Editorial: Anticipating 2007

We cannot tell you what will happen in the future, but we can show you where we're looking for the year's big stories.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [January 10, 2007]

As the year 2007 starts, several big changes are possible. We're not pundits, telling you what will happen. Instead, we're the press, asking the big questions.

1) Will the telcos own the new Congress?

Oddly enough, Dingell, longtime sponsor of the loathed and failed Tauzin-Dingell bill, is now in a position of power. But he seems to be talking sense. Where before he seemed 100 percent pro-monopoly, in his most recent statement on telecoms issues (from September of last year), he spoke out in favor of franchise fees and buildout requirements.

Nevertheless, DSL Prime's Dave Burstein reports that he has hired a Verizon lobbyist, Gregg Rothschild. In the Senate, he reports, new Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill has hired AT&T lobbyist Sean Kennedy.

It is therefore an open question whether the new Congress will support all businesses or just the usual funders of political campaigns.

Independent ISPs want more and better spectrum, and end of the monopoly lock on subsidies, and are on both sides on net neutrality. ISPs that are publicly owned, just as the parent company of this website is publicly owned, want Sarbanes Oxley to cost innovators less money.

2) Will ISPs be forced to spy on their customers?

If you have not done so, make sure that your AUP allows you to do anything with a customer's private information that's required by law. The FCC ruled (.pdf) that "all carriers providing facilities-based broadband Internet access and interconnected VoIP services must be in compliance with section 103 of CALEA by May 14, 2007."

We do not yet understand what this means, but the gist appears to be that all VoIP communications will need to be accessible by warrantless wiretap by May 14, 2007, even though we are not certain that such wiretaps are legal or constitutional or not a violation of the contract signed by many customers.

The ruling says that a yet to be named entity will "operate a service bureau with a system that has access to a carrier's network equipment and remotely manage the intercept process for the carrier."

We have many, many questions about this and, so far, few answers.

3) Is IPTV for real, at last?

Telephony Online is reporting that revised statistics appear to show IPTV playing a genuine role, though still a small role, in the U.S. telecommunications market. The article says that the U.S. is probably in the top 10 IPTV markets in the world, but that no data is available because the position of the U.S. relies on the role of independent ISPs.

The author of the data that is the subject of the article, Dittberner analyst James Heath, told the magazine, "We don't dig down into tons of small service providers, which is where a lot of Myrio's customers happen to be in the U.S. Would that put the U.S in the top ten? It might."

So is IPTV for real? Now that's a good question.

4) Is there a data center boom?

We've reported optimism from one banker (Paul Stapleton) and two data center owners (EasyStreet and opus:interactive).

A recent article gave a biblical explanation for the uptick, saying that tech sector stocks are ready for a year of plenty after seven years of famine. The article picked out a few specific stocks and said that UBS said they could be "big beneficiaries of an upswing in the business technology spending cycle that last peaked seven years ago."

So when was the last big business spending spree? That math is easy: seven years ago was the year 2000, affectionately known as Y2K.

Closer to the data center, Software as a Service (SaaS), a trend that goes under many names but basically boils down to the idea that the network is finally fast enough to deliver applications, could allow even small businesses to obtain services without having to retain in house expertise. Instead, the expertise resides in the data center, on your payroll.

So is your payroll growing? If so, are you hiring people to develop applications and perform IT operations that would have been done by your customers just a few years ago?

5) And many more questions remain.

The ISP industry meets much uncertainty (not only of the regulatory kind) as we enter 2007. In addition to the questions posed above, we link to several intriguing hypotheses below in Related articles.

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