PolicyBlog

A member of my staff – Sanjay Udani – attended a White House event celebrating science fair projects created by kids from around the country.    He pointed out that one of the projects at the event was a mobile app developed by three young students that works in conjunction with a Bluetooth-enabled heart rate monitor to notify family and/or medical professionals in the event of a medical emergency. Version 1 of the product is already available on the web for purchase. Can you imagine a science... Read More

FiOS customers understand what Tom Cruise was talking about in Top Gun when he and Goose said “I feel the need, the need for speed!”   because FiOS satisfies the “need for speed” in the same way that Maverick’s F-14 did - by delivering a consistently high-performance experience.Today, the FCC released the results of its broadband performance test program  conducted this past winter by the UK firm SamKnows.  SamKnows and the FCC, with the cooperation of 13 US broadband Internet Service Providers... Read More

The New York Times discusses a new project that has been shepherded by Blair Levin who helped guide the development of the National Broadband Plan and is now a fellow at the Aspen Institute. In a nutshell, the project brings together dozens of universities who are linked together by very high speed networks with the intent of using them as jumping off points to connect local communities to the university facilities where programs around medical health care technologies, remote education and... Read More

Everyone who follows my blog posts knows that I love stories about the history behind technological developments.  While as a Verizon tech policy person I obviously love technology stories about my industry, I am actually interested in all technologies and their histories.  Last week was the birth date of one of the more interesting technologies we have because it led to a saying we use all of the time: “That’s the neatest thing since sliced bread!” Yes, on July 7th, a jeweler by the name of... Read More

When I first came to Washington, DC I told myself the day I can look at the monuments at night and not get goose bumps is the day I should leave. Twenty-three years later, I look at the Capitol Dome or the Jefferson Memorial and they still have the same effect.  I crave the feeling of being amazed by what they represent and what they can teach about where we came from and what we still have to learn. It occurs to me that I feel the same way about the Internet Ecosystem.  I scan the horizons of... Read More

When it comes to Internet policy the truth is that aside from some of the key policy questions – like privacy – the hardest thing to fathom is defining just what the Internet is.  There is a wide array of definitions and many go back to the protocols that are involved, the fact that it is a “network of networks” or dwell on the large number of routers or users involved.  All of these are important factors but to me, what makes the Internet the Internet is the cooperation and multi-stakeholder... Read More

Recently, Apple co-founder and “Dancing with the Stars” gadfly Steve Wozniak visited Australia and praised that country’s efforts to take over a large swath of their telecom industry in order to further build a fiber broadband network.   Fine -- what a democracy does with its own finite public funds is its right -- and Mr. Wozniak can promote any public policy position he chooses.   But “The Woz” went on to complain about the lack of a similar fiber build in the U.S., seeming to lament our... Read More

I spend a lot of time thinking about Internet policy and the truth is that aside from some of the key policy questions – like privacy – the hardest thing to fathom is defining just what the Internet is.  There are a wide array of definitions and many go back to the protocols that are involved, the fact that it is a “network of networks” or dwell on the large number of routers or users involved.  All of these are important factors but to me, what makes the Internet the Internet is the... Read More

 The FCC is required under the Communications Act to conduct a periodic review of the deployment of “advanced telecommunications capability” or broadband service to determine whether the technology is “being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion.”    Network deployments of necessity can’t be completed in “one fell swoop” as my mother would put it.  Networks take time to deploy and given the high fixed costs and risks involved once a network is deployed, the economics are... Read More