SAN FRANCISCO -- The nascent LCD TV market will follow the same path blazed by monitors, where fierce competition and rapid-fire price declines have enabled them to increasingly displace CRTs, industry officials told the iSuppli Flat Information Displays conference here last week. LCD monitors for desktop PCs emerged in the late 1990s, but a mass market didn’t arrive until they closed the price gap with CRT-based models and dropped under $1,000, they told the conference.
According to Shipper's NewsWire, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is continuing to work on a regulation mandating importers use tamper-evident, mechanical seals for all incoming ocean containers. The article notes that DHS is considering quickly implementing the same requirement for shippers in the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (C-TPAT) program as a temporary safeguard until a formal rulemaking is completed. The article also notes that real world testing of electronic seals and container security devices has not produced a silver bullet yet and that DHS officials state that if electronic surveillance technology is going to be relied upon, the integrity of the equipment needs to be as robust as possible before its use is required. According to the article, DHS officials also estimate that it will take another three years before it can endorse a container security device for limited deployment and five years for universal deployment on the millions of containers in the system. (See ITT's Online Archives or 11/15/04 news, 04111599 1 for previous BP summary on only the electronic seal or container security device aspect of this Shipper's NewsWire article.) (SNW dated 11/12/04, www.americanshippper.com.)
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has issued a press release announcing new measures that have been agreed to by the U.S. and European Union (EU) to strengthen the security of maritime container transport.
In a move strongly supported by FCC Chmn. Powell, the National Emergency Number Assn. (NENA) kicked off its Next Generation (NG) E911 Program on Wed. It urged industry leaders to work with federal, state and local officials and NENA members to update and improve the technical, operational and policy foundations of the nation’s 911 system. NENA officials said they had approached a number of groups and organizations and now were urging them to join forces. The early program partners include SBC, TruePosition, Vonage, TeleCommunications Systems, TelControl and HBF Group.
While agreeing with many proposals by the U.K. Office of Communications (Ofcom) on how to treat voice over broadband (VoB), CompTel/Ascent said in comments this week it was “concerned” about some of them. It said the “carrot and stick” approach that Ofcom proposed in its consultation document regarding publicly available telephone services (PATS) would “stifle competition and seriously hinder the emergence of innovative VoB services.” Ofcom had said communications providers that didn’t provide PATS should have neither the obligations nor the benefits, which include the ability to port numbers. But CompTel argued Ofcom should rule that number portability can be provided to non-PATS providers. It said the distinction between PATS and non-PATS that Ofcom relied on assumed that VoB services provided without fulfilling the definition of PATS were of lower quality or lower value to the consumer. But it said the “U.S. experience clearly demonstrates that those VoB providers that do not qualify as PATS under EU law offer a variety of innovative services that go far beyond what traditional carriers are offering.” It said the distinctions between PATS and non-PATS were already “very blurry” and would “disappear in the near future.” CompTel also said excluding non-PATS from geographic number portability was “a significant market obstacle for new entrants” because customers, especially small business and residential, would be “very reluctant to migrate to those providers if they [couldn’t] keep their telephone numbers.” CompTel also said VoB was “a global issue” that required “close cooperation” between European and U.S. regulators. In line with principles it filed with the FCC earlier this year (CD April 1 p13), CompTel told Ofcom: (1) “Decisions regarding VoB issues should be clearly articulated and easily applied to all network configurations which carry VoB traffic.” (2) “A ‘pure’ VoB provider that does not own, operate or control customers’ access to the Internet or the PSTN should not be subject to traditional telecommunications regulations.” (3) “Access to European incumbents’ last-mile bottleneck facilities must remain available to competitive carriers providing VoB at TELRIC rates.” (4) “Issues such as emergency access should be resolved through industry cooperation with state and federal regulators.” (5) “The need for and the interests of national security… should be addressed through separate and targeted proceedings.” In separate comments, Vonage stressed it had concerns relating to number portability, network integrity, emergency services and other obligations imposed on providers of PATS. It applauded Ofcom for recognizing that “due to inherent technological differences associated with the underlying technology used to provide VoB services, certain requirements imposed on PATS operations cannot be offered by VoB providers, nor as a policy matter should VoB providers be required to do so.” It said competition had already resulted in VoB providers offering functions and features not available from traditional telephone service providers and that would continue. Vonage warned Ofcom against policies that could hurt competition and adoption of VoB services. Specifically, it said, Ofcom must allow all communications service providers to “take advantage of number portability. To shelter traditional telephone companies from true competition by prohibiting VoB providers to utilize number portability will not serve the public interest.”
Several important communications-related items could pass Congress this week as it returns for a brief lame- duck session, industry and congressional sources said. The loudest buzz is on the universal service fund (USF) and the controversy over the FCC’s change in accounting mechanisms that could slow some E-rate payments and possibly lead to a rise in contributions, and several sources expected some efforts to push a legislative solution.
Technical work on ENUM telephony domains is nearing completion, said developers from different countries last week at the Internet Engineering Task Force meeting in Washington. “We are finished with major road work; now we are fine tuning,” said Jiri Kuthan, founder of Siptel, a major vendor of Sip Routers. Kuthan is chmn. of one of the IETF working groups doing the “fine tuning.”
The National Emergency Number Assn. is hosting a “public dialogue” on Enhanced 911 (E-911) on Wed., 12:15 p.m at the National Press Club Lisagor Room. Scheduled participants include: Bill McMurray, Marin (Cal.) County Sheriff’s Office; Billy Ragsdale, InterAct Public Safety Systems vp-operations; Norman Forshee, St. Clair Co. (Ill.) 911 coordinator; Anthony Haynes, Tenn. Emergency Communications Board exec. dir.
The U.S. and U.K. could be headed for a conflict over the need for the World Radiocommunications Conference (WRC) to approve a comprehensive overhaul of Articles 9 and 11 of world Radio Regulations. The FCC Advisory Committee for the WRC approved a resolution Wed. opposing those efforts, saying they could undermine the world satellite industry.
Vonage’s DigitalVoice VoIP service is interstate, so it can’t be regulated by state PUCs, the FCC ruled Tues. The ruling was hailed by CEA, which said the FCC’s action “provides the appropriate framework to establish one federal nationwide VoIP policy.”