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04 May 2015

The FCC’s 3.5 GHz Tiered-Use Plan: Paradigm Shift, Experiment or Both?

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In a series of posts over the past two months I’ve discussed a range of initiatives aimed at using unlicensed spectrum to support the growing demand for wireless connectivity. To put these efforts in a forward-looking context, it’s helpful to get a sense of what changes are in the works in terms of expanding the amount of spectrum available for unlicensed use. In this post I’m going to focus on the most recent development on this front: the FCC’s April 17 decision to make 150 MHz of spectrum (3550-3700 MHz) available for new licensed and unlicensed commercial use, while retaining […]
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29 Apr 2015

Detroit Digital Stewards: Unlicensed Open Source Neighborhood Networks

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In a series of posts over the past two months, I’ve looked at efforts by private companies and city governments to use unlicensed spectrum to improve choice, affordability, innovation and service quality in the communications sector. In this post I’ll add another type of entity to the mix of unlicensed spectrum innovators: local neighborhoods, where issues, interactions and initiatives tend to be more personal and place-based. One focal point for this kind of neighborhood-driven network initiative is Detroit, a city facing severe financial constraints and one of the nation’s lowest levels of Internet penetration (see tables in this earlier post). […]
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26 Apr 2015

Shareholder value, the public interest & the Comcast/TWC deal

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Over the past several days I’ve seen a number of post-mortems on the decision by Comcast to drop its bid to acquire Time Warner Cable after it became clear regulators weren’t going to approve the deal. Two items in particular caught my attention over the weekend: a piece  by Eric Lipton in the New York Times discussing Comcast’s not-so-successful lobbying effort in Congress, and an interview with Comcast Chairman and CEO Brian Roberts on Squawk Box, a program carried on CNBC, a cable network owned by Comcast since it acquired NBCUniversal roughly two years ago. One of the things that […]
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23 Apr 2015

Google’s Project Fi + Free Muni Wi-Fi = Customer Savings + Carrier Disruption

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Yesterday Google officially announced Project Fi, its much anticipated wireless service, which I’ve previously blogged and tweeted about during its pre-announcement rumor/leak phase. Now that more details, including pricing, are available directly from Google, an updated post seems in order, especially following recent posts about newly launched municipal Wi-Fi services in NYC and Boston (later on this post I’ll consider how these two developments may be related and synergistic). As expected, Google’s wireless service will route user traffic over a mix of Wi-Fi connections and, via MVNO arrangements with Sprint and T-Mobile, the two carriers’ cellular networks. This “three network” approach alone […]
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21 Apr 2015

LinkNYC: Free Muni Wi-Fi with Big Apple Style & Ambition

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In my last post I described Boston’s recently-launched Wicked Free Wi-Fi as a new generation of municipal wireless networks likely to be more successful than the first generation of projects launched a decade earlier. Another member of this new generation is LinkNYC, a recently announced Wi-Fi network that will be deployed in New York City starting later this year. While they have some things in common (i.e., a focus on free outdoor nomadic service), the NYC project is, in key respects, different, more ambitious and perhaps more controversial than Boston’s Wicked Free. As Matthew Flamm put it in the lead […]
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17 Apr 2015

Boston’s “Wicked Free Wi-Fi”: A New Model for Municipal Wi-Fi?

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In my last post I briefly reviewed the less-than-stellar history of municipal Wi-Fi networks that were deployed roughly a decade ago. As I noted in that post, these projects employed earlier generations of technology and often-poorly-conceived “public-private partnerships.”  And, importantly, they were launched well before the combination of smartphones/tablets and data-capped LTE/4G mobile services had turbocharged demand for nomadic Wi-Fi connectivity. In this post I’m going to focus on an example of what I consider a new generation of municipal Wi-Fi networks, Boston’s Wicked Free Wi-Fi service, which the city formally launched in April. As reported by Michael Farrell in […]
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15 Apr 2015

Community WiFi in the Smartphone Era: lessons & differences from the past

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So far, this series of blog posts has focused on what private companies are doing in the unlicensed spectrum space—including startups, cable operators, Google and mobile carriers. In the next few posts I’ll consider what cities and local neighborhoods have done, are doing, and are planning to do with unlicensed spectrum. As a first step in considering current and future “community WiFi” projects, it’s worth taking a look back at an earlier wave of municipal WiFi networks. These date back roughly a decade, with one of the most ambitious early projects, in Philadelphia, being announced in April 2005, just a […]
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10 Apr 2015

What Makes a True Progressive in Communications & Tech Policy?

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On April 1 the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) held an event to discuss its new report entitled “How Techno-Populism Is Undermining Innovation.”  The thrust of the report was to contrast the dangers of what it describes as “tech populism” with the virtues of what it calls “tech progressivism.” The report begins with: There was a time when technology policy was a game of “inside baseball” played mostly by wonks from government agencies, legislative committees, think tanks, and the business community. They brought sober, technical expertise and took a methodical approach to advancing the public interest on complex issues such […]
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07 Apr 2015

Signs of Google’s Global Ambition for Project Nova

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In a post yesterday I discussed the disruptive potential of Google’s Project Nova. Having just discovered an article by Christopher Williams published last weekend in the UK’s Telegraph, I thought I should add an update on international aspects of Nova’s ambitions and potential impacts. Williams reports that, according to industry sources, “Google is in talks towards a deal with Hutchison Whampoa, the owner of the mobile operator Three.” He also notes that “Google and Three declined to comment.” The two giants are discussing a wholesale access agreement that would become an important part of Google’s planned attempt to shake-up the […]
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06 Apr 2015

Unlicensed Spectrum: A Look at Google’s Project Nova

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Though Google has not revealed much in the way of details, the Internet search giant is expected to launch a WiFi/MVNO wireless service sometime in the near future. Based on limited comments from company executives and reports in the Wall Street Journal (see here and here; subscription may be required) and elsewhere, it seems that the service will: rely on a combination of WiFi connectivity supplemented by cellular connections provided via MVNO agreements, most likely with both T-Mobile and Sprint; initially be available only to owners of the Nexus 6 smartphone, built by Lenova’s Motorola unit, which was acquired from […]
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