Global mobile data traffic almost doubled in 2013, and 88 percent of Americans now watch TV on their phones, while 21 U.S. carriers offer 4G service, Mobile Future said in its year-in-review posted Thursday. “Tweet” was added to the dictionary in 2013, the group noted (http://bit.ly/1dtCGzX). It said “spectrum is now the hottest word in wireless” and tablets for the first time will outsell laptop and desktop computers.
Britain’s communications sector compares favorably with that of 16 other nations around the world, the Office of Communications (Ofcom) said in its 2012 international communications report (http://xrl.us/bqaaxs). The study benchmarks the U.K. communications sector against other countries to see how it’s doing -- France, Germany, Italy, the U.S., Canada, Japan, Australia, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland, Poland, Brazil, Russia, India and China. The survey found that the sector’s total global revenue, including telecom, TV, radio and post, was around $2 trillion last year, up 2.5 percent from 2011, it said. TV subscriptions generated the biggest and fastest-growing proportion of the total revenue, it said. Fixed-line connections continued to fall, but were most resilient in the U.K., where many customers still get broadband services over fixed lines, it said. Mobile takeup continued to exceed population size in all the countries surveyed except China, it said. Excluding Japan, which has a very high takeup of advanced feature phones not readily available in other countries, the U.S. was the only one to report a smartphone adoption level of less than 50 percent in Ofcom’s online survey, it said. People in the U.K. are most likely to trust online retailers than those in the other countries, it said. In the TV and audiovisual area, Brazil, Russia, India and China continued to have the largest annual growth, it said. The U.K. leads the way in digital conversion and was one of only three countries to have 100 percent of all main TV sets switched to digital in 2012, it said. U.K. consumers are embracing value-added services, with HDTV and digital video recording penetration the highest among the European nations included in the research, Ofcom said. British consumers are more likely to watch catch-up TV on smart TVs, mobile phones and tablets, but scheduled linear TV is also still popular, with Britons watching four hours per day, the regulator said. Other findings included: (1) U.K. residents are the most frequent online shoppers and the most likely to access TV content over the Internet. (2) Social networks are still among the most searched-for terms on the Internet, with Facebook the most searched-for term for 14 of the 17 comparison countries. (3) Mobile Internet users in the U.S. and U.K. are the most active social networkers. (4) Radio revenue was up for the third consecutive year in the 17 countries analyzed. (5) The U.K. had the second-lowest proportion of total telecom revenue generated by data services in 2012, with Japan leading the way.
The White House must issue an official response to a petition asking for stronger email privacy protections, after the petition hit the necessary 100,000 signatures needed by Thursday (http://1.usa.gov/1avKNbR). Digital 4th, an industry and advocacy coalition, filed the petition, attempting to restart debate over updating the 27-year-old Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CD Nov 14 p19). The group was formed in March to advocate for an ECPA modernization bill from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, which would protect electronic communications collected and maintained by third-party service providers (CD March 20 p10). The bill never made it out of committee. “Several bills in Congress would fix this by updating ECPA to require a warrant, but regulatory bodies are blocking reform in order to gain new powers of warrantless access,” said the petition. “We call on the Obama Administration to support ECPA reform and to reject any special rules that would force online service providers to disclose our email without a warrant."
The FCC prison calling order violates the Communication Act’s requirement that inmate calling service providers be fairly compensated, Pay Tel told an aide to Commissioner Mignon Clyburn Friday, said an ex parte filing (http://bit.ly/1cDGn7B). “The Order’s failure to account for the cost of providing ICS in jails will make the provision of ICS in jails economically unsustainable and many high cost small to medium size jail facilities will be left without a service provider.” For Pay Tel, 73 percent of its 160 client locations have at least one category of intrastate calls in which average revenue per minute is below cost, it said. “The total amount by which intrastate capped rates are below cost” is nearly $3 million, about 11 percent of Pay Tel’s revenue, it said. “In this regard, the FCC’s Order violates, on its face, Section 276’s command that the Commission ‘ensure that all [ICS] providers are fairly compensated for each and every completed intrastate and interstate call.'” Pay Tel asked that the commission stay the new rules.
The sixth Wideband Global Satcom (WGS) satellite from Boeing was delivered on orbit for the U.S. Air Force, Boeing said in a press release (http://bit.ly/JaOo8Y). Australia’s funding of the satellite provided the Australian Defence Force with immediate access to the WGS network, Boeing said. “Four additional WGS satellites are in production in El Segundo, Calif., under the program’s Block II follow-on contract.”
JetBlue launched in-flight high-speed Internet service using ViaSat’s Ka-band connectivity. During the beta period rollout of the service, Fly-Fi, JetBlue will offer free basic Web browsing onboard Fly-Fi equipped aircraft through June, the airline said in a press release (http://bit.ly/18FSAXR). The satellite system includes a LiveTV portal, aircraft Wi-Fi system and integration for JetBlue, ViaSat said in a press release. It’s capable of delivering 12 Mbps or more to each connected passenger, ViaSat said. The satellite-based system also can operate on the ground, it said.
Ex-FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski backed the delay of the broadcast incentive auction to mid-2015 by current Chairman Tom Wheeler. Genachowski said he wanted to join three other ex-chairmen from both parties who earlier this week backed the delay that Wheeler disclosed Friday (CD Dec 10 p6). Genachowski “fully agrees with Chairman Wheeler’s decision,” said an assistant to Genachowski by email Thursday. Genachowski had planned a 2014 auction when he was chairman.
The EU and media industry launched a pilot to enable more use of digital content, they said Thursday. The Rights Data Integration (RDI) project will implement work by the Linked Content Coalition on a technical framework to help copyright owners and users manage and trade rights for all kinds of usage of all types of content and protected works in all media, they said. That will move the content industry closer to figuring out how to assert ownership and communicate copyright terms and conditions in the digital arena in a way machines and people can understand, they said. RDI is an early pilot for the “copyright hub” strategy under development in the U.K. and under consideration in Europe and the U.S., they said. It will use a “hub and spoke” architecture that lets users find and access information from rightsholders via a central transformation hub, they said. The hub will transform the data into a common format and then into a format accepted by exchanges that provide the interface for users, they said. RDI doesn’t directly affect copyright laws and agreements but makes it possible to process the results of those contracts in a more highly automatable way, they said. The project will run for 27 months, they said. Media participants include Elsevier, Getty Images and the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organizations.
Getting information needed for effective sharing of spectrum between government and commercial users “will be more difficult in some cases then others,” said the Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee’s Spectrum Management via Databases Working Group in an interim report posted by NTIA. The report is to be discussed by CSMAC Friday. The working group found that the information that will be needed to protect federal agencies is “likely substantially less” than that required to protect secondary users. “Protecting Federal users via a database system likely means we only need receive (Rx) information not information on transit (Tx) characteristics,” the report said (http://1.usa.gov/1bzW1j6). “Rx information is often less sensitive then Tx information.” The report concluded that all sharing scenarios are not the same. “There is no one size fits all solution for what information needs to be shared,” it said. “In fact for some systems, it will be difficult to share at all due to nature of systems. ... We should focus on the most solvable scenarios first.” The key question the working group is considering is: “How can sensitive and government classified operations be included and protected using a database-driven sharing approach, particularly one that strives toward real-time responses?” the report said. “The group agreed to address this question in general to the extent possible but also look at this in context specifically of the 3.5 GHz band.” CSMAC will also get an update from its Bi-Directional Sharing Working Group. The group needs “more specific NTIA instruction (on time period, size of area, demographics, spectrum required, and nature of use) to recommend best possible options,” said a document posted by NTIA (http://1.usa.gov/18FJxpR). “Bi-directional sharing is likely to increase in visibility as the commercial auctions are completed, the opportunities will require a comprehensive ruleset based on best practices."
EU law requiring storage of e-communications traffic data seriously interferes with citizens’ fundamental right to privacy and should be suspended until it’s fixed, said European Court of Justice (ECJ) Advocate General (AG) Pedro Cruz Villalón Thursday in an opinion (http://bit.ly/18nKR2G). The ECJ isn’t bound by its advisors’ opinions but generally follows them. The case involves challenges in Ireland and Austria to those countries’ versions of the EU data retention directive, which their respective high courts referred to the ECJ. Taken as whole, the measure is incompatible with the requirement in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights that any limitation on the exercise of such a right must be provided for by law, the AG said. Use of retained data could make it possible to create a faithful map of much of a person’s conduct or even a complete picture of his private identity, and it could also increase the risk that the data may be used for unlawful purposes, he said. The directive doesn’t require that the data be retained in the territory of an EU country, so it could be held anywhere in cyberspace, he said. Given its serious impact on privacy rights, the legislation should have defined the fundamental principles on which access to the data collected and held would be based, instead of leaving that task to each individual country, he said. Another problem is that the law requires EU members to ensure that data is kept for up to two years when evidence showed here’s insufficient justification for such a long period, the AG said. Instead of advising the ECJ to strike down the law, however, he recommended that it be suspended until the EU remedies the problems. Digital Rights Ireland (DRI), which brought one of the challenges, said it’s happy with the opinion but would have preferred that the AG find the directive unlawful in principle, which he didn’t do, Chairman TJ McIntyre told us. If the ECJ upholds the opinion, it will strike down the directive, he said. The AG wants governments to have a grace period in which to change their laws, but DRI hopes that, given the political climate surrounding former U.S. NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations, there’s enough political opposition to data retention for the law to die, he said. When DRI launched its challenge seven years ago data storage wasn’t a big issue, but the political scene is different now, he said.