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!!!."

Dolan is probably more interested in his basketball team than cableThis may just my wishful thinking, but Moffett's analysis of the finances should be devastating. I'm not objective on this one because I want a great Internet for everyone in my own city. The deal is risky at best, not appropriate for an important public utility. I’ve come to a similar conclusion, calculating the investment won’t pay off unless Cablevision, with Verizon collaboration, significantly raises the price of broadband. This is directly counter to the policy goal of getting more people connected as well as unjustified by the real costs of delivering the service. U.S. prices are a third or more above prices in Europe, including Altice’s own Numericable. Craig has enormous influence, extreme originality and even a sense of humor. He wins polls as the best on wall street and is followed by nearly all major investors.

Craig reports New York City will "weigh whether the deal will be good for New Yorkers along four different dimensions: 1) jobs, 2) service levels, 3) prices, and 4) future investment in the network."

Vint Cerf, Dave Farber and Dave Täht present to the FCC a plan for more secure, reliable WiFi Routers and Internet. Cerf urges "a bare minimum of openness in the technology at the edge of the Internet. He believes this would "ensure that any mistakes or cheating are caught early and fixed fast.” 

260 engineers joined the call including prominent ones like Linus Torvalds, Bruce Schneier, David Reed and Paul Vixie. The vendor would be required to post their software on a public repository such as Github. They would be required to fix any security holes and provide updates as security problems are discovered. In particular, the FCC rules should:

Milo Medin, Matthias Kurth, Robert Pepper, Craig Moffett and other true experts. (Those links take you to comments about who these guys are and what good questions to ask them.) Eli Noam, world-leading public intellectual, and partner Robert Atkinson's annual State of Telecom will be followed the next day by a remarkable conference on Media Concentration. Events like Columbia's become even more important as the lobbyists control almost all the D.C. events. (Five of the first six speakers at the U.S. IGF planning meeting were current or former lobbyists, most from giant multinationals.)

The free Livestream is at http://livestream.com/internetsociety/citisot2015. Thanks to Joly McFie and the Internet Society for the stream. Tickets to the live event oost from $25-$150. I'm sure no one will be turned away because of inability to pay.

Tuesday the 20th will be a remarkable event with Eli bringing together more than two dozen scholars from around the world to discuss media concentration.

Totally unproven, very dangerous but common idea. Hillary Clinton believed the Internet could inspire "regime change" and the U.S. State Department spent millions supporting dissidents in Egypt, Iran and China. Angela Merkel has personally demanded Facebook heavily censor anti-immigrant comments in Germany. Now the New York Times reports "Israeli and Palestinian security services had arrested hundreds of online instigators in recent months," but "it had done little good because 'ideas are becoming immortal — you can take down pages but it will multiply itself.'" http://bit.ly/NoFaceb 

It's too easy to blame the Internet and the above is probably overstated. There were few Internet connections in Palestine during the First and Second Intifadas but thousands chose to risk their life. It's certainly true the Internet makes everything easier, from arranging a bowling date to fomenting a revolution. Lenin needed couriers at great risk to smuggle his papers into pre revolutionary Russia. 

There are no easy answers here.

My comments to U.S. State Department ITAC group. One of the issues at the ITU is whether the cost of peering/transit should be part of the discussion on affordability of access. Africans tell me this is perhaps the largest single impediment to bringing down the cost of the Internet in Africa. Backhaul is 10x the cost in Europe or the U.S., only a small part of which is due to the cost of undersea cables. I infer a (weak) cartel and strongly urge the ITU to produce the data to convince anyone objective something should be done.

Some people are trying to exclude this from the development agenda. They come from countries with companies that benefit from high transit prices. (Surprise.) By accident, I'm on the U.S. State Department International Telecommunications Advisory Committee and wrote this. By my choice, I do not report what anyone else says at that committee. This is my opinion.  

On Peering

Carlos Slim at the Broadband Commission told me $50 mobile phone prices will allow two billion more people to connect, a goal i know we all share. Since then, I've looked closely at the actual cost factors delivering Internet to the poor in emerging nations. I also discussed it with numerous people at ITU Busan. (Article below) Peering/transit costs appear the largest single international issue in affordability in Africa especially, as I report below. According to an African at the Busan Plenipot, the saving from reducing peering/transit costs is 5-10x anything likely from IXPs. Several Africans saw peering/transit costs as a key issue and welcome ITU involvement.  

It is extremely disrespectful for the U.S. to oppose the Africans getting the actual data on peering/transit, especially since U.S. companies are profiting. 

Almost certainly not real. New York is almost certainly a highly profitable telco franchise but for a decade Verizon has been reporting major losses. If they can't make money from the massive business base and general affluence in New York, they must be losing almost everywhere. The network would benearly valueless and the stock wildly overpriced. Lowell McAdam's $15-20M annual earnings would be completely absurd. 

Verizon actually has been one of the most profitable companies on Earth, throwing off $10's of billions of cash in recent years. Bruce Kushnick reports

AT&T puts universal service repeal in state budget. Buy or build a new home in about 25% of the state of Ohio (by area) and your only way to make a phone call or connect to the Internet will be satellite, which sucks. That will reduce fsd

98% of the U.S. by population may well have a wireless signal but the remaining 1-2% of population is spread over 10-30% of the territory. No one has solid data except the phone companies. The 25% figure is an estimate from Ohio Consumer Counsel Gene Krebs.

AT&T & Verizon make more money on rural wireless than they do on landlines so plans to shut down > 10M lines as soon as practical. There's almost always spare capacity on rural wireless networks, typically lightly loaded.

97+% of the Internet is not available on Internet.org. Below, Jeremy Gillula and Jeremy Malcolm of EFF make the point strongly. It is better regarded as a private network dominated by Facebook. The most horrifying thing is Facebook is not paying for it; instead they blackmail telcos in poor countries to give it to them for free.

They threaten to direct their millions of users in many countries to the ISP's competitor, say Bharti versus Reliance. That's a classic use of market power, the kind of behavior condemned by economists and prohibited by the principles of antitrust law. Danny Sepulveda at the State Department should step in and demand Facebook not continue to harm the reputation of U.S. corporations. 

The EFF does exceptional work and deserves support from all of us.

MAY 18, 2015 

6 minutes might transform the discussion on LTE-U/LAA & WiFi spectrum. Larry Strickling of NTIA "prefers the model of the Internet Engineering Task Force... we always prefer a model that invites more participation rather than less. ...  I think you’re making a good point. If Obama had a third term, I think I’d be able to work on it. " Everyone laughed, but he had made his point. (full quote below) Larry is the U.S. lead on Internet issues like the ICANN contract and made a strong speech favoring multi-stakeholder and community processes. Vint Cerf and Laura DeNardis added strong endorsements of participatory processes.

At the end - 132:30 or so in the video - I asked them about whether 3GPP/ATIS should also have open participation, especially around the issues of LTE-U/LAA and Wi-Fi spectrum. These are far bigger Internet policy issues than anything ICANN is likely to do. At about 137: Larry addressed the issue, including mentioning he didn't know the details of 3GPP. Vint spoke about how important it is to apply multistakeholder processes to technical discussions that relate to policy. 

A moment later, Laura DeNardis spoke up. "I’d like to also respond to the issue of Open Standards. I am extremely passionate about this. If one believes that the process for setting the technical rules for the Internet is also a public policy issue, then having openness in that procedure is of vital importance.

Would-be rulers of Africa and IndiaFollow the money, which is flowing from poor countries to the U.S. giant  Facebook is putting up no money for the free traffic, Instead, Zuckerberg is demanding ISPs in poor countries subsidize Facebook. The companies have little choice but to give in before a competitor does. Facebook has hundreds of millions of users without broadband. Facebook will market aggressively the local carrier who agrees to subsidize Facebook. Even with Facebook's changes to allow more into the program they are excluding 95+% of Internet sites. The carriers are given "an offer they [almost] can't refuse." Their people are younger than Marlon Brando was but in general are less subtle.

Put another way, Internet.org does not offer even 5% of the Internet, is not a non-profit organization and extracts money from poor countries to benefit wealthy Americans. Take a look at Zuck and his multi-millionaire colleagues in the picture. 

This is far more than an issue of "net neutrality," "zero rating" or false advertising. Facebook & Google/YouTube have enormous scale and a big cost advantage. This is a huge obstacle to competition developing, especially outside the major developed countries. I originally believed Facebook was buying control of the web throughout the world, something pretty ugly. I didn't expect to discover it was "buying" nothing. Instead, Zuck's minions threaten dire consequences for telcos who won't give Facebook  preference. 

The misinformation is massive. Until the recent changes, 99% of Internet sites was not accessible via "Internet.org." The much heralded move toward openness will leave at least 95% of Internet sites unavailable. Ignore the pr and read the rules about joining at https://internet.org/platform, especially the technical requirements. I'd be very surprised if even 5% of websites will ever qualify. In particular, no African, Brazilian or any other serious competitor to Facebook will be allowed. They do that by blocking anything that uses voice or video, crucial parts of Facebook and subsidiaries. 

Prima facie case if industry comes together to block competition. The U.S. Supreme Court just made a powerful argument that standards bodies should be open and multistakeholder. They definitely can be sued. Over 15 years reporting on telecom standards, I've seen innumerable efforts in standards to favor some companies and exclude others. In one case, I believe a company forced out of business had a very strong case that could have resulted in nine figure damages. (Metalink) As the company ran out of funds, they decided they couldn't afford the legal fees on what would have been a long drawn out case.

The "smoking gun" memo, signed by 11 international telcos, made clear to anyone with common sense they were trying to use LTE-U/LAA to hobble completion and free WiFi offloading. China Mobile, China Telecom, AT&T, CHTTL, KT, China Unicom, T-Mobile USA, Sprint, Telefonica, France Telecom/Orange and Telecom Italia in their candor invited an antitrust prosecution. There are enough wealthy companies interested in Wi-Fi legal fees should be easy to raise. 

The smart move for ATIS and 3GPP is to open their groups to public participation. 

Completely correct only for three states.  Verizon & AT&T have decided to shut down at least 20M landlines between them, going wireless only, as I've reported several times. The evidence is in many state filings and financial reports. I believe the Florida Power & Light FCC filing in the title, while accurately quoted. was only meant to apply to the three FP&L states. In other states, my opinion is they will keep most but not all FiOS lines while dumping 10M lines of copper.  

"All the evidence shows that Verizon has been abandoning its efforts to build out wireline broadband. Verizon, in fact, has made clear it intends to be out of the wireline business within the next ten years, conveying this clear intent to regulated utilities in negotiations over joint use issues and explaining that Verizon no longer wants to be a pole owner. ... Publicly available evidence abounds. ... Verizon is obviously no longer interested in the wireline broadband business and sees its financial future in the wireless industry." 

FP & L's attorneys have written to me with the "three state" update. I'm pretty sure that Verizon intends to continue offering FiOS to 15M+ homes in it's traditional Northeast region. It's a good and profitable business, beating cable in some territories despite extremely high pricing. Verizon and AT&T have been coy on the subject. As far as I know, neither has ever gone on the record with how many lines they intend to scrap in favor of wireless.

A 5% compulsory license. From Africa and from Asia, I've heard many calls to keep royalties fair. Corporate giants like Cisco and Intel, who collect relatively few royalties, quietly agree. Royalties paid in poor nations overwhelmingly flow to rich countries, not a good result. If those royalties are high, so much the worse. 

See Fairness for Africa: Cheaper Transit, Reasonable Royalties, Fair Taxes

America has been the strongest supporter of high royalties, partly because of a patent system unprepared for goods like cellphones with literally hundreds of claims. That is starting to change, as Chinese companies, particularly Huawei, are now filing more patents than the U.S. giants. The U.S. share of patents is about 25% and falling. We will soon have a negative balance on patent accounts. 

Carlos Slim of Telmex tells me that $50 smartphones will result in two billion more people connected. But $50 smartphones are impossible with the level of royalties demanded by powerful companies. 

(Satire) Company CFO's haven't confirmed. Adtran's Tom Stanton saw his stock go down -0.73% today while the market went up +1.47%. Scott Belcher, Tom's handpicked TIA chief, issued a press release predicting "a slowdown in capital investment," after the U.S. Net Neutrality order. Stanton is more vulnerable to a U.S. slowdown than any other large telecom vendor because over 60% of his sales are in the U.S. Adtran has done a remarkable job winning a large vectored VDSL contract in Germany in a fierce competition with Alcatel. To grow in Europe, they've had to accept much lower margins than in the U.S., making any U.S. cutback even more painful. 

    The U.S. is also a crucial market for wireless suppliers Alcatel & Ericsson. Both Verizon and AT&T have covered over 90% of the U.S. with LTE and are slowing down. Any further cutbacks would be particularly painful. Ericsson has just announced 2,000 layoffs and I've lost track of how many people Alcatel has let go.  Alcatel and Ericsson are being propped up by a cartel arranged by the EU and China. Each is given about 10% of the Chinese market and Huawei is no longer bidding as aggressively for European contracts. The EU had to threaten huge tariffs to protect these "national champions."

Both Republicans and Democrats support more spectrum. "Some issues are neither Republican nor Democrat" then FCC Chair Kevin Martin once said to me. More spectrum for everyone - unlicensed or lightly licensed - is proving popular for both. Republicans Latta, Guthrie and Rubio joined liberal Democrats asking the FCC to move this forward. 

2.4 GHz WiFi is already often crowded and 5 GHz is starting to fill up. An ISP engineer implementing WiFi gateways tells me his company already has to bring down energy levels in apartment buildings or performance suffers. The telcos are trying to steal a big hunk of WiFi spectrum for their own (very expensive) networks. 

The FCC has a powerful incentive to stop LTE-U, beyond the obvious harnm to WiFi. Giving the free spectrum to telcos lowers their incentive to bid in the 600 MHz spectrum auction, soon come. The FCC is promising a great deal of money to the treasury from that auction. A failure would be a major political problem. 

Brian Hinman of Mimosa, an old friend, has led the drive to open a massive 500 MHz of the 10 GHz band now used for amateur radio. That would almost double the total WiFi spectrum. Much more including comments from both sides and my comment that Mimosa's 4x4 MIMO radios are shipping and may be a price/performance breakthrough.  

This is an important breaking story. I'm posting here all primary documents I can find as well as any responses from the companies. I hope this is helpful to reporters and others looking for information. Some of these articles contradict others, often because there is no consensus. The spin on this in Barcelona is extreme. My opinions at http://5gwnews.com/90-r/149-verizon-ericsson-want-wifi-spectrum-for-ltehttp://5gwnews.com/90-r/170-qualcomm-makes-the-rules-for-qualcomm-lte-wifi and more shortly to come. (LAA, also called LTE-U, is a proposal tp use some WiFi unlicensed spectrum for telephone company LTE..) 

He said we must "find some international protocols." Actual international cooperation on security would the overrule years-long State Department effort to keep governments away from Internet governance and especially security. It makes sense to cooperate. Internet security issues cross borders and the U.S. has just learned the hard way they cannot be resolved without international cooperation. Obama's words are clear but I wouldn't be surprised if his administration doesn't follow through as I perceive it. Politicians do that.

Until now, the imperative of U.S. Internet policy has been the imperative to keep governments far away from net security. Everyone understands why. The 14 U.S. WCIT delegates from agencies like the NSA were not there to protect free speech.

Barack had the guts to be publicly interviewed by Kara Swisher, the toughest reporter in technology. His comment, 

"What we're going to need to do is to find some international protocols that, in the same way we did with nuclear arms, set some clear limits and guidelines, understanding that everybody's vulnerable and everybody's better off if we abide by certain behaviors." — President Barack Obama