A just-published report on radio spectrum “white space” has found that the technology is a viable alternative for getting high-speed broadband out into rural and remote New Zealand communities.
White space refers to radio spectrum frequencies allocated to a broadcasting service but are not used locally.
The report – written by telecommunications consultant Jon Brewer – explores a number of technology and regulatory issues, as well as several practical uses and trials of white space technology.
Brewer notes that approaches based on “white space” are inexpensive, lightweight and can provide more effective broadband coverage in geographically-challenged parts of the country.
In the report he highlights the potential of white space for three New Zealand rural communities – Parikino in the Wanganui District, Pourerere in Central Hawkes Bay and Clova & Crail Bays in the Marlborough Sounds.
The report was funded by InternetNZ (Internet New Zealand Inc) as part of its Community Projects Funding Round, held last year.
Tag Archives: internet
Doc Searls – Will the carriers body-snatch the Net with HTML5?
Background: telcos and cablecos – what we call “carriers,” and the industry calls “operators” – are hounded by what they call “over the top,” or OTT (of their old closed phone and cable TV systems). Everything that makes you, app developers and content producers independent of telcos and cablecos is OTT. NaaS, as Crossey explains it, is a way for the telcos and cablecos to put the genie of OTT independence back inside the bottle of carrier control.
The blathering about OTT, and its eager adoption as the term of craft to signify understanding, has irked since day one. Because since Day One, every service on the Internet has been (or can be) provided by other than the carrier.
Indeed this structural separation is the foundation of the freedom and flexibility that has caused the innovation for which the Internet is justly famed.
The idea that access to carrier customer information, in the two-sided model advocated for so long by Telco 2.0 (home to “Internet warming” scare monger Martin Geddes), will exclude some by becoming mandatory is a bit of a long bow. Indeed services may differentiate and appeal by not being geo-aware, or interested in all your demographic and social graph information.
That interest is conventionally held to be required for the nirvana of ad-supported services, but Doc Searls has for sometime predicted the demise of the model (or at least its marginalisation).
Too many too large and too clever organisations efficiently deliver their services using the Internet to be tempted by entering a global negotiation with local and national carriers to establish APIs, thus granting them the power Twitter is so casually abusing.
Co-operation at the level required for this strategy is mercifully beyond the narrow short-term self-interest of telcos to co-ordinate. All happy to ITU when the going was good, but competition has changed that happy band of brothers.
Telco 2.0, or at least Dean Bubley, illustrates this over-engineered habit time and time again: http://disruptivewireless.blogspot.co.nz/
In the long term, we’re not going back to X.400, the abstracted Internet market is so many orders of magnitude larger than any “carrier” that working with them (a pig of a job at the best of times) is very unlikely to be worth the grief.
Schneier on Security: Internet Safety Talking Points for Schools
E. Why are you penalizing the 95% for the 5%? You don’t do this in other areas of discipline at school. Even though you know some students will use their voices or bodies inappropriately in school, you don’t ban everyone from speaking or moving. You know some students may show up drunk to the prom, yet you don’t cancel the prom because of a few rule breakers. Instead, you assume that most students will act appropriately most of the time and then you enforce reasonable expectations and policies for the occasional few that don’t. To use a historical analogy, it’s the difference between DUI-style policies and flat-out Prohibition (which, if you recall, failed miserably). Just as you don’t put entire schools on lockdown every time there’s a fight in the cafeteria, you need to stop penalizing entire student bodies because of statistically-infrequent, worst-case scenarios.
via schneier.com
And there are more…
What???s at Stake in the San Diego Round of the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP)
TEMPORARY COPIES: TPP Art. 4.1 proposes to extend the minimum requirements of the right to reproduction for all protected works to include the right to exclude ???temporary storage in electronic form.??? The WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty extends the right of reproduction for performers and producers of phonograms to ???any manner or form.??? But proposals to include a specific right to block temporary reproduction in electronic form were considered and rejected in the negotiation.[4]
The language in TPP Art. 4.1, although included in some other US Free trade agreements, is not a full expression of U.S. law on the topic. Section 106(1) of the Copyright Act does not contain language prohibiting reproduction ???in any form.??? It rather prohibits reproduction of the ???copyrighted works in copies or phonorecords.???[5] Nor does U.S. law include an extension to ???temporary storage in electronic form.??? U.S. law requires that an infringing copy be ???fixed,??? meaning ???sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated for a period of more than transitory duration.???[6] Likewise, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act [hereinafter DMCA] recognizes a safe harbor for ???system caching.???[7]
The distinctions are particularly important for enforcement of copyright on the internet. Lower courts in the U.S. have, for example, held that copyright does not extend to buffer copies on the internet.[8] Similarly, although not a party to this agreement, the EU Copyright Directive (Directive 2001/29/EC, Article 5) contains an explicit exception for temporary reproductions addressing automated caching.[9]
via infojustice.org
Preposterous. First it’s a property, then it’s emphemeral. Whatever makes the most money.
This “ephemeral” right is all about the collecting agencies having a club to beat blanket licences out of ISPs and, well, anyone with a router and money I guess.
Sleazy. And typical. If there’s value, there’s rights.
Hacking Society
The reason that’s important is because if we are here today for one reason at least that we’re here today is that it seems like 2012 has been the year in which the network has come of age politically between the SOPA PIPA battle at the beginning of the year after and its failure, let alone the prior year in the Arab spring where it’s more ambiguous how much was played by the network and how much was played by existing social networks.
But this was really the year of network politics fighting for itself. And so this moment requires that we understand not only what networks are but also what networks are against and what networks are threatened by. And that’s why I wanted this particularly stark definition between twentieth and twenty-first century, or industrial hierarchical and network. Yochai Benkler
Audio and transcripts available.
Fiberevolution: Fastweb was a precursor in IPTV. Will they be a precursor in abandoning it?
Last week a Milanese newspaper announced that Fastweb was abandoning its IPTV offer (in favor of distributing Sky’s satellite Pay-TV solution). Fastweb blames the abandon on dwindling subscriptions and a tough economic climate. As Teresa Mastrangelo highlights in an excellent blog post entitled FastWeb Says ???arrivederci??? to IPTV; Is Telecom Italia Next?, that’s part of the story certainly, but only part of it.
Teresa suspects that Telecom Italia may be leaning the same way soon. More broadly, I’ve been wondering if IPTV isn’t a con’s game for most broadband providers. In a recent study that we undertook for the FTTH Council Europe and that will soon be published, we asked 13 service providers to rank their various services in terms of attractiveness to end users and profitability. IPTV systematically came on top in attractiveness and at the bottom in profitability.
It’s amazing the things a drowning incumbent will cling to. Telcos want to be TV stations? Not even TV stations want to be TV stations, the licence to print money expired with the channel scarcity that drove those margins evaporated.
And they’re not the first:
Faster than your router? Verizon doubles FiOS speeds to 300Mbps
Just how is Verizon doubling its highest speeds? Schommer said the key technology upgrade is from a BPON to GPON passive optical network. Customers with a BPON terminal installed at their house will need to be upgraded to a GPON terminal to get the new, higher speeds. Verizon said it will be able to upgrade the vast majority of customers.
via arstechnica.com
And caps?
The ‘ITUnet’ Folly: Why The UN Will Never Control The Internet
The Internet is near universal because it is entirely voluntary. All of the Internet’s signature elements are voluntary, not mandated by governments. Internet protocol (IP) is a networking protocol that became universal precisely because it offered the ability for everyone to communicate in basically the same “language.” No one was required to use IP; people voluntarily adopted it because it was better and offered the most universal networking opportunity. Moreover, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), whose “mission is to make the Internet work better,” is an entirely voluntary, collaborative, multi-stakeholder process that functions outside of government control.
via forbes.com
For the avoidance of confusion, “voluntary” here means without coercion, not without being paid.
Frankly if the ITU could run an Internet, it would have built one, and neither it, nor its spawn could or did.
Intuit to Acquire Demandforce for $424 million
Demandforce???s success puts it at the forefront of the burgeoning ???Local Internet??? wave. The combination of Internet pervasiveness and smartphone penetration has led to a complete reconfiguration with regard to how local businesses interact with their customers. These local businesses have traditionally spent over $125B/year on traditional media, and this is only in the U.S. But the channels they have historically used, such as the newspaper and the yellow pages, are increasingly compromised. These business owners know they need new solutions, and these dollars will be reallocated to these exciting new platforms. Benchmark believes this ???Local Internet??? wave is many times larger than the ???social??? and ???mobile??? themes with which it is often contrasted.
Don???t trade away our digital future | InternetNZ
Finally, another innovation-killing US proposal worth mentioning eludes the understanding of some of the brightest people I have ever met ??? people who have a rigorous knowledge of the Internet and how it works. This is the proposal that would give copyright owners an exclusive right over temporary electronic copies.
While it took me a while, finally the threat arose. It’s not so much that the operators of caches will have to do all the intrusive things that are mentioned, they won’t.
What the rights holders seek here is the ability to tax cache operators (and that is a wider class than just ISPs). Like this: “We know, and you know, there will be some copyright material cached which has not been licensed, and you can either ferret it all out at great expense, or pay us a simple blanket licence to excuse you.”
Collection agencies have been doing this for sometime, so you can’t play a radio in business where the customers can hear it, without paying the vig. You must pay them a cut even if you don’t play copyright music, but any music at all.
Examples: http://torrentfreak.com/tag/royalties/
The other version of this is “ephemeral rights,” where radio stations buy a record, and for convenience dubs (AKA copy) it to a cartridge for air-play. That’s convenient, that’s value, there’s a right…
Susan uses the example of your heart’s indifference to what it pumps, the vampire at your neck is similarly indifferent, as long as they get their fangs in the vein.
Hamish MacEwan 