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from: Telephony Online

More disturbing numbers for telcos

May 13, 2008 11:02 AM, By Carol Wilson

Two separate sources this week are offering up more analysis showing the telcos are falling behind the cable companies in the broadband and video battle.

Information Gatekeepers, an analyst firm that once predicted the telcos would overtake cable in broadband penetration, this week issued its High-Speed Access Report for the first quarter of 2008, showing cable is outperforming its forecast and the telcos are under-performing what IGI had forecast in 2006. The latest report is in keeping with what IGI began saying in 2007, when it warned that both AT&T and Verizon were falling behind in implementing high-speed access plans, and thus their data revenues would not make up for lost wireline access income.

from: Light Reading

Were Telcos Justified in Warrantless Wiretaps?
MARCH 14, 2008

Democrats and Republicans in Congress are divided over a critical telecom issue: wiretapping. Are the U.S.'s largest phone companies liable for assisting the federal government in carrying out warrantless wiretaps?

from: San Jose Mercury News

Telecom Companies Try to Buy Their Way Out of Trouble

March 7, 2008
By Robert Jacobson

California’s biggest telephone companies are throwing their political weight around again. But this time the issue isn’t about yet more rate increases or competing with cable TV. It’s spying.

from: Huffington Post

GOP To Telecoms: Give Us Cash For Advocating Wiretaps
Roll Call/WaPo | February 28, 2008 10:10 AM

With the House Democrats' refusal to grant retroactive immunity to phone companies -- stalling the rewrite of the warrantless wiretapping program -- GOP leadership aides are grumbling that their party isn't getting more political money from the telecommunications industry.

Note: We hear it's common practice for corporations and lobbyists to hire line waiters and seat warmers for Congressional hearings too - this is why you only see suits in the front rows of major hearings. Apparently democracy has a price . . .

from: Wet Machine

For the Clueless Among Us: Why Comcast Paying Folks to Attend FCC Hearing Is Wrong. I can't believe I actually need to explain this.

from: Media - Space - Place - Network

FCC En Banc: Annals of the Battle for the Last Mile
February 26th, 2008
Fred Johnson

Harvard Law School was “Markey Country” today as Massachusetts Congressman Ed Markey defended net neutrality in his opening remarks before the FCC’s Public En Banc Hearing on broadband network management practices in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Markey declared the US “no country for old bandwidth” and hung around to observe, with the rest of us, the FCC, “en banc” and securely enclosed in Harvard space droning through a tedious day of testimony and q&a, comfortably surrounded by an audience packed with polite but bored Comcast employees trained to provide applause on cue.

from: Ars Technica

Cable and telcos side with Comcast in FCC BitTorrent dispute

By Matthew Lasar | Published: February 19, 2008 - 04:57AM CT

The race is on to get the last word in on the Comcast/BitTorrent controversy. With ten days left to file, telcos, trade, and advocacy groups are sending the Federal Communications Commission their statements on whether Comcast and other ISPs purposefully degrade peer to peer traffic, and if so, what to do about it. Not surprisingly, the debate pits broadband content providers and advocacy groups against the big telcos, cable companies, and their trade association backers.

from: Broadband Reports

Connected Nation's $134 Billion Fish Tale?
Editorial: Lets make sure we adopt the RIGHT national broadband policy....
12:00PM Friday Feb 22 2008 by Karl

Last month Public Knowledge penned a piece that suggested that Connected Nation, a group supposedly created to push a national broadband policy, was actually now essentially a baby bell lobbying effort. The allegation was that what started as a real, local Kentucky effort to map U.S. broadband penetration, has ultimately been hijacked by baby bell lobbyists, and now exists primarily as a way to protect those companies' interests under the guise of a national broadband deployment model. If true, it's absolutely ingenious in a robustly amoral way.

from: Wall Street Journal

Cable Prepares an Answer to FiOS

From Wall Street Journal, February 14, 2008
By Vishesh Kumar

Stung by the success of phone companies in selling packages of TV and high-speed Internet services, the cable industry is getting close to launching a counteroffensive — an inexpensive new technology that dramatically boosts Internet connection speeds.

A very useful article for sorting out all the broadcast digital transition (DTV) misinformation in the media these days. It also highlights cable company strategies for playing the transition to their own end (the cable digital transition deadline isn't until Feb 2012). Lost here is any mention of affordable 'basic' cable service, the tier of analog service consisting of local broadcast and PEG channels priced to ensure that low-income and fixed income families can afford basic local TV service. We need to ensure that digital cable affords this tier of service for those that need it most.

from: MultiChannel News

Analog is Dead. Long Live Analog
Why Cable Won’t Go All-Digital By Feb. 18, 2009, Even If Broadcasters Will

By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 2/18/2008 8:22:00 AM

Is analog TV an albatross for cable?