Broadband Prime’s Top Picks is a weekly digest that brings you the top articles that I’ve read the past week. The focus of the digest is not on news, unless ground-breaking rather on opinions, analysis and comments by individuals or organizations relevant to the blog’s favorite topics. Hopefully, this is going to be a list of good information that you might have missed. I am keeping the number of links strictly to maximum 5 to make the digest meaningful and effective.
Become a bandwidth scavenger – Peter Cochrane, former CTO and Head of Research at BT discusses with a dose of humor (at least that’s how I get it) the limitations of UK’s national broadband plans of 2Mbps for all, when compared with Korea’s plan of 1Gbps for all. He also describes how a rural resident can agreagate and bundle various broadband offerings to increase link’s bandwidth and connection’s reliability.
Group Urges Government To Increase Broadband Regulation – Informationweek comments on a recent report by Freemedia that calls FCC to address network neutrality and competition. Free Press also wants broadband to be defined as a telecommunications service, which would put it under stricter rules regarding access and competition. The report urges for expansion of the Universal Service Fund to include broadband infrastructure. It calls for a review of policies governing competition, pricing, special access, the “middle mile” between cell phone towards and local area networks, and enterprise markets. A personal comment based on what I’ve read is that although it’s nice to have an all-inclusive report with the issues requiring regulatory attention, I’d prefer to see the suggestions ranked by necessity and/or gravity. It’s a good read though.
Europeans Are Eating Our Lunch; Our Broadband Plan Is Toast – Art Brodsky calls to FCC for effective telecommunications regulation. The article also includes a brief on recent EU regulation initiatives (excellent resource if you are not so familiar with EU regulation plans). The article describes a heavenly made situation in Europe (which may not be entirely true – there are several reservations expressed about EC’s regulation plans), however, Europe seems better equiped with regulation tools as far as NGA and related issues are concerned.
Telecom’s submission: proving the point – I was planning to continue Kris Price’s line of thinking on the European level, but time has not been kind with me on this. You may want to read his thoughts on New Zealand’s FTTH project and on the response of the country’s incumbent to it.
