Opponents of content filtering and the law of “gradual retaliation” (a controversial law being considered in France which prohibits the delivery of pirated content on the Internet) considered this to be a victory for end users. The amendment prohibits an EU member from calling an administrative authority instead of a judicial authority to solve problems of piracy.

During a press conference after the vote, Guy Bono, a French European Deputy who was among the three authors of the amendment 138 said, focusing on the French government: “You cannot fool around with individual freedoms. The French government will have to rewrite the ‘gradual retaliation’ law.”

In a separate press conference, Catherine Trautmann, French deputy at the European Parliament said: “The idea of turning the ISP in a kind of cop filtering all downloads and punishing repeated offenders and pirates has been put away under the intense lobbying of the telcos, in favor of the free download and peer to peer sites.”

Christine Albanel, Minister of Culture in France, who is in charge of preparing the ‘gradual retaliation law’ said: “This amendment doesn’t add anything to the existing state of the rights, and by having to resort to a judge to solve a piracy problem, it prevents us from sending administrative notices to the pirates, asking them to cease their activities.”

This week, in the French daily newspaper “Liberation” published the copy of a letter supposedly sent by the French President Nicolas Sarkozy to Jose Manuel Baroso, President of the European Commission, approving of the work of the Commission in a project called “Online Creative Content”, to be presented to the European Parliament next year. Sarkozy adds: “It is crucial for the Commission to be vigilant to threats coming the European Parliament during the first vote of the third “Telecom Package”. It is especially fundamental that the amendment 138 be rejected by the Commission. This amendment tries to prevent States from applying an intelligent strategy against piracy.”

In a conference in Nice, where Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for information society was speaking about the internet of things, she said that: “The Telecom Package has nothing to do with the content. It is only about infrastructure.”

Regarding the “online creative content” project, she added:  “We have a vision of freedom on the Internet, freedom of access for Internet users and protecting the author rights.” She reminded people that the role of the Commission is only to prepare legislative proposals. “It is to the Parliament and to the Council of Ministers to make the law.”

The French Presidency of the EU will be marked by a number of controversial issues that need to be resolved by the end of the year (since the Council of Ministers will make a common declaration on November 27 on its action to develop the Internet Economy in Europe).

© 2008 MuniWireless. All Rights Reserved.

The one nugget burning a hole in the pile of notebooks is Lenovo’s claim to have six WiMax-enabled laptops that should be good to go veryverysoon after Wednesday’s Xohm kickoff party in Baltimore. David Critchley, worldwide segment marketing manager for ThinkPad product marketing at Lenovo, told us last week that he’d be “surprised” if there was any other vendor with as many WiMax-embedded notebooks as Lenovo for the Xohm network. We expect more details about all of Lenovo’s WiMax offerings (following the showcase X300 model that the company had ready before the Xohm rollout stalled) sometime after Wednesday, so stay tuned.

(Due to prior civil commitments we won’t be in Baltimore, but we’ll be happy to post reports, notes, pictures of funny shoes or even videos from the event, so send them along! Look for someone who is sure to be on the WiMax Watch, perhaps with a new Nokia tablet in hand?)

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Need to know more about WiMax? Order our recently updated WiMax report, with full analysis of the “new” Clearwire deal and the motivations for investors Comcast, Google, Intel and others.

© 2008 MuniWireless. All Rights Reserved.

Recently, BT announced the termination of its partnership with The Cloud in the UK. The partnership had given BT Openzone subscribers access to The Cloud’s Wi-Fi network in the UK.

Click here to see all of The Cloud’s networks across Europe.

While I am happy to see more Wi-Fi hotspots being deployed across Europe, the biggest hassle is finding one aggregator that you can subscribe to so that you have access to ALL of the networks across the continent and in the UK. Boingo is very good. I have a Boingo account and I use it in many places including Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, but they don’t have roaming agreements with everyone. iPass recently entered the consumer market but they do not have a Mac client. T-Mobile is the most Wi-Fi “friendly” European operator but they charge you extra fees when you use a T-Mobile hotspot outside your home country (so much for the European “union”).

© 2008 MuniWireless. All Rights Reserved.

Meanwhile in Portland, the city has not done a thing to use the access points set up by MetroFi. They’re just hanging there like overripe fruit. The city wants to dismantle them even if it costs $36,000. Why not donate the network to a group of Portland geeks who can use it to test a variety of applications? Even give them a grant for the upkeep and backhaul, but use the wireless APs for test bed. The city has no plan to use the network for municipal purposes either. What a shame.

© 2008 MuniWireless. All Rights Reserved.

• Sprint’s prices are not low enough, speeds not fast enough to entice people away from their DSL subscriptions;
• very few devices that have a WiMAX chip so why would people rush out and buy the service;
• not available in a lot of places;
• even if Sprint has a $10 day pass, you still have to buy a $60 WiMAX card.

I think it’s hard to predict so early in the game whether Sprint will succeed. But for me, there are several features that Sprint’s WiMAX service MUST have in order for me to run out and get it:

• flat fee monthly price of $30 or less
• no long contracts: I can cancel any time
• roaming agreements with other WiMAX operators around the world so that when I go to Amsterdam for example, I can simply use the WorldMax network without paying extra (this is something the Wi-Fi hotspot operators like T-Mobile do not have because even if you have a T-Mobile hotspot subscription, you have to pay extra to use their T-Mobile hotspots overseas)
• speeds between 2 Mbps and 10 Mbps (comparable to what you get today in Wi-Fi hotspots)
• ability to use the network even in a moving vehicle such as a tram

The most important for me are the flat fee, cancellable at any time, and roaming features — especially the roaming. This last one will save me a lot of money especially on phone calls, which I could do on Skype on a WiMAX network.

What’s your list of requirements before you sign up for WiMAX service?

© 2008 MuniWireless. All Rights Reserved.

Iliad-Free objects on competitive grounds

Immediately after the SFR-Orange announcement, Iliad-Free, the third broadband operator (in terms of revenues), but second behind Orange in terms of subscribers, issued a press release denouncing the deal:

“This agreement offers no guaranty for open competition and free access to different operators and does not comply with the law. It is against the spirit of the previous discussions which have been held between operators.”

Maxime Lombardini, the CEO of Free insists that the LME requires interconnection points to be outside buildings. UFC, a large user group in France said that the SFR-Orange agreement promotes an interconnection point “at the building or very close to the building according to pragmatic operational criteria” which gives Orange an unfair advantage over Free.

In fact for Iliad-Free, the position of the interconnection points will have an immediate effect on the number of NRO (optical central offices) they have to build. “Based on the first deployment we had in Paris, the number of NROs may double from 30 initially to 60 or even 70, depending on the position of the interconnection points,” said Olivier de Baillenx, responsible for Institutional Relations for Free. Orange already owns a lot of facilities and cabinets in Paris for its existing telephony network. Building cabinets will be very expensive for a newcomer. Another reason is more technical: Free is deploying Point-to-Point Ethernet and Orange is deploying Point-to-multipoint GPon. Free needs to put 2 fiber threads in the buildings, one for upstream and another for downstream, which is not the case for GPON.

ARCEP alerted problem of interconnection

Recently in a conference in Paris, Eric Besson, State Secretary for the digital economy mentioned that the discussions between operators were difficult, but that ARCEP had helped to bring them all together. He said he would meet the three operators at the end of October and ask ARCEP to intervene if no global agreement can be found on this controversial connecting point dispute. Frank Esser, CEO of SFR and Lombardini said they are still negotiating and will be open to ARCEP’s propositions. Orange made no comment.

© 2008 MuniWireless. All Rights Reserved.

The initial propositions tailored by the Commission have been actively debated and a final report was steered through the European Parliament by Malcom Harbour, an English deputy. Known since November 2007, the text of the Commission has been beefed up by almost 800 amendments, many of them passed after discussions and negotiations between the Commission and the members of the European Parliament throughout the summer.

A press release said: “All the major political groups in the Parliament agreed to a compromise before the plenary vote which does not alter the main goal of the draft legislation - to improve the position of telecom users - but they greatly clarify its aims, notably as regards protection of privacy and fundamental rights.”

The next step according to Luc Chatel, Minister and spokesman for the French Government is “to reach a political agreement among the 27 Member States on this project during the Council of Ministers in Charge of Telecommunications on 27 November 2008. Then, we will have a second-reading of the text by the European Parliament in March 2009 and a definitive adoption under the Czech presidency.”

From regulation to co-regulation

One controversial measure proposed by Viviane Reding was the creation of a European Electronic Communications Market Authority (EECMA), a pan-European regulator under her administrative control.
Earlier this year, many European regulators disagreed with this proposition arguing it was creating a new bureaucratic level disconnected from the field. The European Regulators Group (ERG), where each of the 27 National Regulatory Authorities (NRA) have a representative, has doing a great job in collecting and coordinating information and sharing knowledge of each others’ works, problems and the most efficient ways to solve them. ERG had produced a set of reports and analysis at the request of the Commission. The Commission agreed to adopt the conclusions of a report made by Pilar Del Castillo, a Spanish MEP, to create the Body of European Regulators on Telecom (BERT). It is an independent expert advisory body which will be funded by both the Commission and each of the NRA. The ERG will be dissolved and replaced by BERT which has a more stable structure; moreover, under BERT’s rules, 2/3 majority is required to pass resolutions. By contrast, the ERG had no budget and its rules require unanimous decision by the 27 members.

BERT’s goal is to promote fair competition and high-quality services across the EU by ensuring that national regulators use similar tools when faced with similar market situations. A report made by Catherine Trautmann, French MEP, mentions a new “co-regulation” system: “national authorities have to consult the Commission and BERT before taking regulatory decisions. If BERT considers the measure inappropriate or ineffective, the Commission may require the national regulatory authority to amend it.”

Promote investments in Next Generation Access networks

Taking over the Commission propositions, the European Parliament added several measures to promote and facilitate investments in new fiber networks. To prevent the former state-owned carriers from rebuilding their monopolies and to lower the total cost of building networks, the European Parliament added several measures to require operators (either cable or telcos) to disclose information about their existing fiber ducts and facilities and to share them with other operators. Smaller operators with little or no networks will have rights to access existing fiber networks and put their fiber in existing ducts. Duct access has a big role to play in the development of next generation competitive access. But widely differing national contexts, ownership structures and legal and environmental restrictions make it very difficult to apply one regime. The Commission has asked a few regulators such as France’s ARCEP and UK’s OFCOM to report on their early experiences in FTTH deployments.

Functional separation as a remedy

The new Telecom Package has reduced the number of markets susceptible to ex ante regulation from 18 to 7. NRAs may still impose ex ante regulation on these markets where, on the basis of a thorough review of national market conditions, they consider that the national market is not yet effectively competitive. In their vote, MEPs clarify that a national regulator may impose functional separation on telecom operators, i.e. require them to create a separate business unit for network services which operates independently from the content services the operator offers, only as “an exceptional measure” to ensure that all service providers can have access to network services on equal terms. Functional separation has been applied to BT group in 2005, which was  separated in two independent companies, Open Reach and BT. But MEPs have stressed in their vote that such a remedy would be applied only if other measures have failed to advance competition and only if BERT and the Commission agree there is no other way to achieve infrastructure-based competition.

Make wireless services interoperable throughout the EU

The directive, as revised by the European Parliament requires all Member States to co-operate with each other and the Commission in the strategic planning, co-ordination and harmonisation of radio spectrum use.

In a report, drafted by Italian Deputy Patrizia Toia on the use of  the “digital dividend”, MEPs called on the Commission to propose measures to Parliament and Council for better coordinating the use of the digital dividend at EU level. Member States, together with the Commission, should identify common spectrum sub-bands of the digital dividend for different application clusters that could be harmonised on a technology-neutral basis. Parliament supports the idea of dividing the Ultra High Frequency (UHF) spectrum into clusters for uni-directional services such as fixed or mobile broadcasting and other mobile multimedia services and for bi-directional services such as wireless broadband.

Commercial information and P2P sites

The Parliament went further than the Commission on consumer rights to information on prices, tariffs and contract conditions.  The final resolution says that contracts must give full, clear and up-to-date details of access to emergency services, restrictions on content or equipment use (e.g. blocking of VOIP services on mobiles supposed to provide internet access), client and after-sales services, payment methods and charges for number portability or for terminating a contract. Catherine Trautmann, in a press conference after the vote mentioned that “the idea of transforming the ISP into a kind of police to filter all downloads and to punish piracy has been definitely discarded under an intense industry lobbying. The law is favorable to free downloads and peer-to-peer sites.”

© 2008 MuniWireless. All Rights Reserved.

Why are the delivery, pricing and other details still fuzzy? Blame it on the September-in-October official launch of WiMax services from the Xohm folks at Sprint, whose network-live party is on Oct. 8. This is just a guess, but it’s a pretty safe one to think that all the supporing peripheral players are being asked to wait until the network is live before divulging their product shipping plans. But despite what you may have read in other places, WiMax devices should be available in force after the network’s launch, with add-in PC cards and USB dongles followed quickly by the notebooks with WiMax chips inside, most likely as part of Intel’s dual WiMax/Wi-Fi silicon package.

(And don’t forget Nokia’s WiMax tablet, which Nokia folks say will be available very soon after the Xohm network goes live in Baltimore.)

That Asus would be in the lead is hardly a surprise, since the company made a big splash of its embedded-WiMax intentions at CES way back in January. “They [Asus] have been very very aggressive” in terms of their WiMax intentions, said Julie Coppernoll, marketing director for WiMAX at Intel, in a recent interview. Lenovo, too, has been public about its intentions to offer embedded WiMax, though the company hasn’t said when yet. While Coppernoll wouldn’t divulge any shipping dates or plans (curse her!), she did say that Asus, Acer, Lenovo and Toshiba have all been actively working with Intel vis-a-vis WiMax for more than a year; use that as you will to form your betting lines. (You could also add in HP as a parlay.)

Also without naming names, Richard Keith, global director of wireless strategy at Motorola said his company (which is responsible for most of the back-end infrastructure for Sprint’s Xohm network in Chicago) is currently testing 12 different laptops with embedded WiMax from four different manufacturers, as well as a couple UMPC devices.

So who will be first manufacturer to hit the shelves at Best Buy with WiMax-embedded gear? Game on, we say. And if they’re not shipping by Halloween? Well then that WiMax-enabled gear can always make for fashionable gifts for the holiday season, provided your recipients live in Baltimore, Chicago or Washington, D.C.

UPDATE: Looks like the Xohm Baltimore network is going live today, according to reports in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. (Thanks to our pal Andy Abramson for the early morning links and the kind words.) The Xohm home page also changed, and now offers pricing plans and info. More soon!

We’ll have more details and analysis in our upcoming WiMax devices report (another addition to our comprehensive Sidecut Report on WiMax), scheduled to be available as soon as possible after we digest all the information we’re sure will be provided at this week’s show. Watch this space for daily reports from Chicago, where Sprint’s WiMax network there already has 480 live tower sites and counting.

© 2008 MuniWireless. All Rights Reserved.

After the report was published, Ofcom (the UK regulator) launched a consultation for a plan to promote choice, competition and investment in high-speed broadband (Next Generation Access Networks or NGA networks) to UK homes and businesses. Ofcom’s Chief Executive, Ed Richards said: “I am delighted that investment in fiber is already underway and other plans are taking shape. Fibre networks are one of the most exciting developments in communications that the UK has ever seen. Ofcom’s plan of action will encourage further investment while promoting and sustaining competition so we can all benefit.”

UK is one the most developed Internet economies in the world

The development of a competitive market in broadband has been the cornerstone of the Government’s strategy. Its landmark initiatives were the Communication Act and the creation of Ofcom in 2003, the Strategic Review of Telecoms in 2005 and the functional separation of BT’s access network.

Today broadband penetration in UK is  approximately 60% (placing the UK at 5th place in the OECD rankings), DSL coverage has reached 99.6% of the population, and average headline speed has gone from 3.6Mbps to 5.9Mbps. The regulatory environment has led to the creation of one of the most developed Internet economies in the world. In the UK, online advertising has now reached 18.9% of total advertising spending, and online retail is the largest in Europe accounting for 15% of total retail.

Ofcom is seeking comments from consumers and industry

Ofcom is seeking to build on existing networks that already deliver broadband services. It will provide certainty on the future regulatory environment especially tailored to the high speed broadband access networks and services. The consultation, which will close on 2 December 2008, is looking for advice, reactions and propositions of the industry in five main areas.

• developing clear standards for wholesale products, thereby allowing communications providers to compete and innovate in the high-speed broadband market;

• allowing pricing freedom where there is effective competition, giving companies the flexibility to price services that reflect investment risk and generate a return on investment;

• understanding the scope for competition based on access to existing telecoms infrastructure, building on the success of local loop unbundling;

• facilitating transition by ensuring the smooth and timely move from traditional copper to fibre networks for both industry and consumers as services take off; and

• communicating the next steps for Ofcom, i.e. how it will work with other interested parties including industry, the UK Government and the European Commission.

Operators are heavily investing in fibre networks

Fiber developments are already taking place in the UK in new developments such as Wembley in London, Belfast, Manchester etc. Last July, BT announced a £1.5 billion investment program to bring fibre access to 10 million homes by 2012. It plans to deliver a range of services with top speeds of up to 100 Mbps with the potential for speeds of more than 1 Gigabit per second in the future. Through Open Reach, a separate and completely independent business of BT which is responsible for the local loop network (the first mile) in the UK, the incumbent began a pilot in August to bring next generation broadband access to 10,000 homes in Ebbsfleet Valley in Kent. This would allow multiple HDTV channels to be watched simultaneously, HDTV gaming, and near instant music downloads.  OpenReach will offer all of its products on a wholesale basis to UK communication providers allowing for competition at a retail level.

Virgin Media, the UK’s first quadruple play media company offering mobile, broadband, digital TV and landline telephony is the second biggest broadband provider in the UK.  It  uses the networks of two major cable operators, Telewest and NTL. Virgin’s offer of high speed broadband (50 Mbps) to some of its customers makes it a high profile contender in the high-speed broadband market.

© 2008 MuniWireless. All Rights Reserved.

© 2008 MuniWireless. All Rights Reserved.