Net Neutrality - Why This Battle Is So Critical

Every time I get a junk fax, I file a complaint with the FCC. Last week, when I received the most recent “too good to be true” offer, I went to file another one, and the first thing that I noticed is that across the top of the FCC’s complaint homepage is a banner providing a short cut to the place where the FCC is taking comments on its proposal to roll back net neutrality rules,  the Obama-era Open Internet Order that the agency is poised to dismantle before year end.  Even the way that the act has been titled, “The Restoring Internet Freedom Act”  is offensive to those of us who believe that while we may be sufficiently lucky to enjoy the benefits of them,  there remain many greater goods than shareholder return.

Click to read more ...

Changing Broadband Definitions

It’s hard to imagine that this is a political issue, but it’s a very hot one!
 
It’s a question that’s almost as old as the one about the chicken and egg.  If too many kids are failing a test, is the test too hard, or are kids not working hard enough, or not being taught sufficiently well, to master the material necessary to pass?  Across the spectrum from education to business to sports, and now to internet access, this question is asked thousands of times when, for any number of reasons (some of them even good reasons), defined benchmarks are missed. 

Click to read more ...

Hurricanes and Spoofers

Aggressive telemarketers—or marketers in general—have a long, successful history of seizing opportunities and running with them.  In fact, this is what all good marketers always intend to do regardless of industry.  Certainly those marketers have relied on (and often exceeded the boundaries of) the ever-evolving rules established by the Telecommunications Consumer Protection Act (TCPA,  47 U.S.C. 227), signed into law in 1991 by President George H. W. Bush.  You’d likely be accused—at least in this industry—of living under a rock if you’d never heard of  or been affected by it, either when the landline rang at dinnertime, or when your mobile device received calls or texts from unidentified or familiar-looking numbers trying to offer you a vacation, free money, or home repair services.

Click to read more ...

Telephony Elegy for Rural America

AT&T, Verizon looking to change rules for copper infrastructure retirement
Earlier this summer, I read J.D. Vance’s eye-opening book Hillbilly Elegy. A memoir about growing up in a poor and unusual family in Southeastern Ohio, this story raised much larger questions for me in terms of how we, as American society, support communities where economic and other associated challenges (unemployment, crime, drugs, among other systemic problems) make breaking the cycle of poverty difficult.

Click to read more ...

Legal Issues to Consider as IoT Becomes Way of Life

Recently I got a new car. I love its many features, including, among other things, on-board GPS.  But my car, like zillions of things around me, is now generating data about where I drive, how fast I go, how much gas I burn (etc.) There is much information to be culled from my car’s embedded sophisticated technology (who knew, for example, that by going from 89 to 93 octane, the mileage would improve by a whopping 6 miles per gallon?).  But the flip side is that my car is generating a great deal of information about me that may be used by the manufacturer or anyone else to whom it sells data about me and thousands—if not hundreds of thousands—of car owners like me.

Click to read more ...