According to the Chicago Sun Times, Chicago’s Mayor is planning to raise the city’s amusement tax from 8 percent to 9 percent. That hike includes a proposal to broaden the amusement tax umbrella to include “direct-to-home satellite service.” The city hopes to shore up a 9 million budget gap by forcing the tax (which cable customers already pay) on Dish Network and DirecTV customers. According to DirecTV, “federal law prevents cities from taxing direct broadcast satellite services.” The city claims they’re on solid legal ground, and that satellite customers should have to pay the same taxes as cable users.
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In August of 2007, Earthlink, failing to make muni-fi work as an incumbent end-around, gave Houston million for missing build deadlines. Earthlink ultimately walked away from citywide Wi-Fi entirely, but Houston used their money to deploy downtown Wi-Fi themselves. That network went live one year later, providing Houston residents with free service last August. Since inception the city’s website hinted the initiative might not last, and now the Houston Chronicle reports the project has been modified to the chagrin of some locals:

With the exception of an area downtown with parking meter mounted hotspots, it looks like Houston is closing the network off to the general public. A project spokesperson says the post-Earthlink plan never involved Wi-Fi for the masses, and tells the Chronicle this effort is “about access with a purpose” and was never intended to be a Wi-Fi free for all. Glenn Fleishman of Wi-Fi Networking News seems utterly perplexed by the move:

Houston’s logic doesn’t seem all that strange, given that restricting the municipal network to schools and community centers reduces network strain and bandwidth costs, while letting somebody else worry about wireless broadband across the rest of the city (which should make ISPs happy). The network was initially deployed to network parking meters and funded by Earthlink’s screw up, so the school and community center Wi-Fi is just an added perk.
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Verizon this week struck a new multi-year deal with Major League Baseball, the agreement bringing the MLB Network and the league’s Extra Innings out-of-market package to all FiOS TV customers. According to the company’s press release, MLB Network will be available to all Verizon FiOS TV customers as part of the Essentials and Extreme HD packages on Channel 86, when it debuts Jan. 1, 2009. Meanwhile, the MLB Extra Innings package provides up to 80 out-of-market Major League Baseball games per week.
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BT to abandon next gen broadband theinquirer.net
CableLabs issues new specs for converged video, broadband cedmagazine.com
EC Challenges Spanish Regulator lightreading.com
Ofcom Extends Broadband Migration Enforcement Program ispreview.co.uk
Warrington first to see Virgin Media 50meg broadband thinkbroadband.com
Verizon Renews BigBand for FiOS cable360.net
High court takes case of Enron Broadband defendant chron.com
AVG offers infected users free year of service theinquirer.net
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It’s Friday, so take off your shoes, put up your feet, and empty your head into the comment section below.
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As AT&T and Verizon attempt to try and lure customers away from cable operators, they’ve focused on matching features instead of trying to undercut cable prices. While they occasionally offer some tasty bundle promotions, they’ve largely refused to engage in price warfare, and in fact have increased TV prices several times since entering the market. A new survey by Heavy Reading suggests that customers really are generally happy with features but are seriously drawn to lower cost offerings — particularly in a tight economy.

Cable and phone companies have had the luxury of engaging in non-price competition. Will a struggling economy force a change?
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Over the last few years, Australian lawmakers have been enamored with the idea of Internet filters, spending almost a hundred million on filtering technology that a teenager was able to circumnavigate in just a few minutes. When Internet filters were voluntary and made available for download, the numbers showed that nobody used them. Undeterred, the Australian government is going forward with mandatory filters nobody can opt-out of. Michael Malone, boss of Australia’s largest ISP iiNet, says the carrier will be signing up for trials of Australia’s new mandatory Internet filtering system, though even Malone thinks it’s a bad idea:

Malone goes on to opine that Australia’s Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, “is the worst Communications Minister we’ve had in the 15 years since the internet industry has existed.”

So far similar efforts here in the States have either been simply too stupid to work or ruled unconstitutional. But as we mentioned last month, with child porn used as a rallying cry, there’s a growing push in the States to use Deep Packet Inspection to monitor each and every packet you send and receive for legality.
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Back in February of this year we interviewed the CEO of NebuAD, who hoped to buy your browsing history from ISPs, then deliver ads based on your browsing choices. Unfortunately for NebuAD, Congressional questions arose over whether NebuAD’s deep packet inspection system violated privacy and wiretap laws, which resulted in ISPs running to the hills to protect their legal posteriors. That led to the departure of NebuAD’s CEO, and left the company on life support. All in all that’s a pretty crappy year for one company, but unfortunately for them things just got worse with the birth of a class action lawsuit:

NebuAD was always in a tough spot, given how their opt-out system let consumers opt-out of targeted ads, but not browsing data collection. If you’re a huge fan of advertising and having your every click monetized don’t worry. There’s a multitude of other operators planning on copying NebuAD’s business model, just as soon as the appropriate politicians are lobbied and privacy laws are weakened or changed. Sometimes it just doesn’t pay to be a technology pioneer.
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T-Mobile’s HTC G1 smart phone, the first smart phone to feature Google’s Android mobile operating system, carries a Bill-of-Materials (BOM) cost of 3.89, according to a “virtual teardown” conducted by iSuppli Corp. According to the group, the estimate only includes the component and material costs for the G1, and doesn’t account for other expenses including software, research and development, manufacturing and accessories. The baseband (.49) and display (.67) are the most costly parts of the G1’s construction. iSuppli previously stated it costs Apple about 4.33 to manufacture each 8GB iPhone, plus on IP royalties per unit.
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Bright House Networks is the latest cable operator to license Comcast’s Powerboost technology, which delivers an extra kick of bandwidth for the first few minutes seconds of a download (or upload). According to the Bright House press release, Road Runner Turbo customers with a current speed of up to 15 Mbps will see bursts up to 22 Mbps, while customers with 20 Mbps service will now see temporary PowerBoost speeds up to 30 Mbps. It looks like they’ve yet to offer upstream Powerboost, something offered by several other cable operators who’ve deployed the technology.
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Several readers write in to note that Arbor Networks has released their 2008 Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report, which picks the brains of roughly seventy engineers from tier 1 and 2 ISPs. Engineers were asked 90 questions about everything from backbone capacity to their workloads, and for the fourth straight year noted that the majority of their security resources and time are spent fighting DDoS attacks, which broke the 40Gbps threshold this year. Engineers say this year truly strained security resources at major ISPs:

Breaching the 40Gbps mark nearly doubled last year’s DDoS threat, and Arbor warns that should it double again next year, many ISPs will be woefully unprepared to handle the threat. As is usually the case, ISP security departments say they’re dealing with increasingly sophisticated threats while they deal with “fewer resources, less management support and increased workload.”
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Macblogz has had an anonymous source telling them for a while that AT&T and Apple were working on making the iPhone tetherable, something AT&T themselves confirmed last week — saying that you’d be able to use your iPhone as a HSDPA modem “soon.” The blog’s source at AT&T now says the plan will cost users a month on top of your existing voice and data plan, and will come with a 5GB per month consumption cap. The source says that “for unlimited bandwidth, AT&T will tell you to get a wireless PC card,” but as our users will be quick to point out, AT&T’s wireless PC cards come with the same 5GB limit.
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AT&T’s new whole-home DVR functionality allows U-Verse IPTV customers to watch recorded DVR content on any television (up to three) in the home. The telco has been deploying the service market by market over the last few months, and today announced that the first phase of the free upgrade has been completed ahead of schedule, in every market where AT&T offers U-Verse TV service. Completing their deployment into 69 markets, AT&T today launched the service in Bakersfield, Dayton, Green Bay, Jacksonville, Little Rock, Miami, South Bend, Tulsa, West Palm Beach and Wichita. User uid://411904 write me to note that the second two phases of AT&T’s IPTV DVR upgrades will allow users to delete and setup shows from remote set tops.
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Polycom yesterday announced the release of the new SoundPoint IP450 3 Line IP Phone.

The SoundPoint IP 450 is a mid-range, standards-based SIP phone featuring three lines, Polycom HD Voice and a high-resolution graphical backlit display that supports multiple languages and Asian characters. The 450 is applications-ready with Polycom’s open API and XHTML microbrowser [...]

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Thanks to Brian Krebs of the Washington Post, McColo Corporation — a Web hosting company that has emerged as a major U.S. base of operations for a host of international cyber-crime syndicates — has been yanked offline. Krebs highlights his investigation into the company in both this Post article and over at the Post’s Security Fix blog. The company for years has been hosting the master servers for a slew of known criminal botnets, which collectively are responsible for roughly 75% of the world’s spam.

Those two carriers were Global Crossing and Hurricane Electric. “We shut them down,” Hurricane tells the Post. “We looked into it a bit, saw the size and scope of the problem washingtonpost.com was reporting and said ‘Holy cow!’ Within the hour we had terminated all of our connections to them.” Yeah, holy cow. Apparently we’re to believe neither ISP noticed they were hosting a huge cyber-criminal conglomerate and master servers for five massive criminal botnets (”Mega-D,” “Srizbi,” “Pushdo,”"Rustock” and “Warezov,”) until a reporter called.

Still, score one for the good guys, even if McColo will probably be up and running under a new name in no time. For reference, McColo didn’t just host spam botnets, they were hosting scam websites, bogus anti-malware operations, child porn, and child porn payment operations. Which makes you wonder why authorities allowed a known criminal outfit to flourish for so long, only to be toppled by a Post reporter and a phone. Perhaps New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo could learn a thing or two from Krebs about effectively fighting child porn.
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