DSL Prime: Powell Should Shun McBride

The Bells must be prevented from buying the regulators.

by Dave Burstein DSL Prime [December 19, 2003]

Editorial: Powell should shun McBride
"The revolving door in Washington, D.C., got a little WD-40 Monday" MN called it, when Marsha McBride jumped from FCC Chief of Staff to lobbying the agency for the National Association of Broadcasters. She follows in the footsteps of Dorothy Attwood, who went from head of the Common Carrier Bureau to millions of dollars at SBC in the middle of the biggest proceeding since 1996, and former Chief of Staff Kathryn Brown who is now at Verizon. Former Democrat Commerce Secretary Bill Daley has options that could be worth tens of millions at SBC. This may be legal, but anyone not part of the inner crowd can recognize these as perversions of American government. I've never met McBride, who is respected by many, but her hiring should lead to ostracizing the NAB.

Mike Powell should cancel his planned speech at the April NAB Conference, and request that other policy makers do the same. Next time the NAB comes lobbying, his office should great them cordially, and assign an intern to receive their presentation. Time to send a signal.

Corrections

• MGCP, not SIP, at Free. Fabien Maisl writes "I'd like to point an error in your report. Free is not delivering SIP VoIP. They are doing MGCP VoIP. This is very important as everyone seems to beleive that SIP is the thing. Both protocols have their pros and cons. MGCP is a slave protocol (ie it cannot work without a softswitch to tell it what to do) whereas SIP is a peer-to-peer protocol (SIP phones can place calls by themselves). Free selected MGCP as it allows much simpler CPE. MGCP also allows a better control on the voice service which means quality of service comparable to the PSTN.
  
  
• Arun Mahajan is right that I should have written Reliance instead of Reliant. Reliance and Tata are two giants with pan-Indian fiber and plans to expand rapidly to millions of line of broadband.
  
  
• DSL Prime's reporting of the FCC Triennial was perhaps misleading in suggesting the Commission's rules were set and can be relied on to make decisions. In fact, the appeal by the Bells may result in significant changes. Tim Horan of CIBC issued an important report based on the court filings and believes the D.C. Circuit is sympathetic to Powell's objections. I've come to the same conclusion, based on Powell's close personal relationship with D.C. Judge Harry Edwards.

Briefs

• Subscriptions came in from Tanzania, Malta, Alcatel Russia and a Pennsylvania official. The last was particularly welcome because that state is an active battleground between telco claims they need price increases and the facts. In Pennsylvania, Verizon is claiming they need what probably amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars in price increases or they will not offer DSL across the state. Unfortunately, the local press hasn't taken the time to inquire whether that's true, and the state legislators are voting their campaign contributions.
  
  
• DSL.net reports they've consolidated the 300 COs of NAS, giving them intense coverage of Verizon's east coast cities.
  
  
• "DSL has gone from running level with cable modems as the fixed broadband technology of choice last year, to taking a huge lead this year," writes Ian Lynch, Network IT Week, as BT is passing 2 million.

Press release of the week

• "Qwest Communications is First Major Telecom Company to Provide Voice Over Internet Protocol Services to Customers." Will someone please tell Dick Notebaert that Yahoo BB passed 1 million VoIP customers a year ago, and now has 3.3 million? That's like the quarterly announcements by SBC they are number one in the industry in DSL. Actually, China Telecom is the leader, recently passing Korea Telecom, DT, NTT, and Yahoo BB.

Chips

• Being submitted to ITU "Q4/15 agrees to develop a VDSL Recommendation for consent in April 2004 or sooner with full text specification for DMT in the main body and full text specification for QAM in a normative Annex." This is not yet approved, and more details, including how VDSL2 is involved, to follow.

Wall Street

• Vik Grover at Needham works extraordinarily hard, which means the Needham Growth Conference in New York January 6-9 will be loaded with interesting people.

People

• Kip McClanahan is no longer President of Motive, I noticed in their IPO announcement. He founded Broadjump, which supplies software for much of the world's broadband, and became President of the merged company when Motive took it over in 2002. Kip writes he's very optimistic about the company, and he still holds millions of shares. Scott Harmon remains CEO. Brad Raymond of Morgan Stanley is a lead banker.
  
  
• John Egan joins Metalink as Director of North American Sales, where he will continue to support QAM VDSL and G.shdsl. Bell Canada and MTT are rapidly expanding VDSL, while Verizon is buying G.shdsl, so he has opportunity. Egan did a remarkable job for Infineon in the QAM vs. DMT standards battle.
  
  
• John Griebling is proving there's life after Enron Broadband. After a stint at Richochet, he's now CTO of Aiirlink, promising Cerrito a Wi-Fi build. The town was sick of waiting for Verizon DSL, so they found an alternative.
  
  
• For jobs ads, visit the DSL Prime website.

Copyright 2003 Dave Burstein.
The DSL Prime Newsletter is reprinted with permission.

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