It seems like the blogosphere and news media is eating up the Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) ten best and worst cell phones when it comes to “radiation”. After reading the usual responses from readers, it seems like a lot of people are needlessly concerned about the EWG’s cherry picked report when they should be listening to the American Cancer Society.
An organic farmer Lenny Levine in Nova Scotia just blocked his rural community from having broadband access by convincing the Kings County Council to block the construction of a microwave tower several hundred meters from his farm. Levine cites his unfounded fear that the microwave radiation would mutate the DNA in his organic crops.
I’m not exactly sure why a debate over whether broadband should be capable of online gaming erupted, but it appears to be a misunderstanding in which some entertainment software executives were needlessly upset. The whole furor came about as AT&T made mention of the word “gaming” once in their FCC filing on how broadband should be defined. AT&T merely pointed out that Satellite broadband technology can’t support online gaming.
The “Environmental Working Group” ewg.org just put out their report on the dangerous of cell phone Radio Frequency (RF) fields. The problem is that their report either relies on very small studies that show a possible correlation with increased cancer rates but they completely omit the largest studies that found no dangers with cell phone RF fields.
The EWG makes several claims in their executive summary but they seem to contradict the larger body of evidence. Read the rest at Digital Society.
I was getting tired of hearing all the exaggerated dire claims of how behind the U.S. is in terms of broadband deployment, so I wrote this article to put things into better perspective. While there’s no question that improvement needs to be made, we need an accurate assessment of the current situation and we need realistic goals for where we want to go.
In response to some of the feedback, I’ve posted this updated discussion “We need to be reasonable about broadband usage caps“
I’ve debunked the myth that wireless mesh networks are practical before, but the same nonsense came up at the FCC wireless technology workshop and the testimony from the New America Foundation’s Sascha Meinrath went unchallenged. I’ve taken the time to thoroughly debunk this myth once again along with a detailed explanation of why mesh doesn’t work.
I’m doing an FCC broadband deployment live blog today.
Mass media and blogosphere hysteria ensued after several ISPs (including AT&T) responded to customer complaints and blocked an IP address that was transmitting massive amounts of Denial of Service (DoS) traffic. For something as routine as and essential as blocking a malicious attack from a computer on the Internet, all hell broke loose late Sunday evening and early Monday morning because the IP address belonged to a popular image sharing site called 4chan whose members are infamous for perpetrating porn flooding pranks on YouTube as well as organizing DoS attacks against other websites.
The folks at breakitdownblog.com have accused Netflix of deliberately throttling their users to 480 Kbps (60 KB/sec). Their proof? Downloading a video stream using 10 TCP flows is 10 times faster than downloading videos using the normal single flow. The blogger at breakitdownblog.com concludes that this must mean Netflix is intentionally throttling their users because they assume that there must be extra available bandwidth that Netflix is keeping from their customers. Unfortunately, this is often what passes as credible news these days and the blog has been slashdotted so they’re probably getting on the order of 40,000 hits or so.
Well I hate to break the news to breakitdownblog.com, but this is normal congestion behavior. In fact, they’ve accidentally discovered the multi-flow cheat that works around Jacobson’s TCP congestion control algorithm which rations bandwidth on a per-flow basis and not per-user basis. Even if the server’s capacity is completely filled, asking for 10 times more TCP connections will allow a client to pull nearly 10 times more bandwidth at the expense of other normal clients who are only asking for one TCP connection. Peer-to-peer (P2P) applications employ the same technique to accelerate its own performance at the expense of other users.
So what this sounds like is that the particular Netflix server they’re connecting to is running out of streaming capacity and it can’t handle this many users. This may still be bad on Netflix’s part if the performance problems are consistent, but let’s not attribute occasional inadequacy to malice. I can’t imagine this being frequent since Netflix’s support lines would be ringing off the hook. I also just ran a quick test with my Netflix account and verified that everything is working fine. I’m not suggesting that the alleged problems don’t exist, but we need to have a rational discussion about them.
Five months ago, Saul Hansell of the New York Times took Verizon behind the woodshed for being the corporate equivalent of the village idiot. Verizon, according to Hansell’s source Craig Moffett, was giving consumers a Maserati for the price of a Volkswagen because Verizon’s new FiOS service was based on super expensive Fiber To The Home (FTTH) technology. Yesterday, Mr. Hansell took Verizon behind the woodshed again because Verizon might stand to benefit the most from the broadband stimulus tax credits for deploying the most FTTH. But given the fact that Verizon has been such a good corporate citizen by being the only large telecom operator to risk huge amounts of capital to deploy fiber to the home, would it not stand to reason that Verizon deservedly gets a proportional benefit from tax credits designed to spur this kind of behavior?
One of Saul Hansell’s assertions is that Verizon could get $1.6 billion over next two years for doing nothing different than Verizon had already planned to do. This of course assumes that Verizon was not going to scale back their FTTH plans as a prudent response to the economic crisis where consumers are tightening their belts on spending. It also assumes that Verizon wouldn’t increase their level of investments as a response to the tax credits.
Another gripe raised in Hansell’s piece is that tax credits apply to next generation broadband deployment for any residential subscriber and not just unserved, low-income and rural areas. But is Mr. Hansell seriously suggesting that we should only incentivize next generation broadband for unserved, low-income and rural areas? The bulk of the broadband market does not fall into these three categories so if we want the biggest increase in broadband investments and therefore the most amount of economic stimulus and jobs, we cannot just focus on these three areas.
Most people don’t know the magnitude of risk that Verizon took to deploy FTTH despite early opposition from Verizon share holders. Because of Verizon, the United States has some of the most FTTH deployment to detached single family homes which are very expensive to wire compared to dense multi dwelling units in countries like France, Korea, and Japan. Verizon has had to invest more than $3,700 per subscriber (assuming 25% uptake) to give people the fastest and highest capacity broadband and television service in the nation. Roughly half of the money spent by Verizon went directly to the hard working men and women that installed fiber to over 10 million homes. Even the money spent on equipment and material put someone to work designing, manufacturing, marketing, and selling that equipment.
Despite all the criticism, the beauty of tax credits is the multiplier effect where one dollar of tax breaks can easily spur five dollars of private investment. In ITIF’s January 2009 paper “The Digital Road To Recovery“, we estimated that a one year $10 billion investment in broadband networks will support approximately 498,000 new or retained jobs in the United States. In this economic storm where workers are getting laid off left and right, stimulating labor intensive broadband projects sounds just like what the doctor ordered. More broadband investments lead to more telecom jobs and more manufacturing jobs or at the very least it means fewer layoffs. This translates to lower unemployment which not only means fewer unemployment checks paid out by the government, but ultimately more tax revenues from more workers which means the government and society gets a good return on investment.