John Stankey, President and CEO, AT&T: "Data consumption right now is growing 40% a year."

With growth rates less than half of the predictions, a data-driven FCC and Congress has no reason to rush to bad policy. Wireless technology is rapidly moving to sharing spectrum, whether in-building small cells, WiFi, White Spaces, Shared RAN or tools of what the engineers are calling hetnets — heterogenous networks. The last thing policymakers should do is tie up more spectrum for exclusive use; shared spectrum often yields three to ten times as much capacity.

Bad compromises on the video spectrum are unnecessary because plenty of spectrum is unused. That includes the 20 MHz that M2Z would be building out today if Julius hadn't blocked them; the 20 MHz the cable companies are sitting on and want to sell to Verizon; and the 30 MHz or so Stankey identifies as fallow at AT&T.

40% growth is still substantial, but wireless technology is improving at a breathtaking pace. LTE has about 10x the capacity of 2.5G and 4x the capacity of 3G. LTE Advanced, deploying beginning 2013 at Verizon, is designed for 10x the capacity of LTE. Putting more spectrum to use would be great, but let's do it right.

Wireless speeds are actually going up dramatically, with AT&T delivering 2-5 megabits to most of the country and Verizon's LTE delivering 5-12 megabits to 2/3rds of the population. Verizon is ahead of schedule to bring 5 megabits+ to 92% of the country in 2013 and 96-98% in 2015-2016. AT&T and Sprint have raised capex to catch up. 80%+ of the U.S. will have a 5 megabit offering in 2013-2014, 90%+ by 2015 or sooner. That's without any additional spectrum.

Today's wireless networks are designed to be shared: towers, WiFi, White Spaces, DAS and small cells all working together. The best engineers in the world are working on RAN sharing, SON, hetnets, 8x8 MIMO and techniques I'm writing about in my next book, Gigabit Wireless. AT&T in fact is one of the world leaders in DAS, WiFi and femtos and behind the scenes a key thought leader. There's wonderfully exciting stuff I'll be doing my best to translate for non-engineers.

Takeaway: The future is sharing the airwaves so let's get the policy right.

Written by Dave Burstein, Editor, DSL Prime

"Today, US carriers have 538MHz of spectrum. And, additional 300MHz of additional spectrum waiting in the wings. But, only 192MHz is in use today."

Perhaps if we had an effective "use it or lose it" policy in place, or a heavy tax on unused spectrum a more vibrant market for this spectrum would emerge. But today, the problem is not a shortage of spectrum but the fact that what's out there is not being utilized.

Obviously things vary by geography, but Citi's summary is completely justified. Their methodology is thorough both as to who owns what and what is deployed county-by-county for 3100 separate counties. Here's the summary of what's in use:

and here are the details on what's currently owned by US carriers:

So why would we repack the TV broadcasters and auction off that spectrum when we've just finished putting in place unlicensed access to TV white spaces? Unlicensed spectrum will be heavily utilized while more exclusively owned spectrum will just add to the pool of under utilized resources.

Written by Brough Turner, Founder & CTO at netBlazr

In June, the net neutrality debate took an unexpected turn when the Netherlands leap-frogged the USA to became the first country to legislate for mobile net neutrality. Business models for fixed and mobile networks must shift toward volume charges.

The net neutrality debate has been seen not having much relevance outside the USA because the plight of carriers there was aggravated by unlimited usage. US carriers objected to carrying the extra traffic generated by the likes of YouTube and BitTorrent and others including Google objected to the carriers' crude attempts to manage traffic by restricting customers' access to such sites.

The issue came to a head in 2008 when the FCC ordered Comcast, a cable TV and Internet access provider, to cease blocking or downgrading certain users' access to some peer-to-peer download services. The FCC's ruling, however, was subsequently struck down on appeal over the FCC's authority to implement net neutrality regulations.

US state of play

The FCC rallied and in December 2010 issued a new policy (still to be tested in a federal court) that sets three basic rules for net neutrality¹:

• Transparency. Fixed and mobile broadband providers must disclose the network management practices, performance characteristics, and terms and conditions of their broadband services;
• No blocking. Fixed broadband providers may not block lawful content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices; mobile broadband providers may not block lawful websites, or block applications that compete with their voice or video telephony services; and
• No unreasonable discrimination. Fixed broadband providers may not unreasonably discriminate in transmitting lawful network traffic.

It is interesting to note that only the first of the FCC's three rules applies equally to fixed and mobiles providers. But for mobiles, the no-blocking rule applies only to services "that compete with their voice or video telephony services” and mobile providers are not mentioned at all in the third rule because "existing mobile networks present operational constraints that fixed broadband networks do not typically encounter. This puts greater pressure on the concept of "reasonable network management" for mobile providers".

But mobiles are under pressure. Free Press wants the FCC to take a close look at Google's move to curtail access (making them "unavailable for download” via the Android Market) to independent tethering apps. Google says it is doing this in response to requests from wireless carriers. But Google's Droid partner Verizon says "Google manages what's available in the Android Market."

When Verizon acquired massive amounts of spectrum in the 700MHz "C Block" auction back in 2008 it promised to adhere to the FCC's "Open Access" rules which forbid carriers from trying to "deny, limit, or restrict the ability of their customers to use the devices and applications of their choice." In the new Report and Order (Paras 134-135), the FCC has hinted that its powers may not be restricted to users of this part of the spectrum. Again, this must be tested in court.

Dutch policy

The Netherlands has gone further. In April 2011, KPN announced plans to charge mobile customers extra for using Skype and WhatsApp (an application that for $2 pa enables smart phone users to send messages for no additional charge). KPN does not reveal much but last year Telstra's messaging revenues were over $1 billion and over 9 billion SMS were sent from its mobile phones. So, losing voice and message revenues to Skype, Facebook and WhatsApp could seriously dent profitability.

To charge users access to such services, KPN would need to look at the data being transferred, using "deep packet inspection." Following protests about possible privacy violations, politicians moved quickly to stop the plan. In June 2011, the Dutch parliament passed a bill which will force mobile Internet providers to let customers use Skype and other rival services on their networks without charging extra or giving preferential treatment to their own offerings (and not to place cookies without express permission from the end user).²

KPN has responded [Business Week 19 July] saying that from September the cheapest advertised price for one gigabyte of mobile data will be part of a euro50 ($70)/month package, compared with current packages under euro20 ($28) that include unlimited data. This is similar to the moves that US fixed carriers have made by moving towards Australian style monthly caps.

Expect to see mobile handset prices increase and more volume-based charging. The latter makes sense for both fixed and mobile networks and is the next logical move after caps.

¹ FCC (December 2010) Open Internet Rules, Report and Order 10-201.
² http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-06-dutch-parliament-mobile-net-neutrality.html

Written by Henry Lancaster, Senior Analysts at Paul Budde Communication

This 2 day meeting, "The Internet Economy: Generating Innovation and Growth”, had the objective of exploring a number of current issues in the public policy space, including:

• how best to develop high speed broadband access,
• how to leverage broadband for economic growth,
• metrics of broadband development and its impact, and
• how best to maintain openness and promote continued growth.

The presentations I heard at this meeting could be broadly classified into a number of themes, as outlined below.

Public Policy: The Internet as a brilliant success of Multi-Stakeholderism

The first theme was somewhat self-congratulatory in nature, and noted that the Internet has been very effective in achieving economic growth. One speaker cited from a McKinsey report that the level of economic growth attributable to the Internet in 15 years, as measured by GDP growth, equalled the level of GDP growth experienced in the Industrial Revolution over 50 years.

The speakers who talked to this theme espoused freedom of expression, freedom of governance, and freedom of enterprise — online. The Secretary General of the OCED proposed that the OECD, and its working methods of inclusion of governments, the private sector, civil society and the technical community, was uniquely positioned to further this effort. As he noted in his presentation to this meeting, "The OECD has already established many of the social norms that define the Internet today." He espoused a light touch public policy environment as a platform to provide growth, and a driver of innovation that improves efficiency and growth. In other words, when handled with some consideration and care from a perspective of public policy and governance, the Internet will continue to play the role of a critical enabling tool for wealth creation.

The prevalent meme of today appears to be "multi-skateholderism," which appears to relate to today's mixed environment of public and private sector activity, coupled with explicit recognition of civil society and other vested interests, including the technical sector as stakeholders in the process.

The tone of such presentations on the success of the open Internet and upon light touch public policies and multi-stakeholderism was generally upbeat, with some concessions to the challenges of security and net neutrality, but overall there was a sense that if the process was well structured, then such challenges could be properly addressed to the satisfaction of all.

In many ways this is little more than self-congratulatory rhetoric about the positive outcomes that have resulted from the general deregulation of the telecoms sector in the late 20th century and the associated shift of the model of service in this sector from a single public sector utility telecom operator to a diverse set of competitive private sector actors. However, an implicit subtext within this theme was a critical commentary on alternative approaches to coordination frameworks for national and international communications, notably the ITU-T, and a rather barbed criticism of the ability of such treaty-based institutions to perform the necessary structural changes to their institutional model that would allow the institution to reflect the broader set of stakeholders that are peer players in today's landscape. Perhaps behind the rhetoric is one more piece of preparatory activity in the extended leadup to the renegotiation of the world telecommunications treaty by the set of nation states that have some level of commitment a communications industry structure that is now largely based on private sector activity within a framework of open competition, and a general desire to reduce, to some extent, an indefinite continuance of the encumbrances, obligations, and structural cross-subsidies that are associated with the current treaty obligations that stand behind the ITU-T.

The Faltering of the Traditional Carrier

A number of speakers on the topic of broadband infrastructure were critical of today's network infrastructure. A salient comment I heard at one point was: "This sector really has a problem in meeting demand."

Some of the now-privatised telcos (for example, the presentation from Telecom Italia) were effectively claiming that with the impositions of net neutrality and the imposition of a public policy agenda of ubiquitous equitable access for all to a high speed broadband infrastructure funded through private capital investment was not a viable proposition.

The broader question was raised in a presentation from the Korean delegate, who raised the question as to who should fund broadband network infrastructure construction. The Australian presentation made that case that such large scale broadband infrastructure projects exceeded the capacity of private enterprise, and therefore the responsibility to lead such projects fell to the public sector. Although it has to be noted that this leadership comes at the considerable cost of around $2,000 per capita in the Australian case, and it therefore takes a relatively robust economy to underwrite such a significant level of public capital expenditure within the broader collection of public sector issues. Many other OECD economies appear to have largely left the activity of the construction of broadband network infrastructure to the agenda of the private sector, particularly where financing is concerned, and limited their involvement to cheering from the sidelines. The outcomes so far from such an approach are not exactly stellar.

Another carrier, AT&T, asserted that public communications policy in broadband infrastructure is being driven by a vocal minority rather than the mainstream and asserts that this imbalance in policy formulation will result in subsequent retrograde intervention that will restore what he termed as "20th century regulation." He argued for continuance of deregulation and a "hands-off" policy response by government. He noted that a policy priority of broadband access, at an affordable price, as a enabler of economic outcomes, and a lever to improve delivery of social services and utilities. Interestingly, he noted a $95B infrastructure investment by AT&T over the past 5 years and claimed that this cost could not feasibly be recovered from the end user base because the imposition of additional costs onto the consumer base would exclude large sectors of users from the network, and this would be counter to a an objective of ubiquity of access. Given the stated preference for continuation of an industry model that is a deregulated industry lead by private sector investment, it would appear that AT&T is constructing a case to forego the concept of network neutrality with respect to their carriage services, and they apparently wish to have the ability to impose additional costs on content industry actors if they want to have high speed visibility to users on AT&T's broadband network and recover a significant proportion of their investment in this manner.

Network neutrality is a significant issue in today's industry, and it appears to be used by the carriers and operators as a keyword for their lack of incentive for infrastructure investment beyond the existing cooper loop wired infrastructure, citing that net neutrality acts as an investment disincentive that brings the financial returns on capital investment in infrastructure below what they consider to be acceptable levels that are able to meet the cost of private capital in their enterprises. At the same time they are pointing to the lack of radio spectrum as the reason for a lack of further investment in mobile data infrastructure, and accusing application developers of generating mobile content applications that make extravagant use of bandwidth, and hence extravagant use of spectrum as being part of the problem they face.

With some small level of dissension, there appears to be a general admission that demand on today's Internet is not only outstripping current levels of supply, demand growth now is outstripping the sector's business plans, capital investment capability and even technical capability, and the resultant need to exercise common constraint in an environment of limited resources is counter to an industry whose relatively crude content and service models appear to be based on continued abundance of the basic commodity of bandwidth and ubiquitous connectivity.
Security and Privacy

This is one of those mantra topics - everyone agreed that security is a Good Thing (at least I heard noone argue against the concept!), and all speakers who touched upon this topic appeared to agree with the proposition that this was a current issue and by no means a solved problem. But where to go from here was definitely not so clear.

It was clearly recognised that the quantity, breadth and detail of information that is now online poses some serious concern. The risk profile of unintended information exposure now includes individuals, organisations and even nation states. The security industry is becoming overwhelmed with the onslaught of new threats on a continuing basis, and the underlying concern is that the current level of cyber attack may mutate at any time into attack profiles associated with cyber warfare between nation states.

Industry commentators perceive this topic to have a low priority in the political agenda, where politicians want lower prices and greater regulatory control, while the ability of the private sector to invest in the necessary resources and measures to support greater levels of online security is limited by the relatively low value placed on this activity by end users. In some ways the issue of security in todays networks, particularly as they relate to high end security measures that are capable of defending a national communications system against broad scale infrastructure attack of a scale and intensity anticipated in the context of a concerted and well resourced attack (such as envisaged in a cyber warfare attack, for example), is seen to be beyond the scope of conventional private sector infrastructure operators. At the same time the public sector is showing some signs of uncertainty as to how to engage with this agenda, as this is a matter that is well beyond simple regulatory responses.

Hand-in-hand with security is the topic of privacy. It was asserted that the challenge about privacy is not about technology, as today's technology is adequately capable of supporting privacy, but is about the nexus of privacy policies and technology. In order to implement scalable systems that respect and adhere to privacy policies and are functional, there is a need to invest in an effort to define common privacy and authentication standards, i.e., standards relating to the nature of credentials that appropriately define individuals and roles, reputation mechanisms and validation of such credentials and the associated topic of negotiation of trust. The privacy management reference model is looking at operational privacy management in online services, and public standards need to be considered in the development of services. There is some optimism that policy entropy and conflicting standards can be addressed, assuming that the various actors in the area talk to each other and work in the context of industry-driven standards that are based on interoperable implementations. There is the expectation that the industry can deploy systems that can manage privacy conflict and ensure compliance with public policy frameworks that would engender trust and confidence. It was suggested that governments need to support the effort to foster the greater use of standards organisations to facilitate the development of data privacy standards and their adoption.

IPR and Intermediaries

This is a long-standing issue in this sector. The copyright holders have been reluctant, or incapable, on the whole to modify their business model to adapt to the capabilities of computing systems and computer networks to replicate and redistribute content. In the face of monotonically declining sales revenue of traditional media, and the collapse of many of former major players in the media-based content distribution industry, the content industry resorted to legal means to attempt to curb the decline in their industry.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the United States is perhaps the most well known, but no means unique, example of this push for legislative remedies to unauthorized redistribution of content, and the industry has, at least in the realm of the public policy debate successfully managed to apply a lexicon that includes emotive terms such as "theft", "illegal", and "piracy" to such redistribution activities and have this lexicon adopted by the broader industry and in public policy debates.

However, such actions have been largely unsuccessful in terms of reducing the level of such unauthorized redistribution of content and the associated revenue leak that such redistribution represents to copyright holders. The copyright industry has now turned its attention to attempts to coerce the carriage providers to act as co-opted vigilantes in the efforts to enforce intellectual property rights.

This effort runs counter to the general principle of the role of a common carrier, where, in somewhat approximate terms, the carrier is bound to respect the privacy of the parties to whom it has contracted to act as a carrier, and in return is not held to be liable for the content carried across its network. However, there is a strong push to have the public sector to force the carriage sector, and all others who act as "intermediaries' in the provision of services and content to users, to play an active role in enforcing the intellectual property rights of copyright holders of the material. Rather than starting from an assumption that carriage providers and intermediaries are not liable for the content they carry on behalf of users, the default position being pushed in the context of this OECD meeting is one of assuming that such liabilities already exist, and the consequent agenda is to "limit" such liabilities.

It has been pointed out by critics of this approach (such as in a recent blog on this topic) that the wording of the communiqué from this meeting that some of the stakeholders, notably the technical community according to this particular critic, acted in a way that played into the hands of the IPR efforts: "Lacking the historical perspective, ITAC failed to see the camels nose being inserted under the tent in the IPR and Intermediary Liability sections."

Some of the presentations at the meeting were staunchly in favour of the copyright industry's proposals for making carriers and ISPs liable for content. In particular the presentation by Vivendi went as far as claiming that the entire content creation industry would come to a complete halt if IPR theft was not halted using all available means. The assertion was made in this context that: "Copyright is a key component of economic growth."

An alternative view was put forward by Deezer (and presumably Pandora, were they to be present) is that "piracy" is just one competing service model for distribution of content, and the real goal of this industry should be to create business and service models for the distribution of content that represent a superior service proposition to users as compared to resorting to unauthorized redistribution of content in the form of "piracy". Such new service models should allow IPR to be respected and due royalties paid in the use of copyright material. From Deezer's reported commercial success, this is evidently an achievable objective.

In any case, the default position of assuming some unspecified level of liability on the part of intermediaries, including carriage providers, and the need to "limit" this liability with respect to copyright material was maintained in the deliberations prior to this meeting, and the Civil Society Information Society Advisory Committee (CSISAC) was unable to endorse the resultant communiqué.

IPv6 - The Elephant in the Room

Oddly enough for a meeting that was intended to discuss the public policy aspects of the internet's future growth and the maintenance of the Internet's openness and ability to innovate, evolve and generate societal wealth through efficient and novel forms of connectivity and communication, the one topic that implicitly threatens the entire framework of today's Internet rated barely a mention in the meeting, namely the exhaustion of the IPv4 address pool and the industry's marked indifference to adopt IPv6. It was the unacknowledged elephant in the room.

While one speaker, Vint Cerf, highlighted the need to place IPv6 adoption as a matter of urgent priority in the public policy agenda, and noted that without IPv6, innovation on the Internet will suffer and beneficial outcomes from an open and accessible communications environment would cease, and we simply have no alternatives at this point in time. He noted that if this meeting can conclude with the imperative to deploy IPv6 across all parts of the Internet, then it would be a useful meeting with a positive message. Oddly enough, the chairman's summary at the end of this particular session omitted any reference to IPv6, despite this topic being the major theme of Vint's presentation.

There was certainly an air of disconnection that persisted through the meeting on the continued omission of any mention of IPv4 address exhaustion and the risks posed to the further growth of the Internet if IPv6 is not adopted in a timely manner. It got to the point that when a speaker from the UK Regulatory Office subsequently mentioned IPv6 and the need for the public sector to actively support its adoption, parts of the audience broke out in spontaneous applause.

It appears that despite many years of active promotion of IPv6 the message is still not getting heard within the area of public policy. The comprehensive transition of the Internet to IPv6 is a central pillar of any expectation that the Internet can continue to grow and sustain a vibrant environment based on open competition and innovation. So far we appear to have failed to effectively make that case that in a networked environment that stalls on IPv6 the resultant NAT and ALG-ridden IPv4 environment is one where the current incumbents will hold all the addresses and any further competitive entry into the Internet by new actors, at both the levels of carriage and content services, would be effectively limited to the terms and conditions imposed by the incumbents. Such a scenario is about as good a definition of the failure of an open market as one could find, and its one that the Internet would do very well to avoid.

Where To From Here?

Somehow I'm missing the sense of driving optimism and opportunity that was associated with the 2008 OECD Ministerial on the Future of the Internet Economy. It's not clear to me that multi-stakeholderism is sufficiently powerful a mantra to shake off the issues that confront this industry as it slowly shifts into a phase of success-disaster.

Yes, the mobile market is a massive commercial success, so much so that we are now running out of useable spectrum space in the most populous parts of the networked world.

Yes, the wired internet is transforming our economies, so much so that the pressure to recable our infrastructure from copper to fibre is now an essential prerequisite to keeping pace with demand, but the capital is not there and the sustainable carrier business models are not there to undertake this effort.

Yes, the provision of content is a runaway success, but the copyright industry still cries foul and in an effort to curb some of the reported massive damage being inflicted to the entertainment industry there is an effort to rip apart the principle of common carrier and hold all elements of this industry liable for the unauthorised distribution of content.

And yes, we've managed to distribute billions of computers, but at the same time we've managed to create significant areas of vulnerability, and we are now witnessing the exploitation of these weaknesses shift from elements of organised crime to the distinct possibility of cyber warfare waged between nation states.

But I don't believe that any of these issues present insurmountable challenges. In seeking productive responses to these challenges we need to make sure that we are looking in the right place. These problems appear to arise from an intersection of rapid shift in the technology base of this industry intersecting a set of business and policy frameworks that are often somewhat conservative in their response to change. I would like to believe that many of the answers we are looking for lie in adaptation of business models and public policy frameworks, and the tools that will best assist this common effort are probably economic in nature.

For that reason I believe that the OECD has a valuable role in the coming months and years, and I am heartened to see the OECD continue to engage all stakeholders in a public dialogue that I hope will be ultimately fruitful and productive for the future of the Internet.

Written by Geoff Huston, Author & Chief Scientist at APNIC

In September 2010, the FCC adopted a Second Memorandum Opinion and Order that updated the rules for unlicensed wireless devices that can operate in broadcast television spectrum at locations where that spectrum is unused by licensed services. This unused TV spectrum is commonly referred to as television 'white spaces'. The rules allow for the use of unlicensed TV devices in the unused spectrum to provide broadband data and other services for consumers and businesses.

To prevent interference to authorised users of the TV bands, TV bands devices must include a geo-location capability and the capability to access a database that identifies incumbent users entitled to interference protection, including, for example, full power and low power TV stations, broadcast auxiliary point-to-point facilities, PLMRS/CMRS operations on channels 14-20, and the Offshore Radio Telephone Service.

The database will tell a TV band device which TV channels are vacant and can be used at its location. The database also will be used to register the locations of fixed TV band devices and protected locations and channels of incumbent services that are not recorded in Commission databases. The rules state that the Commission will designate one or more entities to administer a TV bands database.

In January 2011 the Commission conditionally designated nine entities as TV bands device database administrators. They are:  Comsearch ; Frequency Finder; Google; KB Enterprises and LS telcom; Key Bridge Global; Neustar; SpectrumBridge; Telcordia Technologies; and WSdb.

The TV bands databases will be used by fixed and personal portable unlicensed devices to identify unused channels that are available at their geographic locations. This action will allow the designated administrators to develop the databases that are necessary to enable the introduction of this new class of broadband wireless devices in the TV spectrum.

While there was widespread support for the announcement, I have not, over the past twenty years, noted a sufficient degree of significant change to suddenly propel this technology into a new future.

None of the previous issues have changed enough to warrant more enthusiasm this time. In particular this includes technical and standardisation issues, both for the technology itself and for the end-user devices needed to receive broadband services in this way. With all these different — and competing — companies now involved coordination will become a nightmare.

It will be interesting to see if, this time around, the technology will be able to make some commercial progress.

Written by Paul Budde, Managing Director of Paul Budde Communication

Read full story: ZDNet

As I've argued in the past, TV spectrum is not as valuable as people think. It's apparently desirable propagation characteristics are a function of 20th century technology, not of the physics of electromagnetic radiation. As radio technology progresses we'll find a lot more use for higher frequencies (2 GHz - 10 GHz). If nothing else, there's a lot more spectrum available higher up, and that makes it easier to send a lot more data, for example 10 Gbps links instead of 100-300 Mbps (today's Wi-Fi) or 1-8 Mbps (today's mobile broadband).

Even more than in the TV bands, most of that higher frequency spectrum is unused most of the time even in urban areas. This is the wireless problem of the 21st century. Based on radio technology of 1900-1930, we gave out government guaranteed monopolies on almost all wireless spectrum — monopolies which make less and less sense in the light of 21st century technology and never made sense given basic electromagnetic theory. As a result of these spectrum licenses (monopolies), most of our wireless spectrum is completely unused.

The FCC's TV white spaces order is a major step in getting access to this wasted national resource! Yes, there are decades of work ahead, but the white spaces order gives us a viable political approach to breaking open other bands. Looking back 20 or 30 years from now, we'll remember the TV white spaces order as the first step in remaking our national spectrum policy.

Written by Brough Turner, Founder & CTO at netBlazr

Last week, Google announced the deployment of an experimental broadband network using the TV white spaces for a Hospital in Ohio.

Read full story: Google Inc.

Perhaps it's a timely indicator of just how important the Internet is in our daily lives these days, and how much we've managed to associate keeping in touch with family and friends with tools such as Jabber and Skype, and just how much of our daily working life is now mediated by email. It seems that everyone has an interest in a ubiquitous, fast and cheap internet. Now that interest has been taken up as a major policy differentiator by both sides of the political spectrum in the recent Australian election. What was this all about?

On the one hand there is the National Broadband Network (NBN), an ambitious project to replace the now quite old telephone copper pair access network with a comprehensive fibre optic system. The copper pair network was originally funded by the public purse many decades ago, and has since been passed into private hands, along with all the other network assets of the former monopoly telephone operator. The NBN plan is to provide a layer 2 national fibre access network that would provide a last mile conduit to the majority of the nation's 6 million households and business premises. The NBN was intended to be revolutionary in terms of the change in capability of the national network and lift achievable last mile access speeds from DSL-speeds of 1 to 10 Mbps to a uniform level of access speeds of 100Mbps for every customer. Curiously, the election campaign has managed to squeeze more capacity out of the network and the political rhetoric has managed to up the access speed of this network tenfold to claimed access speeds of 1Gbps. This network is intended to be truly prodigious and the harbinger of bountiful benefits for everyone for many decades to come! Of course such a massive undertaking to rewire an entire continent does not come cheap, and the budgeted cost of providing this infrastructure to its 21.5 million population is a $43 billion impost, or a cost of $2,000 for every Australian resident. This project is a public works program, and the evolving expectation is that the network will once more be a public asset, in the same way that the original copper telephone network was constructed using a funds underwritten by the public purse. In every respect the project is intended to be game-changing. The ubiquitous use of high capacity across the entire population is intended to alter the way in which services are delivered, in which we define work and entertainment and the way in which a relatively small population in the south Pacific Ocean defines its place as a developed and hopefully highly competitive economy in a global context. These are indeed great expectations and the price tag is entirely commensurate with the level of euphoric optimism that is associated with this national project.

On the other side of the political spectrum there is a proposal to scrap this scheme immediately after the election. Lest this political party be perceived as technical troglodytes, they propose to replace it with a program of installing a swathe of wireless access points, particularly in the semi-rural areas of the Australian continent, and undertake some form of unspecified upgrade of parts of the existing copper pair network. This is a far more modest program, which is reflected in the price tag, currently estimated to cost the Australian taxpayer a mere $6 billion Australian dollars.

Each side of this political debate is keen to paint their chosen Internet technology in the most positive of lights, and portray the alternative in as dark a light as possible. A national network based on expansion of wireless infrastructure is portrayed as retrograde and hopelessly ineffectual in terms of national infrastructure. A fibre optic network is portrayed as being wastefully extravagant, unnecessary, and behind the times in today's i* world of wireless access devices. As a result, this ordinarily somewhat dry debate conducted between engineering, product and business line managers within the industry about the relative merits and weaknesses of mass access wireless and wireline networks has come to the surface of the political world for a day or two of mass media focus.

What lies behind this debate? In our efforts to convert every home and office into a wifi hotspot and convert every handset into a 3G wireless client have we really turned our back on the wired Internet? Is the copper pair, and even the concept of the fibre access network already being consigned to the dustbin of historical technologies, and will wireless totally dominate the future of the Internet? Or does the wired network have an assured future as an essential path to higher capacity and greater diversity and utility of the Internet, while wireless is just a passing fad that cannot sustain the full load of the diversity of needs of tomorrow's Internet?

The case for comprehensive uptake of wireless networking in the world of consumer electronics is close to overwhelming in today's environment. This month it has been reported that the 5 billionth device will "plug" into the Internet. It is statistically likely that this 5 billionth device will not exactly "plug in" to the network but wirelessly associate with a nearby base station! Wireless has been focal point for the Internet's evolution in the past few years, fuelled largely by the market success of Apple's various i-devices and the competitive responses from other suppliers. An earlier press story, again from Australia, illustrates this rather dramatic growth of the wireless market sector:

"Use of wireless broadband services mushroomed during the past year [2009] to reach more than 2 million subscribers, driven by the popularity of wireless modems and mobile devices such as the iPhone. The Australian Communications and Media Authority's communications report [for 2009] revealed the use of wireless broadband services jumped by 162 per cent in 2008-2009. ... Wireless broadband subscribers accounted for 25 percent of the number of Internet subscribers, up from 11 per cent in 2008."
The Australian, Wednesday 13 January 2010

There is no doubt that wireless services are so popular with consumers that they attract a price premium for their services. It is still the case that SMS messages in the mobile network are the most expensive data service on the planet, measured in units of dollars per megabyte, but other wireless 3G data services are also up there in terms of the margins of price over cost, particularly if one is daring enough to use international mobile roaming services for data! In the Australian market, for example, for the same $50 per month a consumer can access an Internet service with a usage cap of 3Gb per month with a wireless service provider, or take a service with a cap of up to 100Gb per month with a DSL service provider. Why is the wireless service some 30 times more expensive? The cost or provisioning a wireless service is dramatically lower than the cost of a wired service. The return on the investment of a wireless tower in densely populated urban environments is dramatically higher than the business case of dragging more wires through existing communications conduits. Even taking into account the lease costs of the radio spectrum, wireless services still represent a much higher margin activity than wires services. So its evidently not the relative costs of the service that determines the retail price of the service. Perhaps its more of a case of provider push coupled with consumer pull. Wireless services resonate with consumers in terms of convenience, and are prepared to pay a premium for this convenience. Consumers are prepared to pay higher prices for mobile services. Providers use this preference to add a premium to their mobile products and services, making this a more attractive product for them in terms of return on investment in service infrastructure. In every respect this looks like a mutually satisfactory setup.

There is always a "but" in these arrangements. The perennial question that gets posed about these innovations in service delivery in the internet is: "But does it scale?" When we consider not just a population of some 6.8 billion humans, but a population of over 100 billion chattering devices, will this approach scale?

In other words, is wireless an infinitely exploitable resource? Can we expect ever-increasing numbers of services, ever-increasing intensity of use, and ever-increasing capacity from the wireless network in the future? Like the air we breathe, the radio spectrum is a shared resource with many competing potential uses, from broadcast media, such as radio, television and geolocation to private point-to-point services with mobile telephony, and various permutations of satellite services. And of course, not all radio spectrum is the same. Lower frequencies provide better penetration through buildings, and can extend beyond line of sight, but have limited bandwidth. Higher frequencies have higher bandwidth, but are more readily absorbed by hills, buildings, and even walls. And of course the radio spectrum is a shared medium, so it is necessary to manage the spectrum as a common resource and coordinate the various potential users of the spectrum. The spectrum space is already full, and the prospect of displacing the existing users to make way for a massively larger Internet appears to be an unlikely outcome.

The part of the spectrum is that can be used for wideband digital communications is very limited. As more subscribers crowd in the same shared spectrum space the problem is that the quality of the service ultimately degrades. This can be mitigated to some extent by using more and more base stations with smaller radii of coverage, but at the same time this approach increases the issues with cross talk and signal interference and the complexities with mobile station handover.

The service performance with wireless also suffers, with signal dropouts, higher bit error rates, higher jitter and sudden changes in access capacity due to the method of channel contention in 3G. All of these are particularly hostile to the TCP protocol, and while there has been much said about the rapid rise of theoretical carriage capacity of wireless systems in recent times, achievable sustained data transfer rates using TCP in the wild fall far short of the hype.

Does an investment of $6 billion of public funds into wireless infrastructure represent a wise investment in national infrastructure for a future extending for many years into the future? Or would this be a case of making a investment in a current technology that is closer to a fad than an enduring element of a digital infrastructure? Also, given that the current wireless internet has already been enthusiastically constructed with private capital investment, should further public funds be expended in undertaking a public works program that may well be undertaken by private capital in any case?

There is no doubt that if we are facing a bandwidth hungry Internet future, then fibre optic wireline services can provide much greater reticulated capacity to the network. Unlike wireless, wireline systems behave consistently in terms of bit error rates, latency management and jitter. As a result the TCP transport protocol behaves with close to maximal efficiency, and can achieve sustained data rates equal to the line bandwidth, even at gigabit per second rates. All this prodigious performance can be achieved on fibre optic systems without crosstalk and without interference between users. Because the signal is guided by the wire the systems exhibit far higher energy efficiency, and can operate at far higher speeds. If speed and capacity are what we are after, then speed and capacity is precisely what fibre optic systems can deliver.

But of course despite all these efficiency and performance differentials, it's still a wired service, and the service is tethered to the end of the wire. That limits its usefulness and utility in an acknowledged highly mobile world. However, the choice is not quite so stark as a choice between an RJ45 connector and a 3G modem. WiFi has also revolutionized the consumer marketplace, and these days its quite commonplace to see appliances use WiFi as a connection medium. There is no doubt that I have no interest in using a carrier's 3G network to send a print job to the printer sitting beside me on my desk — that's a job for my local WiFi network, as is access to a home server and a myriad of other local operations in the home and at the office.

Where should public funds be spent? On a comprehensive revamp of the wired access network, replacing the aged copper pair telephone network with a highly capable fibre optic network? Or on improving access in those areas where the copper pair network simply cannot support high speed access by public investment in wireless infrastructure?

In trying to answer this question, we return to a persistent theme in the area of public communications infrastructure. What's the role of public capital investment and how is that balanced against the role of private capital investment? Is it possible for private investment to fulfill the entirety of a public agenda? Given that a capable, cost efficient and effective public communications infrastructure that encompasses an entire national constituency is seen as a core deliverable of any national communications policy regime, then how is this best achieved today?

To more back from generalities to the specifics of this broadband investment choice, is it realistic to expect that we have further decades of useful life from an already ageing copper pair infrastructure? As a consequence, should current public investment focus on current gaps in the national infrastructure, using a relatively cost effective approach of plugging these gaps using wireless infrastructure where the copper network is simply inadequate, and leave the remainder of the network in situ, as being adequate for the moment Or should we leave such wireless infrastructure investment to private enterprise, given that this technology is enjoying strong consumer attention and there is a continuing investment in wireless infrastructure by the industry actors. Instead, should a public investment program focus on a longer term national program of replacing the copper loop with a comprehensive fibre optic network? From such a longer term perspective perhaps the NBN is the better approach, as we need to concede that the level of investment required for a national very high speed access infrastructure in a fibre access network is probably well beyond the scope of private capital works investment. So far all that the industry has achieved in this space has been the rewiring of the CBDs in the major cities, while the upgrading of remainder of the network has been effectively ignored. It appears that this is, like many major infrastructure projects in the past, one that properly sits in the realm of a public investment program, in the same way that we've made investments in national road, rail and shipping infrastructure in the past.

That's the spectrum of choice between wireless and wired infrastructure programs for a better, faster and broader broadband Internet by the two Australian political parties. The wired vs wireless debate has become a matter for the electorate to decide.

Written by Geoff Huston, Author & Chief Scientist at APNIC

First of all the reception is rather poor. And it is not just that it is not showing the bars correctly; many users in congested mobile areas such as London receive the message 'server not available'. (As a matter of fact, this doesn't apply only to the iPhone — it is also experienced with other smart phones.)

The problem is that the current mobile infrastructure is buckling under the enormous increase in mobile data traffic. This is a crisis that is confronting many operators around the world and we have already seen network collapses in many places.

And it is not just people surfing the net or sending emails; the smart phones themselves are continuously 'touching base' — M2M traffic — and this is contributing to the problem. Videoconferencing applications for mobile phones that Skype and Apple are promoting will further add to the problem.

On many occasions over the past decade we have referred to the absence of a proper mobile technology that is designed for data rather than for voice traffic. LTE and WiMAX technologies are needed to make the use of the network for data purposes more efficient.

The difficulty is that there are no short-term solutions here. It will be years before new technologies are developed and introduced, and make any real impact.

At the same time there is the spectrum issue and it will be a few years before more spectrum is available also.

So in the meantime expect more problems and inconvenience:

&bulls; Congestion problems such as no connections, drop-outs and poor quality
&bulls; The need for two phones — a smart phone plus a cheap mobile phone to make calls
&bulls; Relatively high prices as a means of limiting use of the network.

Mobile operators will face a double whammy:

&bulls; The need for ongoing investments in order to prevent a collapse of their network
&bulls; Relentless competition on an infrastructure level that, at best, keeps ARPUs where they are.

Cost-cutting is a key issue and in Australia we already see a great eagerness from the mobile operators to use the NBN for their backbone needs. On the other side, there will be a need to restructure the mobile infrastructure business, most likely along structurally separated lines, with a focus on utilities-based infrastructure investments.

Written by Paul Budde, Managing Director of Paul Budde Communication

Read full story: Washington Post

The telcos are leading the charge, but the broadcasters are lobbying for their case equally vigorously. The broadcasters do not necessarily need all the spectrum they currently have, but they view mobile broadband and telcos as competitors to their monopoly on video entertainment, so they will do everything to keep them out of that market for as long as possible.

The result is that many others who need spectrum find themselves in the middle of this conflict. Because of high commercial interests, other sectors such as public safety, utilities, transport and infrastructure are also forced to review their business models. Simply asking for more spectrum and then possibly wasting it through a myriad of proprietary systems is no longer an option. Cooperation and coordination is required in sectors where egos and financial interest are clashing.

From a technical perspective, there is a consensus of opinion that 4G is the way forward. This is based on open systems such as LTE for outside the building, complemented with pico-cell technologies to extend the services inside the building. These technologies can deliver the video-based and high-speed data services that are currently needed by every organisation using mobile telecoms services.

Of course open systems would also reduce costs quite significantly, which would have far-reaching consequences for public safety operators in the USA which are currently paying as much as four to 10 times more for their equipment than those operating similar services in Europe or Asia. Obviously those proprietary vendors have a vested interest to argue against open standards. While Motorola's P25 is in theory an open standard. The problem is the company controls both the market and the standard and there is no ecosystem supporting this standard in the competitive market sense.

Security is often put forward as a reason to not coordinate and cooperate. However, all open standards do offer quality security and ways that allow for the prioritisation of traffic from the public safety sectors, which generally is not much more than 1% of total mobile traffic.

However when all of the above is considered, very strong lobby forces emerge, eg:

• mobile operators would like public safety agencies to use the spectrum they are deploying for LTE (with a view to securing their business); However, within the industry different positions occur:
  
  • Verizon and AT&T, because of their much stronger spectrum position want the 700 MHz D block that did not meet the reserve price in the last auction to be allocated to public safety so that it cannot be used commercially;
  • the other carriers (T-Mobile, Sprint, MetroPCS, etc.) want the D Block auctioned commercially as currently required by the statutes but with spectrum caps that would preclude AT&T and Verizon from bidding for the spectrum.
• public safety agencies want to control their own spectrum;
• broadcasters don't want to give up their spectrum;
• vendors are promoting spectrum solutions that would protect their vested interest in proprietary technologies.

The incumbent operators which currently dominate the market, AT&T and Verizon, do not want to see more spectrum freed up because they are now sitting in a very favorable position, particularly in low frequency cellular spectrum where they effectively control the use of 85% of the available spectrum as measured by population served in the original cellular spectrum in 800MHz and the recently auctioned spectrum in 700MHz. This is the "beachfront property" with much lower costs to build for 4G and much better coverage and in-building performance.

This is exactly where AT&T and Verizon want to be. They do not want more spectrum to be made available in the near future, particularly if the FCC, as it may well do, puts spectrum caps or other mechanisms in place to make sure a reasonable amount of spectrum is available to other players. What AT&T and Verizon want is to see spectrum tied up in regulatory/legislative battles while they consolidate their monopolistic positions. They have fine-tuned their legal approach and know that they can play the regulatory system game for another five to 10 years.

An attractive alternative to the incumbents would be for the spectrum to be dedicated to government use. The statutes require the 10MHz of D-block which was not sold in the last 700MHz auction to be allocated to commercial use. But the public safety community and Motorola (which is trying to protect its monopoly in the public safety market) and, behind the scenes to some extent the incumbents, are working hard to get the 10MHz D-block assigned to public safety, even though public safety already has its own broadband spectrum above the D-block.

The idea behind all of this is to take that spectrum off the market so that T-Mobile, Clearwire or LEAP cannot get access to it. T-Mobile's position is already weakening in the market, and this what the incumbents want to see.

In addition, much of the interesting spectrum below 1.5GHz in the USA is controlled by the Federal Government and much of that is woefully underutilised. Taking spectrum away from the military, for example, is even harder than getting it away from broadcasters.

The FCC would like to use spectrum as a way of restoring competition to the wireless market so as to return to the halcyon days of the late 1990s when there were four to six player markets in most parts of the country. In those days features, penetration and usage went up and prices went down: that is, competitive markets worked.

Unfortunately, the reality today is that it may be already too late to have anything other than a dominant duopoly market, particularly now that Google and Apple are supporting the incumbent duopoly through various agreements.

As an example of the unmanageable complex spectrum situation in the USA, the Federal Government's military spectrum is not even under the jurisdiction of the FCC — it is under the jurisdiction of NTIA (National Telecommunications and Information Agency), a branch of the Department of Commerce. So it will be another problem to be faced to free up the hundreds of MHz of spectrum the FCC is hoping for.

All hope is now focussed on Congress, which may support the FCC's proposal and not give its support to the incumbents.

However, because very few people watch broadcaster content over the air in the US, they do not need the spectrum for services. Instead, broadcasting over the air gives broadcasters the right to demand the cable TV providers carry their channels in the local markets they serve under the FCC must-carry rules. So owning broadcast spectrum is a very important bargaining tool. Unless Congress changes the law to guarantee local 'broadcasters' can get their content onto other broadband networks (ie, cable, telco broadband, satellite), then broadcasters will hang onto their spectrum for dear life.

Decisive political action would be required to resolve these issues, and unfortunately that is something that is currently in short supply in the USA.

Nevertheless the FCC is very knowledgeable about the complexity of this situation and very realistic to know that, in order to free substantive spectrum in the 2015 to 2020 timeframe, the battle has to start now. The question will be if the USA can afford to take such a long time to catch up with the rest of the world and thus fall further and further behind in the digital economy, while Chinese companies such as Huawei and ZTE are rapidly overtaking Motorola and other American companies.

Written by Paul Budde, Managing Director of Paul Budde Communication

With that market saturated their attention has now moved to mobile broadband.

However, it was the iPhone that broke open this market. The mobile operators didn't want to sell mobile broadband access on its own; they preferred to bundle it with the content offerings in their mobile portals. Apple broke that nexus and this led to the current mobile broadband explosion.

At the same time this clearly brings mobile into the data market. The emphasis is now on applications and many of them are based on video. This has also affected the mobile radio market — these are the thousands of mini mobile radio networks that operate around the world, mainly for the public safety agencies such as police, ambulance, fire, security, etc. Because of proprietary technologies these networks are still stuck in the old world of voice only. All of these networks are in desperate need of upgrading but very few can afford these upgrades on their own.

This is where the trans-sector concept kicks in. By sharing common infrastructure each agency can run its own service over that shared infrastructure. However, most agencies are wary of using a commercial network for this purpose. Nevertheless in the USA that is exactly what the FCC is proposing.

In Australia ACMA has also clearly indicated that these agencies will have to learn to share; and they will need to work on harmonising their networks.

It will be interesting to see whether this will happen on a voluntary basis and if commercial networks are willing to make their infrastructure available to these agencies on a utilities basis.

Alternatively, could this also lead to regulatory intervention that could possibly, in turn, lead to a separation of the basic infrastructure from the services?

Written by Paul Budde, Managing Director of Paul Budde Communication