Broadband Blog Entries

Sometime next year, the new Administration will start to figure out a plan for collecting information about where broadband is, and how to increase deployment. The delay will be necessary because while Congress passed the bill to improve broadband data collection, S. 1492, there isn’t any money actually set aside to pay for the program. Until appropriations bills are passed for the next fiscal year, FY 2010, which starts Oct. 1, 2009, there won’t be any money. As a result, it could be calendar year 2010 before any program gets going.

The bill is a worthwhile first step, because it puts Congress on record as wanting more information about broadband.

Thanks to Comcast and Verizon/AT&T, we now know a little more about the limits of “unlimited.”

Comcast announced that, starting Oct. 1, it will impose a 250 GB cap on usage. At the moment, the announcement is relatively benign, although there are lots of dangers lurking in the weeds.

Comcast has long complained that it needs to engage in legitimate “network management,” as opposed to the management techniques the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) found not to be so legitimate. One of the meat-cleaver approaches would be to lower the demands on the network as a whole. However, this new cap doesn’t appear to help Comcast meet its network management challenges.

It didn’t take Comcast long to run away from its latest embarrassment. On Wednesday, Comcast Senior Vp Mitch Bowling told Bloomberg News that in an effort to control traffic, Comcast might slow down the transmission of packets from its heaviest users by “10 minutes to 20 minutes.” Here’s the story. PC Magazine had the same story.

For the second straight year, I addressed the EDUCAUSE/Cornell Institute for Computer Policy and Law, held at Cornell’s beautiful campus. The Institute gathers 50+ higher education information technology (IT) professionals – usually campus CTOs, librarians and legal counsels, and teaches them the substantive particulars of IT policy issues and advises them how to be strong advocates.

It's no secret that Comcast is a company with a bit of an image problem. If you're a regular reader of this blog, chances are that you already know this, given the frequency with which Comcast is discussed around these parts. And even if you're not a policy geek, chances are fairly high that you see America's largest cable company in a less than favorable light. As the most recent American Customer Satisfaction Index survey reveals, Comcast is one of the least trusted cable providers out there. So you can't blame the company for attempting to rehabilitate its image in the eye of the consumer…or can you? Today, Comcast found itself in hot water with consumer advocates yet again, over a controversial response to online complaints. For once, however, I'm siding with Comcast.

The Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) rulemaking on collecting broadband data has brought some of the critics of Connect Kentucky/Connected Nation to the fore, while challenging the semi-sacred status of the “public-private partnership.”

In recent comments filed with the Commission, the arguments on who should map broadband deployment fall into two categories. One side is those of Connect and its allies in the telephone companies, cable companies and labor. The other is the one made up of public agencies and publicly owned utilities which are wary of too much of the “private” side taking over the equation. The Kentucky Public Service Commission (PSC) and the American Public Power Association (APPA), led by their Kentucky members, are in the forefront.

I've been a Comcast cable television and Internet customer for almost two years now. And to be quite honest, during those two years, I've had relatively few complaints. Sure, I'm not crazy about my upstream BitTorrent traffic getting throttled. But that aside, I feel as if I've always enjoyed a fairly high level of service. I'm more or less pleased with the speeds that I get with my Internet connection, the picture and sound quality of my cable television service is high enough to pass muster and I can't remember ever experiencing any downtime (which initially came as a shock, after having been a DSL customer for a number of years). And all those horror stories about Comcast technicians? Mine arrived right on time for my installation appointment and was both courteous and helpful--even if he did try to sell me a cable descrambler box. In fact, during the last few years, I've only had one complaint regarding Comcast's Internet service: the price tag that comes attached to it has always seemed a bit high. As of yesterday, however, that's no longer an issue for me.

About 16 months ago, I heard Ed Richards of Ofcom speak at a CITI conference at Columbia, and blogged about it here. I remember thinking that Richards didn’t seem to think that highspeed access to the internet was all that important. The market had to demand it, and the market wasn’t being demanding. Also, he wasn’t interested in government intervention to support highspeed access.

Over the next couple of days, thousands of online activists will gather in Austin for the Netroots Nation conference. This is the former Yearly Kos meeting, an extension of the Daily Kos progressive blog.

There are scheduled caucuses for Open Left Readers and Geeks and Texans and Moms, and sessions on how to use social networking tools in campaigns. There are panels on how the Internet could be used for transparency in government, how the Internet has affected campaigns and lobbying, to discussions of science, space and food policy. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) will be there, as will Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD) and retired Gen. Wesley Clark.

All of the speeches and 99.99% of the panels and discussions will be about how to the Internet is being used, and should be used. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s fabulous that activists want to make the most out of the online medium.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have been quick to blame problems with service quality on so-called “bandwidth hogs.” According to AT&T, the top 5% of their Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) subscribers use 46% of the consumed bandwidth, and the top 1% of subscribers use 21%. But it is unclear what these figures mean, and if congestion problems could even be caused by those who use the network the most. These figures would seem to be describing the bandwidth consumption totals at the end of some designated time period (day, week, month). If this is the case, then 5% of subscribers using 46% of bandwidth consumed is not necessarily cause for alarm.

Excessive bandwidth usage is only a problem when it degrades the quality of service for other users of the network.