F2C: Freedom to Connect

Freedom-to-Connect partner and speaker Esme Vos has a post on MuniWireless called Find out if your ISP is a bad ISP with Glasnost in which she asks if your ISP is “playing funny games” with your Internet connection. She urges inquiry:

Simply go to Glasnost (appropriate name as it refers to a period in the 1980s in the USSR when there was a bit more openness and transparency). Glasnost is but one weapon in your arsenal for finding out the TRUTH about your broadband connection and your ISP. It is a product of Measurement Lab, founded by the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, the PlanetLab Consortium, Google Inc. and academic researchers: “M-Lab was developed in 2008 after Vint Cerf and others at Google initiated conversations with network researchers to learn more about challenges to the effective study of broadband networks.”

She reported that her ISP came out clean. I can report (finally, busy servers) that my ISP is doing well as of this post. However, all ISPs will not have such good reports. What should be done about it?

Join us at Freedom to Connect to discuss this and more! Here’s a link to the registration page.

Friends and Colleagues,

Just a quick note. The price of admission to F2C: Freedom to Connect goes up $100, from $395 to $495, this Sunday, February 1. The details are at http://freedom-to-connect.net

F2C: Freedom to Connect will occur March 30 & 31 in Washington DC. This year, F2C is a partnership between isen.com, LLC and MuniWireless. Esme Vos of MuniWireless writes:

This year, President-elect Barack Obama has made
broadband — its cost, quality and availability — a
major issue for his administration to tackle.
Broadband is, in the eyes of the new administration,
not just there for its own sake, but is the means to
improving our lives: from the education of our children
to the reduction of social isolation among seniors to
efficient management of our energy grid.

There will be a lot of new people in Washington DC.
In the past, many of Freedom to Connect’s attendees
have come from the FCC, various federal government
agencies, the Congress and the Senate. We need to have
a dialogue with them about the future of broadband
and technological innovation in the United States.

Next week F2C will cost $100 more. Tickets at the door will be $795. So register now.

I hope to see you at F2C: Freedom to Connect!

This book was recommended on Jerry Michalski’s Yi-Tan call on Wireless Broadband this morning: …and Communications for All: A Policy Agenda for the New Administration. It will be available on January 31, 2009.

F2C speaker Sascha Meinrath and The New America Foundation is in the news again with a report entitled Building a 21st Century Broadband Superhighway: A Concrete Build-out Plan to Bring High-Speed Fiber to Every Community. In this report, the authors describe

a fundamental commitment to building an open and accessible high-speed links, allowing a multitude of service providers and services to utilize the infrastructure on a wholesale, non-discriminatory basis, and ensuring that this public investment is as beneficial as possible to the maximum number of potential users.

From the report:

The 21st Century Broadband Superhighway initiative would fund and mandate the installation of high-capacity, dark fiber bundles along all federally-subsidized and direct federal highway projects, thus creating over time a fully interconnected, public access fiber infrastructure to bring high-speed connectivity to every community served by these highways.

While this report offers a workable proposal, an article in Ars Technica, Two-thirds of Americans without broadband don’t want it, points out that

Pew’s Internet & American Life Project reminds us that a hardcore contingent of holdouts won’t, no matter how cheap or how fast the connection is.

What will become of the Info Superhighway? Come to F2C to explore these views and more!

I’m live-blogging part of the Pacific Telecom Council Conference (PTC ‘09 in Waikiki, Hawaii, over the next four days at ManyMedia. Topics I’ll be covering include the state of the undersea fiber cable industry, emergency communications management, satellite, and policy and regulatory changes.

For more information on the conference, check the website.

Lee S. Dryburgh interviewed F2C Speaker Sascha Meinrath on Spectrum 2.0, Battling the Incumbents and Future Telecom Networks. The audio interview is downloadable, and the transcript is available.

Well into the interview, Dryburgh asks:

What do you see as the future of telecommunications infrastructure? What will it look like and how will we get from where we are today, to there?

Meinrath answers:

The future is absolutely going to be a hybrid infrastructure. You will have fiber connectivity. You want the fiber because it has capacity and reliability, but it will also be this hybrid with a wireless communication system, which will provide cost efficiencies and mobility. Together, they will hopefully look like a seamless roaming between these different media – wireline and wireless – seamless roaming across multiple, different systems and networks. They might go from EVDO to cellular, to Wi-Fi, to a wire line plug-in, depending on what’s most effective for your needs. All of this is predicated upon an open networking system where interoperability is paramount and where users are empowered to jump amongst multiple, different networks. That’s really, where these battles are going to be fought. The telco incumbents really want to be sure that their users stay on their network and really don’t like the notion of freeing up users to jump to whatever is most effective for end users.

If I were to point to the future of communications, it is in this tension between end-user empowerment, edge-to-edge networking and command-and-control infrastructures that attempt to lock down users and networks and keep you on a specific network.

F2C ‘09 is centered around the theme of Plugging Into the Internet Economy. The changes described above will change the nature of how we do business on the Internet.  Will the FCC be part of this change? Will our Congress? The media? How is the Obama Administration facing this change? Join us for the discussion at F2C to learn more!

The House Appropriations Committee released a Stimulus Draft Bill (PDFs: text of bill, House Report) which has a broadband component. This should be no surprise as the incoming Obama administration has promised that broadband would be a key to the overall approach to healing the economy.

Ars Technica reports:

The “American Recovery and Reinvestment Bill of 2009″ is designed to create and save between three and four million jobs, [House Appropriations Committee Chair David] Obey says, “and begin the process of transforming [the United States] for the 21st century.” It is also packed with tech- and science-related investment programs. The broadband plan will target high speed Internet access “so businesses in rural and other underserved areas can link up to the global economy.” And the proposal includes $10 billion for science and research.

Ars continues:

…the advocacy group Free Press has already filed comments on the broadband aspect of the plan. The group says it’s happy about the bill, although it doesn’t think $6 billion is enough. Beyond that concern, it wants Congress to require any new network funded by this program to adhere to open access and nondiscrimination principles, or possibly open them to providers at wholesale access rates. In addition, some government agency must oversee the program to “enforce concrete administrative accountability.”

Ditto say Public Knowledge and the Open Internet Coalition, which rushed their press releases to Ars shortly after Obey released his summary of the bill. Everybody’s praising this proposal, up to a point.

F2C09 speaker Geoff Daily takes this concern further, asking if grants are “really the best way to distribute that money quickly, ensure accountability, deliver rural areas the connectivity they need to compete globally, and maximize the impact of government dollars?” Daily contrasts the Draft with a proposed Rural Fiber Fund (RFF), which:

• Will work more quickly
• Will require less administration
• Will be less likely to turn into a boondoggle
• Will bring world-class broadband infrastructure to rural America
• Will deliver the most bang for the government buck

Geoff’s article has more general information on how this works. Watch AppRising for a stimulus-ready, detailed plan for the RFF shortly.

Telephony Online has an article featuring Benoît Felton about a global report issued by the Yankee Group Dec. 31. Felton points out that

While incumbents remain convinced that open access or wholesale models won’t enable them to earn a return on their investment, regulators would prefer open access models, said Benoît Felten, senior analyst with Yankee Group and author of “Fiber to the World: A State of the Union Report on FTTH,” along with co-author Vince Vittore. In the report, Felten advises regulators to be more decisive, choose a model for regulating next-generation access networks and move on, since regulatory uncertainty is almost guaranteed to slow investment in new networks.

“I think the core issue especially right now with [the economic] crisis going on is that the regulators are under a lot of pressure, moral and governmental, not to hit the big guys,” Felten said. “But if you want to ensure competition in a new market from day one, you have to take a tough stand. At the end of the day, a solution is not going to come from regulators, it will come from competition.”

Mr. Felton will be speaking at F2C09 on The State of The Fibersphere. Check out our (evolving) agenda for more.