"Net Neutrality" Might Happen Tomorrow...We Still Can't Agree On What it Is

The Federal Communications Commission is supposed to introduce and possibly vote on new "network neutrality" rules on Dec. 21, 2010, and whether one is in favor or not, we still cannot agree on what it is.

For some, it is a freedom of speech issue; for others a simple matter of network management, with many views in between. One can argue that the FCC already has addressed the "freedom of speech" issue, that Internet service providers already agree, and that there is in fact no need for new rules. The FCC's "Internet Freedom" principles are widely accepted, and one might argue that if anything needs to be done, it is a simple matter of enforcing infractions, as the FCC already has done, twice.

There is, in short, widespread agreement that users have the right to use all lawful applications.

Of course, even with recognized "freedom of speech" rights, there are permissible "time, place and manner" restrictions. Among the issues for network service providers is that all networks will, under extraordinary load, have to "block access to the network." Though some will disagree, such blocking is a network resource fact of life. When a server gets taxed, what does that server do? It blocks additional requests for access until it can clear the existing load.

Back in the old days, when telephone networks got overloaded, what happened? New callers were blocked from access. "All circuits are busy, please try your call again later." All servers work the same way.

But this is complicated. All networks get congested, some times. Outright access blocking is one way to deal with the load. Shaping the traffic and prioritizing traffic are other ways to deal with the overload problem.

Some net neutrality advocates believe such shaping and priorities should never be allowed. Some opponents say such blunt force rules will foreclose creation of new services that users might actually want to have access to. Some might want first priority for any active voice, video or conferencing session, with other classes of traffic, such as bulk software downloads, email or web surfing traffic given lower priority.

We might see, soon, what new rules the FCC wants to implement, and then we will see what is likely years of litigation about whether those rules can be enforced.

But no matter what form any new rules might take, they will not dispense with the need to allocate resources under conditions of congestion. One hopes any such rules will not reduce the amount of innovation. Ironically, one of the stated reasons in favor of strong net neutrality provisions is the preservation of an innovative climate. The problem with such rules is that they preserve freedom for some by taking it away from others in the ecosystem.

Four takes on why net neutrality matters

Best Buy bundling free Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T MiFis with iPads

Best Buy is now offering an iPad bundle which includes a choice of an AT&T, Verizon, or Sprint MiFi, when purchased with a two-year data subscription. The bundle deal is good until Jan. 2, 2011.

This sort of bundle illustrates the upside for mobile service providers for sales of mobile-connected iPads and tablets, and also allows people to use their tablets on several networks, not just AT&T, in the case of the iPad.

Best Buy bundling free Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T MiFis with iPads, contract required | 9 to 5 Mac Best Buy bundling free Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T MiFis with iPads, contract required | Apple Intelligence

AdMob and Coca Cola Launch Campaign

The AdMob team at Google recently worked with the Coca-Cola Company to produce a live wallpaper celebrating the holiday season based on their annual holiday commercial. Live wallpapers are animated homescreen backgrounds that respond to both touch and phone movement, and can also react to the time of day and a device’s geographic location.

This is the first time the AdMob team has worked with an advertiser on creating this type of mobile experience.

AdMob and Coca Cola bring the holidays to your mobile phone - Google Mobile Ads Blog

Facebook and Twitter are Big

Facebook and Twitter both are big. Here's a look at how big the two firms are. You can click on the image for a larger view.

The most reliable blogging services on the Web

Google’s Blogger platform is the most-reliable of several tested by Pingdom. The Blogger blogs didn’t have any downtime whatsoever during the two months we monitored them, followed by WordPress.com which had very little downtime.

Typepad performed about as well as WordPress. Posterous had somewhat mixed results, but overall performance was close to tht of WordPress and Typepad. Tumblr was the only service in the test that truly failed.

The most reliable (and unreliable) blogging services on the Web

AT&T Acquires 700-MHz spectrum from Qualcomm

AT&T is buying spectrum licenses in the 700 MHz frequency band from Qualcomm for $1.925 billion. The spectrum will be used as part of AT&T's Long Term Evolution 4G mobile broadband network.

Qualcomm had been using the spectrum to support its FLO TV business, but Qualcomm is shutting the service in March 2011.

The spectrum covers more than 300 million people total nationwide and includes 12 MHz of 700 MHz D and E block spectrum covers more than 70 million people in five of the top 15 U.S. metropolitan areas, including New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The network also includes 6 MHz of 700 MHz "D block" spectrum covers more than 230 million people across the rest of the United States.

Frequencies in the 700 MHz and 800 MHz bands are highly favored for mobile services because the signals feature both more range and greater ability to penetrate buildings. As indoor coverage is a continual issue for mobile services, the new frequencies will help AT&T deal with indoor coverage for its LTE network.

read more here

Zong for Content Purchases

Zong, a provider of content purchases, might ultimately have a wider role in the transaction space.

ITU Says Some 3G Networks are 4G, Pre-4G is 4G, and 4G is 4G

The International Telecommunications Union recently defined  “LTE-Advanced” and “WirelessMAN-Advanced” as the only "official definitiions of "fourth generation" networks, automatically making networks operated by Sprint, Clearwire, Verizon, MetroPCS and all other operators of WiMAX and Long Term Evolution networks something other than standards-based "4G" networks.

Now the ITU has muddied the waters even more, saying that some "3G" networks are "4G," while the formal "pre-4G" networks in existence, or about to be built, also are "4G."

"As the most advanced technologies currently defined for global wireless mobile broadband communications, IMT-Advanced is considered as “4G”, although it is recognized that this term, while undefined, may also be applied to the forerunners of these technologies, LTE and WiMax, and to other evolved 3G technologies providing a substantial level of improvement in performance and capabilities with respect to the initial third generation systems now deployed," the ITU says in a new statement.

Huh? Some of us have had no issue with T-Mobile USA saying its new HSPA+ network offers "speeds equivalent to 4G," because the WiMAX and HSPA+ networks do offer comparable access speeds. But it does create a definitional muddle. It's one thing for marketplace contestants to position their networks in one way or another.

It might be quite another for a "standards" body to argue that 3G is 4G, existing 4G is 4G, and other possible networks might also be 4G.

What's the point of a standard when it isn't a standard any longer? In this case, it might mean that the "non-standard" standards will grow organically to the point that the newly-minted "4G" standard simply ceases to be relevant, much as adherence to the supposedly-"legacy" TCP/IP completely killed the shift to new protocols for layers one through four of the data communications protocols.

One might say the ITU flip flop is merely embarassing, and yet another example of standards bodies attempting to define "next generation" networks. It might result in something far more substantial than that. One might suggest that the whole effort now is questionable, in terms of helping shape the development of 4G.

Once critical mass developments around the real-world 4G and advanced 3G networks, services, revenue elements and devices, evolution will happen based on those factors. That doesn't mean operators will abandon the effort to keep developing more-capable networks. But as we have seen with TCP/IP and other data "standards," the market often decides what a standard is.

So far, the markets, and end users, have decided the path for next-generation networks, in large part. That could well happen here as well. No matter what the ITU thinks, if voluntary groups such as the GSM decide to evolve LTE in some other direction, the existence of a formal standard will not deter them.

That is not to fault the well-intentioned hard work of the technologists working on the standard. The point is simply that the global telecommunications industry has yet to prove it can devise a "next-generation" network standard that real-world operators actually embrace obviously, and with great commercial success. Instead, the pattern so far has been that network operators and end users sort of grope towards better solutions as best they can.

But it is equally true that, up to this point, real-world commercial success has not been driven so much by the standards as by solutions that users believe are workable and useful.

For a discussion f the ITU standards, read this: http://www.itu.int/itunews/manager/display.asp?lang=en&year=2008&issue=10&ipage=39&ext=html and this http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/121710-itu-softens-on-the-definition.html.

For a discussion of the change, arguing that the ITU now has erred twice on the same subject, see http://www.abiresearch.com/research_blog/1520.

Social Adoption by Enterprises

What social technologies and tools do enterprises view as most important, and what kind of investments do organizations plan to make in Web 2.0 in the future? This McKinsey presentation tries to answer the questions.  The survey examines business use of 12 technologies and tools: blogs, mash-ups (a Web application that combines multiple sources of data into a single tool), microblogging, peer to peer, podcasts, prediction markets, rating, RSS (Really Simple Syndication), social networking, tagging, video sharing, and wikis.


http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Business_and_Web_20_An_interactive_feature_2431?pagenum=1#interactive

Is 2011 the Year for Social Commerce?

Facebook has 600 million users worldwide, and about 140 million of those users in the United States. Facebook reports that about 50 percent of those users check the site every day.

Time on Facebook represents about 25 percent of time spent on line (11 hours a week for the average user), now cannibalizing time spent on line doing things like reading news and other online media, instant messaging and emailing, thanks in part, to entrepreneurs who have developed applications that keep users on the site more of the time.

Brands already use Facebook for branding and customer interactions. Can mobile and online commerce be too far away?

Is 2011 the Year for Social Commerce?

One Wonders Whether Many Charging Methods Will be "Legal," after Dec. 21

Packet priorities obviously raises hackles in some quarters, but there also is no question service providers are anxious to add value to their broadband access services, or services provided by their partners. One wonders how many of the possible techniques will be permissible after Dec. 21, 2010, at least temporarily, while the legal challenges are sorted out.

This webinar highlights the benefits of deep packet inspection, policy management and new differentiated charging solutions, especially in the wireless domain. In principle, some of the techniques are borrowed from the ways service providers have created incentives for users to shift some voice usage to non-peak hours.

Managing the unmanageable: monetizing and controlling OTT applications - FierceWireless

Orange leads NFC charge in Europe - Rethink Wireless

Orange, the key France Telecom brand, has announced that it will roll out near field communications-enabled handsets across its whole European Union footprint starting in the second half of 2011.

These phones can be used to pay for goods by wanding the devices near special retail terminals. Orange will kick off its initiative in its home base of France, and among its postpaid user base. It expects to have 500,000 French customers equipped with NFC by the end of 2011.

Orange told handset vendors at a meeting that it aimed to see NFC included in over half the new smartphone models it buys next year. Orange is the first European operator to make such a clear commitment to the development of mobile contactless services.

Orange leads NFC charge in Europe - Rethink Wireless

One Reason Online Privacy Rules Are Coming

An examination of 101 popular smartphone apps by the Wall Street Journal show that that 56 transmitted the phone's unique device ID to other companies without users' awareness or consent. Not everybody would think that especially intrusive.

Some 47 apps transmitted the phone's location in some way. Five sent age, gender and other personal details to outsiders.

Apple says that iPhone apps can’t transmit user data without approval, but the WSJ’s findings reveal many apps that don’t follow that rule. Google leaves it up to app makers to make users aware of the data their apps reveal. Android also gives users specific notes about the phone resources (including hardware and data) apps will use before they’re downloaded.

Unfortunately, there’s little users can do to protect themselves from data-sharing apps, aside from avoiding many popular apps entirely, the report suggests. Many mobile ad companies let users opt-out of their website tracking, but those opt-out lists don’t apply to apps, according to the WSJ. The ad company Jumptap says iPhone users can opt out of app data sharing by emailing their phone’s user ID to them. Apple says its iAd opt-out also applies to apps (but doesn’t prevent iTunes data from being collected).

The findings reveal the intrusive effort by online-tracking companies to gather personal data about people in order to flesh out detailed dossiers on them, and suggest why there will be growing political pressure to toughen online privacy, and mobile privacy by extension, if not formal and specific rules relating to mobile data.

read more here if you aren't a Wall Street Journal subscriber.

IPhone and Android Apps Breach Privacy - WSJ.com (subscription required)

Anonymous Anything Is a Problem

Washington Post readers constantly complain about the excessive use of anonymous sources in the newspaper. But the problem is even worse online, according to the newspaper's ombudsman.

"Staff-written news blogs are replete with violations of The Post's long-established and laudable standards governing confidential sources," Andrew Alexander, Washignton Post ombudsman says. "These unnamed sources often are cited without providing readers with even a hint of their reliability or why they were granted anonymity."

In the first two weeks of December alone, Post news blogs included more than 20 unnamed sources without any explanation of their quality or why they warranted confidentiality, says Alexnder. Many blogs referred only to 'sources' or 'those close to' a subject or situation.

In some ways, use of such sources is an occupational hazard. Some sources will say things only if they are not quoted or identified, and the technique remains an important way some news gets out. But such leaks typically always have an agenda.

Some might say the problem is even worse for anonymous comments and posts online, which tend to encourage rude behavior. Some will argue anonymous comments, posts or statements, though sometimes useful, are overused.

Andrew Alexander - Post's problems with anonymous-source rules get worse online

Visa Talks About Mobile Payments