The day the internet became cable television: Dec. 29, 2006
As part of the AT&T/BellSouth merger that is expected to be approved today, AT&T is now pledging to keep its “wireline broadband Internet access service” neutral.
AT&T joins the trickster pantheon with this move. (Other well known recent tricksters include Br'er Rabbit and Bugs Bunny.)
“Wireline broadband Internet access service” means traditional copper-wire digital subscriber line access provided by phone companies like AT&T. It's not very fast, but it's much faster than dial-up, and AT&T and Verizon sell it to a lot of people.
But cable internet access is more popular in this country, and although the phone companies are closing the gap they'd like to compete more effectively with the cable industry.
Hence AT&T's big push to announce a “massive access network upgrade, dubbed Project Lightspeed, back in 2004.” (Light Reading story here.) The idea was that AT&T would put in fiber optic lines that would allow data to travel much more quickly to households across the country.
AT&T renamed the service “U-verse” in 2005, and has promised to roll it out to 15 to 20 markets before the end of 2006. It's hurriedly doing this in San Jose — press release from a week ago is here. When you read the press release, you see that U-verse includes (is “bundled with,” in the now-standard term) high speed internet access. But it's not plain old internet access — it's not naked or neutral or commoditized. It's “AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet U-verse Enabled.”
That's AT&T's new high-speed internet access — AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet U-verse Enabled. It'll have speeds of up to 6 Mbps for downloading (not very fast — Singapore, Japan, and Korea and lots of other places have 100 Mbps and more available). It'll use all kinds of “middleware” from Alcatel and Microsoft and other companies to prioritize and privilege particular packets. It cannot be purchased separately — “purchase of AT&T U-verse TV required.”
If some nascent Google/YouTube application — some now-garage-bound online thingie we can't even imagine yet – wants to reach AT&T U-verse subscribers at these high speeds, it'll have to strike a deal. It'll have to ask for permission.
This means that naked, neutral, non-prioritized internet access (for AT&T customers, anyway) stays at 2001 speeds. AT&T has no incentive to upgrade its existing DSL facilities — it wants to move everyone to this new U-verse.
As AT&T says, “the new U-verse enabled AT&T Yahoo!(R) High Speed internet builds on AT&T's position as the nation's leading provider of broadband DSL.” It's not the same as the “wireline broadband Internet access service” that AT&T is willing to keep neutral.
I applaud the consumer advocates who got AT&T to promise neutrality as to DSL — but I think they may have missed a major battleground.
AT&T is effectively saying, “We'll keep existing 'broadband' access neutral. But when it comes to our new super-duper 'AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet U-verse Enabled,' well, that's not up for negotiation. We need to make money there. 'Enabled' and 'broadband' are not the same thing.”
I understand that the fix is in and the merger will go through. It would be great if someone, somewhere, realized that neutral high speed internet access would be good as a matter of economic and social policy in this country. But getting there will take leadership that we don't now have.
[Update — I've been reminded that it's a BIG DEAL to get AT&T to make any concesssions, and I certainly agree with that. The precedential value of this merger deal on neutrality is important. I hope that the next step will be general-application legislation that is clearer as to what exactly has to be neutral — and I hope that legislation will include all transport to the internet in the sweep of a clear neutrality mandate.]
Spectrum
I spent much of today reading about electromagnetic radiation. Imagine those rays bouncing through and around us all.
Some of those rays are visible, so we can see colors. Some are x-rays and gamma rays. And some frequencies are allocated by the FCC.
Yesterday's Harold Feld post is a doozy — all about a spectrum giveaway being sought from the FCC in the name of public safety. Lots of details here.