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Net Neutrality, ICANN, and other issued related to internet infrastructure

Voice Link Sitcom Now Playing The Borscht Belt — Shows Why We Need STATE Jurisidiction Not Just FCC.

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New York is extremely lucky that it has not joined the Chump Parade and totally deregulated its telecom sector, although apparently it has such a proposal on the table. I say this because New York now faces one of those quintessential local problems that is much, much better handled at the state level than on the federal level.

It involves Verizon’s Voice Link product.  As regular readers know, That Darn Voice Link is the summer replacement series for Game of Sprint —  the Sprint/Softbank/DISH/CLWR drama which is now winding down.The plot for That Darn Voice Link is fairly straightforward. Scrappy little Voice Link, the daughter of the highly successful Verizon Wireless family, must get along with curmudgeonly old Uncle Copper while learning the family business and replacing Uncle Copper as the landline substitute. Will Voice Link provide a valuable alternative service? Or is Voice Link not yet ready for her big debut? Hijinks ensue!

In this week’s episode, Voice Link may have been selling herself a little too aggressively to some problem customers up in the Catskills. The State Attorney General thinks Voice Link crossed the line, but Voice Link insists she was just being helpful.

So is Voice Link going to get in trouble? Will the Federal Communications Commission get involved? Will this hurt Voice Link’s big debut on Fire Island?

Probably not. But it does underscore the very real question of what does it mean for Verizon to offer Voice Link as an alternative service while still genuinely offering copper, and stresses the importance of state jurisdiction — because there is no way the FCC can handle this sort of one-off local practice thing effectively.

 

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For the First Time In 100 Years, Copper Lines Come Down And Don’t Go Back Up. Verizon Files It’s 214(a) To Stop Copper Service In NY & NJ.

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Verizon has filed its request to the FCC to discontinue copper service in certain communities on Fire Island, NY and the Barrier Island of NJ, as required by Section 214(a) and 47 C.F.R. 63.71. You can find a copy here. At some point, the FCC will put this out on Public Notice and then folks can file objections if they want.

In some ways, this is a little thing impacting only a few communities. In other ways, it is a very big deal. If there is a single moment to point to and say “This is it! This is The Day We Started To Shut Down The Phone Network,” that day is today. With this little routine barely noticed filing for an administrative procedure that impacts a handful of communities.

Why? Because for the first time, the local phone company has said “once the old copper lines come down, they are not coming back — ever. We are out of the traditional phone service on Fire Island and Barrier Island and no one else is going to provide it either.”

Yes, there are other services that will sell you voice service. They will tell you its a phone. Each of these does many things the old phone system does, and most of these services do amazing things the old phone system could never do.

But like any transition — especially one that rests on a social contract people have relied upon for 100 years — we must expect a lot of disruption as well as anticipate the potential benefits. Verizon should not need to maintain an increasingly expensive and antiquated copper network until the end of time. Nor should they be required to rebuild copper they expect to shut down again in a few years time.

At the same time, we don’t just throw people under the bus — or send them suddenly scrambling for expensive alternatives. I’ve objected before to the way Verizon has moved forward with Voice Link because Sandy victims should not be guinea pigs for Voice Link’s first ever mass deployment.  At Public Knowledge, we’ve also had some concerns about what Verizon says Voice Link doesn’t do that the old copper service did do. Some of these can be addressed relatively easily, and Verizon has stated publicly it is working on improvements in things like battery life and using commercially available double AA batteries. Services that are considered vitally important by some communities, such as the ability to use international calling cards and receive collect calls, would require more work.

The question isn’t whether we transition the phone system or don’t. The question is how we transition. This is why my employer Public Knowledge has supported using a Framework of Five Fundamental Principles to guide the transition: Service to All Americans, Consumer Protection, Reliability, Public Safety, and Competition. This is why we have supported AT&T’s call to engage in dialog on the transition, and endorsed the idea of carefully conducted technical trials that protect consumers and genuinely inform the process.

As the FCC and state regulators evaluate Verizon’s application to end copper wire service entirely and replace it with Voice Link, it should evaluate Voice Link under the Five Fundamentals Framework. Does Voice Link provide adequate service to all members of the community, including the poor and vulnerable who have depended most heavily on the “copper safety net” of the old phone system? Does it adequately protect consumers? Will it function reliably in an emergency? And what are the implications for competition?

Above all else, the transition of the phone system and the end of the old copper network must not be a step backward. Handled properly, the transition can benefit everyone. There is nothing magical about copper.  All the fundamental principles we have relied on for 100 years — service to all Americans, consumer protection, reliability, public safety, and competition — were the result of deliberate policy choices. We can maintain these principles as we move forward to new wireless and IP-based networks, or we can chose to discard them.

Verizon and AT&T, understandably, have stressed everything we have to gain from the networks of the 21st Century. It falls to the regulators — and the public that holds them accountable — to make sure these gains do not come by sacrificing the poorest and most vulnerable.

 

Stay tuned . . . .

Quick Update: Verizon Responds To Yesterday’s Blog Post.

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Tom Maguire, Verizon’s point person for the Fire Island deployment, responds to my blog post here. At the end of the blog post, Maguire states that: “In addition, as part of our ongoing communications with the Federal Communications Commission, we have been working with the FCC for some time on filing the appropriate discontinuance filings and other notices for the affected services.”

 

Hopefully, Verizon will file sooner rather than later so that we can have the full and robust debate these important policy questions deserve. Remember, we are not just talking about Fire Island. We are talking about what rules apply anywhere a disaster destroys the copper infrastructure and the provider wants to replace it with something other than traditional copper phone service. For Verizon, that’s Voice Link. But the same rules apply if AT&T (or anyone else) wants to replace traditional TDM service with VOIP.

 

Tom and I were also (separately) interviewed by WAMC (the NPR affiliate in Albany) last week, you can find a transcript and audio here. Tom was responding there to my original blog post arguing that Verizon should replace copper with fiber rather than with an untested wireless technology. Amusingly, Maguire’s call (on cell, not Voice Link) dropped during the interview.

 

Stay tuned . . . .

 

FCC Needs To Step Up On Voice Link; Nature (and Natural Disasters) Abhor A Vacuum

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According to this report from Stop the Cap, Federal Communication Commission (FCC) line staff are telling your average citizen who calls to ask that Verizon can refuse to repair their copper lines as long as Verizon offers Voice Link instead. “It is acceptable” for Verizon to refuse to offer copper service even if “there will be no landlines” available at all, said FCC Representative TSR54. (And no, I did not make up the designation just to make this look more like some faceless bureaucratic drone.)

 

Did I miss the FCC Order on this? No.  But the fact that FCC line staff are taking it upon themselves to say this is totally O.K. shows just how badly the FCC has lost control of the situation. The FCC needs to move quickly to (a) makes Verizon file the necessary application under federal law to discontinue its traditional copper service so the FCC can actually decide this question for real; and, (b) develop a process for carriers in areas where disasters have destroyed copper infrastructure to replace that infrastructure with a new product like Voice Link or voice-over-IP (VOIP). Otherwise, we can forget about having any kind of useful pilot program where we protect consumers and gather information.  Carriers will take the Verizon approach, and convert natural disasters into “nature’s little laboratories.”

 

After all, nature abhors a vacum — whether in space or in policy. If the FCC continues to let Verizon decide on the proper policy for itself, we can expect other carriers to stop playing by the FCC’s rules and follow in Verizon’s footsteps.

 

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Google Fiber and the Next Stage In The Evolution of T. GOOG

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Back in 2007, when Google was suddenly interested in the 700 MHz auction and everyone was speculating whether or not Google planned to enter the wireless business (and if so how badly it would fail), I wrote this piece about Google’s behavior.

As I explained in the intro:

“Unless you own a cat, or have a bizarre interest in parasite-induced behavioral changes, odds are good you never heard of a critter called toxoplasma gondii (or “T. Gondii” to its friends). This little protozoa lives a complex lifestyle. In its immature phase, it can live in any mammal. But to reach the mature stage and reproduce, it must get into a cat. It does this by the expedient of reversing the usual aversion mice have to cats. A mouse infected by T. Gondii will find the odor of cat a powerful attraction and, on spotting a cat, will rush out to challenge the cat instead of hiding. As a result, the cat eats the mouse and the T. Gondii gets on with its reproductive business.

“I find myself regarding this as a very apt analogy for Google and its interest in wireless. Google has no real interest in becoming a network provider. Sure, it has dabbled a bit in broadband over power lines (BPL) and muniwireless, but nothing major. But this summer, Google got told in no uncertain terms that if it wanted access to the wireless world, the only way to get it was to win licenses and set up its own network.

“Google, of course, still doesn’t want to have to build a network. So it has adopted the strategy of our friend T. Gondii. Modify the behavior of someone else to make your life easier. I don’t regard this as “bad” or “freeloading” or “evil” anymore than I regard T. Gondii as evil. A protozoa (or a profit maximizing firm) has to do what a protozoa (or profit maximizing firm) has to do.”

And didn’t Google do just that? Without owning a network, Google is now happily embedded within the mobile world. And all the mobile companies, that swore in 2007 they would fight to the death to keep their platforms closed and that disruptive Google out, out OUT! plan a good portion of their lifecycle around Google’s Android operating system and Google mobile applications. Even its arch-rival Apple discovered it couldn’t displace Google Maps and get Google entirely off the platform.

Some years back, when Google announced their plans for a fiber network, I predicted that Google had similar intentions. Google did not intend to become a major network operator, if it could help it. But it needed to do something to get the landline mice, particularly cable, to start servicing us consumer cats better so that T. GOOG could get into our guts and alter our behavior better. Three years later, with recent announcements of Google expanding to Austin and Provo, I think it’s time to check in on how our favorite behavior-altering parasite is doing.

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Will Walden Wipe Out DMCA and CISPA To Take Out Net Neutrality In The Name of “Internet Freedom?”

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Today, the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology will begin mark up of the so-called “Internet Freedom Bill.” As explained in the Majority Briefing Memo, we’re still on about that whole “the ITU will take control of the Internet and black helicopters will come for out name servers” thing.”  Unfortunately, as keeps happening with this, it looks like some folks want to hijack what should be a show of unity to promote their own partisan domestic agenda. Specifically, does the bill as worded undercut the (by accident or design) the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) authority to do things like Network Neutrality?

 

As I elaborate below, however, this is not so much a stab at net neutrality and the FCC generally as it is a murder/suicide. You can’t claim that this clips the wings of the FCC to do net neutrality by making a law that the U.S. is opposed to “government control” of the Internet without also eliminating laws that deal with cybersecurity, copyright enforcement online, privacy, and a range of other stuff that are just as much “government control” of the Internet — but that most Republicans opposed to net neutrality actually like. Plus, as I noted last week when discussing the rural call completion problem, taking the FCC out of the equation may have some unforseen nasty consequences that even Republicans might not like.

 

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Rural Call Completion and the Problem of Network Neuropathy.

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I made a passing reference to the rural call completion problem in a post about 2 months ago. I’ve now written a much longer piece explaining the problem of rural call completion, and the nature of the problem, for the Daily Yonder. You can find the article, and the very nice illustrations they added, over here.

To give a very brief recap for why y’all should click through to learn the details of rural call completion — rural call completion is an unexpected side effect of the transition of the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) to an all-IP based network. Using IP-packets gives you greater flexibility to pick how you route calls. To avoid very expensive rural termination fees (which subsidize rural systems and keep them operating), Least Call Router systems can send calls through lots of hops, creating latency or even trapping the call in a perpetual loop. As a result, calls to some rural systems don’t go through, or quality degrades to where rural areas may not be able to have reliable phone service or reliably reach 9-1-1. The FCC has issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to address the problem, and every Commissioner has emphasized that making sure the phone netwok remains reliable is a core mission of the FCC.

I and my Public Knowledge colleagues have emphasized both network reliability and service to all Americans as part of our “Five Fundamentals Framework” to guide the transition of the PSTN to all-IP. The rural call completion problem demonstrates precisely why we need a framework to guide us, rather than jumping right away into the “deregulation v. regulation” fight so many people want to have instead of focusing on the real issues.

It is also an example of a phenomenon I call “network neuropathy,” how problems in networks may first manifest themselves in failures of service around the extremities.

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Shutting Down the Phone System: Comcast’s Very Scary Filing

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I’ve been sorting through the various filings at the FCC in the Phone Network to IP transition docket. I single out the 7-page filing by Comcast as the filing that scares the absolute bejeebers out of me.

 

Why? Because everyone else – no matter what their financial interest or political alignment – at least paid lip service to the idea that we ought to have some kind of regulation. Whether it’s a general nod to a “minimal and light touch regulatory regime” or a specific shopping list, the vast majority of commenters recognized then when you have something as big, complicated and utterly essential to people’s lives as the phone system, you need some kind of basic backstop for people to feel comfortable and to address problems that will invariably come up. Even AT&T has made it utterly clear that it does not see the future of phone service as a regulation-free zone.” Even staunch free market conservatives such as TechFreedom and Free State Foundation acknowledge that, as a practical matter, there is going to need to be some set of rules – even if they hope to keep these rules to what they regard as the barest minimum necessary.

 

Comcast, and Comcast alone, suggests otherwise. Comcast alone thinks we can manage the phone system as the Libertarian Nirvana. This smacks either of unbelievable hubris (“we’re so big everyone will have to deal with us – what could go wrong?”) or an incredible sense of market power (“we’re so big everyone will have to deal with us – heh heh heh”). Either way, this sends chills down my spine, because the filing signals loud and clear that Comcast – one of the largest providers of residential phone service in the United States, the largest residential broadband provider, and the single most powerful entity in U.S. telecom policy – simply doesn’t get it when it comes to the future of the phone system.

 

As I explain below, Comcast needs to understand that “With Great Market Share Comes Great Responsibility.” Because when you are this big, even what you don’t say can have huge consequences. Comcast is beyond “too big to fail.” It is now officially in its own regulatory category called “too big to be allowed to screw up.” Because Comcast is now so big, and so central to communications in the United States, that it could single-handedly crash the phone system by stupidly trying to manage it as if it were the cable world. Unless Comcast gets with the program and acknowledges the need for some kind of ongoing oversight of the phone system, this transition is guaranteed to become an utter disaster.

 

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Cecilia Kang Is Right: There Really Could Be A Free National WiFi Network (of Networks)

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This past week, we’ve had quite the discussion around Cecilia Kang’s WashPo piece describing a plan by the FCC to create a national WiFi network by making the right decisions about how to allocate spectrum between licenses for auction and what to leave available for the unlicensed TV white spaces (“TVWS” aka “Super WiFi” aka “Wifi on steroids”). As Kang describes, the FCC’s opening of sufficient spectrum for TVWS could lead to “super WiFi networks (emphasis added) around the nation so powerful and broad in reach that consumers could use them to make calls  or surf the Internet without paying a cellphone bill every month.”

Needless to say, the article faced much pushback, despite a subsequent Washpo clarification to indicate the FCC was not, actually, planing to build a network. Amidst the various critics, there were some general defenders of the concept. My colleagues at EFF noted that increasing the availability of open spectrum for WiFi-type uses , and my friends at Free Press argued that such a free public wifi network (or, more accurately, series of networks) is in fact possible if the FCC makes enough good quality spectrum, suitable for broadband and usable out doors, available on an unlicensed basis.

I will now go a step further than any of my colleagues. I will boldly state that, if the FCC produces a solid 20 MHz of contiguous empty space for TV White spaces in the Incentive Auction proceeding, or even two 10 MHz guard channels that could nationally produce two decent sized LTE-for unlicensed channels, then we will have exactly the kind of free publicly available wifi Kang describes in her article. Or, “Yes Cecilia, there really is free national public wifi. Don’t let the haters and know-it-alls tell you otherwise.”

 

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Shutting Down the Phone System: “IP” Does Not Equal “Fiber,” “Fiber Does Not Equal IP.”

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As regular readers know, I regard the upgrade of the phone system (aka the “public switched telephone network” or “PSTN”) to an all-IP based network as a majorly huge deal. As I’ve explained at length before, this is a huge deal because of a bunch of decisions the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has made over the years that have fragmented our various policies and regulations about phones into a crazy-quilt of different rules tied sometimes to the technology (IP v. traditional phone (TDM)) and sometimes to the actual medium of transmission (copper v. fiber v. cable v. wireless). This whacky set of FCC decisions has produced a great deal of confusion about what we are talking about when we talk about the upgrade of the phone network.

 

As a result, people keep pointing out the same two things to me over and over and over. “AT&T is not switching to fiber to the home! Their upgrade is still copper!” The other is: “Verizon is pulling up all their copper in New York City (and everywhere else in the Sandy zone) and shifting customers from copper to FIOS without getting any permission from anyone!” These observations are usually made with the same fervor as Charlton Heston giving out his recipe for Soylent Green.

 

Allow me to debunk the Cult of the Copper Snake (with bonus points for recognizing the Biblical reference. And no, it isn’t the Golden Calf. It’s the Copper Snake.) You can have an all IP network that runs on copper, and you can run a traditional TDM-based network over fiber that is treated like a phone service. Both of these are different from a TDM-system that runs on copper.  All three are treated differently from each other from a regulatory perspective. I also must point out, in AT&T’s defense, that AT&T never claimed it was upgrading to fiber, and in fact has been quite specific that they are not going FttH (to Wall St.’s great relief and the disappointment of many others paying attention).

 

If you want to stop here, you can. If you want to find out why this is true, and why people keep confusing them, then you must continue on, delving into the minutiae of the last ten years of regulatory history. While a pain in the patootie to sort through (and I will do what I can to make it less boring where possible), it’s worth it if you want to understand what’s going on and how AT&T can be going on about how this is going to improve broadband and blah blah blah without ever promising to move to fiber to the home.

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