Microsoft Closes Digital Divide! Heh, Just Kidding
Happy Prime Day! Here’s one special deal you don’t want to buy: Microsoft’s grand plan to bring high speed broadband to the less-populated fringe of rural America for peanuts. It…
Voluntary Net Neutrality: Holy Grail or Total Hoax?
If net neutrality is what its supporters say it is – the best overall way of setting expectations and managing Internet service agreements, it should be expected to become self-executing at some point. I think we passed that point about ten years ago, but we will see what we will see.
Wireless First: A Winning Strategy for Rural Broadband
The nice thing about focusing on wireless for the final leg of the extended broadband system is that it doesn’t duplicate effort or waste money. Despite the glory of fiber optic networks, people want mobility. So wireless is going to be part of the solution regardless. Why don’t we just accept that and concentrate on building the best wireless networks first and fill in with fiber only when and where it’s truly needed?
San Francisco’s Cultural Divide
The failure of Google Fiber to connect America’s cities to ultra-fast gigabit networks took a bizarre turn this week: San Francisco, the incubator of the apps economy, is seriously considering…
Senate Internet Hearings
As a technical matter, it is the case that the Internet is more like cable TV than the telephone network. While the Internet does support interpersonal communication, its primary role is publishing audio, video, pictures, and text. And like cable TV, it’s a platform in which advertising is a very important source of revenue.
Internet Issues Front and Center in Ross Confirmation Hearing
Questions asked of prospective Commerce Secretary show how important the Internet is to American commerce: spectrum, broadband, and cybersecurity dominated the discussion.
Scary Experimentation at 3.5 GHz
Experiments, essential to the scientific process, can advance understanding, but they can also fail without producing any valuable new information. At a time when the mobile broadband industry is thriving…
No Way to Run a Railroad
Spectrum is valuable, that much is certain. Exactly how valuable it is is a matter for economic analysis at a level that exceeds my knowledge of economics by an enormous…
What’s the difference between Wi-Fi and unlicensed spectrum?
Ask the Engineer: What’s the difference between Wi-Fi and unlicensed spectrum? Answer: Wi-Fi is a particular service that uses unlicensed spectrum, but there are others as well. As the FCC…
Improving Federal Spectrum Systems
Last Friday, the Information Economy Project (a project of the George Mason University School of Law and Clemson University) held the best little spectrum conference Washington has seen this year….