Termination charges in mobile systems

This post discusses a paper by economist Sandy Levin comparing Wireless Party Pays and Calling Party Pays. The paper rightly concludes that CPP systems require ongoing regulation because there is no competition for termination charges, so they can get quite high. The subject of high termination charges has been the subject of EU regulation as well as complaints by the US Trade Representative.

Future of WiMAX

I am not quite as pessimistic about WiMAX as this item is. Instead, I think it will serve a role as a wireline replacement technology rather than as a competitor for LTE.

USDA report on rural broadband

This report form the US Dept of Ag. seems as though it will be worth reading. I suspect that the timing of the report is no accident, coming as it does as the FCC is in the midst of developing a broadband policy for the US. From the report summary:

Analysis suggests that rural economies benefi t generally from broadband availability. In comparing counties that had broadband access relatively early (by 2000) with similarly situated counties that had little or no broadband access as of 2000, employment growth was higher and nonfarm private earnings greater in counties with a longer history of broadband availability.

By 2007, most households (82 percent) with in-home Internet access had a broadband connection. A marked difference exists, however, between urban and rural broadband use—only 70 percent of rural households with in-home Internet access had a broadband connection in 2007, compared with 84 percent of urban households. The rural-urban difference in in-home broadband adoption among households with similar income levels reflects the more limited availability of broadband in rural settings.

Areas with low population size, locations that have experienced persistent population loss and an aging population, or places where population is widely dispersed over demanding terrain generally have diffi culty attracting broadband service providers. These characteristics can make the fixed cost of providing broadband access too high, or limit potential demand, thus depressing the profitability of providing service. Clusters of lower service exist in sparsely populated areas, such as the Dakotas, eastern Montana, northern Minnesota, and eastern Oregon. Other low-service areas, such as the Missouri-Iowa border and Appalachia, have aging and declining numbers of residents. Nonetheless, rural areas in some States (such as Nebraska, Kansas, and Vermont) have higher-than expected broadband service, given their population characteristics, suggesting that policy, economic, and social factors can overcome common barriers to broadband expansion.

Availability in current cloud computing services

This article reports research performed in Australia looking at the availability of cloud services provided by Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Here is how the experiment was set up:

The team of researchers, led by the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and in collaboration with researchers at NICTA (National ICT Australia) and the Smart Services Cooperative Research Centre (CRC), have spent seven months stress testing Amazon's EC2, Google's AppLogic and Microsoft's Azure cloud computing services.

The analysis simulated 2000 concurrent users connecting to services from each of the three providers, with researchers measuring response times and other performance metrics.

Here are some things they found:

Response times on the service also varied by a factor of twenty depending on the time of day the services were accessed, she said.

The response times collated in Sydney were tested against measurement instruments loaded onto the cloud platform to isolate whether delays were attributable to the service itself or the latency involved with accessing US-based data centres from Australia.

and

None of the platforms have the kind of monitoring required to have a reasonable conversation about performance," she said. "They provide some level of monitoring, but what little there is caters for developers, not business users. And while Amazon provides a dashboard of how much it is costing you so far, for example, there is nothing in terms of forecasts about what it will cost you in the future.

Network economics and universal service

I found this item over at CircleID interesting. In it, the author discusses the penalty of non-inclusion (see the graph below) and uses it to make an argument in favor of universal service.



This brought to mind some of Eli Noam's seminal work (this article, for example), in which Noam outlines the incentives people have to leave a universal network (see the graph below, from the paper). We are thus left with conflicting incentives, which serve to underscore the difficulties in achieving universal service.