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Net Neutrality 9-18-2006

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Net Neutrality Links

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Why Distrust Bell Promises on Net Neutrality

The dirty secret of modern telecomm is that all the money is in wireless. Verizon Wireless is the largest wireless provider. Verizon advertising claims only “the network” can guarantee good wireless service. (That is a lie.) Verizon claims it offers Internet service off its phones.

Does it? Not on your tintype.

Even The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg refers to the Verizon and Cingular networks as “Soviet Ministries.” They decide what online services users will be able to access, and at what price. They also take money from both sides of every information transaction.

When challenged about this, they lie. That’s right, they lie. They claim that if someone was unhappy with a third party they would complain to Verizon. As though people complain to their ISPs about every bad site visit they have. As though the mobile companies were paragons of customer service. They are not.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Net Neutrality 9-17-2006

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Net Neutrality Links

I’m adding this link to the Net Neutrality Page.

Major U.S. Trade Group Makes Case for Neutrality

The American Electronics Association (AeA) released a report yesterday strongly supporting Net Neutrality and urging Congress: “Don’t stifle competition and innovation by allowing network operators to change and distort what is currently a highly competitive system.”

“The principles of Net Neutrality have created the Internet as we know it — the most dynamic network for communication and commerce in human history,” states The Case for Preserving Net Neutrality, a report by AeA, which represents 2,500 companies from every corner of the high-tech industry.

[ . . . ]

According to the report, the only way to [“safeguard the competitive nature of the Internet] is for Congress to prevent companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast from abusing their market power by imposing discriminatory new surcharges that favor the content from companies and Web sites that pay them the most.

Allowing the nation’s largest phone and cable companies to tilt the market in favor of larger and better funded content providers would “undermine the fundamental principles of open and free exchange of information across the network,” according to the AeA report.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Net Neutrality 9-16-2006

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Net Neutrality Links

I’m adding this link to the Net Neutrality Page.

Guess the State and Win a Subsidy: Senate Plays Geography Games in Telecom Bill

Are you good at geography? If so, you may enjoy the small geography quiz buried deep inside of the telecommunications bill now pending in the U.S. Senate. Hidden on page 121 is a paragraph directing the FCC to expand universal service payments to “insular areas, including any insular area that is a State comprised entirely of islands…”

[. . . ]

As it turns out, the list of states covered by this provision is quite short:

1.Hawaii.

And, by total coincidence, a senator from that state — Daniel Inouye — is the co-chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee — which wrote the bill.

[. . . ]

The provision illustrates how far the bill has strayed from a hoped-for focus on eliminating unneeded regulation. At its core, there still is substantial positive reform: streamlining of the video franchising process. But that important change is surrounded by a luau of special interest provisions. . . .

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Net Neutrality 9-15-2006

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Net Neutrality Links

I’m adding this link to the Net Neutrality Page.

Google End Runs AT&T, Verizon and the other Telecomms

Google is leasing a huge chunk of space, almost two full floors, at 111 Eighth Avenue in the Chelsea District of Manhattan in the landmark former Port Authority Headquarters. . . . But it isn’t the building that’s the key to understanding this move. According to the breaking story in the Village Voice,

The old Port Authority headquarters sits atop one of the main fiber optic arteries in New York City—the Hudson Street–Ninth Avenue “fiber highway.” The venerable behemoth is already one of the country’s most important “carrier hotels”—loosely speaking, the physical connection points of the world’s telecommunications networks and the World Wide Web. As a result, Google will “have access to as much bandwidth as possible and as much variety of bandwidth as possible,” says Dana Spiegel, a technology consultant and executive director of NYC Wireless.

The tenant list of this building reads like a Who’s Who in High Tech, with many of the top internet and Telecomm players in residence . . . There’s a “meet me” room known as NYC Connect . . . a carrier neutral facility . . . This will allow Google to bypass the Telecomms and go directly to Tier 2 service providers. The meet me facilities “are built to N+1 redundancy.

There is much speculation about why Google is doing this, but what it really comes down to is that Google is now master of its own fiber optic destiny and can’t be held hostage by Ed Whitacre or any other Telecomm. And if you add up the ongoing purchases of dark fiber all over the map, it spells out a future where the Telecomms will never be able to hold Google hostage to additional fees or slow down delivery of Google Video or VOIP.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Net Neutrality 9-14-2006

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Net Neutrality Links

I’m adding this link to the Net Neutrality Page.

New Report Skewers Telco Spin on Competition

Why has the United States fallen behind the rest of the world in accessible and affordable broadband service?

The answer, according to a report [PDF] released by Free Press, the Consumer Federation of America and Consumers Union, is marketplace failures wrought by phone and cable companies’ near monopoly control of last-mile broadband markets.

The 44-page report, Broadband Reality Check II, exposes the truth behind America’s digital decline: A marketplace controlled by the likes of AT&T, Verizon and Comcast has left Americans with higher prices, slower speeds and no meaningful competition for high-speed Internet service.

It exposes the lie behind phone companies’ repeated claims that the U.S. has a diverse marketplace, with myriad broadband choices for the consumer.

It decisively skewers the notion — put forth by telco executives and their high-paid shills — that “fierce competition” precludes Net Neutrality protections.

[ . . . ]

Broadband Reality Check II also finds:

The 14 other OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] nations saw higher overall net growth in broadband adoption than the United States from 2001 to 2005.

Consumers in other countries enjoy broadband connections that are far faster and cheaper than what is available here. U.S. consumers pay nearly twice as much as the Japanese for connections that are 20 times as slow.

U.S. broadband prices aren’t dropping: Cable modem prices are holding constant or rising, and DSL customers on average are getting less bandwidth per dollar than just a year ago.

The market share of “third platform” alternatives like satellite, wireless and broadband over powerline technologies has actually decreased over the past five years.

The report contradicts the rosy picture painted by the Federal Communications Commission, by exposing the agency’s failure to rein in broadband monopolies . . .

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

5 +1 Whole Brain Steps to Believable Strategic Goals OR Find Your Bliss Without Wasting Time

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But the Sky Is WAY Up There!

Strategic Plans logo

When I introduced this series with the overview The 5 Step Strategy that Saved a Company Can Also Get You to Your Dream, Chris and Hendry Lee pointed out in the comments a mistake that is easy to fall into — setting an unbelievable goal.

After all, we’ve decided. We want to get going, make things happen, put our strategy in place. So let’s choose a goal that’s mighty, powerful, and going to get us there now. Friends and family, thinking the problem is self-estem, often advise and encourage us to do just that.

Soon enough we end up with a goal like this one.

“Find Your Bliss and the Money Will Follow.” That’s a dream — too nebulous to be a strategic goal. I can imagine bliss, sort of, but I can’t define it. I can’t put my arms around it or draw a map to show me or anyone how to get there.

The irony is that when we face an impossible goal, we become overwhelmed, lose that self-same self-esteem, and talk ourselves out of our quest, knowing we’d fail. After all, I can’t ahieve or become what I can’t define or see — I’m not foolish enough to try that.

End of quest, end of strategy to improve,.we’re left without the goal, somehow feeling less for even thinking about trying. We might even be thinking that strategy is something that other folks do . . .

Pfft! balderdash, piffle, and keruffle. All four apply to that response. Add to that . . .

Unbelievable!

We’re not what’s wrong in this picture. The goal is. [Read more…]