Category: telecomm
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It’s Confirmed — AT&T Planning To Gobble Up BellSouth, Public Interest Be Damned
AT&T confirmed today that it plans to buy BellSouth and the remaining portion of Cingular wireless that it doesn’t already own, for $67 billion. If the deal goes through, AT&T will be both the biggest conventional telephone and the #1 wireless/cellular company in the US. Marketwatch is reporting that analysts it has talked to don’t…
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Recreating a Monopoly
Remember the old Ma Bell, AT&T? Before the 1980s we pretty much all had the same phone company and one long distance company with pretty high rates. You could only get your phone from the phone company, and this monopoly was protected by the federal government. That looks like the current dream of the new…
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News Headlines from the Feb. 24 Radioshow: Net Neutrality Setback in the House; Senate Comm Committee Considers Cable
These are the news headlines as read on the Feb. 24 edition of the mediageek radioshow. Net Neutrality Setback in the House Energy & Commerce Committee The battle over the future of the internet is heating up on Capitol Hill. The House Energy and Commerce Committee is currently drafting telecommunications legislation that will address many…
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The Future of the Internet Is on the Table
I dedicated all of yesterday’s radioshow (already available for download) to the issue of network neutrality. I’m quite convinced that this is the most important communications issue to watch in 2006, since whatever Congress does will have long-lasting repercussions on the very basis of our telecommunications infrastructure. Yesterday’s show featured some excerpts of testimony from…
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What Congresscritter Can Say ‘No’ to Network Neutrality?
Tuesday morning the Senate Commerce Committee takes up the issue of net neutrality, which I believe is the most important issue on the nation’s telecomm agenda this year. As Ben Scott, Policy Director for Free Press, pointed out on this week’s radioshow, Congresscritters aren’t weighing in definitively yet on the issue, and the devil will…
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mediageek radioshow headlines: Indecency at the Senate; Google Won’t Pay Telcos; Stern Back on FM… Pirate FM
These are the media news headlines as read on the mediageek radioshow on Jan. 20, 2006: Indecency Day at the Senate Commerce Committee; Consumer Groups Prefer A La Carte; Google Says It Won’t Pay Telcos for Consumer Bandwidth; Stern Gets Pirated. Indecency Day at the Senate Commerce Committee Decency, and indecency was the big topic…
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News Headlines from the Jan. 6 Radioshow: New FCC Commissioners Sworn In; No Indecency Fines for 2005; CBS Splits from Viacom; Texas Is IPTV Frontier, but Problems Ahead for Public Interest
These are the media news headlines as read on the Jan. 6, 2006 edition of the mediageek radioshow: FCC Commissioners Sworn In On Jan. 3 Michael Copps and Deborah Taylor Tate were sworn in as FCC Comissioners. This will be a second term for Copps, a Democrat who has been on the FCC since 2001,…
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Senate Communications Hearing Orgy with our Spectrum and Internet Rights in the Middle
Perhaps responding to criticism that he’s been dragging his feet on comm stuff, Senate Commerce Committee Chair has schedule a virtual assload of hearings for the first 11 weeks of the next session on various communications related issues. My guess is that this is all prep work for the forthcoming Telecommunications Act of 2006, and…
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FCC Dems Get a Few Concessions in Verizon-MCI/SBC-AT&T ClusterMerger
As I reported in this week’s radioshow, the FCC’s Democrats have had the opportunity to flex a little muscle in favor of the public interest. Mostly, it’s caused Chairman Martin to delay some issues–like media ownership rules–until the Bush Administration can get around to appointing a fifth commissioner and third Republican. But Martin couldn’t significantly…
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Another Reason Why US Broadband Sucks
This morning on boingboing I noted that there have been all sorts of outtages at two of the biggest Internet backbones. I didn’t think much of it at the time, since my own access at work and home was working — aside from some sites being slow. A little later in the morning I was…