Archive for June, 2008

European Parliament urges coordinated approach “digital dividend” spectrum, including public safety

Friday, June 27th, 2008

In a previous Cool Stuff, I wrote about the study which I completed demonstrating the social value from reallocating some of the Digital Dividend spectrum for broadband mission critical public safety communications. The European Parliament seems to agree.

Yesterday, the European Parliament’s Industry Committee adopted a report urging that the EU should ensure a set of harmonized, EU-wide rules on how to allocate radio frequencies that will be freed up when analog terrestrial television broadcasting ends in 2012. The report was an own-initiative report authored by Italian liberal MEP, Patrizia Toia and was adopted in Committee with 41 votes in favor, 1 against, and 1 abstention. A plenary vote is scheduled for September. Further, the amendments to the report argue that approximately 100 MHz of the Digital Dividend could be reallocated to mobile broadband and other services such as public safety services, radio frequency identification (RFID), and road safety applications, without preventing broadcasting services from flourishing.

Insight:  While the transition from analog to digital terrestrial television should be complete in Europe by the end of 2012 (nearly 4 years after the U.S. is scheduled to complete its transition), decisions on how to reallocate the approximately 75% of the highest quality spectrum which will be released cannot come fast enough. Mission critical broadband communications networks require long lead-times to plan and deploy, and the services they enable are nothing short of lifesaving.  Public safety and security users urgently need an additional allocation of a approximately 30 MHz for these purposes.  The Industry Committee correctly urges Member States to release their Digital Dividend spectrum as quickly as possible, follow a common methodology, and develop national Digital Dividend strategies by the end of 2009.

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Observations from Supernova2008

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

I have been listening to a bunch of excellent presentations for the first two days of Supernova2008. Rather than rehashing what each speaker has said, I have been trying to formulate a theme. Not an easy task. I have noticed a few reoccurring themes: social activity, intellectual property, management of information, and marketing; all good network-related themes. I spent most of the second day at the Open Flow Track. Much of what was discussed was is integrating systems: Connecting the connections. That is to say that the internet has provided connectivity and access to persons and applications. The essence of Web 3.0 is making sure that your Flickr works with your Dopplr, with your, dare I say, Napstr.

Insight: The rich and lively discussion in the Open Flow Track seemed to focus more on engineering and business practice questions in terms of getting APIs to work together and making sure that privacy, security, and trust are respected according to applicable law and good business practices. I still found myself searching for more a fundamental concept. A more fundamental question which was present but perhaps not fully articulated was how to describe this continuum of “openness” vs. “closedness” (not a real word). So, here I get to like to wax poetic for a second. Eric Raymond, a pioneer of Linux and the open source movement, gives us a particularly literary book title and syllogism, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”. Raymond sees the cathedral as representing a system of architecture which is, “carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation – no beta version.” It is a centralized, coordinated approach. Open source architecture he likens to “a babbling bazaar of different agendas and approaches.” It is decentralized with varying standards and rules, but is not anarchy. Both approaches seem to work in creating stable systems, though they may be suit to different types of applications.

It was widely agreed that there should be a general preference for openness. I agree, but to my mind that there is a choice between openness and closedness. This choice implies a tradeoff. And, if there is a tradeoff, there is by necessity some optimization. What the optimum is will depend largely on your point of view and social optimum does not necessarily equate one-to-one with a private optimum. At the very least we can have a rational discussion as to what the relative merits of the tradeoff are and where the different optima may lie. In sum, do we want a world that looks more like the Cathedra or the Bazaar, or is there an entirely new form of architecture that we should consider?

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It says “handsets”

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

I finally just had a chance to read the FNPRM for the rules governing the C Block in FCC’s recently concluded 700 MHz Auction and it says “handsets”! Why is this significant?

For the C Block, comprising 22 MHz in the upper 700 MHz band, the FCC created special open access provisions. The FCC will require licensees to provide a platform that is open to third party devices and applications. Specifically, licensees must allow customers, device manufacturers, third-party application developers, and others to use any device or application of their choice on their networks in this band, subject to certain limited conditions. Licensees may not “lock” handsets to prevent their transfer from one system to another, or to other services that compete with wireless service providers’ own offerings. The FCC concluded that these rules were justified because it did not find “that competition in the [mobile] marketplace is ensuring that consumers drive handset and application choices, especially in the emerging wireless broadband market…. it is easy for consumers to differentiate among providers by price, most consumers are unaware when carriers block or degrade applications and of the implications of such actions, thus making it difficult for providers to differentiate themselves on this score.”

Insight: Beware the law of unintended consequences. Here it is not the proverbial monkey wrench, but a pair of bolts, literally, which could bring the FCC’s policy to a grinding halt. Implicit in the service rules is the assumption that the band will evolve to resemble the next generation of the current mobile market in the US. But assumptions like this never last. I wonder if it is possible for clever operator could escape the open handset requirement by providing fixed services. The 700 MHz spectrum is particularly well suited to a variety of applications, one of which might be fixed broadband. In rural and suburban areas fixed wireless broadband could be an effective competitor to wireline. Presumably these areas would be sufficiently competitive that the FCC’s finding would not hold (remember it is limited to handsets, and not even service plans). Thus, if the licensee is bolting “pizza boxes” to the side of homes, would this type of network not be subject to the open access provisions? It’s unclear, but something to think about.

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