Tag Archive for 'New York City'


Call for Papers: Infrastructure Regulation: What works, Why, and How do we know?
Deadline: 05 December 2008.




US bemoans falling behind in broadband (and lacking data to measure the extent of the fall)

Broadband Access Data Mischief — SSRC

There is clear consensus that our nation’s ability to compete in the high speed broadband world is essential to our economic future. Unfortunately, the Administration and the Federal Communications Commission continue to rely upon inadequate, highly-flawed data to assess the marketplace for high-speed Internet access. The Administration’s “mission Accomplished” rhetoric does not match reality:

* According to a September 2007 Pew Internet & American Life Project phone survey, roughly half of all Americans don’t have broadband at home. Half is far from universal.
* Fewer than 25% of New Yorkers in rural areas have access to broadband service and nearly two-thirds of people living in New York City lack access to affordable, high-speed broadband. Some New York City neighborhoods — like Sunset…

Are subsidized data networks the solution?

How will John Gage’s proposal play out in the telecom eco-system of developing countries?   Who will operate them?   Will they suffer the same fate as ICTA’s  VSAT based connectivity for telecenters, where you can do  Internet but cannot call the next village?

Can you just drop technology in, without addressing the overall institutional setting?     

At Davos, the Squabble Resumes on How to Wire the Third World - New York Times

Separately at the meeting on Saturday, John Gage, the chief researcher at Sun Microsystems, proposed an industry plan to deploy advanced data networks in developing economies with contributions of engineering staff time of 1 percent.

Mr. Gage, who headed the NetDay project for connecting American schools to the Internet, said that rural areas in the developing…

Fiber to the home, thanks to competition

In the 1990s, I was involved in intense debates in the US about how to incentivize telcos to bring fiber closer to the home. It’s finally happening, and guess what is driving it? Competition.

“Verizon will spend about $20 billion by the end of the decade to reach 16 million homes from Florida to California. But it is in New York City where Verizon has the most at stake, because New Yorkers are some of the nation’s biggest buyers of video, Internet and phone services. The company plans to spend about $3 billion to reach the city’s 3.1 million homes and apartments.

With such a high concentration of potential customers, competition is fierce — and Verizon has been losing ground. Time Warner Cable, Cablevision and others are…

LIVE FEED Colloquium Jan 7, 2005, Disaster Management

Rohan: Vanguard Foundation was recently created which has a center for disaster management. The work I have done at TRC on disaster management will be leveraged in the current context, and we will prepare a document. Pete Anderson is disaster communication expert who will be brought in to design a concept paper to set up parameters of a disaster management system. We are moving very fast on this.

Sequence: Disaster happens, analysed, and transmitted in a secure communication mechanism to the media. Once the warning message is transmitted, the disaster warning process is over. As far as Vanguard and LIRNE is concerned this is a ICT and telecom problem. Disaster education will be undertaken by vanguard at a later point in time.

Since we are not govt,…