Posts Tagged ‘FCC’
Police and Firefighters in the U.S. Get a Tiny, Throwable Recon Robot
You read that correctly: a potentially life-saving tool that’s earned broad approval by service members serving in some of the toughest regions in the world was previously denied to first responders and law enforcement stateside because the robot couldn’t get a waiver to operate in a certain block of spectrum needed to transmit its live video feed. We’ll save you the rant about a bloated and slow-moving bureaucracy. Suffice it to say, Throwbot now has its waiver and is ready to recon.
And recon it can. At just 1.2 pounds and eight inches long, the camera-equipped rolling robot can be quite literally tossed like a football onto rooftops or through building windows. Its design ensures it lands upright in pretty much any situation where it hits a flat surface, and once deployed it can stealthily move under furniture, cars, or other cover and beam back live video to a command station 1,000 feet away. It is designed to be controlled by an operator working alongside it via a simple joystick control that also sports a small display that provides a ‘bots’-eye view.
Such a small, durable, and easily deployable robot with video streaming capability has so many potential (and critical) uses that it’s mind-numbing to think that it took this long for something like broadcast spectrum to get approved. See Throwbot get thrown in the video below.
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FCC lays down net neutrality rules, wireless providers exempt from some
The Federal Communications Commission voted today to lay down a number of basic rules that ban Internet service providers from blocking specific content and help keep the web open.
The new rules keep ISPs from blocking specific websites and other content. The rules also allow ISPs to throttle web connections if they believe their customers are using too much bandwidth, but require the ISPs to be “reasonable” when doing so. Internet providers also have to have a greater level of transparency.
But wireless telecommunications companies were exempt from the packet discrimination rules — which is a bit of a head scratcher. Mobile web use is growing rapidly and some actually rely on wireless networks for their Internet usage through mobile hot-spot devices. Without those rules in place, wireless companies are free to stop some smartphone users from taking advantage of their data plans by throttling download and upload speeds.
Both Google and Verizon agreed that wireless web access requires a different set of tools and technology. The chief executives for both companies said , a suggestion . Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that both companies had been in discussions for over a year, and that they already had discussions with the FCC.
Government officials have been arguing about net neutrality for some time now. The idea first came up when the FCC ordered Comcast to halt plans to slow Internet traffic for peer-to-peer file sharers. A federal appeals court said that the FCC had overstepped its authority. The vote happened right down party lines, with both Republicans on the committee voting against the new net neutrality rules.
Back when President Barack Obama was campaigning for office, he made net neutrality a big part of his tech policy platform. But as wireless Internet use continues to grow, it’s unclear whether the FCC will step in and begin regulating that space and lay out a new set of net neutrality rules for wireless providers.
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FCC Expected to Pass Net Neutrality Rules Today, Drawing Line Between Wired and Wireless Web
For those who haven’t been following the debate, what’s at stake here is unfettered access to everything – everything that’s legal anyhow – on the web without interference from internet service providers. Net neutrality, as the notion is called, aims to prevent ISPs from showing favoritism to one web service (say, Netflix streaming over Amazon streaming) or to sell better bandwidth to one company over another. It also aims to keep ISPs from charging entities that consume a lot of bandwidth – again, Netflix streaming is a good example – higher service fees (thus driving up the cost to consumers). Keeping the web open and undiscriminating, the net neutrality argument goes, ensures that online innovation continues unhindered.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski – a proponent of the new net neutrality regulations – describes the as-yet-unseen rule set being voted on as a compromise, a word we’re hearing a lot lately from Washington. They would require neutrality for wireline web providers, ensuring that the wired web remains open.
Unfortunately, the wired web is the web of the last century. The mobile, wireless web is where the internet is going, and providers like AT&T and Verizon will not be beholden to the same regulations as their wireline counterparts. Under the new rules, wireless providers will have to allow unbiased access to web sites, but not necessarily to applications or services. incidentally, this line of thinking is very similar to a vision for net neutrality recently by Verizon and Google.
It essentially means that while the FCC is stepping in on behalf of net neutrality as it pertains to our home and office computers, our smartphones and tablets and the apps thereon – increasingly the way many of us consume bandwidth and information these days – are still subject to the whims and discriminations of service providers.
The wireless web is the future, and if the proposed regulations are passed today, as they are expected to be, advocates of neutrality will get a watered down version of what they wanted: free access to everything for everyone, anywhere the web reaches. So long as you're not using your smartphone.
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FCC Considers Allowing You to Text Emergency Messages to 911 (LOL HELP)
The plan, called Next Gen 911, would be the first national update to the 911 service since 2001. That update was also focused on modernity; it required cellular carriers to stamp an emergency caller's GPS location on the call. But so much more could be done.
The events at Virginia Tech in 2007 also served as an impetus for the change. During those shootings, many students attempted to text 911, rather than calling and possibly giving away their locations to the shooter. But with no system set up to retrieve the texts, they simply vanished. Imagine if not only those texts could have gotten through, but also a live streaming video. The smartphone could be an incredible tool in this kind of situation.
Even more, the proposal outlines a plan to incorporate various communicating sensors into smoke detectors and other alarm systems, so 911 services could be alerted to any problems more quickly.
It's not clear how much of the proposal will actually make it into the bill, or even how much funding (or from where) the FCC will be able to secure to make these improvements.
[Next Gen 911 via Wired]
Verizon pushes for rewrite of “antiquated and anti-competitive” US telecom law
Tell us what you really think, Verizon. The company yesterday titled “Congress Needs to Update the Nation’s Antiquated and Anti-Competitive Telecom Rules” — which, as you can guess, isn’t exactly a love letter to the FCC.
Verizon executive vice president of public affairs Tom Tauke is quoted as saying in the release: “The grinding you hear are the gears churning as policymakers try to fit fast-changing technologies and competitive markets into regulatory boxes built for analog technologies and monopoly markets.”
The company’s frustration isn’t unwarranted. The FCC is still fighting for authority when it comes to regulating the internet, mainly because current telecom rules aren’t suited to the issues we’re facing today like net neutrality. The agency tried to in a “third way” that gave it more authority earlier this year — after a US court on providers.
Verizon’s position now is even more extreme than its stance earlier this year, when together with Google. The company is now proposing four components that it feels are necessary for a new policy to guide the internet: It should be a federal framework; allow for case-by-case rulings; government intervention should be allowed only to protect consumers from harm or to stop anti-competitive activity; and perhaps most importantly, a single federal agency should be given clear jurisdiction.
As Engadget points out, of the Telecommunications Act earlier this year. Perhaps Verizon’s prodding will move things along even more quickly.
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Week in review: Web pioneer bashes Apple, SXSW attendees slam Twitter keynote
Here’s our summary of the week’s business and tech news. First, the most popular stories we published in the last seven days:
— Tim Bray isn’t as well-known as Sir Tim Berners-Lee, but the guy has had a leading role in defining the Internet. When he announced this week that he’s joining Google as an evangelist for the Android platform, he published a blog post that was pretty critical of competitor Apple, and which VentureBeat’s Paul Boutin found “off-putting.”
— Performance monitoring service Gomez has released its annual list of major websites with the best overall responsiveness as measured by Gomez over the entire year 2009. Surprise winner: IRS.gov, a site that uses images sparingly and pushes off large documents to PDF format for downloading, rather than trying to serve them as Web pages.
— Facebook is now the most popular site in the U.S., according to analytics firm Hitwise. In the week ending March 13, 2010, Facebook surpassed the previous most popular site, Google, in terms of overall traffic for the week.
— A product manager from Google told attendees at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas that Google had misstepped by launching its social network, Google Buzz, too broadly and too promiscuously. In the future, said Google’s Todd Jackson, the company will pre-test new features rather than roll them out to all customers at once.
— Twitter CEO Ev Williams demonstrated a new platform this week that will spread the microblogging network’s profiles, tweets, and possibly advertising across the web.
And here are five more stories we think are important, thought-provoking, or fun:
r — Although Twitter co-founder and and chief executive Evan Williams made a couple of interesting points during his keynote interview (and announced the ‘At Anywhere’ platform mentioned above), the consensus was that it did not go well. Following the tradition of journalist Sarah Lacy’s similarly-criticized interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at SXSW in 2008, where Zuckerberg staged a second interview where he engaged more directly with the audience, Williams offered to answer more questions over Twitter.
— Sony’s role in video games seems to be to remind us every now and then what an epic game is all about. It did so again with the launch of God of War III for the PlayStation 3.
— European music streaming service Spotify now has 320,000 paid subscribers, said chief executive Daniel Ek, speaking at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin. But he couldn’t give a firm date on when the service would come to the United States.
— The FCC finally unveiled the National Broadband Plan following months of speculation. The plan — for how to extend internet access to all American citizens — marks the first time that broadband access, and internet access in general, have been given considerable government attention in America.
— The Energy Star program has successfully broken into the mainstream consciousness. But before last year, it seems like the label didn’t mean much. Now government agencies are making good on their promise to be tougher about who gets certified and who doesn’t, and they’re kicking the effort up another notch.
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To Explain the Broadcast Spectrum, FCC Unveils Cool Interactive Tools
The agency may also open up parts of the spectrum for private experimentation
The tools on the FCC's provide access to information about the current spectrum allocations by frequency, type of use, and user. Study enabled by this dashboard can help us to better understand how portions of the spectrum are used and in what areas experimentation and innovation are possible.
The Spectrum Band Browser provides a color-coded breakdown of the current spectrum allocation scheme. Moving the mouse over a portion of the spectrum gives key details on the type of use.
If you find you like this spectrum chart so much that you would like to have a copy of your very own, the full chart is available for download . Regrettably, the Government Printing Office no longer carries this poster, so you will have to make your own printing arrangements if you'd like to have this on your wall, as I do.
The Spectrum Dashboard also provides two tools for researching license holders and the portions of the spectrum to which they have been given access. Pictured above is a screen shot of the Map tool, which reveals license holders by county. Searching by both the legally registered and common brand name of the license holder is also supported.
The spectrum availability map by county provides a visualization of the amount of the licensed bands not currently allocated to license holders. For most of us at the present time, it is somewhere right around none.
If you find yourself interested in the details of the frequency bands, don't miss the "Search by FCC License Categories" tool. This is a search interface for detailed information about each of the allocated bands in the radio spectrum.
Radio-wave tinkerers may find something else to like. According to a recent , "The plan will advise that some of the spectrum become unlicensed, so it can serve as a test bed for new technologies."
While there are already parts of the spectrum available for public usage, both through the portions allocated for amateur radio and the portions allocated for unlicensed operation, the FCC broadband plan acknowledges the benefits and innovations that have resulted from federal support of research and development and specifically addresses the issue of expanding the parts of the spectrum that are made available for research and experimentation. In of the plan, it states "Allowing research organizations such as universities greater flexibility to temporarily use fallow spectrum can promote more efficient and innovative communications systems."