The following are a few topics I which found interesting but don’t require a full blog entry:
FCC to Allow Cable Black-outs. The FCC has officially decided that it is not going to intervene in the many disputes we see these days between programmers and cable operators. Only a few years ago this was a fairly rare occurrence, but you can’t read industry press without seeing some new dispute – many of which are now leading to content black-outs when the two sides can’t reach a resolution.
The FCC has always been allowed to intervene in disputes and routinely did so a decade ago. The American Cable Association which represents small and medium cable companies wants the FCC to be more active today to protect against abuses by the programmers, but the agency has decided to let the market work to resolve disputes. There have been over 600 blackouts since 2010 and the frequency seems to be accelerating.
Blogger Loses Life’s Work. Google recently hit the news when it disabled access to 14 years of blogs as well artwork, photograph, a novel and even the Gmail account that was being stored online by Dennis Cooper. The blogger claims he received no notice until his work disappeared and Google won’t tell him why he was cut off or if his content still exists. Cooper’s blog always contained controversial content and was a popular destination for fans of experimental literature and avant-garde writing.
His case highlights the intersection of first amendment rights versus the ability of private corporations like Google to allow or not allow content on their private platforms. Google has slowly been cutting back on storage services such as Google News Drives and Google Groups and Cooper’s content might not even still exist. If anything, this case highlights the importance of backing up content offline. It also raises the issue of how permanent anything is on the web.
AT&T Testing Drone Cell Sites. AT&T has been testing the use of drones as flying cell sites to use during big events. Large events always overwhelm local cellular sites and drones might be the answer to give access to many people in a concentrated area.
The company has already been using a technology that it calls COWs (Cells on Wheels) that are brought to large sporting events to provide more coverage. But the hope is that drones can be deployed more quickly and for a lower cost and provide better service. Of course, this just means more of a phenomenon I’ve seen a few times in recent years where people in the stands at a football game are watching the same game on their cellphone instead of looking at what is in front of them.
Huawei Creates 10 Gbps Cable Platform. We are in the earliest stages of deployment of gigabit broadband using DOCSIS 3.1 on cable systems and Chinese vendor Huswei claims to have already created a 10 Gbps platform using the new standard.
The company faces several hurdles to deploying the technology in the US since the company is under scrutiny by the US for doing business with North Korea and with Iran during the recent embargo. But the biggest issue with a cable company offering gigantic bandwidth over coaxial cable is freeing up enough bandwidth in a cable TV network to do so. Cable companies have to free up at least 24 empty channels to offer a gigabit over coax and it seems unlikely that are willing to try to open up a lot more channels than that for higher bandwidth. The only realistic scenario for going much larger than a gigabit is to migrate a cable network to IPTV and make the whole network into a big data pipe – but this is a very costly transition that means a new headend and new settop boxes. .
Facebook Develops Mobile Access Point. Facebooks has developed a shoebox size access point that can support wireless transmissions including 2G, LTE and WiFi. The box is hardened for the harshest conditions, is relatively low-powered and is intended as a way to expand Internet coverage around the world in poorer areas. Most of the world now connects with the Internet wirelessly and this access point can enable customers with a wide range of devices to gain access.