We filed comments with the FCC yesterday on the proposed purchase of 122 AWS spectrum licenses by Verizon Wireless that are currently held by a group of cable companies including Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox, and Brighthouse. In aggregate, the licenses cover a 20MHz national footprint, about 10% as much spectrum as Sprint/Clearwire has today. The cable companies purchased the licenses in order to build a mobile broadband network that would compete with AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint, but soon discovered...

The FCC released an important new report Tuesday, Measuring Broadband America, which shows how actual broadband speeds compare to advertising claims. You can read the report and download the data the FCC collected here. The report is the result of a year of work by the FCC, its contractor Sam Knows, and a diverse group of people from the FCC, industry, universities, and public interest advocacy. The report follows a year after a quick snapshot of broadband speeds conducted during the development...

Susan Crawford rings in the New Year in the Yale Law and Policy Review with an article (The Looming Cable Monopoly) that illustrates a prime reason that it’s nearly impossible to have a discussion about Internet policy in the United States without a food-fight breaking out. Crawford tells us, unequivocally, that a cable company takeover of the Internet is imminent, according to no less an authority than the National Broadband Plan. The Plan doesn’t say this, of course, but Crawford twists it into...

After five years of bickering, the FCC passed an Open Internet Report & Order on a partisan 3-2 vote this week. The order is meant to guarantee that the Internet of the future will be just as free and open as the Internet of the past. Its success depends on how fast the Commission can transform itself from an old school telecom regulator wired to resist change into an innovation stimulator embracing opportunity. One thing we can be sure about is that the order hasn’t tamped down the hyperbole...

The Washington Post’s lead gadget writer, Rob Pegoraro, graced us with the benefit of his expertise yesterday in a column on the FCC’s Open Internet order (FCC votes for a half-measure on net neutrality;) In short, he’s not happy.  His FCC post is actually more closely related to the frustrations expressed in a preceding post reviewing the video calling services provided by a game controller, the Xbox Video Kinect, than he apparently realizes. Pegoraro fails to find satisfaction with video calls...