Archive for October, 2008

When the DTV transition happens in Feb. 2009, channels 2 through 51 will remain allocated for television transmission.  Few of the nation’s television markets actually use 49 channels.  Indeed, most use less than half of that number.   The “white spaces” are these unused television channels, which amount to approximately 300 MHz of frequencies. According to Blair Levin, “[e]stimates vary, but most of the population (between 73% and 97%) lives in areas with access to 24 MHz or more of white space. Rural areas in particular, have a great deal of white space as they generally have fewer television broadcasters.”  Rules for the “white spaces” are now on the Commission’s agenda.

This is a proceeding about almost 300 MHz of spectrum (and all the fighting over the 700 MHz C Block concerned just 22 MHz).   It will be in “swiss cheese” (non-contiguous) form, but there will be a great deal of it.

Today, with Congress in recess, leaving less room for last-minute-Lucy-with-the-football lobbying gambits, the FCC appears to be poised to release a report saying the white spaces can be used without necessarily causing interference to existing broadcasts.

There are still many questions to be answered -

(1) Will permitted uses of the white spaces have to be licensed, or can they be unlicensed? Unlicensed uses could unleash the creation of an entire ecosystem of new devices and new uses, as we’ve seen in the “junk band” use of wireless hotspots.  With machines making their own etiquette decisions (subject to power-level certification by the FCC), the capacity of the white spaces (potentially enormous) could be used far more effectively.  This could provide a much-needed end-run around last-mile bottlenecks, particularly for mobile and rural users.

(2) Will devices have to be fixed, or can they be portable?
If portable devices are allowed, a much larger market for these new gadgets will be created – which means they’ll be cheaper (because they’ll be sold in enormous numbers), which means that innovation will move much more quickly, which means many more interesting mobile uses will be possible.  You can’t use a fixed device in a car moving at 60mph down the highway.

(3) What kind of spectrum sensing will be required?
Will devices be permitted to carry out their own sensitive etiquette so as to avoid interference?  Or will they need to check against authoritative databases and/or send out foghorn-like “beacons” so that existing actors will know they’re interested in transmitting?  Google has proposed a hybrid solution that includes the use of databases and beacons (and protects those holy wireless mics); other groups are more interested in pure spectrum sensing.

More coming, but this is a very interesting first step.

First, you should have seen the enormous demonstrations in connection with the Freedom Not Fear effort on October 11.  Reports here.  The peaceful march in Berlin was 2km long.  In at least 15 countries, citizens demanded a cutback on surveillance, a moratorium on new surveillance powers, and an independent evaluation of existing surveillance authorities. US-based statement by the Privacy Coalition (fourteen organizations calling for an end to watch lists, protection of freedom of expression, an end to the Patriot Act, and implementation of comprehensive data protection) here.

Second, you still have a chance to be at a great event next Tuesday, October 21.  It’s a policy forum on a host of wireless broadband issues that all, inevitably, connect:  white spaces, open spectrum, open networks, and community networking.  It’s hosted by Google and the New America Foundation Wireless Future Program, and will feature Michael Calabrese, Paul Kolodzy, Tim Wu, Sascha Meinrath, and many others.  Full description and RSVP form here.  You have to RSVP by the 17th, so get to work.  Haven’t you always wanted to visit the Googleplex?

I spent the morning doing a short program with DueProcess.TV, a Michigan-focused program that is taped in Detroit.  Much of the conversation seemed to be along alarmist lines – there’s this wild Internet thing, people are out there commenting on blogs, saying all kinds of stuff! and what can we do about all this information that’s available publicly! shouldn’t there be a law? My God, what is it doing to newspapers!

My role, I decided, was to acknowledge all the fears and try to say something positive about the Internet.  Enormous public benefits, new ways of making a living (particularly good thing for Michigan), new ways of working with people across distance and time. . . it’s not all bad, surely.

It did feel like a conversation from 1996 or so.  There was even a journalist there with vivid memories of monitoring his newspaper’s Compuserve forum comments.  I brought out the news that there was now a federal statute that protects online newspapers from liability for comments the paper didn’t originate.  They looked interested.

Anyway.

AdAge is pointing out that there is rich cooperation between newspapers and Google/Yahoo.  Jeff Jarvis has everyone thinking about what is replacing the article – and suggests a curatorial approach, akin to the radar screen filtering we used to talk about a few years ago.  (I wrote about this in 2005 here and here.)  But more humanistic.  And here’s a nice implementation:  Yahoo Pipes.  It’s exactly the radar screen approach, aggregating many different feeds, videos, pictures, you name it.  And here’s a mainstream aggregation-tied-to-domain-name-registration move from GoDaddy:  SmartSpace.

Phew.  All of this looking and linking has cheered me up.  It’s not all fear and doubt out there!

In fact, it’s a good day in history of the U.S. approach to high-speed Internet access.  Jim Baller’s newsletter lets me know that a judge in Monticello, Minnesota has said quite strongly that, yes, cities in Minnesota are allowed to raise money to build their own fiber installations with the help of private partners.  (ArsTechnica story here; decision here.)  It’s a public convenience, that fiber – it will “make a city a better place to live.”  It’s also true that the telco gambit of filing suit has achieved the victory it wanted:  Delay.

So – if someone asks you what new laws are needed for the Internet, don’t hesitate.  We need new laws that make it clear both (1) that cities and states can install their own fiber and (2) that these fiber installations should be open-access.

We can’t write a law protecting journalists, but the journalists are finding ways to protect themselves.

Briefly:  Reuters suggests there’s a report coming soon supporting unlicensed use of the white spaces.

Second:  Tomorrow there will be Freedom Not Fear demonstrations throughout Europe.

From the web site:

On the 11th of October 2008, human and civil rights organizations from all over the world are planning protests in their capitals.

This world-wide campaign seeks to raise awareness for the need of greater freedom and democracy in Europe. We organize a protest against the security and intelligence apparatus of states, which contravene human rights by means of surveillance, data retention and biometric databases.

The retention of citizen’s electronic communication violates fundamental human rights, such as the right to privacy. It prevents confidential communication between priests and confessors, journalists and their sources, doctors and their patients, lawyers and their clients.

And it does not increase the success of criminal investigations.

Instead it can be used to reveal political, business, and private communication and thus endangers the work of political, direct aid as well as refugee support groups.

Someday there will be demonstrations in the streets in the US about surveillance, and EPIC and EFF (among other groups) are already supporting FNF.

It would make sense to treat all network infrastructure providers as infrastructure providers, separating out the world of “information services” from basic transport.  Singapore’s recent move in this direction is inspiring.

Here’s Neal Stephenson, also a source of inspiration, in The Diamond Age.  A character named Carl is talking:

“Our media system today – the one that you and I make our livings from – is a descendant of the phone system only insofar as we use it for essentially the same purposes, plus many, many more.  But thekey point to remember is that it is totally different from the old phone system.  The old phone system – and its technological cousin, the cable TV system – tanked.  It crashed and burned decades ago, and we started virtually from scratch.. . The media net was designed from the ground up to provide privacy and security, so that people could use it to transfer money.  That’s one reason the nation-states collapsed.. .

With the help of Todd Hopfinger here at the University of Michigan, I’ve been trying to figure out the high-speed Internet access penetration story (numbers, speeds, costs) for Detroit, Pontiac, and Flint. I think it’swe’re on to quite an interesting tale, and I’ll cover it here as developments emerge.

There is apparently no public data available that is more fine-grained than the existing FCC zip-code level data. (The FCC is going to slightly improve the quality of the data gathered, but hasn’t yet.)

This means that if one person or business in a given zip code had access to high-speed Internet access, the entire zip code would be marked A Success. The actual number of subscribers, and the name of the carrier(s), is not revealed by the FCC.  So even if just one business had a special deal for service, the entire zip code would be included.  And we wouldn’t know how much service cost there or how competitive the situation really was.

Now, in 2002, former Gov. John Engler set up the Michigan Broadband Development Authority, which loaned federal money to communities and private companies to bring broadband service to areas of the state without it.  As far as we can tell, they used the FCC zip-code level data.  Engler was predicting that wider high-speed access in Michigan would create half a million jobs and half a billion in economic growth by 2012.

Governor Granholm has long been interested in high-speed Internet access.  Back in 2004 she was proud to note that the Michigan Broadband Development Authority would be working to close the digital divide in Michigan, giving out loans to encourage infrastructure investment in underserved areas of Michigan.  The state legislature funded the MBDA, and Granholm added members. The MBDA gave out about $20 million in loans over the next few years.

A year ago, the FCC allocated Michigan $20 million for high-speed Internet access improvements under its Rural Healthcare Pilot Project.

That’s fine, but what happened to the Michigan Broadband Development Authority?  It was eliminated by the state legislature, according to a July 2007 article in the Grand Rapids Press.  The whole effort has been branded a flop:

Senate Majority Leader Ken Sikkema, R-Wyoming [attacked the MBDA]. . .

Sikkema said the expansion of broadband should be driven by the market instead of government.

“The broadband authority is one of the biggest flops in state government,” said Sikkema.

. . . . Telecommunications and cable company officials counter that the authority has done nothing but invite government interference into an industry that is expanding to most markets anyway.

“There really wasn’t a need for state money to develop networks, because the private sector was already doing that,” said Colleen McNamara, who heads the Michigan Cable Telecommunications Association. “Why would the state want to fund competitors to us?”

Why was it shut down?  What’s taking its place?

And why isn’t there any data out there that’s useful?  Hmm?  I suspect the carriers take the view that more fine-grained information is confidential.  We’ll see.

The debate is going on all around me, but the candidates are so focused on offshore drilling and tax cuts that I feel free to multi-task.

Surely a high-priority item for any new President will be looking hard at public long-term infrastructure investment – not just open-access municipal fiber (although that’s central), but also basic research, graduate education in the sciences, anything that will help us address an increasingly hot, flat, and crowded world with new ideas.

Back to more awkward jokes from that guy wandering around on the bright red carpet.

“One Way Up: U.S. Space Plan Relies on Russia,” a front-page story by John Schwartz in The New York Times today, should last in our collective imagination for a long time.  On a day when the stock market reeled yet again (at a retirement dinner I went to tonight, a retiree quipped that the market was retiring along with him) and the campaigns moved into attack mode, we heard that there’s A Gap in the U.S. space program that will run from 2010 to at least 2015.

During the Gap, the U.S. will have to rely on the Russian space program for transport to the International Space Station.

What this story says about our national outlook depends on who is doing the looking.  Some commenters seem bent on reading the story as encouragement to demonize Russia, missing the sub-point that there’s a lot of honor in space and among scientists.   As a quote towards the end of the article points out, “there is a longstanding etiquette: you do not mess with the safety of humans in space.”

Some see the Gap as a huge, sudden symbol of American decline.  Some see the story as a moment to crow that America has actually been in decline and without real scientific imagination for a long time.  Some are using the story as an opportunity to point out that private enterprise will have the answers, not NASA (even if that won’t be completely true for a while).  Some see a future of golden cooperation in space travel predicted here – we can’t do it alone.

I spent the day pulling together all the elements I could think of for a next-Administration tech policy menu, in preparation for a session later this week.  Just as prone to preconceptions as everyone else is, I mentally bent the story into the shape I wanted:  “Depending on someone else for transport puts innovation and economic growth at risk.”

Maybe that’s the wrong lesson to take from that story.  It may be more meaningful to note that this story, coming at this time, won’t spark outrage.  By contrast, almost exactly 51 years ago, the idea that the Russians were beating us into space launched a thousand educational initiatives and investments – and ultimately drove funding towards what became the internet.

As I’ve written in the past, it was then that the USSR launched Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite.

On February 7, 1958 (just a few months later, and arguably directly in response to the launch of Sputnik), the U.S. Department of Defense issued directive 5105.15 establishing the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).

Four years later, J.C.R. Licklider was chosen to run ARPA computer research. Read The Dream Machine for the rest of the story.

Now, all we can do is squabble, point fingers, bemoan various things – and there doesn’t seem to be much hope of a collective, well-led response back towards public investment in space and/or other basic infrastructural research.

Now, that could be wrong.  New leadership could emerge in this next administration that cared about super-charged investment in long-term technical initiatives.

I’m ready with my wish-list, and I’ll start posting the menu items tomorrow.  Meanwhile, contemplate space, the apparent global recession, and the many different ways to read a Times story.

From a recent Farber list message:

Late last month, Senator Inoyue held a hearing on broadband and asked those testifying at least twice how much it would cost to deploy broadband across the entire country. No one had an answer for him.

If we expect to have nationwide broadband, if would be helpful to have an answer. Does anyone on the IP list have a good estimate for the cost of:

— nationwide fiber broadband (reaching 98% of the population or
so) and

— nationwide ultrafast (100 mbps+) wireless?

While we’re waiting for that answer, it would be good to know where we are with highspeed internet access numbers.  Try Michigan.  I sent out a graduate student recently to find out what the penetration/speed/cost figures were in Detroit, Flint, and Pontiac.

Results?  No data.  Nothing public out there – other than the concededly weak existing FCC data.  We’re continuing to dig, and it may be that students will be able to do a survey that will pull some information together.  Let me know if you have better data than the FCC does.

Today’s link, in honor of the VP debate:  Five Sites That Will Boost Your Political Awareness.

Great news: Jon Peha is the FCC’s Chief Technologist. A wonderful hire.

ArsTechnica has a classy roundup of the white spaces hearing in NYC here.

And CDT suggests patiently that ECPA should be updated, surveillance should be subject to oversight, and government identification initiatives should be carefully evaluated. Getting ready for the next administration.

Speaking of the next administration, the US election will happen during the next ICANN public meeting. Thanks to the city of Ann Arbor for making it (relatively) easy for me to get a new driver’s license and submit an application for absentee voting. Unbelievably, the clerk I dealt with had helpful suggestions for additional identity information needed to get the license (“do you have a new registration in your car?”), waited for me to run out to the car and get that information, and was ready with copies of absentee voting application forms – even though her office wasn’t actually processing those applications, she thought it was a good idea to keep them on hand. Amazing. Lots of talk among the people in line about registering to vote – several of them for the first time.