Sidecut Reports

Anyone hoping to “get a little more color” on Sprint’s ultimate plans for its Xohm WiMax rollout was disappointed during the company’s earnings call Thursday morning, where Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said the company will “talk about WiMax plans at a later date.”

Alongside all the ugliness of the company’s most recent quarter, Hesse said that in terms of WiMax, “Sprint has an enormous asset in nearly 100 MHz of unused spectrum… and the opportunity for a 3-year headstart with the Xohm business.”

In regards to the Xohm “soft” launches of services in Chicago, Baltimore and Washington D.C., Hesse said “I am extremely encouraged with what I’ve seen. Our soft launches offer confidence in the performance of the technology.”

While confirming that Sprint and Clearwire have had ongoing conversations about potential WiMax collaboration, Hesse said that “no final agreements have been reached,” and that he would not comment specifically on any rumors in stories that have surfaced (presumably he means TheStreet.com’s speculation that Intel will save Sprint’s WiMax bacon).

Sprint did, however, join the all-you-can-eat pricing wars with its own $99.99 monthly plan that also includes data and exclusive video content. Let’s see if that helps.

Could Comcast step into it any deeper? Sure, according to this report, which quotes Comcast as saying it paid people to save places in line for those waiting to attend the FCC hearing at Harvard Monday.

That’s sad enough, but it even went farther, according to Portfolio’s Sam Gustin, who reports:

Some of those placeholders, however, did more than wait in line: They filled many of the seats at the meeting, according to eyewitnesses. As a result, scores of Comcast critics and other members of the public were denied entry because the room filled up well before the beginning of the hearing.

Now that’s network management in real time, eh?

Gotta love the photo! (courtesy of Free Press, which has its own report on the seat-blocking) Gripping stuff, that net neutrality debate.

I didn’t get to listen to all of the FCC’s Broadband Network Management Practices forum from Harvard today, but I did get to hear one excellent presentation from Internet legend David Clark, a technologist who offered some great insights on network management and bandwidth pricing — while also wondering out loud if the whole network neutrality discussion couldn’t be conducted with just a tad more civility.

“I would plead with all the actors [in the debate] that when they look over the fence, don’t say ‘enemy’ but say ‘partner,’ ” said Clark at the opening of his remarks, reasoning that if access providers and content creators work better together, there might be hope for a better Internet for all in the future. Not a bad sentiment to embrace as the new season of network neutrality debates kicks off.

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Who says telecom issues aren’t mainstream? Check out what MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann has to say about President Bush’s obfuscation of facts in the FISA fiasco.

David Isenberg, whose blog has been All FISA All The Time lately, boiled it down to a simple statement, one that’s hard to disagree with.

If there is a valid reason for the telcos’ behavior, let it be judged in a court of law — and not by an executive branch which receives political contributions from the same companies.

Think there’s any relation between the rumored Intel-Sprint-Clearwire WiMax deal and the flurry of new cell data plans being announced today by both Verizon and AT&T? The guess here is that it would have been hard to justify top-dollar prices for cell data plans if and when WiMax launches with much faster speeds (and we hope, much lower rates).

Not a bad move by the telcos to jump now — and maybe sign up more data customers to long-term contracts before they get a chance to see what WiMax is all about.

Thanks to all our new visitors for checking out SIDECUT REPORTS. The long-term goal of SIDECUT REPORTS is to provide an online home for long-form analysis of topics at the intersection of Telecommunications, the Internet and Public Policy.

Stay tuned for our inaugural Sidecut Report on WiMax, coming soon! To receive an email update when it’s ready, send a message to info@sidecutreports.com.

Now that our serious work is out of the way, here’s a quick take on the non-attributed, behind-the-scenes, from-the-hallways-or-maybe-even-the-restrooms stuff we heard at the Silicon Flatirons conference in Boulder last weekend:

Where’s AT&T? Too busy filtering traffic? Too bad reps from Ma Bell weren’t on hand in Boulder, since the company’s pledge to sift through all its traffic for possible copyright violations seemed to be part of every panel discussion, whether it was part of the topic or not. Since this was a conference mainly of lawyers, the main question seemed to be whether or not AT&T was setting itself up for legal liabilities by pledging to do deep-packet inspection on all bits running across its network. (At one point we were worried that Tim Wu was going to charge the stage in his no-need-for-a-microphone back-and-forth exchange with panelist Mark Lemley. But things calmed down.)

In the end, there seemed to be no good answer (though Level 3 CEO Jim Crowe told his lunch table that his company was legally afraid to do such inspections), especially since nobody from AT&T was around. “It doesn’t really matter if they would be guilty or not,” noted one men’s room pontificator. “No court would convict them of it anyway.” Nothing like a good cynical note to close it.

(At any rate, AT&T did sponsor the Sunday-night beer-n-wine reception, where on their dime we had a tasty 90 Shilling. Thanks!)

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BOULDER, Colo. — Here at the Silicon Flatirons telecom policy conference, you don’t need to convince anyone about the importance of broadband policy and all its related aftereffects. The real challenge, of course, is making broadband issues matter to the outside world, especially when a pending change in the White House presents an opportunity to bring real leadership and vision to the country’s information policy direction.

From both sides of the political aisle, and from all different competitive parts of the industry, there was violent agreement here during Sunday’s sessions about the need to elevate the image of broadband policy in the ongoing political process. While other hot-button issues like the war in Iraq, health care and education rightly are political priorities, the ability for broadband to enable and improve all the other directives means it’s time to stop ignoring the need for leadership and vision in information technology — even if the topic is as boring as hell.

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It’s been a pretty amazing day of discourse at this year’s Silicon Flatirons conference, hosted at the University of Colorado by Phil Weiser and the rest of the Silicon Flatirons gang. It’s going to take some time to process all the thoughts, opinions and even insider telco humor that reverberated inside the spiffy new CU law building during Sunday’s sessions, but stay tuned because there was as usual some great stuff about topics like network neutrality, why communications should matter more and what industry, politicians and the public at large should do to make broadband better. I am still doing some news posts on the conference for the GigaOM blog, so after I’m done with that I plan to weigh in with some more thoughts here.

As a tease, let me say that it is no small feat to get so many big personalities in the world of telecom, media and communications into one small auditorium — from commissioners from the FTC and FCC, to top execs from companies like Comcast, Google and Verizon to the leading legal and policy thought leaders — and then get them to not just speak, but to challenge each other and respond to the multiple queries from the just-as-wired members of the audience. More soon, after a break for dinner.

Update: More tomorrow, not tonight. Promise!

When I was managing editor at GigaOM last year, I used to look forward to the P2P posts from Janko Roettgers for the NewTeeVee site, because they were always interesting and offered a nuanced take not found in many other places. Today Janko scores again with a post about how BitTorrent isn’t just for blockbuster movies, a fact that may escape those who only scratch the surface of the P2P world.

Janko’s post is a bit of a reply to Tim Wu’s recent article for Slate, where the esteemed legal scholar came up empty-handed after searching popular P2P sites for Sundance-type films. Wu’s following hypothesis — that pirates are interested mainly in big-money films — is partially on, but as Janko points out it is possible to find artsy and niche material, but you have to look a bit harder. Maybe it’s the online equivalent of finding a cool record store that specializes in quirky stuff, as opposed to scanning the bins at Best Buy. Good thing we NewTeeVee fans have Janko around to peer down those dark alleys and find what others miss.