Technology blogger Ike Elliott has a terrific series underway over at his blog this week looking at the differences between cable and telco-fiber infrastructures. He is "looking at why cable companies are kicking the tires on fiber-based passive optical networks, even though they have a heavy investment in hybrid fiber coax (HFC) networks." The series is a good primer on these issues. Here are the entries in his series so far:

* "Internet Capacity Demands Increasing"
* "Does Cable Need Fiber to the Home?"
* "How Far Does Cable Fiber Go?"
* "Fiber vs. Coax"
* "DOCSIS 3.0 Upstream Still Skinny"
* "When Will Cable Bite The Bullet and Upgrade to Fiber?"

And here's a handy table that Ike put together comparing the capabilities of fiber vs. coax:

Paul Davidson of the USA Today called me last week seeing comment for a story he said he was putting together on the legacy of Kevin Martin's FCC. I spent roughly 30 minutes on the phone with Davidson and went through a litany of policy issues with him itemizing the "assets and liabilities," if you will, of the Martin regime, as viewed from the perspective of someone who cares deeply about free markets and property rights. I did not hold back during the interview. I told Davidson in no uncertain terms that Chairman Martin had gone far off the free-market reservation on a great number policy issues.

Anyway, Davidson's story appeared today and is entitled "FCC Chief Martin Hasn't Lost Focus on Cable." It mentions how Chairman Martin has managed to alienate a good portion of the the free-market movement by straying far off the reservation on a great many issues, but it never really gets into the details. To get the complete story, I encourage you to read this editorial that James Gattuso and I penned for National Review as well as an editorial by the magazine's editorial board that appeared the following day entitled, "Pulling the Cable on Martin’s Crusade."

And those essays just cover the economic policy failings of the current FCC. To see what has been proposed on the social / speech side of things, see my essay, "FCC Violence Report Concludes that Parenting Doesn’t Work" and "The FCC’s Indecency Bomb."

Cable and telecom operators have long fought like cats and dogs in the political marketplace. And now that they are competing more intensely for customers in the real marketplace, we can expect relations between the two camps to grow even more acrimonious inside the Beltway.

Case in point: Yesterday, cable operators Bright House, Comcast, and Time Warner filed a complaint at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) alleging that telecom giant Verizon has been offering “unlawful inducements to customers” in an effort to retain those customers looking to switch over to cable-based voice offerings. The cable companies want to FCC to force Verizon to halt those “winback” tactics which take place before a customer switches over. And the cable operators also want the FCC to award damages based on past harm supposedly done to them.

It’s an example of just how cut-throat the marketplace competition has become between the two sectors recently. As Cynthia Brumfield of IP Democracy points out, telecom operators have been hemorrhaging customers in recent years and cable operators have been the primary recipient of those telco-defectors. As Cynthia notes:

I found this article by Ernesto over at TorrentFreak ("Decluttering The Tubes, Solutions to the BitTorrent “Problem”?") to be very interesting and open-minded, but his readers are really taking him to task for it. In the piece, Ernesto outlines the upsides and downsides of 6 possible ISP responses to the "BitTorrent Problem," which has been in the news a great deal lately. (These models were apparently suggested to Ernesto by Art Reisman, who is chief technical officer at APConnections):

1) Ask for voluntary cooperation.
2) Keep connections within the providers network.
3) Usage based quotas.
4) Limit the total connections allowed at one time per user.
5) Build out networks to handle the increased load and pass the cost onto the consumer.
6) Cancel the service of users who abuse their privileges. There have been reports of providers doing this already.

[Again, see full article for explanation of strengths and weaknesses of each.]

I think many of these solutions sound quite constructive and could possibly be used in some combination to alleviate network congestions problems. But the reader response over at TorrentFreak, which obvious skews towards the heavy BitTorrent user, is perhaps all too predictable: Just give us more capacity!

"Cable-TV Industry Girds for New Threats." That's the title of an article today from Ben Charny of the Wall Street Journal, who is reporting on what he's seeing at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and how it is upending the traditional TV market:

"[A]s evidenced this week by the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas... thanks to the Internet becoming a bigger distributor of entertainment, and new gadgets and other developments that make it easier to show the Internet's content on TVs. ... As the Internet becomes a larger provider of video, and technology makers ease the flow of that content to television sets, it threatens the cable and satellite industries. Currently, the number of subscriber dropouts remains relatively small, according to cable and satellite operators, but anecdotal evidence suggests those affected by a souring U.S. economy are more inclined to keep their less-expensive Internet services than their cable-TV subscriptions.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin was out at the show this week, too. Hopefully he was watching and listening so his outrageous regulatory "war on cable" can finally come to an end.

Who would Patriot fans have to blame if their cable operator did not carry the final game of the New England team's undefeated regular season? Look no further than the NFL offices.

The NFL is the most financially successful league in the world. NFL franchises are worth, on average, about a billion dollars each, and five of them are worth quite a bit more than that. One might imagine that a league whose aggregate value exceeds the GDP of Iceland and Jordan combined would be content. One would be wrong.

No, the NFL is not making enough, apparently, merely filling stadiums (many of which were built with taxpayer subsidies), hawking team wares, and marketing TV rights to broadcast and cable networks. Now the NFL would like to wring a few more golden eggs from the goose by forcing non-fans to pay for televised games. Even those accustomed to the rich getting richer must find the inherent unfairness of the NFL’s power sweep offensive.

The big news this week in communications policy circles was the hullabaloo at the FCC over cable regulation. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin suffered a major setback in his attempt expand regulation of the video marketplace when he failed to get the votes he needed to impose new mandates on cable TV operators. Specifically, Chairman Martin was seeking to breath new life into an arcane provision of a 1984 law--the so-called "70/70" rule--that would have given him much greater regulatory authority over the day-to-day dealings of the cable market.

But the war certainly isn't over. The day after losing that skirmish, Chairman Martin made it clear he would be pursuing other forms of regulation for the cable sector, including an arbitrary 30% ownership cap on the reach of any cable operator. And the Chairman's crusade for a la carte mandates on cable will no doubt continue since it has been on his regulatory wish list for some time now, and many other groups support his efforts.

These cable TV regulatory proposals have always been fueled by the same two arguments: (1) cable TV operators have a stranglehold on market entry by new video providers and, (2) because of that, media diversity has suffered. For example, the New York Times editorial board opined this week that: "Twenty-five years ago, cable carriers promised to provide consumers with a wealth of new programming options. Today, the carriers and their packages of unwanted channels are obstacles to choice." This is the same logic that animates Chairman Martin's crusade against cable and the efforts of his pro-regulatory allies, most of whom are radical Leftist media critics.

But that logic is dead wrong.

As I mentioned yesterday, James Gattuso and I penned an editorial for National Review this week about the growth of FCC regulation and spending in recent years. In the op-ed, we also noted that, "For whatever reason, a disproportionate number of these [new regulatory proposals] have been aimed at cable television, so much so that press and industry analysts now speak of Chairman Martin’s ongoing 'war on cable.'"

Today, the editors at National Review have chimed in with an editorial of their own on the issue entitled, "Pulling the Cable on Martin’s Crusade." Specifically, the editors address what most pundits believe really motivates the Chairman's crusade against cable: His desire to force cable companies to offer consumers channels on "a la carte" basis in an effort to "clean up" cable TV. "Martin should abandon this particular crusade," the NR editors argue. "While we are sympathetic to parents’ desire to get the channels they want without having to buy access to racier fare, using economic regulation to restructure an industry is the wrong approach." They continue:

This is just a quick follow-up to the post I made earlier in which I mentioned the new editorial James Gattuso and I penned for National Review about the growth of FCC regulation and spending in recent years. A few people asked me where we got the numbers we used in the piece regarding the growth of the FCC's budget over time. Here are the relevant numbers and a graph charting that growth. The numbers can all be found in the the FCC's annual budget reports.

Next time some pro-regulatory advocate says that the agency is engaged in "radical deregulation" or something absurd like that, show them these numbers. There's still a whole lotta regulatin' going on over there!

This week in National Review Online, Cesar Conda and Lawrence Spivak ran an editorial entitled “Kevin Martin’s Pro-Market FCC,” arguing that the current FCC has generally been deregulatory and free market-oriented. Today, James Gattuso of the Heritage Foundation and I have set the record straight regarding just how off-the-rails this current FCC has really gone…
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November 29, 2007

TV Train Wreck
Martin, markets, and the potential for regulatory disaster.

By James Gattuso & Adam Thierer

Like cops shooing away onlookers at the scene of an accident, Cesar Conda and Lawrence Spivak argue (“Kevin Martin’s Pro-Market FCC”) that there’s no reason for conservatives to be concerned about the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Under Chairman Kevin Martin, they say, the FCC has been “characterized by a consistent pro-entry/pro-consumer welfare mandate, the very hallmark of economic conservatism.”

In other words: “Just move along. Nothing to see here.”

Despite Conda and Spivak’s exhortations, however, there is much for the curious crowd to see in the train wreck that is the FCC. The most recent derailment began earlier this month, when Martin leaked plans to invoke an obscure provision of the Communications Act, and to assert nearly unlimited powers to regulate cable television if more than 70 percent of households subscribe to cable.