As noted back in June, companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast started indicating they were actually looking for Congress to begin enacting telecom law “reform.” Why? These three companies have such immense influence over Congress, they’re the ones that are usually ghost writing new laws. Not surprisingly, Politico notes that AT&T, Comcast and Verizon outspent nearly every other major tech giant in lobbying during the second quarter, spending a combined 11.3 million.

What is that money buying? Bills like Sen. Jim DeMint’s (R-S.C.) “Freedom for Consumer Choice Act,” which essentially bogs the FCC down in red tape at AT&T’s behest (AT&T is DeMint’s third largest campaign contributor).

As a South Carolinian, this affects me in more ways than just a few. Fight it, if you can, vote accordingly.

Link to the original article…

What do you do when you’re a telecom industry trade group that wants the FCC to ignore the fact that U.S. consumers pay more money, for slower bandwidth, in fewer locations than more than a dozen other countries? You pick out a largely meaningless metric we actually are good at and blow it out of proportion. If you’re a lobbying organization like the USTelecom Association, for example, you can send a letter to the FCC (warning: pdf link) highlighting how all those critics of expensive U.S. broadband who say we lack competition are ignoring the fact that we’re a world leader in – consuming broadband:

To date, international broadband comparisons seem to have largely ignored actual usage in favor of more theoretical measurements based on capacity. We believe that the amount that Internet consumers are actually making use of their broadband connections to pull value from the Internet – whether education, government services, or entertainment – provides a more real-world, practical measure of how successfully a country’s broadband networks and regulatory environment are providing consumers with what they want. By this more consumer-focused measure U.S. Internet users and our broadband networks are among the world leaders.

In other words, USTelecom would prefer the FCC avoid looking at data that shows we are mediocre in most every metric – and instead operate from the belief that we’re doing great – because Americans like bandwidth. That certainly sounds almost like science, and it does put us at the top of something. Even after using the lobbying firm’s data (which is just culled from Cisco’s latest study) we’re still only in fourth place – American’s consuming about 14.24 gigabytes per month. As long as you ignore price, speed, competition, predatory practices, connection quality and every other meaningful metric – we’re world beaters.

Yeah. I’m convinced.

Link to the original article…

AT&T executive comments yesterday that the carrier might be ditching the current “all you can eat” iPhone data plan for usage-based pricing didn’t go over very well with either the company’s users or the press.

Many felt AT&T was blaming its customers for the company’s inability to adequate meet iPhone bandwidth demand. Others felt AT&T was continuing the industry trend of pretending that the flat-rate pricing model doesn’t provide enough revenue for network upgrades. The coverage has had echoes of Time Warner Cable’s botched attempt to hoist usage-based billing upon their customers earlier this year.

As has repeatedly been the case when it comes to AT&T’s 3G network this year, AT&T again found itself in the unenviable position of having to do damage control. As such, AT&T’s been going around to various news outlets insisting that AT&T Wireless boss Ralph de La Vega’s comments were “taken out of context.” As such, they’re providing a link to the one hour presentation where the comments were made. Here’s the transcript of the relevant bits:

I think one of the first things that we need to do is we need to educate the customers. And it s something that customers today have not been used to doing, so we ve got to get them to understand what represents a megabyte of data. And so what we re doing now is we re improving all of our systems so that we can begin to give customers real-time information about their data usage and begin to get customers educated. And I think longer-term, there s got to be some sort of a pricing scheme that addresses the usage, but that s going to be determined by industry competitive factors, regulatory factors and customer successes.

The idea that “user education” will somehow magically compensate for the capacity and network reliability AT&T failed to provide iPhone users is the kind of disingenuous language Time Warner Cable used when they tried to impose a new pricing model that lacked consumer value. Like Time Warner Cable, AT&T investors and executives are chomping at the bit to impose an unpopular usage-based billing model on both their wireless and wireline networks — simply because it generates more revenue than flat rate pricing. “User education” plays no part in the equation. User disinformation does, and there’s been a lot of it.

The argument that an already hugely profitable company wants to charge even more money for bandwidth isn’t one that sits well with consumers. As such, AT&T’s tried to sell the idea by arguing that usage-based billing is about being fair to grandmothers, while their lobbyists have spent a lot of money arguing that unless you embrace their new pricing vision, the Internet will explode. As with Time Warner Cable, AT&T’s customers see this “consumer education effort” for what it is: an effort to impose higher prices on consumers. As de la Vega himself notes, the issue will be whether regulators and consumers sign off on the idea.

Link to the original article…

Being a college student usually means that your book expenses were more than your food expenses… which is not exactly fun at all. Well, Questia plans on making learning a bit more inexpensive and modern with their Apple iPhone and iPod Touch app.

The application, called Questia Library, provides mobile access to the full text of 74,000 books and over 2 million journal, magazine, and newspaper articles. The collection consists mostly of copyrighted works and is selected and organized by professional librarians to facilitate academic research in the humanities and social sciences.

“The research process is becoming increasingly mobile,” said Tim Harris, President and CEO of Questia. “Questia Library enables students and other researchers who are on the move to search, browse, skim, and read a large and valuable collection for the same price they might pay for a single ebook. Questia Library delivers amazing resources all in the palm of your hand.”

The application makes browsing for research purposes easier than ever, allowing users to quickly navigate Questia’s subject category schema and drill down to one of 6,700 research topic pages, such as psychology of war or magical realism, where they can view the top librarian-recommended books and articles for that topic.

24/7 access to just about every book!? I could have definitely used this while I was at the University of Colorado at Boulder – that’s Norlin Library above in the picture by the way.

The price of the app is 99¢ via the Apple iTunes Music Store and gives users permanent access to 5,000 public domain books and 1 week of access to every publication in Questia Library. After one week, users may purchase additional access to the full library through iTunes on a non-recurring basis and most books are quite inexpensive for purchase, while many are free public domain books.

Think I can pass for a freshman?

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