TRAK Communications |

Senators Urge F.C.C. to Review Licenses of 2 Chinese Telecom Companies

WASHINGTON — The Senate’s top Democrat on Monday asked the Federal Communications Commission to consider whether two major Chinese telecommunications companies should be barred from operating in the United States.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, along with Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, cited national security concerns in a letter asking the commission to review the licenses that give the two companies, China Telecom and China Unicom, the right to use networks in the United States.

In the letter, they said that the two Chinese government-linked telecom operators could use that access to “target” Americans’ communications. And they warned that the companies could reroute communications traveling on their networks through China. The text of the letter was obtained by The New York Times.

The request by the two senators shows how leaders in Congress are willing to apply more pressure to Chinese technology firms even as President Trump seems open to pulling back on some of the restrictions as part of the trade negotiations with China. The focus on two previously untouched firms shows that efforts to restrict Chinese technology firms are expanding.

Brian Hart, an F.C.C. spokesman, said that Ajit Pai, the F.C.C. chairman, had made it clear that the agency was “reviewing other Chinese communications companies such as China Telecom and China Unicom” but didn’t commit to opening a formal proceeding to look at the licenses.

China Telecom denied that it represents a national security threat to the United States.

“We make the protection of our customers’ data a priority, and have built a solid reputation as one of the best telecom companies in the world,” said Ge Yu, a spokesman for China Telecom’s Americas subsidiary, adding that the company is proud of “maintaining a good standing with all regulatory agencies.”

In recent years, Washington has levied $360 billion in tariffs on Chinese goods, moved to block the ability of American companies to export their technology to China and tried to stop certain products linked to the Chinese government from being sold in America.

National security officials have been worried for years that the Chinese government could use its companies to gain access to crucial telecommunications infrastructure. Those concerns have become more prominent as carriers in the United States and in China race to launch next-generation 5G wireless networks — and American regulators have targeted Chinese telecom companies in the name of security.

In May the F.C.C. denied an application from China Mobile to operate in the United States. Ajit Pai, the commission’s chairman, said at the time that there was a risk that the Chinese state would use the carrier to “conduct activities that would seriously jeopardize the national security, law enforcement, and economic interests of the United States.”

But China Unicom and China Telecom have retained the ability to operate in the United States. Both have licenses that were granted by the F.C.C. in the early 2000s, and some regulators have said that they should be re-examined even though the companies are smaller than China Mobile.

Brendan Carr, a Republican commissioner on the F.C.C., said in May that the agency should go “even further” than denying China Mobile’s application and look at the other two companies. A Democrat on the commission, Geoffrey Starks, said that the “national security environment has changed” since the firms were allowed access to networks in the United States.

Mr. Schumer and Mr. Cotton echoed those concerns in their letter, saying that “the evolving national security environment and increased knowledge of the Chinese government’s role in economic and other forms of espionage” requires a re-examination of licenses belonging to any state-controlled Chinese telecom company

Some experts disagreed with the idea that cutting off China Unicom and China Telecom would protect national security, in part because they largely serve companies that do business in China as well as some Chinese consumers in the United States.

“They’re not operating in the sense of a Bell company, or a T-Mobile, or a Verizon; they don’t compete in the U.S.,” said James Lewis, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “I think it’s overblown.”

Revoking the licenses would be the latest way the United States has tried to check China’s tech sector since Mr. Trump’s 2017 inauguration.

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the panel that vets deals between American and foreign firms, said in 2018 that the acquisition of the chip maker Qualcomm by then Singapore-based Broadcom could limit America’s ability to compete. The same panel demanded this year that a Chinese gaming company sell the gay dating app Grindr.

The administration has been especially aggressive in cutting off Chinese telecom companies’ access to American customers. It banned the networking manufacturer ZTE from buying American products in 2018. Earlier this year, it placed Huawei on a Commerce Department list of companies to which American companies cannot export goods.

Some of the Huawei restrictions are expected to take effect in November, but the White House has reconsidered its Chinese telecom restrictions under pressure from American companies and the Chinese government during on-again, off-again trade negotiations.

After China’s president, Xi Jinping, appealed on the company’s behalf, Mr. Trump interceded with his administration to reverse the ZTE ban. In trade negotiations this summer, the administration appeared willing to back down from some of the restrictions it had placed on Huawei.

Lawmakers have been taking their own steps to put pressure on the companies.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, has expressed interest in expediting consideration of a resolution declaring that Chinese telecom companies like Huawei and ZTE pose a national security threat to the United States, according to a congressional aide with direct knowledge of the matter.

Such requests can be blocked if a senator objects. A spokesman for Mr. McConnell, David Popp, declined to comment.

But a nonbinding resolution is unlikely to satisfy lawmakers in both chambers, including Mr. Schumer, who are trying to make sure that language giving Congress more oversight over some of the Huawei restrictions is included in the upcoming military spending bill.

“If we’re serious about this, we need to have something with teeth,” said Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland. “Making a statement may have symbolic importance but it does nothing to address the real issues.”

Source: shorturl.at/ekmvJ

Hackers could use connected cars to gridlock whole cities

In the year 2026, at rush hour, your self-driving car abruptly shuts down right where it blocks traffic. You climb out to see gridlock down every street in view and then a news alert on your watch tells you that hackers have paralyzed all Manhattan traffic by randomly stranding internet-connected cars.

Flashback to July 2019, the dawn of autonomous vehicles and other connected cars, and physicists at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Multiscale Systems, Inc. have applied physics in a new study to simulate what it would take for future hackers to wreak widespread havoc by randomly stranding these cars. The researchers want to expand the current discussion on automotive cybersecurity to include potential mass mayhem versus the present focus on singular vehicle/individual crashes.

They warn that, even with increasingly tighter cyber defenses, the amount of data breached has soared recently. Moreover, objects like cars becoming hackable can convert the rising cyber threat into a potential physical menace.

“Unlike most of the data breaches we hear about, hacked cars have physical consequences,” said Peter Yunker, who co-led the study and is an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Physics.

It may not be that hard for state, terroristic, or mischievous actors to commandeer parts of the internet of things, including cars.

“With cars, one of the worrying things is that currently there is effectively one central computing system, and a lot runs through it. You don’t necessarily have separate systems to run your car and run your satellite radio. If you can get into one, you may be able to get into the other,” said Jesse Silverberg of Multiscale Systems, Inc., who co-led the study with Yunker.

Freezing traffic solid

In simulations of hacking internet-connected cars, the researchers froze traffic in Manhattan nearly solid, and it would not even take that to wreak havoc. Here are their results, and the numbers are conservative for reasons mentioned below.

“Randomly stalling 20 percent of cars during rush hour would mean total traffic freeze. At 20 percent, the city has been broken up into small islands, where you may be able to inch around a few blocks, but no one would be able to move across town,” said David Yanni, a graduate research assistant in Junker’s lab.

Not all cars on the road would have to be connected, just enough for hackers to stall 20 percent of all cars on the road. For example, if 40 percent of all cars on the road were connected, hacking half would suffice.

Hacking 10 percent of all cars at rush hour would debilitate traffic enough to prevent emergency vehicles from expediently cutting through traffic that is inching along citywide. The same thing would happen with a 20 percent hack during intermediate daytime traffic.

The researchers’ results appear in the journal Physical Review E on July 20, 2019.

It could take less

For the city to be safe, hacking damage would have to be below that. In other cities, things could be worse.

“Manhattan has a nice grid, and that makes traffic more efficient. Looking at cities without large grids like Atlanta, Boston, or Los Angeles, and we think hackers could do worse harm because a grid makes you more robust with redundancies to get to the same places down many different routes,” Yunker said.

The researchers left out factors that would likely worsen hacking damage, thus a real-world hack may require stalling even fewer cars to shut down Manhattan.

“I want to emphasize that we only considered static situations — if roads are blocked or not blocked. In many cases, blocked roads spill over traffic into other roads, which we also did not include. If we were to factor in these other things, the number of cars you’d have to stall would likely drop down significantly,” Yunker said.

The researchers do have some general ideas of how to reduce the potential damage.

“Split up the digital network influencing the cars to make it impossible to access too many cars through one network,” said lead author Skanka Vivek, a postdoctoral researcher in Yunker’s lab. “If you could also make sure that cars next to each other can’t be hacked at the same time that would decrease the risk of them blocking off traffic together.”

Traffic jams as physics

Yunker researches in soft matter physics, which looks at how constituent parts — in this case, connected cars — act as one whole physical phenomenon. The research team analyzed the movements of cars on streets with varying numbers of lanes, including how they get around stalled vehicles and found they could apply a physics approach to what they observed.

“Whether traffic is halted or not can be explained by classic percolation theory used in many different fields of physics and mathematics,” Yunker said.

Percolation theory is often used in materials science to determine if a desirable quality like a specific rigidity will spread throughout a material to make the final product uniformly stable. In this case, stalled cars spread to make formerly flowing streets rigid and stuck.

The shut-down streets would be only those in which hacked cars have cut off all lanes or in which they have become hindrances that other cars can’t maneuver around and do not include streets where hacked cars still allow traffic flow.

The researchers chose Manhattan for their simulations because a lot of data was available on that city’s traffic patterns

Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190729111337.htm

Apple TV+ will cost $4.99 per month — here’s how that compares with Disney+ and others

Apple announced Tuesday it will price Apple TV+ at $4.99 per month A one year subscription is also being offered for free with the purchase of any new Apple device.

Apple’s streaming service will showcase original programming including “The Morning Show,” a drama starring Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carell, and other content from contributors including Oprah Winfrey and J.J. Abrams.

On its own, Apple TV+ will be limited in its viewing choices compared with a traditional cable bundle or Netflix. But when added together with other streaming options, consumers will have yet another choice to recreate an a la carte pay-TV video service. Here’s where we are in terms of pricing of the major streaming services:

Apple TV+ – $4.99/month (free for a year with purchase of new device)

ESPN+ – $4.99/month

Hulu w/ ads – $5.99/month

CBS All Access – $5.99/month

Disney+ – $6.99/month

Starz – $8.99/month

Showtime – $10.99/month

Hulu (no ads) – $11.99/month

Netflix (most popular plan) – $12.99/month

Amazon Prime Video – $12.99/month

HBO – $14.99/month

That means that if you want, say, Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, Apple TV+, Disney+, HBO, Hulu and Showtime, you’ll be paying about $70 per month. And you won’t get ESPN with that.

There are also several shoes yet to drop. NBC Universal, the parent company of CNBC, hasn’t announced pricing of its streaming service, though it will be free for subscribers of a traditional pay-TV bundle. AT&T is considering a price of $15 to $18 per month for HBO Max. This service will include all of HBO, new originals, library shows from Warner Bros. and may eventually include live programming from CNN, TNT and TBS.

Since their merger is still very new, CBS and Viacom have yet to say whether the combined company will announce a new streaming service featuring content from networks such as Nickelodeon and Comedy Central.

Disclosure: CNBC and NBC are owned by Comcast’s NBCUniversal unit.

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/10/apple-tv-pricing-vs-disney-hulu-cbs-and-others.html

Poland and the USA declare need for stringent checks of foreign Telecoms

As concerns about foreign state influence over critical telecommunications equipment grows, Poland and the USA have signed a declaration calling for stringent checks.

The declaration was signed during a state visit to Poland by US Vice President Mike Pence.

“Protecting these next-generation communications networks from disruption or manipulation and ensuring the privacy and individual liberties of the citizens of the United States, Poland, and other countries is of vital importance,” the agreement states.

While concerns about foreign state influence over national telecom networks have been raised in the past, the debate has grown amid the rollout of 5G due to this generation’s expected use for more critical applications including smart cities, connected cars, and healthcare.

The US has led the concerns for quite some time, but the pressure on its allies to follow has increased amid growing trade tensions with China of which Chinese telecom giant Huawei, in particular, has found itself in the crossfire.

Some observers believe the US’ calls are more political than based in reality, especially given the lack of proven evidence that Huawei itself has ever been involved with any form of espionage. Even the UN said that US fears over Huawei’s equipment are politically-motivated.

However, a series of events haven’t helped Huawei’s case.

A series of unfortunate events?

Huawei CFO, and daughter of the company’s founder, Meng Wanzhou, was arrested in Canada earlier this year over allegations of using a Huawei subsidiary to flout US sanctions against Iran.

A report in the WSJ revealed that a group of Huawei employees were caught intercepting encrypted messages on behalf of the African government to spy on its political opponents. The Huawei employees used software called ‘Pegasus’ to access encrypted messages. However, the report notes that Huawei executives in China weren’t aware of this activity taking place and the company says it’s “never been engaged in ‘hack’ activities”.

Back in 2003, Huawei installed a network in the African Union (AU) headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A few months after, it was noted the network was most active long after staff had left – between midnight and 3am – and that Chinese trade envoys appeared to be suspiciously informed of the AU negotiators’ positions. A French security company drafted in to examine Huawei’s equipment in the AU HQ found a number of software vulnerabilities had been sending data back to Beijing.

In January, and perhaps the reason Poland decided to join the US in calling for more stringent checks of foreign telecoms equipment, the country’s authorities arrested a Chinese employee of Huawei – a former Polish security official – on spying allegations.

Source: https://www.telecomstechnews.com/news/2019/sep/03/poland-usa-declare-need-stringent-checks-foreign-telecoms-gear/

5G: Why you should ignore the hype and wait—until 2020

Sprint brought 5G phone service to four of the nation’s biggest cities this week, including New York City; Washington, D.C.; and LA, and naturally, tech nerds got really excited.

The next wave in mobile. New technology on display!

Then came the reality check: 5G service may be touted as available in my town, but not everywhere. Not at my home, on commute to work, in the office or nearby. Just elsewhere.

After doing some research about the other guys, you come to realize that what Sprint is doing is a milestone. Its coverage is wider than competitors. It’s just not as fast as we imagined 5G would be and certainly not worth the extra expense of an extra $40 monthly (minimum) that Sprint is charging for the family plan, nor the $1,000 or so for the new 5G capable phone.

“This is not the year of 5G,” says Bob O’Donnell, the president of TECHnalysis Research. “Not yet.”

There are a handful of phones currently out that connect to the existing 5G networks, led by the $1,100 Samsung Galaxy S10 5G, but notably, nothing from the best-selling consumer device, the iPhone. Apple’s next iPhone, to be released in September, isn’t expected to work with 5G. That’s not coming until 2020, say analysts.

For consumers, 5G won’t be worth paying attention to until “the end of 2020,” says O’Donnell, “which means that Apple will time things just right.”

By then, the wireless networks will be stronger, new 5G modems will be out that will work with more phones and coverage will be more widespread, he says.

Just how limited the 5G coverage from competitors is today was apparent this Tuesday when we started calling T-Mobile stores in Los Angeles to see if we could come in and test their 5G.

T-Mobile, which is set to acquire Sprint, has a coverage map on its website showing where 5G works with T-Mobile in Los Angeles, most notably in downtown – but only on certain blocks. We called five stores and not one of them had 5G service, nor 5G phones for sale.

T-Mobile declined comment. T-Mobile’s website says it’s in six cities, but a good look at its coverage map shows blocks that are available, as opposed to neighborhoods.

On top of that, the carriers have different methods of how they bring 5G to us. Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile are using high-frequency waves, which offer faster service but work best when you’re closest to the cell tower. Plus, they can get interference from outside elements, ranging from trees to windows in a building.

Sprint is using a lower frequency, which gets them wider coverage without the obstacles. The downside is the service isn’t as fast, but it’s more consistent, O’Donnell says.

Figuring out exactly what the wireless carriers are doing with 5G is confusing.

AT&T says it has 5G in many cities from California to Florida, but it turns out it’s just for corporate customers. The carrier hasn’t announced the availability for consumers, nor pricing. It doesn’t offer 5G phones for sale.

Verizon has pricing listed on its website, an extra $10 monthly for 5G service, which it says is available in Washington; Atlanta; Detroit; Indianapolis; Chicago; Denver; Minneapolis; Providence, Rhode Island; and Phoenix, with 30 cities in total by the end of the year.

Sprint says its mobile 5G is six times faster than 4G. But getting back to the higher frequency coverage, O’Donnell talks of taking a speed test with AT&T in Los Angeles, where he stood directly under the cell tower and found it to be 60 times faster. Or as he puts it, the difference between downloading an entire season of Netflix’s “Stranger Things” or “Orange Is the New Black” in three minutes versus three hours.

“And then I turned my phone away from the tower, and the speed went down by a factor of four,” he says. “It was that short and directional.”

In other words, 5G is here now, if you’re willing to pay for it. Or you could wait for 2020, higher speeds and better coverage.

Early adopters, what say you?

Source: https://techxplore.com/news/2019-08-5g-hype-waituntil.html

Should Inmates Pay for Universal Service?

There is no question that inmates are among the most vulnerable segments of our society. They are disproportionately poor and if they have children, cannot effectively contribute to support their families. It is no different when it comes to telecommunications. Inmates cannot choose their provider and they and their families have been forced to pay extremely high rates for phone calls for years. Most inmate calls are either collect, debit account or pre-paid account.

Over the years the FCC has often addressed inmate calling service (ICS) with mixed results. The agency’s efforts have been hurt by courts finding it cannot control intrastate ICS and by its own failure to account for the legitimate costs of ICS providers. Most recently on August 4, 2016, the Commission set rate caps for local and long-distance inmate calls. They were scheduled to take effect for prisons on Dec. 12, 2016, and for jails on March 13, 2017. However, those rates were stayed by a court order, pending judicial review. As a result, interim rate caps implemented in 2013 remain in effect. The interim rate caps apply only to interstate long-distance calls, not in-state long distance or local calls. The rates are 21 cents a minute for debit/prepaid calls, and 25 cents a minute for collect calls.

In that 2016 Order, the Commission permitted certain authorized fees to be passed through to inmates when they make interstate calls. One of these fees is universal service fund (USF) charges. For the third quarter of 2019, the universal service contribution percentage is 24.4 percent. That means that every call made by an inmate can be marked up by 24.4 percent. Obviously, this is an additional hardship for many poor inmates and their families. Fortunately, this soon may change.

On August 9, 2019, a company that provides prepaid accounts for inmates, Network Communications International Corporation (NCIC), filed a Petition for Forbearance with the FCC seeking an end to the absurd requirement in which inmates with incomes so low they qualify for the Lifeline program, which would enable them to pay subsidized low rates for phone service, must pay universal service charges when they make interstate calls. Industry comments are due on September 16, 2019.

NCIC believes that its Petition meets the three forbearance conditions in the 1996 Telecommunications Act:

It Would Enable Just, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory Inmate Calling Rates—Data indicates that families of inmates have approximately $75 per month to spend on inmate calling services. If the Petition is granted, they will be able to use more of these limited funds communicating with inmates rather than paying into the universal service fund. Moreover, providers of ICS would not incur administrative fees in passing through these fees. A win-win for the public.

Forbearance is Necessary for the Protection of Consumers—According to ICSC:

[T]he pass through of USF fees on interstate and international ICS calls on already suffering ICS consumers most certainly leads to the absurd result that inmates and families are actually funding the programs that were established to provide them with financial assistance. As such, the elimination of the USF fee on interstate and international ICS calls, would actually provide more protection to consumers and satisfy the second forbearance standard. (ICSC Petition, at p. 9).

Forbearance Will Best Serve the Public Interest—ICSC argues that elimination of USF charges for inmates would have a de minimis impact on universal service revenues. The budget for all four USF programs for 2018 is $11.42 billion.

Previously the FCC collected comprehensive, but confidential information from ICS carriers with regard to the revenue generated from interstate and international ICS calls. It has been estimated that ICS providers earn annual revenues of approximately $1.2 billion a year. Assuming that interstate and international ICS calls comprise roughly 20% of all ICS calls, then the total revenue earned on interstate and international ICS calls is approximately $240 million.

Therefore, based on the current contribution factor of 24.4% the amount collected from interstate and international ICS calls will be roughly $58 million in the 3rd quarter of 2019. This amount represents only 0.5% of the USF 2018 budget. Notably, the instant request, if granted, would be less than what the FCC previously found to be de minimis. (Id. at p. 10).

This Petition makes common sense and should be approved by the Commission. Unfortunately, it covers only about 20 percent of ICS calls and previous FCC attempts to regulate all ICS calls including intrastate and local calls have been rebuffed by the courts. Therefore, the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, which would authorize the FCC to regulate prison phones and cap the rate of all calls made from state and local prisons introduced by Sen. Tammy Duckworth earlier this year makes a lot of sense and is worthy of support.

Source: https://www.ccmihub.com/blog/should-inmates-pay-universal-service?spMailingID=16159906&spUserID=Mzk4NDM3NDY0NDAzS0&spJobID=1701474583&spReportId=MTcwMTQ3NDU4MwS2

New York stock exchange has its first female leader in 226-year history

Stacey Cunningham, who began her career as a summer intern on the New York stock exchange 24 years ago, will become the first woman to head the 226-year-old financial market on Friday, an appointment that raises hopes that the glass ceiling may have finally cracked on Wall Street.

But has it? Cunningham takes up the position as the financial services sector is struggling to show it has moved beyond the cliches of Wall Street’s sexist culture.

Stock markets drop after Trump signals dissatisfaction with China negotiations

Little epitomized Wall Street better than the pre-digitized NYSE – at the time the now 43-year-old Cunningham joined she was one of just three dozen women among more than 1,000 men.

When she first arrived, Cunningham recalled last year, the women’s restroom on the seventh floor was inside an old phone booth. Men, she said, had a “palatial” bathroom next door with couches and a full-time attendant.

But while Cunningham has her work cut continuing to modernize NYSE’s trading operations and induce more companies to list publicly, Wall Street itself is eager to show it is on the path to gender parity.

In a symbolic gesture, city authorities led by New York’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, moved the Fearless Girl, a statue commissioned to stare down the 7,000lb Charging Bull of Wall Street, to a spot outside the exchange.

The Fearless Girl statue stares down the Charging Bull.

In interviews, Cunningham has acknowledged the women who came before her, among them , a Wall Street legend as the first woman to join the exchange as a trader in 1967.

“I was a woman trader on the floor, and I never thought about it – I never thought for a moment whether or not that could happen, and whether or not that was an opportunity available to me,” Cunningham in March.

“And it’s because Muriel paved the way. I think it’s just really important to recognize that any time a woman pushes the boundaries and redefines the boundaries, she’s redefining them for everyone else that follows her.”

But to some ways of thinking, celebrating Cunningham is itself a testament to how few women achieve top leadership positions on Wall Street.

Two weeks ago, the Campbell Soup CEO, Denise Morrison, abruptly stepped down, triggering hand-wringing that her departure left just 23 women as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, a drop from 32 in 2016.

Morrison followed a number of other high-profile women out of the door, including Meg Whitman at Hewlett-Packard, Irene Rosenfeld of Mondēlez, Sheri McCoy of Avon and Margo Georgiadis at Mattel.

On the plus side, there is still Mary Barra at General Motors, Marillyn Hewson at Lockheed Martin, Ginni Rometty at IBM and Indra Nooyi at Pepsi.

But according to Kathryn Kolbert, founder and outgoing director of the Athena Center for Leadership Studies at Barnard College, the fact that we still count arrivals and departures of female executives is testament to how much remains to be done.

“If you look at the pace of change it’ll take another 100 years to get to parity.”

According to figures Kolbert compiled two years ago, women hold just 16% of board seats and 14% of executive officer positions on the Fortune 500 list. A quarter of those firms had no women at all in executive leadership positions.

The figures are improved for the financial industry, which boasts 29% women in senior leadership positions but precious few at the top level.

“Yet we know that having women at high levels of leadership not only improves the bottom line but makes a company much more creative, innovative and responsive to its clients, yet I don’t see a significant change in the numbers of women at high levels of leadership at financial services companies,” Kolbert said.

“You cannot have gender parity until you have critical mass, and you do not have critical mass until you get to 30%,” says Nathalie Molina Niño, CEO of Brava Investments and the author of Leapfrog: The New Revolution for Women Entrepreneurs. “It’s only then that you really start to see culture change. Having one woman on a board really makes no difference at all.”

In Kolbert’s view, improving gender equality is a question of will.

“It’s not hard to do. We know that when a senior member of a Fortune company wants change, it happens and it happens quickly. I have long believed companies not only need to see the advantage, but need the will to make the change.”

That corresponds with the thinking of Elissa Ellis Sangster, executive director of the Forté Foundation, a group that helps guide women in business. Sangster told the Guardian she too found it “frustrating” that we’re still celebrating when women are named to top positions.

“You’d think by now the pipeline would be 50-50 and we’d see enough women in one-level-down positions who are ready and able to helm some of these top companies.”

Please see full article here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-stock-exchange-to-have-first-female-leader-in-226-year-history-1526955129?redirect=amp

Don’t Count Dish Out Yet

It’s hard to keep up with – or care about – the on-again, off-again status of the T-Mobile-Sprint merger. As a rule, isn’t it best when our carriers are invisible?

For now, the T-Mobile-Sprint merger is on (read related No Jitter post). U.S. regulators approved the $26.5 billion combination, with a key stipulation – creation of a new fourth cellular provider. The need for a fourth carrier is questionable, as wireless expert Michael Finneran pointed out in his No Jitter post on the news. But, for whatever reason, the regulators insisted. The question of the need was lost after the focus shifted to the nominee: Dish Networks.

As currently agreed, the new T-Mobile will allow Dish to acquire Sprint’s prepaid brand Boost. However, Boost is a brand and not a network, so T-Mobile also agreed to provide Dish with wholesale service on the newly combined T-Mobile/Sprint network for the next seven years. There’s a series of other transactions between the three companies, but in the end, Dish becomes an mobile virtual network operator near term and a 5G mobile network operator long term.

It seems like a longshot. Dish has no experience in cellular service, no cellular network, and its planned acquisition of the Boost service only gives it nine million (prepaid) subscribers. In comparison, Verizon has about 120 million subscribers, while AT&T has about 90 million subscribers, as will the combined T-Mobile-Sprint.

Most of the cellular experts believe that Dish will either fail or not even try. Either way, the result will be three U.S. 5G carriers. Regulators were concerned enough to have T-Mobile agree to a no-fourth-competitor penalty of up to $2.2 billion if/when Dish fails.

Having casually followed the satellite company since the ‘90s, I’m not so quick to write-off Dish. I’ve outlined several reasons why Dish could emerge as a successful cellular provider below.

Founder-power

Charlie Ergen, Dish founder and executive chairman, is a fighter, survivor, and self-made billionaire. When selling giant satellite dishes at a Denver retail store, he understood the disruptive potential of the next wave of tech. The dish antennas were going to get much smaller, and picture quality was going to improve. He created satellite communications solutions provider EchoStar in 1980, which then created and eventually spun out the Dish brand in 2008. He has nearly lost these companies several times yet survives. He bets big and somehow wins despite failed mergers, failed satellites, and other failures.

Ergen used the new digital technology to disrupt the cable television industry. He had regular fights with competitors and suppliers. Most of these battles took place behind the scenes, but some were visible. For example, it wasn’t uncommon for Dish to black out channels during content negotiations. Ergen even survived a very public failed deal with media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Here’s a story that shows how Dish survives. The company introduced the Dish Hopper in 2012 — a commercial-skipping, whole-home DVR and satellite receiver. In 2002, ReplayTV introduced a commercial-skipping DVR and then filed for bankruptcy in 2003 after the networks filed lawsuits. The major networks also sued Dish for skipping commercials, yet the Hopper and Dish continue. The Hopper even won the Best of Show at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show, following a controversy where CNET’s parent company CBS initially pulled the device for consideration due to on-going litigation with the company — Dish won the award and CNET lost its contract with CES.

Source: https://www.nojitter.com/mobility/don%E2%80%99t-count-dish-out-yet?_mc=NL_NJ_EDT_NJ_weekly_20190813&cid=NL_NJ_EDT_NJ_weekly_20190813&elq_mid=92401&elq_cid=2875177

CenturyLink CEO: Fiber wins over 5G, wireless and hybrid fiber coax

Century Link is defining itself as the go-to provider of fiber-based services for business customers, according to CenturyLink CEO Jeff Storey.

Speaking on the company’s second quarter earnings call Wednesday afternoon, Storey, the former CEO of Level 3, said that CenturyLink would continue to micro-target new fiber builds in additional neighborhoods and cities. CenturyLink sees fiber as the winning hand for its future success, which was evidenced in its recent announcement to deploy 4.7 million miles of new fiber from Corning across the company’s intercity networks in the U.S. and Europe.

“We know that when we have a building on-net, our fiber-based services provide a better, more reliable and higher margin solution than competing infrastructure,” Storey said on the earnings conference call. “Fiber beats twisted pair copper, hybrid fiber coax, and it beats wireless. Whether it’s 5G or not, fiber wins. It’s highly flexible and increasing speeds, it is secure and really is the basis for all the other competing technologies.”

“We just do one thing differently. We take fiber all the way to the customer, and customers always want fiber when they can get it. You can expect us to continue investing to expand the reach of our access fiber network.”

To highlight the pace of CenturyLink’s fiber frenzy, Storey said CenturyLink added 5,000 new fiber-fed buildings in the second quarter, compared to 4,500 in the first quarter. By contrast, Level 3 used to add around 500 fiber buildings per quarter.

While fiber trenching can be expensive and disruptive, CenturyLink can tap into the fiber conduit it has collected over the years from acquisitions such as Level 3, Qwest, Broadwing and WilTel.

Storey said that fiber was well suited to meet the demands of emerging opportunities driven by artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data applications.

“Fiber-based solutions are better able to satisfy what we see as four key market trends,” Storey said. “The need for highly scalable capacity, now ranging into multi gigabits per second; the need for connecting and increasing number of widely distributed locations; the need for the network itself to protect the privacy and security of our customers; and finally, the need to move bandwidth intensive computing resources closer and closer to the edge to reduce latency and unnecessary backhaul of traffic.”

Storey said that CenturyLink recognizes that access and long-haul transport are only parts of the overall fiber equation.

“There’s increasing demand for computing capabilities at the edge of the network, and we believe we’re uniquely positioned to capitalize on this market opportunity,” he said.

According to CEO, CenturyLink’s dark fiber business, which will benefit from the fiber expansion, is providing connectivity to hyperscale cloud providers and enterprises.

The company’s top dog also mentioned CenturyLink’s win of a $24 million contract with the U.S. Census Bureau to provide secure cloud connectivity for next year’s census, which was announced on Thursday.

“CenturyLink will help to collect the census digitally by providing the bureau with managed trusted internet protocol services or MTIPS at speeds of 40 gigabits and higher,” he said.

CenturyLink’s second quarter numbers

In the quarter that ended June 30, CenturyLink had net income of $371 million, which was a 21% increase over last year’s $292 million. CenturyLink’s total revenue was $5.58 billion, while diluted earnings per share came in at 35 cents compared to $5.90 billion and 27 cents per share in the same quarter a year ago.

Revenue declined 1.2% both year over year and sequentially in CenturyLink’s enterprise segment. The enterprise segment had revenue of $1.50 billion during the second quarter, compared to $1.52 billion in the same quarter a year ago. CenturyLink expects its enterprise revenue will rebound in the second half of this year.

“If you think about our enterprise segment, our sales in fourth quarter, and January and February, were impacted by the government shutdown, but we saw good sales in March and we saw good sales in the second quarter of this year,” said CenturyLink CFO Neel Dev on the conference call.

While most of the larger cable companies are adding broadband customers, CenturyLink had a net loss of 56,000 broadband subscribers. CenturyLink lost 78,000 subscribers who were taking speeds of below 20 Mbps, but added 22,000 customers for speeds of 20 Mbps and above. Dev said the growth of broadband subscribers for speeds of 100 Mbps and above had increased 100% on a year over year basis.

“Broadband revenue for the second quarter 2019 grew 1.8% year over year, which compares to growth of 1.4% last quarter, driven by our efforts to increase penetration in our competitive assets and investing in fiber,” Dev said. “Voice revenue on a year over year basis declined 13% this quarter compared to 12% last quarter. The decline in other revenue continues to be driven by our decision to de-emphasize our Prism video product.”

During the earnings call, Storey said CenturyLink’s internal teams continued to review the possibility of CenturyLink selling off its consumer business, but that the review is a lengthy process.

Source: https://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/centurylink-ceo-fiber-wins-over-5g-wireless-and-hybrid-coax

Intel sold its smartphone modem business to Apple, but it says it will still be a big player in 5G

Intel sold its smartphone modem business to Apple, but the chipmaker’s CEO said Wednesday that his company will still be a big player in the 5G space.

5G refers to next generation of mobile networking that promises super-fast data speeds with the ability to support new technologies like driverless cars. Apple bought the majority of Intel’s modem business for $1 billion, including technology related to the development of the 5G modems required for devices to connect to the new networks.

However, Intel still has the option to develop 5G chips for non-smartphone products.

Apple made the move in order to develop its own, in-house 5G modems rather than rely on Qualcomm, a company with which the iPhone maker has had a long history.

But according to Intel CEO Bob Swan, the move is also a positive because now the company can focus on 5G in other areas.

Speaking with CNBC, Swan explained that 5G modems were not an area that would differentiate growth for the industry; and with only one customer (Apple) retaining the business, it would not provide attractive returns.

“So we doubled down on 5G networks where we think there’s real opportunity and last week we announced the sale of the 5G smartphone modem to Apple. But we also retained access to the technologies in the event that we need a 5G modem for non-smartphone applications, like a PC or an automobile,” Swan said.

Meanwhile, mobile networks will also be a big area for Intel going forward. The U.S. chip giant traditionally hasn’t focused on the telecommunications sector, but now there’s a shift in its attention to what the CEO calls the “cloudification of the network.” That refers to the increasing amount of software being used in mobile networks that runs in the cloud.

Traditional mobile networks rely on huge amounts of expensive hardware, but an increased use of cloud-based software could reduce the need for some of the physical gear, making networks cheaper to build and faster to upgrade.

Last month, Intel announced a partnership with Rakuten, a Japanese tech conglomerate, to create what it calls “the world’s first end-to-end cloud-native mobile network.”

That’s an area Swan said he sees as a big growth area for Intel due to the world’s “insatiable demand for data.”

What is 5G?

Intel, he said, believes that the future will see more and more processing moving “from the cloud or from the data centers into the networks.”

“That is what we have been investing in and we see that as significant opportunities,” Swan told CNBC.

Intel has been looking to diversify its business beyond just processors for PCs to new always-connected areas such as driverless cars and so-called internet of things devices. The push into the world of telecommunications is part of that.

Swan said that, while the revenue split between what he calls PC-centric and data-centric products is around 50-50, that will change in the future to favor the company’s data-centric chips.

“The technologies and the architectures that we’re building for this data center of the world will become a bigger and bigger part of the company,” Swan said.

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/01/intel-future-in-5g-networks-after-apple-buys-modem-business.html

Womens Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC)