$20million FCC "Broadband Plan" a Waste of Money?: [22nd Apr 2010]

AT&T have released details of their first quarter results and have increased revenues by $78million versus the same period last year. They also experienced a $1.9m increase in wireless subscribers, which is the highest first quarter increase they have ever had. This has helped wireless service revenues increase by more than 10% and wireless data revenues to increase by 29%. The company has been making cuts in costs to build on revenue growth and strong cash flow. Randell Stephenson from AT&T has commented that they are off to a great start to the year and they are increasing investment to build on the success.

Wiliam H Cole, a councilor for Baltimore is holding a meeting this week to find out why Verizon is failing to roll out its high speed broadband internet network in the area, despite doing so in surrounding counties. The councilor said that he has received a number of complaints from local people and wants an explanation from Verizon. He commented that it is about equality and getting the same thing which their neighbors are going to get. Verizon have said that they have never said they wouldn't bring FiOS to Baltimore and will be attending the meeting to discuss the issues.

Public interest group, The Free Press has suggested that the FCC broadband plan has been based on flawed data. They say that the FCC overstated the availability of broadband around the country and used figures which were not suitable for long term policy making. Derek Turner a research director from the Free Press said that they doubt very much that 95% of US householders have access to broadband which can deliver the speeds suggested by the FCC plan. Sharon Gillett from the FCC has commented that they admit that data on availability is limited and they used the data they could find as a reasonable indicator of broadband availability. Turner has retorted by suggesting the FCC should have started collecting this data two years ago.

The man who led the FCC and it's work on the Broadband Plan is leaving the agency to join the Aspen Institute as a communications and society fellow. He will be leaving his post on May 7. He started work at the FCC as Chief of Staff in 1993 and oversaw the introduction of the Telecommunications Reform Act in 1996. FCC chairman Julius Genachowski has praised the work Levin did on the broadband plan.

BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker has suggested at a conference this week that ISP's will have to self regulate and respond to consumer demands following the Comcast court case against the FCC. Comcast appealed the original decision which stated that Comcast should not interfere with peer-to-peer applications, which Comcast said they did to ease network congestion. The FCC suggested that this would interfere with the principles of an open internet. Klinker has commented that the public will have to regulate the internet and suggests that the biggest worry at the moment is Apple who are locking customers into using their products, applications and services.

The latest State of the Internet report has just been released by Akamai which covers data on broadband penetration, broadband speeds and security. The data tracks information from 465million IP addresses from 234 countries. The US has an average connection speed of 3.8Mbps which is ranked at 22nd across the world. The average speed actually dropped almost 1% for the first quarter and 2.5% for the year. The report suggests that the drop is due to an increased use of the internet which is have influence over the average speeds. Delamare is the fastest state in the US and Alaska can boast the slowest speeds. Berkeley in California is the fastest city in the US.