South Africa shouldn’t regulate Internet Protocol TV services, commentators told the country’s telecom regulator late last month. Although IPTV hasn’t taken off in there, there’s “considerable interest from stakeholders,” the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa said in a discussion paper. After reviewing how the EU, U.S., U.K., France, South Korea, India and Canada handle IPTV rules, ICASA said it will focus on content issues. Respondents urged it to stay out of content regulation.
There’s “public confusion and industry uncertainty” over U.K. plans to switch to digital radio by 2015, the House of Lords’ Select Committee on Communications said Monday. A report said a move to digital TV seems to be on track but the radio change is raising strong qualms, including about consumer and environmental matters. If these aren’t dealt with, it said, “there is a danger of public backlash."
Uncompetitive telecom markets are holding broadband speeds back, the European Competitive Telecommunications Association said Wednesday. Its study on Europe’s digital deficit said consumers and businesses are losing 25 billion ($34 billion) per year because powerful monopoly providers are keeping prices higher and broadband speeds lower. It said incumbent retail market shares are high, stable and, in some cases, increasing, and that some dominant companies are engaging in potentially anti-competitive and discriminatory practices. Meanwhile, ECTA said, new entrants struggle to make a return on their investment. ECTA said it will press the European Commission and national regulators to investigate competition failures in the sector and to consider using the new power of functional separation of a business’s network and services arms when needed. A study for the EC concluded that effective broadband take-up across the EU would create more than a million new jobs and boost gross domestic product by 850 billion by 2015, ECTA said. Separately, network operators said the EU digital agenda should be given higher priority and a stronger role in cross- sector issues such as CO2 reduction, education and social cohesion. Besides boosting jobs and economic activity, broadband-enabled applications in the energy, transport and building sectors could cut carbon emissions by 15 percent by 2020, the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association said. It again backed a “more targeted and proportionate regulatory environment” to encourage investment in risky next-generation access networks. Meanwhile, Point Topic analysts said emerging countries are now experiencing the largest growth in the number of broadband lines and will likely be the main drivers of broadband take-up in the next four years. By 2014, emerging economies could account for more than 320 million lines, 43 percent of the world total of 740 million by then, it said. The forecast looked at the 40 biggest countries in terms of broadband lines, dividing them into emerging, youthful and mature. The first category, which includes Brazil, China, Russia, India and others in Southeast Asia, South America and Eastern Europe, could see growth of more than 14 percent per year. Youthful economies such as the U.S., Japan, Greece and others, can expect broadband growth of 5.5 percent annually, mature countries such as Canada, South Korea, and advanced Western European nations 4.6 percent, the analysts said. The youthful markets are “probably the most unpredictable,” they said. With about 155 million lines as of mid-2009, they're just behind the emerging countries in terms of broadband size and they include the world’s two largest economies, the U.S. and Japan, they said. Individual countries in this group could see a change in prospects if governments set higher goals for broadband take-up, they said. It remains to be seen, however, whether the broadband investment plan in the U.S. stimulus package will boost take-up above the predicted 6 percent per year, the analysts said. The ten countries predicted to have the biggest broadband networks by 2014 are China, Russia, India and Brazil (emerging), the U.S., Japan and Italy (youthful) and Germany, the U.K. and France (mature), they said.
Global satellite navigation system Galileo has a “huge downstream value chain” which must be exploited to bring services and applications to European citizens, said Alvaro Herrero Porteros, technical counsellor to the Spanish EU Presidency,. He and others opened the March 3-5 Galileo Application Days, where about 32 cutting-edge satellite applications will be demonstrated live, the European Commission said. Applications are a main driver of the system, Porteros said. The goal of deploying Galileo isn’t the infrastructure itself but providing a signal in space to enable services and applications, he said Wednesday. Porteros urged the EU to commit in the short term to an exploitation study and an applications action plan which addresses regulatory issues and how best to maximize the returns of Galileo and the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service. The EU must also assure industry it will do its best not to miss windows of opportunity for authentication-based services development, mass-market penetration and use of the system by the defense community and interoperability with the U.S. Global Positioning Service, he said. Galileo has two satellites in orbit testing critical technologies, said Rene Oosterlinck, director of the Galileo program and navigation-related activities. The navigation signals are working well but they have many errors which are being corrected, he said. Those errors contain information that could be spun off for useful applications and services, he said. Orbit determination errors showing a satellite’s orbit is changing may provide information on space weather and the earth’s gravitational pull, he said. Analyzing clock errors could help prove Albert Einstein’s theories or lead to quantum communications, Oosterlinck said. Signal speed is affected by vapor in the air, so errors can be used to evaluate water in the atmosphere, he said. Reflected signals offer information on the object doing the reflecting, such as soil or waves, he said. Earthquakes are reflected in the atmosphere so satellites could assess what happened under the earth, Oosterlinck said. New tools made possible by Galileo will bring social, environmental, safety and economic benefits to citizens and deliver downstream market revenue “our industry so urgently needs,” said Industry and Entrepreneurship Commissioner Antonio Tarjani.
German and Italian efforts to adopt EU laws into national legislation are sparking confusion for ISPs and telecom providers, sources said this week. An Italian measure enacting the EU audiovisual media services directive into national law leaves some key Internet issues unclear, while the decision by Germany’s Constitutional Court to void a law requiring storage of Internet and telephony traffic data raises questions about the future of the controversial EU data retention directive, they said.
Harmonizing telecom rules across sub-Saharan Africa faces several major challenges, a report last month for the ITU and European Commission found. Most information and communication technologies regulation now exists at the regional or national level, with wide variations in content and time lines and, in some cases, non-binding rules, it said. The review, part of the Harmonization of ICT Policies in sub-Saharan Africa project funded by the EU, compared the current level of regulatory standardization in various regional organizations.
Don’t use the debate on Europe’s future digital strategy to rehash issues resolved in the overhaul of telecom rules, several EU lawmakers and a European Commission official said Thursday. The European Parliament Industry Committee began considering a draft report by Pilar del Castillo of Spain and the European People’s Party that responds to EC proposals for a digital agenda -- “digital.eu” to 2015. It encourages the EC to speed up resolution of digital content issues, develop EU-wide copyright rules and create an Internet users’ bill of rights.
Internet Protocol version 6 may be the “future of the Internet” but few seem to be in a rush to adopt it. The lack of interest in the new technology prompted ICANN and the Number Resource Organization to warn Wednesday that the available pool of unallocated IPv4 addresses could be depleted in “a couple of years.” Some ICANN players said IPv6 deployment is being slowed by lack of an incentive for consumers to upgrade and the possibility that the technology’s time may have already passed. ICANN’s numbering authority said ISPs have delayed making the switch because IPv4 addresses are still available.
Neelie Kroes, the EU’s digital agenda commissioner- designate, looks set to squeak through the confirmation process despite her poor performance at last week’s European Parliament hearing, sources said. However, final approval of the entire new European Commission is likely to be pushed back several weeks following the withdrawal by Bulgarian Rumiana Jeleva of her candidacy for EC humanitarian aid commissioner, a spokesman for the center-right European People’s Party (EPP) said Tuesday. Kroes won praise from digital and civil rights activists for her strong stand on net neutrality and online rights protection (CD Jan 15 p7) but all of the political groups on the industry committee vetting her considered her hearing unsatisfactory, EPP spokesman Robert Fitzhenry said Monday. “A harsh observer might say that Mrs. Kroes was incoherent on many replies and seems to have no grasp of even the most basic concepts of the portfolio for which she will be responsible,” he said. But Kroes, currently well-respected as Competition Commissioner, got a second chance Tuesday when she was called in for a meeting with industry committee lawmakers. There, she provided more concrete opinions and proposals, the spokesman said. The meeting appears to have gone better than the initial hearing, said a spokeswoman for French legislator Catherine Trautmann of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats. Kroes was honest about answers she failed to give the first time around, offered more precise responses, and “clearly understood the warning” from lawmakers to respect Parliament, the spokeswoman said: “Some fruitful cooperation could even arise.” The committee is expected to make its final decision Wednesday, setting out its reservations and overall approval in a letter to Parliament President Jerzy Buzek, the EPP spokesman said. After that, political group leaders will review the letters from all the committee hearings and decide whether to ask for the withdrawal or change of responsibilities of some candidates or to proceed with a vote on the entire panel, he said. Jeleva’s withdrawal means there will have to be a hearing for her replacement, he said. Buzek said Tuesday he will schedule one as soon as he receives the name of the new Bulgarian candidate. The hearing could be Feb. 3 and the final vote Feb. 9, Buzek said. Several other commissioner- designates are undergoing the same process as Kroes, the EPP spokesman said. “There is no guarantee that these will be successful but the assumption is that the problems that exist can be overcome,” he said.
Neelie Kroes, the EU’s digital agenda commissioner- designate, promised to protect net neutrality and online human rights. Responding Thursday to lawmakers’ questions at a three-hour confirmation hearing in the European Parliament, Kroes said an open and neutral Internet is crucial to promoting competition. Service providers shouldn’t be allowed to restrict access for commercial reasons, she said. She also promised not to let the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement sidestep citizens’ fundamental rights. Kroes’ comments showed a full understanding of net neutrality issues, a digital-rights activist said.