More than half of this is taking place in Asia. Over the last two years close to 300 mobile operators in 120 countries have launched mobile broadband networks (using the 3G HSPA technology) and some 70 of these are already planning the next upgrade of their networks using the LTE technology—the first $5 billion of investment money has been committed to that technology.

The two countries that are ahead of the pack in this are—where else but in Scandinavia?—Sweden and Norway.

Japan and Korea are also moving in this direction but they are using different technologies.

Within that same short time period over 200 million subscribers have embraced mobile broadband and, as reported previously, this has caught many mobile operators unprepared. They were still peddling their mobile portals while the apps available on smart phones almost instantly overtook a market that the mobile operators had been trying to build up for ten years.

Because of the success of this market mobile operators are now scrambling to keep up with an enormous demand for mobile broadband access. They are eager to get at least their share of the access market and competition is driving them to charge ever less for simple broadband access. As a result of this the margins available for mobile operators are being squeezed more and more.

Does that mean that mobile operators will be relegated to becoming pipe suppliers? Not necessarily. They have a number of very powerful tools that they can use. They know mobile customers better than anybody else and they are able to provide a very reliable and secure service—so much so that banks are using their networks to deliver financial services. This has built a powerful trust relationship between operators and some very key service providers. The mobile operators are the only ones who have a very secure identity management service on their networks that can be used by these financial institutions, and (if the mobile operators permit) by others also.

Furthermore, mobile networks are excellent for mobility applications such as GIS, location-based navigation, etc. Again, the mobile operators are currently the only ones who have access to this user information.

It then comes down to whether the mobile operators will be able this time around to also develop business plans that are going to make it attractive for other providers to utilise the network. This will require open networks, wholesale, MVNOs, etc. The question is will they indeed this time around do change their business models, or will they again wait for others to eat their lunch.

Mobile operators and their supporters all talk about a range of essential services such healthcare, education, public safety and so on. Lessons learned from the past will hopefully encourage operators to open up their networks to these public sectors. It is not too difficult to predict that, if this does not happen and consumers want to make more use of mobile broadband infrastructure for such services, regulation will be used to force the operators to open up to these new social and economic opportunities.

What might change their attitude this time is the fact that they now nearly all operate in saturated markets. There are very few new users that can be connected—certainly in the developed markets. So today there is certainly more urgency among the mobile operators to change their business models to cater for the new opportunities. Also, it will only be a matter of time before OTT providers such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, eBay, Skype and others will have more sophisticated applications in competition with the mobile operators.

One of the main problems still being experienced by operators at the moment is a lack of sophisticated middleware that would allow them to deliver these new applications more efficiently and effectively. For instance, the many BSS/OSS systems within the mobile operators' organisations are making it very difficult to deliver real-time and on-demand services.

Who will win?

The judges are still out on this. There are the smart device operators like Apple, with their proprietary applications; companies like Google and Microsoft, with devices based on Operating System (OS) innovations; and the mobile operators, who recently formed an alliance to also develop their own apps stores. This broad level of competition will drive innovation and those who are able to deliver the best customer experience are going to be in the lead here.

Over the next few years the mobile market will pass the $1 trillion revenue mark. The stakes are high, the rewards are great, and the future looks very bright indeed. So may the best one win.

Written by Paul Budde, Managing Director of Paul Budde Communication

The context is the FCC's "National Broadband Plan". I guess the FCC wants to gather data about the kind of internet users receive today so that the National Broadband Plan, whatever it may turn out to be, actually improves on the status quo.

The motivation is nice but the FCC's methodology is technically weak.

There are several goals to which the National Broadband Plan ought to aspire:

• That consumers have a subjective sense that their use of the internet is fast and without unacceptable delays. I picked a subjective standard here for reasons to be discussed later in this note.
• That reliability of consumer access is high and that the time for providers to detect, diagnose, and repair problems is low (and not expensive to providers.) It seems that these matters of reliability are routinely ignored, yet they are of paramount concern, particularly as the internet becomes more and more a part our health and safety systems; it will be a sorry day if someone picks up their internet based VoIP phone to call 911 and the link (or some necessary ancillary service, such as DNS) is down for an extended repair.
• That consumers' have a real foundation to believe that their use of the net is private and not being used either to generate marketing data about them.

This note will address only the first of these goals.

The first thing that is wrong is that the FCC's tools are not well focused with regard to exactly what parts of the internet they are measuring. And second, the measurements that are taken are too vague to be of more than anecdotal value.

I've drawn up a simple diagram to illustrate.

This is a simplified diagram, it is intended to focus on that part of the net of concern to the National Broadband Plan. In particular it looks at the part of the net that represents the "internet" product sold by today's Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The arrows in this drawing are interfaces where these clouds join, they are not communications lines.

This diagram shows things as connected clouds because that more accurately represents the things that make up the way that user's connect to the internet. The basic parts of the diagram are these:

• User Network: Many users today, and probably nearly all users in the future, will have networks, often wireless, within their homes. The quality and traffic of those networks will have a substantial effect on consumer's perceptions of net quality (and ISPs will bear increasing non-reimbursed costs when their customers have troubles in his part of the net.) However, except with regard to the maintenance issue, the user's home network cloud ought to be considered neither as part of either the National Broadband Plan or of the FCC's Consumer Broadband Test.
• User Access Link and User's ISP Cloud: I have shown the provider ISP's path as two parts. First is the part that runs from the router of "modem" at the consumers home or office to the provider's first IP router. The second part is the provider's internal "backhaul", i.e. the IP network inside the provider. It is important to consider these two parts separately.
  • User Access Link: This is the part of that today's ISPs advertise to consumers; this is the part about which the claims of umpteen megabits/second download are made. In general the User Access Link is the IP "hop" between the user's home modem or router and the first IP router within the ISP. Often this "link" is composed of several communications technologies. For example what appears to the consumer to be an Asymmetrical DSL link (ADSL) might be composed in full or in part of ATM or other non-IP switching technologies that exhibit many of the congestive and impairment behaviors found in IP networks. There may be MPLS paths that simply do not show up in "traceroute". Moreover, the User Access Link may have an IP Maximum Transmission Unit size that is less than the 1500 bytes that is presumed by a considerable amount of end-user network applications and protocol stacks; that difference can have a substantial negative impact on some forms of network traffic (video) and almost none on others (VoIP). The User Access Link should not be considered as a private path that is not shared with other users' traffic.
  • User's ISP Cloud: This is that portion of the ISP that carries traffic to and from customers User Access Links. Some resources that are critical to user perception of network speed may be located here, most particularly domain name system (DNS) resolvers, web caches, email servers, and the like. For small ISPs the "ISP Cloud" might be as simple as a small Ethernet at the provider's facility; for larger ISPs the "ISP Cloud" might be an national or international network of substantial size and power.
• Internet: This is the vast landscape of the internet except for those content providers with which the ISP entered into special traffic exchange arrangements.
• Private Peering to large content providers: This is often where the largest of the large network traffic sources and sinks are to be found. This is the land of Google/YouTube and of content distribution networks. Content to/from users might be able to flow via the internet to those places but in order to provide faster access and to give the large content providers better control over the quality of their products both ISPs and large providers often prefer to create these kinds of special peering relationships. This is a game for big players; small ISPs and smaller content providers are often not able to play at these tables.

  (Please note that I am using the word "peering" in a way that may be different from its use in settlement-free peering between ISPs.)

The portions of interest to the FCC's National Broadband Plan are the part between "A" and "B" and between "A" and "C". These are shown inside the yellow box.

So what does all of this have to do with the National Broadband Plan in general and the FCC's Consumer Broadband test in particular?

First of all, we must recognize that a user's perception of network quality and speed is a complex function that involves the entire path between the user and the remote service.

Many protocol stacks and applications can degrade badly even if one seemingly small aspect changes. For example, the speed with which domain name system (DNS) queries are answered is often a major, or even the dominant, component of how quickly web pages are fetched and rendered. Indeed with the increasing number of "analytics" web bugs and links to "share" content the number of DNS queries involved in a page fetch can be quite surprising.

And DNS responsivity is a matter that involves more than mere bandwidth.

Other applications degrade for other reasons. VoIP is often made incomprehensible by even small amounts of packet reordering, something that can occur quite often as a result of certain wireless technologies, load-balanced pathways, or routing behavior. And applications that use large packets, applications such as high quality video, can be badly affected by fragmentation of packets due to link MTU values of less than about 1500 bytes.

There are many characteristics that play a part. Among these are Quality of Service (QoS) handling, queuing disciplines and drop policies in routers, and congestion handling in protocol stacks. Moreover there are an increasing number of protocol "accelerators" that try to obtain better user performance by abandoning the protocol etiquette algorithms that are built into well implemented TCP stacks. Those accelerators may create local benefits to their users, as long as the number of such users is small, but they damage the experience of other users.

The National Broadband Plan tends to be involved only with the "User Access Link" part of my drawing.

Yet the FCC's tests tend to lump all the parts of the drawing into one number thus masking the contribution of each part.

A national broadband build-out that does not deal with the entire system will be a waste of time and money. A user whose ISP has a magnificent broadband User Access Link but inadequate backhaul and connectivity to the internet at large is a user who is going to be dissatisfied.

Thus for the FCC's tests to be meaningful they need to do two things:

• They need to isolate and separately report the attributes of the User Network, the User Access Link, the User's ISP Cloud, and the degree of private peering to large content providers.

• The attributes that are measured need to be much deeper than "bandwidth" and "latency" and "jitter". I would recommend that the FCC look at the way that tools like PathChar and Pchar construct a detailed hop-by-hop analysis of network paths. Those tools require many thousands of packets over many tens of minutes for each hop in a path. In my own work I began (but never completed) a project to design a protocol to enable the fast and inexpensive measure of paths characteristics for proposed packet flows. That work is visible on the net at http://www.cavebear.com/archive/fpcp/fpcp-sept-19-2000.html.

Written by Karl Auerbach, Chief Technical Officer at InterWorking Labs

Depending on your country, the Internet has been available for ten years or more, and for individuals—at least in the developed world—it has since become ingrained in psyches as an essential commodity, akin to access to fixed-line telephony, electricity and potable water. For a growing number, the Internet is essential for work, for a greater number it is the first port of call for problem solving and information (Wiki and online Yellow pages come to mind) or getting things done (banking, finding out timetables for travel, etc). Most governments, too, now take the Internet as a key component of infrastructure, crucial to a nation's future socio-economic potential.

What governments may do with the Internet is another matter. A decade's experience and use of the service has enabled a growing number of governments to manhandle the potential dangers of hacking, fraud and privacy as a means to tighten the screws on their own control of access, and of their nationals' use of it. This is rightly opposed by the users themselves, over half of whom surveyed for the BBC believing that no government should be empowered to regulate the Internet.

In Europe, the 'three strikes rule' threatens to become more fashionable, following measures first proposed in France: there, the Création et Internet Bill failed in 2009 when France's Conseil Constitutionnel ruled that it leaned too much to 'guilty until proven innocent' and that it threatened major sanctions (Internet disconnection and a national blacklist on access) without judicial oversight. Nevertheless, the government shoehorned the Bill a second time, which this month came before the National Assembly for debate.

The Bill proposes that the scheme be administered by a newly formed group called HADOPI. ISPs notified about alleged file-sharing would be required to send an e-mail to the customer involved, a registered letter at the second alleged offence and, for a third offence, terminate access for up to a year. A database managed by HADOPI could presumably prevent blocked users from switching ISPs.

Italy looks like adopting a similar approach. Having in 2009 sued the Swedish The Pirate Bay site and attempted to force ISPs to block access to its content, the more recent charging of Google executives with criminal charges resulting from YouTube content denotes a government leaning towards authoritarianism regarding the Internet. The Italian three-strikes proposal would be complemented by a requirement that all blogs register with the government.

In the UK, meanwhile, the government is pushing through its controversial Digital Economy Bill, which proposes empowering regulators to disconnect or slow down Internet connections of persistent illegal file-sharers. Amendments to the Bill passed this month at the report stage at the House of Lords before its third and final reading in the House of Commons, could in theory force sites such as YouTube which host copyright-infringing material to be blocked or forced offline. The UK's three-strikes rule is similar in its essentials to those of France and the UK, with disconnection following two warnings.

At the European Union level, the European Parliament was initially critical of the three-strikes schemes, largely due to the absence of judicial review. However, this month the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was put forward for debate between the US, the EC, Japan, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Canada and Mexico. Aimed at preventing online counterfeiting, it threatens to punish ISPs for content delivered.

Polls show the sincerity of popular regard for a free Internet, and suggest that to tackle piracy other solutions than blocking ISPs and throwing citizens offline should be considered. Until they are considered, citizens should, as always, be vigilant about what their governments are legislating, lest they find themselves with a thoroughly policed Internet far removed from what they now know it to be.

Written by Paul Budde, Managing Director of Paul Budde Communication

LTE was envisioned as an all IP system, but the RF allocations follow the voice-centric approach of earlier generations. While LTE standards allow for either Frequency Division Duplexing (FDD) or Time Division Duplexing (TDD), all initial LTE equipment uses FDD. FDD requires two separate blocks of spectrum—one for each direction. FDD makes perfect sense for bi-directional voice traffic. It makes no sense for data. With the exception of peer-to-peer file sharing (which most mobile operators block), data traffic is very asymmetric. Sending data via FDD means one block of spectrum is fully utilized and the other, equal sized block, is dramatically under utilized. Result: the operator pays for almost twice the spectrum they actually use.

Verizon is deploying LTE in the 700 MHz C block which means they are using 746 MHz to 756 MHz (a 10 MHz channel) for their downlink (to the mobile device) and wasting most of 777 MHz to 787 MHz (another 10 MHz channel) for the uplink. If Verizon could deploy TDD (as used by WiMAX and as defined for LTE but not implemented), they could fully utilize both 10 MHz blocks for data transfers, almost doubling their data capacity.

I don't know the actual capacity Verizon will realize on average with their first generation LTE infrastructure. But suppose Peter Rysavy is correct (as implied by Gigaom) that Verizon will initially average 15 Mbps per 10 MHz channel. That's 15/15 Mbps, symmetric, even though average traffic is likely to be 15/2 Mbps. No single user is likely to see 15 Mbps; rather that 15 Mbps is shared among all users in that sector. With TDD (the default for WiMAX and an unimplemented option for LTE), the Verizon spectrum could support two channels of perhaps 13/2 Mbps each in that same sector. Again, no single user will see 13 Mbps, but all the users in the cell will be sharing 30 Mbps of capacity that can be dynamically divided between up and down—mostly like averaging 26/4 Mbps but able to allocate 15/15 or 28/2 as the traffic mix changes.

It's ironic the LTE implementors got this wrong when you consider their decision to use only IP in the rest of the LTE design, thereby dropping support for traditional voice or SMS services. That's right, initial LTE deployments won't support voice telephony or SMS messages, only data services, and yet LTE spectrum assignments were made as if voice comes first.

That's ironic.

Written by Brough Turner, Founder & CTO at Ashtonbrooke; Chief Strategy Officer at Dialogic

The Internet is like that doll… and not because it's used by some for smuggling drugs! Rather, the Internet is seen as a thing filled with interconnection relationships, when in fact the Internet is interconnection. The relationships make the internetwork. They are more significant than the TCP/IP protocol, the end-to-end design philosophy, the bandwidth, or the routing algorithms, as important as all those things are. Kill interconnection, and a network disappears from the Internet. Kill the culture of interconnection, and the Internet dies. Another analogy is Arthur Koestler's concept of a holon—something that is both a whole and a part of the whole. (Thanks to Miko Matsumura for the pointer at a recent retreat.)

The value of interconnection is often missed, because it's the space between networks. It's much easier to grasp the impacts of those individual networks on their customers. Every piece of the Internet, however, must interconnect to serve its users, which means its internal policies and practices are never the whole story. Interconnection is generally reciprocal, so if you want to benefit from a link with a network, you take on some obligations in return. The details get complicated, and network interconnection is constantly evolving, but that's the core magic.

Today, John Markoff published a New York Times article on how Internet interconnection may be changing. (The short version is that private peering is short-circuiting the major backbones, with unpredictable consequences.) Markoff deserves credit for giving a serious summary of academic network science research that bears on Internet structure. You usually don't see these concepts in the popular press. It matters whether or not the Internet is a scale-free network, however, as esoteric as that may sound. As Markoff notes, even the experts can't agree on what the Internet looks like today, raising serious questions about its performance going forward. They just know that it's changing. One reason is the lack of public traffic data on Internet-connected networks, which KC Claffy of CAIDA has been warning about for years.

I wrote three law review articles about interconnection over the past three years. I didn't realize it, but they form a trilogy. Only Connect argues that interconnection, not non-discrimination, should be the central focus of telecommunications policy today. The Centripetal Network delves into the network science that Markoff's article summarizes, raising the concern that the Internet's interconnectivity may not be as robust as it seems. And in Off the Hook, coming out shortly, I develop a detailed legal theory for an interconnection-based policy regime under the Communications Act.

Interconnection is poised to become even more important, because it's not just a factor at the network layer. Internet applications and content are increasingly becoming interconnected, moving toward the syndication model of business I proposed a decade ago. Twitter interconnects with Google for real-time search, while YouTube interconnects with blogs for content distribution. Everyone's a platform, and virtually everyone is both a consumer and a producer of external information. I'm firmly convinced that the dynamics of interconnection will keep policy-makers and business executives busy for years to come. All the more reason to make it a focal point now.

Written by Kevin Werbach, Professor at the Wharton School and Organizer of the Supernova Conference

Although I didn't attend, this week's Mobile World Congress seemed like a fitting stage for news of this nature. Until only recently, has it been remotely plausible to consider such different companies joining forces. I've written about Skype often, and for the most part, they've been a threat for incumbents of all stripes. To hear about this from Verizon during such a public event makes it very clear that the sands are shifting once more, and yet again, VoIP is the culprit.

Skype has upset another apple cart, but I'm more inclined to put a positive spin on things, and say the opposite. No doubt the golden egg of wireless is poised to go the way of the RBOCs in the wireline world, and that's not good for the major mobile operators. On the other hand, this trend is inevitable, and in time, all mobile voice calls will be IP, running over a data network. Service providers are well aware of the risks of waiting too long, where either an established asset becomes a liability, or they miss the boat the first time around.

Think about the wireline incumbents, who of course, were the last to embrace VoIP. They've hung on too long, and that market is going away either to cablecos or wireless. We all know that today's youth will never have landlines, so there really is no future in this market. Think about how Verizon Wireless turned down the iPhone, and what a winner it's been for AT&T. Verizon Wireless has a pretty healthy business, but they've never had an answer for Apple.

Skype, on the other hand, has its own challenges. Having gone to Silver Lake, they have debt to manage now. Their growth story is still intact, but the business model has inherent limitations, and this has led them to seek closer ties with service providers. The business market could be a great opportunity for them, but they need carrier partners to really make this work. They absolutely need to grow beyond the desktop, and their efforts to date have been moderately successful, but a far cry from being a real growth driver.

I am sure you can see where this is going. Verizon and Skype both have needs, and face some common enemies. They are hardly complementary and have no warmth in their history. However, when long term survival is at stake, you can rationalize anything, and at face value, its news on Tuesday makes good business sense. Verizon gets access to Skype's huge global community, which they expect will be a great driver of data traffic over their 3G network.

Also, with Skype being mostly a voice service, you don't need an iPhone to use it. Any smartphone will do, so in lieu of offering the iPhone, Verizon can now create a distinct value proposition built around the smartphones they want to offer. This may not totally neutralize AT&T's handset advantage, but it gives Verizon a different advantage that comes by not being an Apple partner.

With Skype, Verizon has more levers to control the overall value proposition, and not be held hostage to the demands of Apple, who have radically shifted the traditional balance of power between operators and handset vendors. I would argue that this matters to Verizon, especially when all evidence points to the superiority of their network over AT&T. An example of this control is the fact that Verizon's deal with Skype precludes the use of WiFi. This ensures that Skype calls are routed over their network and not someone else's. It's not clear how long they'll be able to uphold this, but for now, it helps make their data plan more attractive, hopefully to the point where people will think twice about going to AT&T just for the iPhone.

Interestingly, Skype's deal is not exclusive to Verizon, as they do have an iPhone app with AT&T, so they actually get the best of both worlds. However, with Verizon, they get an instant bolt-on to a huge subscriber base and integration with every top smartphone not made by Apple. We don't know the revenue sharing details, but I have no doubt the financial upside is attractive for Skype. It's also not clear how using Skype for IM will impact Verizon's SMS revenues - which could be substantial—but I'm sure they'll figure this one out.

Thinking more strategically, Apple may be the coolest tech brand ever, but Skype has cachet too, and Verizon knows this is a great way to gain overnight credibility with the youth market, as well as business users (and their addictive BlackBerrys), both of which are heavy Skype users.

I'm keeping this analysis high level, mainly because the details would make this a very long piece, and they've been dissected extensively by bloggers who followed this minute-by-minute. There are many items I haven't touched on here, but from my view, I'd say both companies come out as winners.

Skype brings more to Verizon than to AT&T and the iPhone, and the longer mobile operators ignore VoIP, the more they stand to lose. Sure, those long distance and roaming charges will be hard to give up, but they won't disappear entirely any time soon. More importantly, anyone using mobile broadband knows there are cheaper ways to make phone calls, and customer goodwill will turn into goodbye if carriers stand still.

With IP, the economics of voice change big time, and there's no turning back. What happened to wireline will be repeated with wireless, and this news with Skype and Verizon is a major inflection point in the evolution of mobile. The iPhone was a big one for sure, but I think this will be bigger as it will cause every mobile carrier to rethink their core business plans. It will be very interesting to see who makes the next move, and how they will respond, and you can be sure I'll have something to say about it soon after.

Written by Jon Arnold, Principal, J Arnold & Associates

Like many, I have bought the view that voice communications has become a software application that rides on top of any wireline or wireless link. As such, the downward trend line for telephony approaches zero, right? Yes, if subscribers abandon their voice minutes of use plans that start at about $45 for 450 minutes a month. But no if subscribers keep the voice plan and add the $30 or higher data plan.

There was a time when wireless carriers mandated the bundling of a voice plan for the privilege of adding a data plan. Absent such compulsory bundling, Verizon must have confidence that consumers will opt to keep the user friendly voice option. This assumption makes sense particularly if wireless carriers expect to replace unmetered, "all you can eat" data plans with several tiers of monthly throughput baskets.

Cable television operators did not have such confidence that their subscribers would add service tiers rather than cherry pick. By law cable operators must provide subscribers with some "buy through" opportunities.

With a future data dominant, but tiered service environment, users may consider it prudent to keep their voice minutes on a voice plan to conserve their available megabytes for nonvoice services. Under this scenario, efficient pricing plans trump visions of convergence and zero cost voice.

Written by Rob Frieden, Pioneers Chair and Professor of Telecommunications and Law

Telecom providers and community projects alike concentrated on their stimulus applications from passage of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) in February of 2009 until the application deadline in midAugust of last year. Money was (and is) hard to get, so looking for a share of the promised $7.2 billion of ARRA money seemed like a good idea even though the odds were long. According to NTIA, there were $19 billion in requests for the $1.2 billion they intended to make available in the first round. RUS says that they had $28 billion in requests for $2.5 billion in grants and loans. Even with some applications being to both NTIA and RUS, the odds were at least ten to one against any individual applicant!

The grants were supposed to be announced in October; everyone waited. The first announcements were made in December. A few more have dribbled out since. So far the agencies have announced awards for only about 15% of the money they said they would make available in round one. Doing the math, the odds go to a staggering seventy to one against getting funded (so far) in round one. Probably not many applicants would have spent the money they did on applications or waited so long to move ahead if they'd known how long it would take for so little to be given out.

But it gets worse.

Without having finished notifying people whether or not they have round one grants, NTIA and RUS recently announced that March 15, 2010 is the deadline for round two (the final round) of broadband applications. Applicants, of course, must prepare applications immediately; more first round information is supposed to dribble out; but, as of now, there's not nearly enough information about round one.

• Many applicants have not yet received word of whether or not they've been chosen. This means, if not selected, they haven't received the promised information on why they were rejected which would certainly be helpful in preparing a new application. If they've been selected, in whole or in part, a new application is, of course unneeded (some may be on some sort of waiting list but there's no information on that).
• Since we don't know for sure what awards remain in round one, we don't know which territories still need coverage.

Particularly frightening is that incumbent carriers were allowed to provide non-public information to dispute the claims of applicants that their projects would extend coverage to unserved Americans but there is no mechanism for making either the allegations public or for applicants or states to dispute the data which may have been used to disqualify applications. This is hardly transparency. See http://www.ntia.doc.gov/broadbandgrants/applications/responses/722pnr.pdf for an example of a filing by Comcast apparently challenging a request by Vermont Telephone Company (VTEL). Nothing against Comcast; but, if they are going to dispute coverage data, they should have to make their own data public and subject to rebuttal.

So what should be done?

An organization called National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors (mainly non-profits and community organizations) has called on NTIA and RUS to move the deadline out to May 1 so that first round information will be fully available to second round applicants. That's a good start but it's not enough; there's no reason to think RUS and NTIA will do a better job of awarding the second round money plus the unawarded remainder of first round money than they did in administering the first round—especially now that they must also finish the award process and start monitoring for those projects which were funded.

• There is a statutory deadline of September 30, 2010 for awarding all the money. The agencies can't waive this so Congress may have to extend it.
• The agencies should, as many of us urged them to do in the beginning, give the states a significant role in the process both to assure grants comply with state plans and just to speed up the grants with local knowledge. Fine with me if Congress just delegates all of this to us at the state level.
• No one should be allowed to use non-public data to impugn applications and rebuttals must be allowed.

Counter-cyclical Government programs which are a day late and a dollar short are worse than no program at all. It's already clear that the broadband stimulus money isn't going to be spent during the latest recession. The unfulfilled promise of the money has slowed down broadband progress and cost jobs. Just leaving the money in the private sector from whence it came (or from whence it will come when the bills are due) would have been much better than dangling an undelivered carrot of stimulus.

Written by Tom Evslin

At the time he raised obvious concerns over the impact on privacy, the security of the data, the enormous cost involved and the feasibility of the project. His concerns were echoed by LINX, a major UK peering organisation who stated "We view the description of the government's proposals as 'maintaining' the capability as disingenuous: the volume of data the government now proposes CSPs should collect and retain will be unprecedented, as is the overall level of intrusion into the privacy of the citizenry."

Then in December 2009 it emerged all of the UK's mobile operators had also announced their concerns over the project. Vodafone, Orange, 3 and T-Mobile all voiced their concerns in the form of submissions to the government's consultation.

The mobile operators also questioned the IMP's feasibility, accuracy of estimated costs, morality, legality and even its usefulness, questioning whether or not access to all communications records is even necessary for law enforcement and intelligence.

T-Mobile stated "We have not yet seen persuasive evidence of credible research into the extent to which these new communications technologies will actually be used for the purposes of serious and organised crime."

After such widespread industry and public criticism it was expected that development of the IMP would slow down and that the project may even be placed on hold until after the election. However last month news emerged that the IMP was far from on hold. The government instead announced the establishment of the Communications Capabilities Directorate (CCD) which will provide a structure for the implementation of the IMP which is apparently continuing as planned.

As a communications provider Entanet has a number of obvious concerns regarding the IMP which are reportedly shared by many of our colleagues within the industry. The government expects providers such as Entanet to maintain massive databases of our customers' online communications including social networking, emails, VoIP calls and browsing, basically anything our customers do online. Currently CPs are required to keep basic communication records for use by the authorities but this is a huge increase in the level of 'snooping'. This raises a number of obvious privacy concerns and raises the question: Where do we draw the line between protecting our privacy and ensuring security?

A home office spokesperson states "The Directorate will continue to consider the challenges posed by new technologies, working closely with communications service providers and others to bring forward proposals that command public confidence and demonstrate an appropriate balance between privacy and security."

However many critics would argue that we are a long way off a 'balance' between privacy and security with the proposed IMP. If anything the scales are swaying vigorously in favour of security at the expense of the public's privacy.

Ignoring for a minute the huge privacy and ethical argument that this ignites, we also have concerns over the usefulness of the data in terms of fighting crime and even the feasibility of collection and storage. This will be the largest IT project ever undertaken by the UK and previous attempts leave us far from confident in its success, take the NPfIT in the healthcare sector for example.

We will be watching the progress of the IMP and the CCD very closely over the next few months.

Written by Jon Farmer, Voice Technical Lead, Entanet International Ltd

My analysis of Google's announcement to become involved in building FttH networks is actually the same as the one as I made when that company announced its plans to build wireless city networks, and when it announced its intention to invest in submarine cable networks.

The company has a vested interest in making sure that the digital economy is developed and, like most others, it is frustrated by the extremely slow pace at which the telcos are upgrading their networks. They will do anything to nudge the process along, or to kick-start developments. I remain of the view that Google has no intention whatsoever of becoming a telco; that would not make any sense. So all those endless blog discussions (mainly in the USA) about what underlying business model Google will base its FttH model on, and what the costs per house will be to lay fibre, are utterly useless.

The company will want to establish a business model for high-speed telecoms infrastructure. FttH will produce this model along the lines of the trans-sector synergy that this will create, as we have been discussing in various BuddeComm reports. Many telcos insist that there is no business model for this, but Google is now placing its resources behind such investments, to show how economically viable business cases can be developed. Their projects can become demonstration sites that are able to be replicated elsewhere.

The initiative also supports those countries and those companies that have been advocating the need for FttH infrastructure in conjunction with trans-sector services (healthcare, education, public safety, etc). This will most certainly support this concept within the political, business or investment circles where these plans are being discussed.

Google has indicated it wants to cooperate with municipalities in the rollout of these networks. Perhaps they should extend this and consider at least sharing their results and using these demo sites for national and regional government purposes as well, which might be more appropriate in other parts of the world.

In Australia, Google is very supportive of this government's planned NBN rollout and has already indicated that it will actively support this development, they don't see a need to develop their own FttH networks in such a situation.

Written by Paul Budde, Managing Director of Paul Budde Communication

Right now, most people consume video over television sets, and most people in the US subscribe to cable. The TV advertising market is still doing pretty well—about $70B in 2010. TV is still the dominant mass medium. But cable operators don't capture very much of that total $70B—maybe only $5B goes to them.

With (1) an intermediary providing anonymized but complete data about what all cable subscribers are up to at all times (including their broadband usage), (2) standardized technology for ad insertion for all major cable systems, and (3) a "return path" (a way for users to interact with advertisers and others), the cable industry could achieve the Holy Grail: household-by-household targeted advertising via must-have cable set-top boxes.

Instead of a fragmented market in which nationwide advertisers have to sell to multiple cable operators and programmers (and TV networks) without useful metrics, you'd have a dream interface for cable advertising—nationwide, interactive, one-stop shopping for advertisers, using actual data rather than relying on Nielsen-like guesstimates. Clutching our remotes, we consumers will click around giant TV screens, buying products shown on cable network shows, viewing ads targeted to our household, and responding to well-organized stimuli designed to appeal just to us.

This dream is what the six largest cable operators, led by Comcast, have been working towards since 2008. It's called Canoe Ventures. So far, Canoe hasn't quite delivered. It had to drop 2009 plans to provide targeted ads because it was held back by clunky legacy cable ad-insertion hardware. But it's planning to offer RFIs (allowing viewers to ask for information) later this spring, and Comcast is already piloting this technology in Chicago, SF, and Detroit. About 12 million Comcast households are technically ready for interactive ads.

Here's the CEO of Canoe, David Verklin, in a June 2008 article in Multichannel News: "At some point, Canoe will combine TV viewing metrics with Internet surfing data to provide advertisers an integrated view across both platforms." The success of Canoe is central to the future success of cable.

Canoe has to move fast. Online ad spending is climbing rapidly. Internet video—which hasn't yet taken off—could destroy cable. But if Comcast and its colleagues find a way to corner the mainstream advertising market by making ads much more effective through their set-top boxes, online ad-supported TV and other video won't work.

It's called Canoe because all the major cable operators are in the same boat. They're trying to row together.

Here's a quote from 2009 from a programmer, Discovery Communications CEO David Zaslav:

In the industry, there are a lot of things we debate, but there is no debate about Canoe, Discovery Communications CEO David Zaslav said. It's hard to raise your hand and say that having a platform you can customize isn't anything but a positive.

Zaslav also commented on the potential threat of online video to operators and programmers. Discovery, he added, has opted to put mostly short-form clips of its shows on the Internet for free, a move to drive traffic to the television. But he said that while operators and programmers are in the same boat, they can't ignore that a shift in viewing habits is beginning.

We have to put our content on platforms people are consuming, Zaslav said, adding that part of the problem was created by programmers who rushed to put all of their content on the Internet for free. He said that while that model obviously doesn't work for everyone, all parties should be wary of what they ultimately decide.

We have to be careful we don't train people to view on platforms that are going to put us out of business, Zaslav said.

Written by Susan Crawford, Professor, University of Michigan Law School