Neutrino:
The 700 MHz Band Auction, Part IIIa: The Classic Pattern and the Mid-Range Competitors

To begin our analysis of strategic options for major actors in Auction 73, 700 MHz Band, it is useful to look at the footprints established by many of those actors in two previous Lower 700 MHz auctions (Auction 44 and 49) and the AWS-1 auction (Auction 66):*
Cellular Market Areas (CMA) Map for Auction 44
Economic Area Groupings (EAG) Map for Auction 44
Cellular Market Areas (CMA) Map for Auction 49
Economic Area Groupings (EAG) Map for Auction 49
Cellular Market Areas (CMA) Map for Auction 66
Economic Areas (EA) Map for Auction 66
Regional Economic Area Groupings (REAG) Map for Auction 66

The Classic Pattern

The classic pattern for an RTC and for most CLECs and WISPs in these auctions is that of Agri-Valley: expansion through Auctions 44, 49 and 66 to attempt to match its landline footprint with CMA acquisitions. In Auction 66 Agri-Valley went for and failed to obtained consolidation in Flint, Lansing, Saginaw, Muskegon, Gogebic, Alger, Cheboygan, Roscommon, and Cass. Expect Agri-Valley to continue this pattern in Auction 73. The same holds true for Whidbey Telephone in Maine in Auction 49, for Hemingford Cooperative in Nebraska, Wyoming, and Colorado in Auction 66, Bluegrass Cellular In western Kentucky in Auction 44, Union Telephone in Wyoming and Colorado in Auction 44 and 66, East Kentucky Network in eastern Kentucky in Auction 44, Fidelity Communications in Missouri in Auction 66, KTC AWS in South Dakota in Auction 66, Public Service Wireless in Georgia in Auction 66, Redwood County Telephone Company in Wisconsin and Minnesota in Auction 44, 44, LL License Holdings in Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Nebraska in Auction 66, Grand River Communications in Iowa in Auction 44, and Iowa Telecommunications in Iowa in Auction 66. This pattern will continue to hold in Auction 73, and will hold for the vast majority of new entrants in Auction 73: their action will be in the CMAs and to a much lesser extent in the EAs.

More below…

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Neutrino:
Noosifixes spotted in the wild!

The still unfinished masterpiece, The Pains, is already having a n impact on our culture, as evinced by this John Galliano fashion show, complete with models wearing nooses. Nooses! What could be more trendy? OK, maybe the knitted penis-gourds that they mentioned, but that’s probably just the thought of having a nice toasty penis-gourd on a cold and frosty New England morning.

Read The Pains now, and it’ll make you far more fashionable!

Inventing the Future:
“Who would've thought…it figures”

John Sundman, friend, founder of Wetmachine and my colleague at Curl, wrote some reflections on what went wrong at the two Rich Internet Application startups he worked for. (One was Curl.) I think his comments are spot-on. Here are some concurring reminisces, and one additional hindsight: we engineers were wrong not realize the deep structural flaw in our position.

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My Thoughts Exactly:
An expensive way to learn elementary-school civics

The Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece the other day, called The Lessons of Iraq, by one Erik Swabb, who, according to the journal, “served in Iraq as a Marine infantry officer.” Here’s the lede:

While the improved security situation in Iraq is changing views about the chances for success there, one common belief has remained unchanged: that the war is eroding U.S. military capabilities.

It is true that repeated deployments have caused considerable strain on service members, equipment and our ability to respond to other contingencies. These problems, however, only tell half the story. The Iraq war is also dramatically improving the military’s understanding, training and capabilities in irregular warfare. Since this is the preferred method of Islamic extremists, the experience in Iraq is transforming the military into the force required to help win the Long War.”

The article goes on to make the case that the war is not all bad for the fighting forces, because now they really “get it” that they’re not in a big war against Soviet armoured divisions on the plains of northern Europe.

As a former Peace Corps Volunteer, I find this embarassingly thin gruel. In fact, it borders on noxious.

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Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Cleland's “Common Sense.”

“You keep saying that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.”
–Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride

I suppose it’s just overkill for me to pounce on Cleland’s over-the-top (even for him) blog post purporting to make the “common sense case” against our complaint against Comcast and Petition for Declaratory Ruling. After all, Dave Isenberg and others have already taken this on. But (a) it helps to restate the facts and focus on the issues, and (b) it gives me a chance to quote Angels by Within Temptation, and I ABSOLUTELY LOVE THAT SONG (In fact, if y’all haven’t done so, scurry to your favorite place to buy music online and download this and their other stuff. I’ll wait . . . .)

Cleland’s claims can be divided into two: whether Comcast’s behavior was “reasonable network management” and whether the FCC Policy statement is enforceable. I shall address each (and get to the music quote) below . . . .

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Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Time Warner May Pilot Metered Pricing With Easy Consumer Monitoring Tools. Good for now, but bad for ecommerce in the long run.

As reported by Broadband Reports and now confirmed elsewhere, a Time Warner internal memo indicates Time Warner will pilot a program where it has an explicit bandwidth cap, and users that exceed the cap will pay additional explicit fees — rather like what happens now with your standard cell phone package where you buy a bundle of minutes and then pay for any overages. The pilot will include a website to allow customers to track their usage, moderate their behavior, or buy additional capacity if they wish.

I agree with Dave Isenberg that this is the best way for Time Warner to handle its network capacity constraints and address the supposed 5% of users gobbling 50% of the bandwidth. We can expect some heavy users to move to other networks without caps, but also expect that users that use much less capacity and frustrated by congestion caused by heavy use by others to prefer plans like Time Warner’s because it should produce a less congested pipe overall.

I would be remiss if I failed to note that I was just musing about this the other day, giving me a chance to do another Stephen Colbert I CALLED IT!!! dance.

O.K., shameless gloating over. Analysis below . . . .

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My Thoughts Exactly:
And counting!

Harold’s post, below, on the subject of ATT’s being [bleep!], is Wetmachine item #1000.

A while ago I came up with the notion of some kind of fireworks display to mark this momentous milestone, but somehow I never got around to it.

The “Nucleus” software that we use to drive this site assigns item numbers not monotonically, but according to some heuristic I cannot figure out. So Harold’s is not necessarily the 1000th blog entry here. But close enough. Harold, you win the booby prize! Which is a lifetime subscription to the Tales of the Sausage Factory RSS feed! Lucky you!

Parsing website stats is an arcane science art perhaps best done under the influence of burning oak leaves. When your referrer log is populated with pornsite spam, and your top search items are things like “freckled breasts” and “Katrina Witt Naked”, which have been driving dozens, or even hundreds of people to this site each month for years, it’s hard to take the numbers too seriously.

Yet even these rough metrics tell you something. According to my records, when Harold made his first post here, in December, 2002, we got 47 visitors on our biggest day, with an average of 26/day for the month. Lately we’ve been getting about 1100/day.

I’ll check back in with yz when we get to item 2000, s’OK?

Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Oh Canda! Lessons for My Native Land.

Someone tell me why Canadians seem to be so much smarter than we are, at least on the public policy fronts that I cover. Maybe we should try to convince Michael Geist to take a position at one of the local law schools here in DC?

Whatever it is, two recent developments in Canadian media and information policy highlight that a does of common sense and a willingness by government ministers to (a) actually listen to what people have to say, and (b) learn something from our mistakes.

First, the Candian Radio-Television Commission (CRTC) just announced it will impose new national ownership limits and cross ownership limits on its broadcast media. Why? As stated in the CRTC release:

The trend toward greater consolidation in the broadcasting industry has raised concerns that a large ownership group could achieve a dominant position through acquisitions, which could bring about a reduction in the diversity of local, regional and national content. To address these concerns, the Commission has decided to:

* impose limits on the ownership of broadcasting licences to ensure that one party does not control more than 45 per cent of the total television audience share as a result of a transaction; and
* not approve transactions between companies that distribute television services (such as cable or satellite companies) that would result in one person effectively controlling the delivery of programming in a market.

While I think their national cap is too high, I applaud CRTC for recognizing the need for regulation staring them in the face as consolidation continues to grow. What a far cry from the debate we have in public policy circles in this country, in which regulators vie with each other for who can do more favors for their industry patrons, discuss how to raise ownership limits to permit more consolidation, and argue over whether to deregulate just a little more or a whole lot more.

The second “Canada is smarter than we are” example comes from last month’s succesfull citizen campaign to delay introduction of a “Canadian DMCA”. When Canada’s Conservative government seemed quite willing to acquiesce to industry demand to produce — in a fair use parody of Simpson’s Comic Book Guy — the worsht copyright ever, a grass roots movement organized that apparently shocked the government with its vehemence and popularity with mainstream Canadians. The government delayed introduction of the proposed Copyright Bill until at least the end of this month, where hopefully Canadian common sense will once again send it packing.

Meanwhile, in the United States, Democrats and Republicans join together for bipartisan legislation designed to turn the Department of Justice into the enforcement arm of the entertainment industry, and judges weigh whether the act of copying a legally obtained CD onto your computer for your own personal use constitutes a copyright violation for which you can be fined and/or do jail time.

Oh Canada, why can’t you teach my native land a thing or two?

Stay tuned . . . .

Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Dave Sez: AT&T Are [Bleep!]

My friend “Dave” recently moved from San Francisco to Sacramento. Being of the modern mobile generation that has “cut the cord” and lives by the cell phone, Dave wanted to get “naked DSL.” i.e., DSL (or other broadband) without any kind of telephone or video contract (Dave also refuses to pay for cable TV, on the grounds that 99% of the programming “sucks”). To his surprise and disappointment, Dave couldn’t find any naked broadband available in his neighborhood. So he wrote to me, as the known expert on all things broadband. “Isn’t there any way I can just get broadband without a telephone contract?” Dave wrote me in an email.

So I thought about it, and I said: “Is Sacramento AT&T territory?”

“Yeah.”

“Well AT&T has to offer $20 naked DSL, as a merger condition from when they bought BellSouth. Why don’t you try for that.”

So Dave dug around until he found the offer for AT&T DSL until he found the AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet Package With No Voice Contract:

Basic 768 kbps $19.95
Express 1.5 mbps $23.99
Pro 3.0 mbps $28.99

We talked, and I recommended the “Express” package as probably the best suited to his needs. Dave went to order it. His reactions below (warning, contains frank language and highly suggestive ASCII)….

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