deal to include SMS. Sprint Nextel and Alltel are likely to follow, analysts said.