Markets don't capture externalities. Most of us understand that "the market" produces a pollution problem if unregulated. Utilities can save money burning dirty coal; the pollution cost falls on others. That's been a hard problem to solve for two decades. Telecom policy has many similar choices. 

If you believe that better mobile broadband is an important goal, you often can't expect even strong competition to deliver what's best. LTE gets 2x to 10x the capacity in the same spectrum, depending on how it's configured.  Allocating spectrum to 3G rather than 4G, as some countries still do, cuts the total bandwidth available. Choices like that are common in spectrum policy. Economists think of spectrum as a commons, where if everyone maximizes their own profits the overall system is a problem. 

I think this issue particularly important where there are few landlines, which is most of Africa and much of Latin America.

34,000 kilometers of fiber to towns of 250-500 people. The government program, managed by Rostelecom, offers basic service at 10 megabits for less than $1/month to about a million Russians. Complete universal service coverage of Russia will require 215,000 kilometers and is scheduled to be finished by the end of 2018. 

Let's hope the Russians do better than the Indians, whose similar "fiber to the village" program is the better part of a decade late. India's telecom programs are world-class examples of inefficient government work. Less reported is the equally incompetent American "public-private partnership."

Ralph de la Vega, one of the most capable executives in telecom, is retiring as Vice-Chairman of AT&T. He brought the iPhone to America, working closely with Steve Jobs. I first met him in the early years of DSL, when his BellSouth division was far more efficient than any other in the U.S. Gary Becker won a Nobel Prize for developing an economic analysis of the cost of discrimination. Ralph's career shows how a company benefits by not discriminating.

Nearly sixty years after Ralph came to America as a young boy, you can still hear Cuba in his voice. He worked his way through a college that isn’t famous as a janitor; he probably didn’t have the style to get a job at many companies. Even today, someone like de la Vega from a working class background, with strong ethnicity, and a degree without prestige would rarely get a chance at Google, Facebook, or Apple.

If a company discriminates against some qualified employees, the company is weakened. The U.S. telcos have accepted that since the 1950's. They've been more open than most American companies.

113M 3G/4G phones sold in 2016. The ten South East Asian countries have a population of 625 million, nearly twice as many as the United States. By some measures, they will soon have more Internet users than the U.S. Indonesia, the Philipines, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore have more SIM subscription than they have people. Mobile is exploding in Myanmar, which will soon join that group.

There are probably only 350-400M mobile subscribers; dual SIM phones and other factors explain the discrepancy. Digitimes's 60% smartphone estimate is for the end of this year, up from 46% in 2015.

80% to telcos, 20% as tax to gov. You virtually can't get to the 50 million fairly affluent Koreans without going through the network of Korea Telecom (largest in landline,) SK Telecom (largest in wireless,) or LG. Economists call this a "terminating monopoly" and like all monopolies it can be used to extract more from customers.

The government has now proposed to charge what one source estimates as $0.026/gigabyte on the traffic they receive, reviving a "sender pays" system.  I can't find the primary sources, all of which are in Korean. Google translate works well if I could find a webpage or document. Help appreciated. A charge at that level is totally unrelated to costs, being several times higher than content delivery networks charge for a comparable service. Much of the impact will be on foreign companies, and the Korea regulations provide some benefits to local companies. From France and Germany to Korea and China, "tax the Americans" is a very popular cry.

Akamai data. Akamai's Q3 State of the Internet report shows average connection speeds in Kenya rose more than three times in the past year. Akamai delivers more traffic, more places, than any other content delivery network. They have data on 144 countries, generally with a statistically valid sample. The reported 11 Mbps in Kenya is higher than the 9.7 Mbps in the United Kingdom. 

Having listened to Safaricom CTO Thibaud Rerolle describe his network, I'm not surprised Kenya is doing well. However, the Akamai figures have important limits. To begin with, most of Kenya's connections are on mobile, but Akamai's figures are (mostly) based on landlines. They only include IPv4 data when an increasing share of the traffic is IPv6. Akamai's average connection speeds are much lower than other measures. Most speed tests are based on large files; Akamai is looking at much smaller files, such as the 100 html requests seen on many web pages. I'm unsure how to work with the different figures; pointers to reliable data on the various measurements very welcome.

"Year over year, on a global basis, the average connection speed increased 21%.

With Trump's "extreme vetting" extending to Pakistan and others, nearly all U.S. institutions with a global reach will be cut off from some members. Internet Society Board Member Walid Al-Saqaf, from Yemen, can't attend the IETF meeting next month in Chicago. Board Member Alice Munyua from Kenya may also have to skip the event. "There is a high threat from terrorism in Kenya," the British government reports. Kenyans likely will require extreme vetting. ICANN board member Kaveh Ranjbar, born in Iran, has also been appointed to the IETF Administrative Oversight Committee. Update: Keveh posted that he has been blocked from attending an ICANN Board event in Los Angeles despite having a current U.S. visa and a Dutch passport. Update 2 Jari Arkko, IETF Chair, just blogged that the IETF is reviewing plans for future meetings in the United States. Below

From now on, people from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and others will face, per Trump, "Extreme vetting. It’s going to be very hard to come in. You’re going to see. You’re going to see. We’re going to have extreme vetting in all cases. And I mean extreme. And we’re not letting people in if we think there’s even a little chance of some problem.” Anyone from Syria, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan are blocked. New reports suggest the extreme vetting will apply to anyone with ties to countries with what he calls a terrorism problem. Egypt, Nigeria, and Mali face active insurgencies resulting in many casualties. So does India, both in Kashmir and West Bengal.  Update: Jari Arkko of IETF blogged, "We are already reviewing what to do as far as location for the next open North American meeting slot."

IETF has a "mandatory" requirement to include in site selection whether "Travel barriers to entry, e.g. visa requirements that can limit participation, are acceptable."

In 2009, the NY Times reported, "A gathering of academics poured cold water on the idea that the new stimulus plan will create lots of jobs." Saul Hansell's sources were several of the most quoted economists in the field, including Scott Wallstein, who went on to be the chief economist of the Broadband Plan. (Saul, a friend, is probably the best mainstream reporter about the Internet in the last ten years. Dean Baquet should reach out to Saul and try to bring him back. John Markoff just retired; they need a few stars.) I wish broadband did wonders for jobs and the economy; the evidence says it doesn't

In 2017, The Washington Post printed, "For every billion dollars in spending, 13,000 jobs lasting at least a year would be created," based on some claims by Democratic Senators. They added, "Economists generally believe that improving infrastructure would increase productivity and economic activity." The "13,000 jobs figure" is almost certainly rubbish; Shane Greenstein, now at Harvard, ripped into similar claims made at the beginning of the Broadband Stimulus. We all know about politicians and truth; the Post should have found at least one non-DC source before printing that. I'm sure if I looked I could find similar in the Times as well.

"Economists generally believe ..." is offbase, at least in broadband.

The quiet man at the FCC engineering office is one of the best. Howard Buskirk says Julie is leaving, a major blow. He survives the politics at the FCC by keeping a low profile, but every engineer who goes through Washington knows him well. He can go one on one with top CTOs or Professors and earn their respect. He's one of the few in the industry with a broad enough knowledge to look years ahead. 

Will universal service funding be obsolete in a few years because of the low latency LEO satellites? Is 5G millimeter wave going to be a competition killer? Was wireless ready to displace DSL and cable, as some people told the broadband plan? Ask Julie and you get a well-informed answer, including an "I don't know if he doesn't."

At the FCC, on important decisions, The Eight Floor - the Commissioners - are said to ignore everyone else, especially the technical staff. Every other regulator I know - France, England, China - make sure at least one of the decision makers has enough of a technical background to point out to the others when the usual influence peddlers are lying. (In D.C., they are almost all lawyers including many former politicians. Many are very good at persuasion. With salaries up to $16M (David Cohen, Comcast,) you get some of the best. Some of them - Tom Tauke, David Young - are skilled enough to make their points without abusing the truth. Most don't care, as long as they aren't caught.

There are two open seats, one Democrat and one Republican. (I've never talked politics with Julie so I don't know which he is.) Ajit Pai would be proving he deserves the job if he offered one of them to Julie to keep him in the building.

The new men and the issues they should face. I know several. They are smart, dedicated, and believe in what they are doing. They are hardline against regulation and have often supported the telcos against the FCC. It’s likely Trump era policies will echo Bush II. Bush’s first FCC Chairman, Mike Powell, was close to Eisenach’s PFF.  I hope they focus on government waste, such as the $100 scandal at RUS that’s been covered up or how much of USF/CAF is pure giveaway. (about half, based on what the telco CEOs are telling Wall Street.)

Ajit Pai looks to take over the FCC. He has a brilliant legal mind but needs a deeper knowledge of the facts on the ground and technology. (If I wasn't on deadline, I'd find and include half a dozen examples. See Neutrality and investment below.)

He has a plan to extend broadband that needs to be informed by how much has been wasted in government programs to do so. He's very well informed about the D.C. discussion, but needs to know more to recognize lobbyist lies.

"The broader benefits of higher growth, more jobs, and better services have fallen short." Deepak Mishra and a team of a dozen at the World Bank early in 2016 burst the myth that the Internet would produce significant economic growth. It's not in the data, as anyone who looked closely would have seen since at least 2009. Anyone with common sense can see that growth has fallen most places despite a remarkable increase in Internet users. Take a look at the productivity chart at the left. It plummets after 2005, as the worldwide Internet growth accelerated. Just one example: India, one of the fastest growing economies, has lagged far behind in Internet use until the last year or two. 

So many of us want to believe the Internet, which we love, would solve many economic problems. So would I; I've earned my living since 1999 reporting the Internet. It hasn't worked. Those who have looked with an objective eye at the actual results have known since about 2005 that the economic impact was often so small studies couldn't find it. In Washington in 2009, an important Columbia University event in DC made mincemeat of the economic claims based on U.S. data. The World Bank reports that's also true in the developing world.

Most Americans and Europeans will support "Terrorist" censorship. The U.S. giants are under pressure from Germany's Chancellor Merkel and soon probably President Trump to effectively censor the net. They've come together to create a database of hashtags that can reliably detect repostings in today's systems. They can be worked around with a little work, but many posters are too lazy to do so or don't have the expertise. Details in the Facebook post below.

Hillary Clinton is an example of the many "liberals" who have joined "conservatives" calling for limits on speech for those labeled "terrorists." Unfortunately, no one can agree on who is a "terrorist." The Turkish government labels some Kurdish groups "terrorists" while the United States sends arms to their close allies in Syria and Iraq. The term has become almost meaningless. The U.S. free speech standard - that almost everything is protected except an immediate call to violence - seems better to me. ("Clear and present danger.") 

I doubt more than 10% of people in Europe and the United States are near-absolutist in a free speech debate. One reason I do is I have a clear perception of the slippery slope.

Jeff Eisenach, Trump’s comms guy, is a first-rate economist. He holds very strong “free market,” “deregulatory” opinions, presumably a requirement for Trump. Many, including the Times, suggest he is inspired by the money he has taken from telcos. I disagree; he has held similar positions for decades and has long been a political activist. "Jeff Eisenach is certainly as smart and wonky as they come," Harold Feld wrote.

Eisenach's PFF colleagues, Scott Wallsten and Ray Gifford, would be better choices for FCC Chair than Jeff or either of the Republican Commissioners. Trump has enough battles to fight without having combat at the FCC. Eisenach presents such certainty in his positions he will be a lightning rod for criticism. Commissioners Pai and O’Rielly, along with Democrat Wheeler, are part of what they agree is the most contentious FCC in many years; the job calls for a diplomat, especially today. Pai is a very skilled lawyer, often making cogent arguments on difficult issues of law. 

Unfortunately, both Pai and O'Rielly concentrate too much on legal theory while neglecting what's going on in the industry.

NTIA head Larry Strickling, the U.S. guy in charge, explained the problem to me, "Dave, do you want Russia and China to run the Internet?" The world majority didn't want the U.S. running things. Strickling's plan was to reduce the criticism by handing off to a group that nearly always takes the same position as the U.S.Before I get too many flames, let me say I support the ICANN transition. I titled my writeup Ted Cruz is a bleeping idiot,Unfortunately, both sides treated this like a political campaign. We all know about politicians and truth.

The battle over ICANN was a symbolic fight between the Global North (led by the U.S.) and the Global South (BRICS and more.) The "problem" the ICANN transition is meant to solve is the demand by the majority of countries in the world to have a representative say in decisions about the Internet.

The Global South generally believes the system is rigged to protect things like high transit prices and unreasonable patent royalties. Many of their issues are on target, although ICANN itself has almost nothing to do with them. Despite the irrelevance, both sides choose ICANN and the ITU as the battleground.

Dominated by U.S and Europe. Don't flame me; I supported the ICANN transition.  I also am aware of the limitations of ICANN that are generally ignored. In particular, some who know better called this a victory of the global Internet community. 

It always was a symbolic battle. Steve Crocker is Chair of ICANN as well as an outstanding engineer throughout Internet history. 

 "While today is an absolutely historic day for ICANN and for the success of the multi-stakeholder approach toward governance of an important portion of the Internet ecosystem, from the perspective of the Internet user community, today is a day like any other.  The transition of the stewardship of the IANA process from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to multi-stakeholder oversight of ICANN, has had and will have no impact on the orderly operation of the Internet.  Packets will continue to flow and new services will continue to be invented.  (And, of course, the multiple forms of abuse, conflict and controversy over content and other matters will also continue as before.)

Thousands of man hours and very large numbers of emails, documents and meetings tallied up between NTIA’s announcement 2-1/2 years ago on 14 March 2014 and the big event last night.  And what was the big event?  The quiet completion of the contract between NTIA and ICANN which was really vestigial in nature.  ICANN now has stronger accountability mechanisms, and the paperwork documenting the interactions with the operational communities is now more direct and does not involve the U.S. government, but otherwise it’s business as usual."

I support the IANA transition but the proponents also stretch the truth. Nothing important will change no matter how this resolves, because ICANN has little real power. ICANN, a once obscure agency, maintains the Directory Name Service, DNS. If Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump takes over ICANN, they couldn't effectively use it to censor. The Internet is a network of networks. The "infrastructure of the Internet" is actually controlled by AT&T, France Telecom/Orange, MTN South Africa, Russia's Sistema and the other carriers and backhaul systems. The DNS is just one possible way for those networks to communicate. If ICANN becomes a problem, those companies can and would move to another system.

Andrew Sullivan, Chairman of the Internet Architecture Board, notes, "Other name systems have been invented and deployed, and they don't depend on a root zone. Also, even if we keep using DNS, nobody can force you to use the same root zone. ... If the IANA system ceases to be useful (or starts to be too politically controversial), then people will choose something else. And there is no central point where people could be forced to use the IANA system because there is no center in a network of networks. That is also the reason why nobody -- not China, not Russia and not the bogeyman in the basement -- can 'take over' the internet." 

Ted Cruz is a bleeping idiot thinking ICANN could be dominated by the Russians or Chinese. ICANN's Chair is Steve Crocker, who has worked alongside Vint and others to build the Internet since earliest days. Also on the board are George Sadowsky, who had a distinguished career with the U.S. government; Marcus Kummer, who served the Swiss government and then was ISOC's policy lead; Thomas Schneider, currently of the Swiss government; Ron de Silva, of Time Warner Cable in the U.S.; Jonne Soininen of Nokia; and a half dozen others with generally concurring views.

25 Societies fight increased staff power. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers does extraordinary work, from broadcasting the world's best 5G Conference to setting the standards for Wi-Fi and so much else. The IEEE Communications Society publications are by far the most prestigious in the field. Their oral histories can be fascinating. The work on making royalties reasonable benefits all of us but the poor most of all. It's long been a member-driven organization, with volunteers staffing the editorial boards and many other positions in the organization. So when the below note from UCLA Professor Ali Sayed came across the IP list, I did some basic research.

There are obviously some issues not apparent in the public statements, so I'd welcome private comments from readers. Putting the Executive Director on the Board would seem a minor change, although that's been cast as a symbol. More important is consolidating power in the existing board, apparently close to the senior staff. The new election model is likely to reduce the powers of the regions. That's the wrong move as the majority of the Internet is now in the developing world. The reasons presented are vague notions of efficiency, not concrete improvements in what IEEE does.

I do not know enough about the issues to have an opinion on the merits. But the opposition of 25 IEEE societies suggests a breakdown in governance that would be best addressed by pulling back the changes.

Put here until I catch up, especially because the stories finished are mostly U.S. That will change. See also the satire on gnoblog.org.

Yes, Germany's vectoring plan is about a Deutsche Telekom monopoly. Smart pricing could protect consumers.

Massive MIMO and spectrum policy to make sure Africa's and India's wireless broadband doesn't suck

ITU Study Group takeover of IoT standards could break the U.S.-EU-CJK control.

China Mobile - With 500M LTE subs, it's going to be our rules.

and more.

Larry Strickling's great accomplishment was to hand the DNS to our chosen people at ICANN, but the Trump platform says it’s going to the Chinese and Russian governments, After Snowden, there was no way the rest of the world was going to accept the current U.S. (symbolic) control of the Internet. Larry's brilliant plan was to convince people that ICANN, controlled by Americans and a few Europeans, was "independent" and represented a "multi-stakeholder" equivalent to democracy. 

Anyone not blind can look at the board of ICANN pictured and below and see they aren't Russian and Chinese bureaucrats. Several have been employed by the U.S. and Swiss governments and others by U.S. companies. The handful from other parts of the world generally have strong financial ties to the U.S. and Europe. A third of the Internet is Chinese but no one from China is here. The Trump platform on this is hogwash. 

"Protecting Internet Freedom The survival of the internet as we know it is at risk. Its gravest peril originates in the White House, the current occupant of which has launched a campaign, both at home and internationally, to subjugate it to agents of government.

Tony Romm identifies 11 telecom folks working with Clinton. Alec Ross, Ben Scott, Jennifer Pahlka, Bruce Gottlieb, Rebecca Arbogast, Kevin Werbach, Phil Weiser and Tom Power are working with the campaign. I know almost all of them; they are intelligent, experienced and hardworking insiders. They are center-left as measured in D.C., which is to the right of the Conservative Party in England. None are likely to make large changes. Blair Levin in the article projects, "When it comes to telecom, a Clinton presidency would be like 'a third Obama term.' He's correct in that none of these people are radicals; I'm sure most would consider themselves "pragmatic." I hope it's not like the first Obama term, when the Bells walked all over Genachowski.  

I met Susan Ness in 1999 when as an FCC Commissioner she raised important questions about backbone competition in the Sprint-MCI deal. She worked with Hilary when both were out of office.

Congressional committee demands ISPs censor criticism of politicians. "We need to kill this now," demanded a leading Brazilian Internet Rights activist. "Censorship Never!" proclaimed ITS Rio. There is an emergency session Friday at RightsCon in San Jose. I'm working from early translations by activists since this hasn't been reported in English. The report is 200 pages in Portuguese. I Google translated substantial sections, including part of the index at the end here.   

If you criticize a politician and she complains, the ISP/Internet service must remove all the material without any requirement for review. The original refers to "honor,"

No change? CTIA, the front group for the wireless carriers, wants us to believe no action on privacy is needed. Like the silver tongues they are, they speak indirectly. They suggest continuing the existing rules, which, "Successfully protected consumers throughout the Internet services market."  They want us to believe the big telcos, "Remain committed to robust privacy protection for their customers, which is why they proactively implemented strong data privacy and security programs." 

I believe most of you have already made up their mind on whether privacy protections are adequate.

Cisco just published the new Visual Network Index, the world's most accurate study of the wireless Internet.

The most important finding is that wireless growth is slowing down significantly. 37% growth/year is still significant but a heck of a lot less than the 100% we saw when people were first getting iPhones. Fortunately, wireless technology can increase capacity even faster even faster than 37. Carrier aggregation, MIMO, SON, advanced sharing and other new tools promise a 10-25X improvement in a few years. More. 

The second crucial point was that future wireless growth is unlikely to have a major impact on the economy. Nearly all the growth is in video or audio with a projection tv and music will be 83% of the traffic in a few years.

"Up to" claims generally False Advertising. Connecticut-based Frontier must, "reduce its monthly rate for affected customers to $9.99 – a savings of $10 to $20 per month. The reduced rate will remain in effect until the mandated improvements allow Frontier to increase existing download speeds provisioned at 1.5 Mbps or lower to at least 6 Mbps." In addition, Frontier must spend $150M more than planned on upgrades. The cost of their settlement is over $6.000 for each of 28,000 homes affected. 

West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey achieved something neither Britain's OFCOM, Germany's BNetzA or the U.S. FCC or FTC have ever achieved. Since the frist consumer broadband lines were installed around 1999, telcos have knowingly misled customers on both speed and pricing.

Ed Snowden put his life on the line to prove all larger Western countries were massively spying on their own people. Dozens of top people, including AT&T CEOs Randall Stephenson and Ed Whitacre, could have been sent to jail. The reaction in the U.S., France and England was to change the laws to allow almost all of the spying to continue. Barack Obama as a Senator and when campaigning wanted the laws enforced. As President, he decided to go along with the security agencies.

The latest battleground is encryption. The security forces want to make sure no encryption can lock them out. With 75%+ of the population scared enough to give security anything they ask, basic privacy protections are disappearing. Those who think the government shouldn't be able to spy on everything we do on the Internet have a tough battle.

200 organizations have now signed An open letter to the leaders of the world to hold back this tide. They include the market-oriented TechFreedom group, which rarely sides with progressives. As Kevin Martin said to me, "Some issues are not Republican or Democrat, left or right.

Drahi tells Wall Street he'd drastically cut employees and capex. New York City's counsel Maya Wiley finds, "a number of important concerns" in an interview with Shalini Ramachandran Wiley adds, "Altice is talking about $900 million in synergies. Well, what's getting cut? How's that going to impact the economy of New York and quality of services? We certainly are not afraid to disapprove a transaction." 

Last month, I wrote, "Craig Moffett may have just killed the Altice-Cablevision Deal." Craig wrote a devastating report that ripped into Altice's finances. New York City will judge whether the deal is good for 1) jobs, 2) service levels, 3) prices, and 4) future investment in the network. My analysis is they fail all four.   

The $900 million has to come out of an operating budget of $2.6 billion, almost certain to reduce service levels. It includes firing 900 people and cutting 25% from capex. They are paying $6,000/subscriber, requiring a profit of $40/month just to pay off the financing for the purchase. Cablevision's net income over the last three years has been about $30/month. Their bonds are hard to sell. Altice could be facing bankruptcy if they don't get large price increases. Cablevision is already highly leveraged, with $10B in debt, about $6,000/customer.

500,000 have already signed up in the most successful program in the U.S. In Philadelphia, Comcast has agreed to extend the program to low-income individuals and seniors, "Internet Essentials" now delivers 10 megabit service, enough for an HD channel and plenty of surfing. They've simplified the application form, reduced red tape and have fewer restrictions. 

In August of 2014, while Comcast was looking for approval of the Time Warner deal, I spoke with David Cohen of Comcast about the program. "We're going to expand it to senior citizens and others, not just families with schoolkids." Many thought this was just hollow pr to look good in D.C., but talking to Cohen made it clear this was a passion project for him. He's now expanding the program significantly despite losing the merger fight. 

Bob Fernandez, in a thoughtful article, quotes Deb Socia of Next Century Cities. "This will be what people look at when they are organizing their franchise-renewal agreements in the future.

If done right, maybe almost OK. If effectively gives preference, Legere deserves a jail term. T-Mobile says it's allowing any video provider to stream to (some) T-Mobile customers for free. The customer gets the stream without being charged for the data. They claim:

Open to Everyone, No One Pays

With Binge On, our doors are open to all streaming providers who want to participate.  We’ve proven our track record with Music Freedom. No one pays us, and we don’t pay them - and everyone wins – especially customers.  We’re not here to play favorites. Like Music Freedom, Binge On is open to any legit streaming service (with lawful content) out there – at absolutely no cost to them. They just need to contact us and work with us on the technical requirements, optimization for mobile viewing and confirm we can consistently identify their incoming music or video streams.

(A first sketch)The short range of high frequencies means you need slews of cell sites and massive backhaul. (Think every lamppost.) In most places only the incumbents have enough backhaul capacity. If we go widely for high frequencies, we will need to take drastic steps to maintain competition. More and more, it's looking like telecom is again tending toward monopoly. On the other hand, regulation has many problems. No easy answers here.

Certainly, mmWave is right for some places. The thousands of MHz little used in millimeter can deliver literally tens of gigabits of data. Ted Rappaport at NYU and now the telecom giants agree. As Ted says, "It will work!!!."