Competition, not consolidation, is the way forward

Rewheel, the ‘pro-competitive’ Finnish analyst house, has completed its mobile internet access competitiveness report, Q4 2014 and released some of the key numbers. I like Rewheel for their dogged insistence on loudly calling out numbers which much of the rest of the European telecoms industry doesn’t like to hear. In particular, the industry doesn’t like to hear evidence which runs against the seemingly unshakable conventional wisdom that European telecoms and IT salvation lies in building ‘too big to fail’ pan European telcos along the lines of AT&T and Verizon.  

The idea is that we should sacrifice price competition to consolidation and scale and so affect some ‘market repair’. The financial community, which has watched as the European telecoms industry floundered about in the financial crisis and subsequent recession, loves this idea.

read full article at TelecomTV

One-third of German internet users would pay for data protection, survey finds

German internet users strongly oppose the sale and misuse of their personal data, according to a recent study, and are willing to pay €900 million for data protection. EurActiv Germany reports.

Online consumption is spreading like wildfire but users are often reluctant to pay for products, such as news or computer games. These were among the findings of a recent survey of German internet users, conducted by the German Institute for Trust and Security on the Internet (DIVSI) and the polling institute dimap.

read full article at EurActiv

No One Is Willing to Compromise on Internet Rules

If the best compromises make everyone unhappy, Federal Communication Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler and his proposals for regulating the Internet have lot going for them.

Everyone seems to hate the FCC’s latest trial balloon, floated by unnamed sources in the Wall Street Journal. The compromise proposal calls for splitting broadband into two different services: a largely invisible one connecting networks to one another, and the public one in which people pay to connect their homes to the Internet. The FCC could then regulate the back-end service under a stringent legal authority known as Title II without applying the same legal standard to the consumer-facing Internet. From a political perspective, 

Wheeler’s hope is to appease advocates who want the FCC to take broader authority over the entire Internet while avoiding an additional round of lawsuits from Internet providers.

The idea of splitting broadband into two services for legal purposes stems from proposals by Mozilla and from an academic named Tim Wu, both supporters of strong restrictions on Internet providers’ rights to treat various kinds of traffic differently. But  the concept has been losing support, probably because backers now think they can get a better deal.

read full article at Bloomberg Business Week 
 

Samsung gives us a taste of 5G (with 7.5Gbps speeds)

Korean giant Samsung is often at the forefront of new technologies, and with 5G, it looks to be well-ahead of its time. The standard isn't expected for a few years yet, but a number of companies have started to work on and help shape what it should look like according to their visions.

Samsung has been testing its own version of what an event 5G network could become, and some of the incredible speeds which have been achieved leave the rest of us hoping it makes it to our devices sooner-rather-than-later.

What the company has come up with is capable of 7.5Gbps stationary, and just below 1GB/s (or 7.5 whilst moving. The test was performed not just in a controlled lab environment, but also on the road with just-as-impressive results. In a car moving at over 100km/h (60mph), the connection was still able to download files at over 150MB/second.

read full article at Telecoms Tech

Confusion and contradiction: The state of mobile network testing in the UK

In April this year a report in an industry publication suggested Ofcom was planning to purchase ‘over-the-counter’ handsets and use them to execute its own UK-wide walk and drive mobile data testing programme. According to the correspondent contacted by Ofcom, the planned testing would look at “whether UK networks have achieved consistency” - but not go so far as to test for “quality of service”.

In other words, the tests would ascertain where in the British Isles you can get a signal from EE, Vodafone, O2 and 3 but nothing else revealing in relation to the actual network performance (e.g. are you able to look up a web page, send an email or a tweet, upload a photo of your fish and chip dinner to Instagram, etc).

Would the results of such a test benefit UK consumers? Some would say that all testing on behalf of consumers is a good thing – but I am not so sure. Mobile network testing is notoriously difficult to get right, and its outcomes are fiendishly difficult to interpret; if either the testing or the interpreting goes wrong, the whole business can be more than a little misleading.

read full article at Telecoms Tech

Ofcom to auction off military airwaves

Military airwaves could soon be used to meet growing demand for mobile broadband under plans being proposed by Ofcom.

The communications watchdog is asking potential bidders for comments on a plan to sell off radio spectrum in the 2.3 GHz and 3.4 GHz bands, in an auction that could raise £50m to £70m.

The sale, expected to take place late next year or in early 2016, is part of a Government drive to free up Britain’s airwaves for civil use and comes as the military transfers to other communications.

read full article at The Telegraph

For German Healthcare Apps, U.S. Data Rules Are Hard to Swallow (oddly enough...)

Germany has become known for its strict data-protection measures, but for some of the country’s healthcare-app developers, the U.S. has put up even bigger hurdles. The reason: America’s strict patient-data rules.

“Honestly, the U.S. had way more regulations than Germany,” said Simon Bolz, whose company, goderma, makes an app called Klara that allows smartphone users to take photos of a skin problem and send it to a dermatologist.

He said getting the company’s IT systems compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), a 1996 law that regulates patient data in the U.S., required more effort than for satisfying German authorities.

read full article at WSJ

UK: German Airlines Must Hand Over Passenger Data or “Don’t Land”

German airlines face being banned from landing in the UK unless they hand over their passenger lists in advance for security screening, The Guardian reports. “Urgent talks are now underway between London and Berlin to pressure the German government to drop their data protection laws that prevent advanced passenger lists being provided on privacy grounds,” the report states. 

Counterterrorism legislation is expected later in the month, and UK Prime Minister David Cameron has said he plans to put existing “no-fly lists” on a statutory basis, claiming that those who don’t comply “will not be able to land in Britain.” Separately, BBC News reports on "modern cars morphing into mobile data centres" and whether they're turning into "spies in our drives."

read full article at IAPP and The Guardian

Appeals Court Is Urged to Strike Down Program for Collecting Phone Records

A conservative legal activist urged a federal appeals court Tuesday to strike down the National Security Agency’s program that collects Americans’ phone records in bulk, calling it “perhaps the biggest violation of freedom and constitutional rights in history” and warning the judges that if they did not step in, Americans would take to the streets in revolt.

But a Justice Department lawyer insisted that the once-secret program was designed only to identify “known and unknown contacts of individuals associated with international terrorism,” and said that the activist had no proof that his records had been collected, let alone scrutinized.

“There is no protected constitutional interest that has been invaded by the mere collection of business records,” the Justice Department lawyer, Thomas Byron, added.

read full article at NYT

Facebook reports 24% rise in government requests for personal data

Government requests for Facebook’s user information rose by about a quarter in the first half of 2014 over the second half of last year, the social media company has revealed.

read full article at The Guardian 

Law enforcement lost public's trust after NSA leaks, says UK police chief

Law enforcement agencies lost the public’s trust after disclosures on government surveillance by the whistleblower Edward Snowden and must ensure that they strike the right balance between privacy and security, the UK’s most senior police officer said on Thursday.

Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, commissioner of the Metropolitan police in London, told a conference of senior American police chiefs that authorities must take care “post-Snowden” to use the most intrusive surveillance tools available to them “only where necessary”, or “risk losing them altogether”.

“We need to ensure that where law enforcement accesses private communications there is a process of authorisation, oversight and governance that gets the balance right between the individual’s right to privacy and their right to be protected from serious crime,” said Hogan-Howe, whose force that takes the lead on police counter-terrorism efforts in the UK.

read full article at The Guardian

U.S. regulators to vote on treating Internet TV like cable

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission in coming weeks will vote on whether Internet TV should have the same access to television programming as cable and satellite TV providers, which could shake up competition in the video industry.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler on Tuesday said he has asked his fellow commissioners to vote on a proposal that would help Internet TV services, such as ones being developed by Dish Network Corp, Sony Corp and Verizon Communications Inc, to compete with traditional pay-TV for digital rights to major network programming.

The potential regulatory change concerns online subscription video services that offer scheduled programming similar to traditional pay-TV providers, and not online video services such as Netflix Inc that stream content on demand.
Satellite provider DirecTV is another company that has indicated plans for an Internet video service and CBS Corp this month revealed a plan for an Internet streaming service that would include scheduled programming.



read full article at Reuters