GigaOm

[Commentary] My seven years on the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), from 2003 to 2010, definitely taught me interesting things, including how to get a group of people to deliver when you had no control over their jobs.

As co-chair of the Network-based Mobility Management (NETLMM) working group, I led one of the rather contentious working groups at the IETF. Overall, my experience with IETF has positively contributed to my skills in leadership, consensus building, design thoroughness and seeing the big picture.

So, why did I actually stop contributing to standards definitions? The primary reason is the fact that while the pace at which standards are written hasn’t changed in many years, the pace at which the real world adopts software has become orders of magnitude faster.

[Narayanan is an engineer at Google]

As regulators attempt to sift through the possible public harms and benefits of Comcast’s $45.2 billion plan to buy Time Warner Cable, we thought it was worth showing that if the deal takes place it could lead to a significant jump in the number of broadband subscribers getting a data cap.

If we add Time Warner Cable’s 11.6 million broadband subscribers from the end of 2013 into the mix of customers with caps, the total percentage of US homes that have some type of cap or other limit on downloads rises to 78 percent up from 64 percent today.

Live-event streaming is not new. Companies like Ustream and Livestream have been at it since 2007 and major sports leagues have been offering live streaming of out-of-market games for nearly as long.

But at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in Las Vegas video streaming service providers were clearly preparing for a major expansion in the breadth and volume of content broadcast over-the-top.

“It’s the fastest growing part of our business,” thePlatform’s senior VP of sales and marketing Marty Roberts told me. “The Super Bowl and the Sochi Olympics were really proofs points for a lot of people. There’s also a lot of interest coming from regional sports networks who want to offer their games online.”

Microsoft’s newly rebranded Azure Media Services (formerly Windows Media Services) also touted its live-streaming capabilties at NAB. Microsoft also announced a series of strategic partnerships with streaming service providers including Ooyala and iStreamPlanet to support its live-streaming push.

Verizon Digital Media Services, now bolstered by the acquisitions in 2013 of EdgeCast and UpLynk, is also preparing for a major expansion in the volume of live content streamed online. “Being able to do it at scale is obviously the key piece of it because the demand [for over-the-top access to live events] is insatiable,” VDMS’ chief revenue office Ralf Jacob said. Like thePlatform’s Roberts, Jacob also pointed to ability to insert targeted, online-only ads dynamically as a critical capability.

[Commentary] When I think about climate change and biological systems in general, I tend to think not in terms of the mere warming of the planet but in terms of balance/stability versus volatility/anomaly.

When we see Hurricane Sandy and attempt to draw a connection to climate change, what we’re concerned about is not the warming of the planet by itself but anomalous and volatile weather.

To that end, the folks at Enigma labs have mined the last two centuries of daily weather data to produce expected daily normal high and low temperatures. They’ve then mapped the last 50 years of data against that data to produce a compelling graphic indicating that daily weather behavior is getting more anomalous.

[Commentary] The analytics firm Flurry reported that mobile app usage in the US was higher than ever in the first quarter of 2014, accounting for 86 percent of the average mobile user’s time, or two hours and 19 minutes per day.

The mobile web accounted for just 14 percent of the average user’s time spent on mobile (22 minutes per day), down from 20 percent during the first quarter of 2013. Flurry’s data isn’t surprising, but the report generated some incendiary headlines. Forbes shouted that the mobile browser is dead, Business Insider echoed that claim, and BuzzFeed concluded that no one uses the mobile web anymore.

Perhaps the most thought-provoking piece was from entrepreneur-turned-venture capitalist Chris Dixon, who said the “worrisome trend” is likely to relegate the web to a “niche product” used only for a few specific tasks. Dixon makes some great points, and his brief post is well worth a read. But there are a few important reasons I disagree with his conclusion:

• Mobile apps often overlap with the mobile web.
• The mobile web experience still stinks.
• Web-friendly technologies will continue to improve.

[Commentary] Well this is disappointing. Google is telling a local Austin news station that it plans to open signups for Google’s fiber-to-the-home service this summer, putting off the launch of the service until “later this year.”

KXAN, an NBC affiliate, also looked at some of the permits that Google has filed to see where it might be planning to lay fiber first. Google must apply for right of way in areas where it wants to dig and string fiber. So far, the map included with the story shows the current permits filed for areas south of the Colorado River (which is confusingly called Lady Bird Johnson Lake).

Delays aren’t unusual for Google’s gigabit network deployment, but it is nice to have a new deadline. When Google said last April it was bringing fiber to Austin it had planned to connect the customers by mid-2014 and open up the signups sometime around the first of the year. It doesn’t seem like the date has slipped too far, and I was wondering what the holdup was.

[Commentary] The Comcast-Time Warner deal may not do anything to spur competition in broadband, but it might give consumers additional options for connecting their smartphones, tablets and laptops.

In its 180-page merger filing with the Federal Communications Commission, Comcast confirmed what we’ve suspected all along: it’s weighing using its growing footprint of wireless home gateways and outdoor hotspots to create a “Wi-Fi-first” network that could both complement and supplant the carriers’ 4G data networks.

Comcast didn’t say whether it is considering offering such a hybrid mobile service itself or selling Wi-Fi access capacity to carriers, who could use it to amp up speeds and capacity available in cities and other high-demand areas. Comcast didn’t go into any details about what such a Wi-Fi network would look like, and there’s the chance this all could be a ruse. Comcast could just be holding out the carrot of a 4G alternative to convince regulators to approve the deal.

If you know what to look for, those endless rows of corn that paint the Midwest in summer are full of a lot more than just cattle feed and future Doritos.

They’re full of data. Now, it’s not news that data science can and should be applied to agriculture.

The field of precision agriculture has received a lot of attention over the past few years thanks to advances in sensors and computer vision technologies, and Silicon Valley venture capitalists are now lining up to fund startups that can apply the power of predictive models to all that data. For one, it proves that you don’t need a Silicon Valley connection to make it big in the data business. It also highlights just how much data we’re talking about when it comes to quantifying the farm. Hint: It’s a lot.

If the numbers are any indication, the product, which is delivered as a cloud service and is only a few years old (it’s actually an affiliate of an older company called Superior Edge) seems to work. Farm Intelligence is managing about a million acres of land right now (most of its users have at least 1,000 acres), but Kickert expects that number will be well into the eight-figure range soon enough. And as the technology advances, it’s figuring out ways to capture even more data about each one of those acres.

Europe’s highest court declared that a directive requiring phone and Internet companies to retain data for up to two years violated citizens’ fundamental rights to privacy and to control personal data.

The ruling by the European Court of Justice means national governments will have to rewrite data collection laws that the EU requested after terrorist bombings in London and Madrid in 2006. While noting that authorities had a genuine national interest in collecting the data, the court said the current rules exceed what is needed to fight crime, and leave citizens “feeling that their private lives are the subject of constant surveillance.” The decision also complains that the law does not require data collected from phone and Internet companies to remain in the EU -- an apparent acknowledgment about ongoing concern over European countries sharing data with US intelligence services.

[Commentary] Not every community needs a fiber-to-the-home network. Not every home needs a gig to their doorstep.

In our gigabit crazy era this statement might seem like a step backward, but take note that there’s more than one option for delivering the speed consumers and businesses need. Even Google is hinting that some form of wireless might become part of its goodie bag of services. When people fixate on one technology to the exclusion of all else the people governing cities can make wrong choices that hurt or hinder communities’ ability to fully benefit from broadband.

When investing in technology, users’ needs should dictate technology choices, not media hype. Two other recent broadband developments indicate some broadband decision makers should step back for a minute and re-assess their options.

RST, a new regional ISP, announced it had quietly built and acquired a 3,100-mile 100-gig fiber middle mile infrastructure throughout the state of North Carolina. However, it plans to deliver a 1-gigabit last mile service there and in South Carolina, mostly using Wi-Fi with fiber options available on demand.

In Utah, home security and automation company Vivint threw its hat into the gigabit ring with plans to connect Utah homes wirelessly using gigabit Wi-Fi on rooftops to create a high-capacity mesh network built on customers’ rooftops. But every community is different in terms of demographics, broadband needs, geography, etc.

The lesson people should take from RST and Vivint is that a thorough, objective evaluation of all available technologies is in their best short-term and long-term financial interests. For example, wireless last mile networks can meet peoples’ needs now, then become backup for fiber network later.

[Settles is a consultant who helps organizations develop broadband strategies, host of radio talk show Gigabit Nation]