The Internet Innovation Alliance is a broad-based coalition of business and non-profit organizations that aim to ensure every American, regardless of race, income or geography, has access to the critical tool that is broadband Internet. The IIA seeks to promote public policies that support equal opportunity for universal broadband availability and adoption so that everyone, everywhere can seize the benefits of the Internet - from education to health care, employment to community building, civic engagement and beyond.
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Rick Boucher
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Bruce P. Mehlman
Co-Chairman
Jamal Simmons
Co-Chairman
Tracey Sawicki
Executive Director
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Friday, January 27
From 1971, introducing the Sharp LC8, the world’s smallest electronic calculator! For the low, low price of $345!
Thursday, January 26
Via Steve Walsh and Michael Shepard of Bloomberg, House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology Chairman Rep. Greg Walden wants to get to the bottom of the ongoing regulatory saga being faced by mobile broadband startup LightSquared:
The high-speed wireless venture backed by hedge fund billionaire Philip Falcone won preliminary approval from the FCC a year ago. It remains without final clearance as the agency and other federal regulators weigh test results that show LightSquared disrupts global-positioning system equipment used on autos, tractors, boats and aircraft.
“How did that process fail?” Walden said in a briefing with reporters in Washington. “Because you’ve got a lot of people spending a lot of money trying to sort this out now, and it would seem to me somebody would have sorted it out before they made the licenses available.”
A date for the hearing has yet to be set.
Over at Maximum Entropy, industry analyst Bret Swanson (who is also one of our Broadband Ambassadors) echoes the concerns of AT&T’s Bob Quinn earlier this week that the FCC’s “digital roaming” order and other regulations risk discouraging investment from wireless providers:
We warned here and here that turning competitive broadband infrastructure into a “common carrier” could discourage all players in the market from building more capacity and covering wider geographies. If company A can piggyback on company B’s network at below market rates, why would it build its own expensive network? And if company B’s network capacity is going to company A’s customers, instead of its own customers, do we think company B is likely to build yet more cell sites and purchase more spectrum?
With 37 million iPhones and 15million iPads sold last quarter, we need more spectrum, more cell towers, more capacity. This isn’t the way to get it. And what we are seeing with Sprint’s decision to roam instead of build in Oklahoma and Kansas may be the tip of this anti-investment iceberg.
Wednesday, January 25
Yesterday, Apple released its quarterly earnings, and in yet another example of the power of technology — not to mention the importance of mobile broadband for America’s economy — the iPhone maker shattered expectations, announcing quarterly revenue of $46.33 billion and net profits of $13.06 billion.
As David Goldman of CNN Money points out, Apple is now worth over $400 billion, making it worth more than Greece. Wow.
In last night’s State of the Union Address, President Obama highlighted the need to build out high-speed broadband to everyone in America:
Building this new energy future should be just one part of a broader agenda to repair America’s infrastructure. So much of America needs to be rebuilt. We’ve got crumbling roads and bridges. A power grid that wastes too much energy. An incomplete high-speed broadband network that prevents a small business owner in rural America from selling her products all over the world.
The President also called for “comprehensive cybersecurity legislation from Congress. As Gautham Nagesh of The Hill reports, that call received a swift response from key members of the Senate:
Senate Homeland Security chairman Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) echoed President Obama’s call in the State of the Union for Congress to pass comprehensive cybersecurity legislation on Tuesday evening.
“The President’s call for Congress to pass cybersecurity legislation underscores the pressing nature of securing the government’s cyber systems and networks—and a limited number of private sector networks that touch the lives of all Americans,” Lieberman said.
Senate leaders have been working on legislation that would place the Department of Homeland Security in charge of regulating private networks, while in the House a more limited legislation has also been debated.
In a post at AT&T’s Public Policy Blog, Bob Quinn, the company’s Senior Vice President-Federal Regulatory and Chief Privacy Officer, argues that the recent announcement from wireless carrier Sprint that it was going to rely on roaming to provide customers coverage in Kansas and Oklahoma reveals major flaws in two orders from the FCC:
First, in 2010, the FCC reversed itself by eliminating the Home Market Rule. That rule, which was pretty logical and straightforward, said that, if a carrier owned spectrum, it was good public policy to require them to build out that spectrum and therefore they should not be able to demand roaming from other carriers in those “home markets.” Thus, if Sprint owned spectrum in Kansas and Oklahoma, it wouldn’t have a regulatory “right” to roam. Then, last April, the Commission extended roaming rules that had previously been limited to voice services (and that now contain no Home Market exception) to broadband infrastructure.
In arguing to impose those requirements on its competitors, both Sprint and the FCC said that broadband roaming obligations would actually promote “the deployment of broadband facilities and thus expand coverage.” Good in theory, I suppose, but not in practice, as I stated at the time. As a result of those two FCC Orders, Sprint can now use other folks’ networks rather than pony up its own investment dollars. Nice work if you can get it.
Quinn goes on to explain why his company is hopeful the D.C. Court of Appears will step in to scale back the FCC’s orders:
We remain hopeful that the Court will reject the FCC’s market intervention here and realize that this regulation actually disincents investment by everyone in the marketplace at a time when promoting investment and job growth should be priority #1 for every policymaker in this country. And it serves as another lesson in why unbridled discretion to shape markets in the name of competition is not always good public policy.
Monday, January 23
In yet more evidence that tablet computers like Apple’s popular iPad are shaking up the computer industry, new numbers from the Pew Internet & American Life Project find that the number of people who own a tablet computer jumped from 10% to 19% from the middle of December to January. From Pew:
These findings are striking because they come after a period from mid-2011 into the autumn in which there was not much change in the ownership of tablets and e-book readers. However, as the holiday gift-giving season approached, the marketplace for both devices dramatically shifted. In the tablet world, Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Barnes and Noble’s Nook Tablet were introduced at considerably cheaper prices than other tablets. In the e-book reader world, some versions of the Kindle and Nook and other readers fell well below $100.
Four billion: the number of videos YouTube now streams to users every single day. Wow.
In an op-ed for The Hill‘s Congress Blog, Mobile Future chairman Jonathan Spalter argues it’s critical to free up more spectrum for mobile broadband to keep up with growing demand:
To provide maximum benefits both for American consumers and the American treasury, any reasonable solution must encourage the open participation by the greatest number of stakeholders, including those who need additional spectrum to meet the growing demands of the 300 million mobile consumers in the U.S.
Now is the time for leadership. Policymakers on Capitol Hill, at the FCC and in the Administration must work together to chart a clear and sustainable path to address the nation’s immediate spectrum needs as quickly as possible. Mobile innovation, economic growth and hundreds of millions of mobile consumers can’t afford to wait.
Spalter’s full op-ed is worth checking out.
Friday, January 20
25 years before Apple’s Siri took people by storm, IBM was touting its own voice-recognition technology.
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