Government

US Democratic Party Adopt Net Neutrality
The US Democratic party has adopted net-neutrality as a party-political issue following the rejection of a second pro-neutrality amendment in a vote late last week.
Previously we reported on the demise of the first pro-neutrality amendment as part of the ongoing review of US telecommunications law.
The Senate Commerce Committee were tied at 11 for and 11 against, with Republican members voting against the amendment and Democrats for it. A majority vote is necessary for a bill to pass. Afterwards, Republican Senator for Alaska, Ted Stevens, gave his reasons for voting against the bill as well as displaying his obviously comprehensive grasp of the technicalities of the Web, “It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.”
The Democratic party subsequently took up the issue with the slogan “Republicans: They sold the environment to Exxon, and sold the war to Halliburton. Now they want to sell the Internet to at&t.”
Former presidential candidate Senator John Kerry commented, “This vote was a gift to cable and telephone companies, and a slap in the face of every Internet user and consumer.” Another Democrat, Senator Ron Wyden, placed a ‘hold’ on the bill which temporarily stops further progress but a decision is inevitable and both sides are marshaling forces behind their cause.
Lawrence Lessig greeted news of Democratic support with caution, “Good for the Dems that they got it. Bad that the issue is now within the grips of party politics.” He acknowledged that, give the amount of money involved, political involvement was inevitable.
Many fear that the loss of net-neutrality will signal virtual civil war on the Internet and that commercial interests are having too much effect on the US Legislature. Jeannine Kenney, Senior Policy Analyst, Consumers Union offered a concise summary, “The network neutrality nondiscrimination principle, which protects competition, maximizes consumer choice, and guarantees fair market practices, is one step closer to being abandoned with the Senate Commerce Committee’s vote. This endangers the most important engine for economic growth and democratic communication in modern society. Nondiscrimination made possible the grand successes of the Internet. Its removal can take them away.”
6 July, 2006
Ofcom GPS Repeaters Ruling May Hit Mobile Phone GPS
Ofcom has just issued guidance that GPS repeaters are probably illegal in the UK, both in their use and their sale.
In their dry language, “Any person who places this type of apparatus on the market or uses it in the UK is likely to be committing an offence.”
Medium term this action could hit the wave of GPS-equiped mobile phones that are a year or so away, and the location-based services that they’ll bring.
GPS repeaters use radio signals to pass Global Positioning (GPS) or other Radionavigation Satellite system (RNSS) location information between units. Unless the operators have specific licenses, they be breaking the law in the UK.
GPS devices need to be able to receive the positional information from satellites. Initially this involved having line-of-sight to the ‘birds’, but as chip-sets have improved, they’ve become more sensitive, so requiring less direct sight. If GPS units work within buildings, they do so at the sacrifice of accuracy. Even with the chip improvements, GPS will not work within buildings, and certainly not underground.
We spoke to Jenny Bailey, Technical Director of J-Squared to get the low-down. J-Squared were funded by the DTi 3 years ago to develop a GPS repeater system, which they subsequently received a patent.
Jenny told us the major current use for GPS repeaters is by the emergency services. Ambulances stations are equipped with them to ensure their on-board GPS ‘know’ where they are as they leave, speeding them to their location. Police and firefighting services also benefit from being able to locate their personnel within buildings.
In the medium term, Ofcom will create quite a kerfuffle with this ruling. Mobile phones will, within a couple of years, be commonly equipped with GPS, enabling location-based information and services. These will not work within buildings without GPS repeaters, knocking their broad usefulness on the head. We’d imagine that the mobile companies will be on the phone to Ofcom sharpish.
Ofcom is becoming increasingly stringent on the ‘unauthorised’ use of radio spectrum. One of their Big Ideas is to auction off radio spectrum to the highest bidder and if people are using it without paying for it, the whole idea becomes undermined.
Given the inevitability of the march of mobile phones, it could be that Ofcom are acting as King Canute, but in this case attempting to hold back radio waves.
Ofcom GPS or GNSS signal repeaters ruling
J-Squared
Indoor Positioning Limited
4 July, 2006
Ofcom To Provide Solomon Judgement On HD Frequency Spectrum
One of the challenges facing Stephen Carter’s replacement as head of the UK communications regulator Ofcom, is how the frequency spectrum released by the move to digital terrestrial TV will be allocated. Not only is the decision crucial for Ofcom, who must reconcile both the requirement to allow the market to operate while taking into account the British citizen, but it also figures in the BBC’s strategy around the impending licence settlement and the organisations’ worldwide ambitions.
Although the World Cup has not been the High Definition eruption many in the electronics retailing sector had hoped for, there is now a realisation in the industry; that the move to adoption of flat screen TV displays has started in the homes of Great Britain.
How will displays receive the content to create the impetus for a large scale take up? The likely options are; Cable under what is expected to be a Virgin branded offering; Sky who are pushing HD to protect and grow their revenue; the BBC who are committed to both an alternative to Sky on Satellite and providing their content on all viable platforms and broadband, which looks increasingly viable by virtue of higher transfer rates to the home, along with improved digital compression technologies.
The issue for Ofcom is, should the frequency spectrum vacated by analogue TV go to the highest bidder (which on past experience looks likely to be mobile communications of some sort), or should it propel TV into the HD age with the potential benefit for the UK’s important media industries?
France, slower off the blocks in moving to a Digital Terrestrial TV service, with its’ amusingly acronym-ed TNT, has a solution that builds in HD capabilities, and for sure the UK will not wish to be seen falling behind mainland Europe.
And where does the BBC anguish become an issue? Well, if the only methods of receiving HD are by commercial operators Sky and Cable, how does the BBC reconcile the cost to all viewers when only a subset can receive it? The BBC is terrified of losing arguments that could justify a decrease of its universal fee, or marginalisation of its place as a leader in the deployment of advanced distribution and production technology. They’re actively lobbying to make sure that new frequency plans allow for both mobile TV and HD terrestrial.
Given all this, it looks like Stephen Carter could be showing admirable timing skills in vacating the OFCOM hot seat.
29 June, 2006
Net Neutrality Matters
Imagine a world where Internet performance is controlled by the company who owns the cables and where speed is sold to the highest bidder. Imagine a world where some Web sites load faster than others, where some sites aren’t even visible and where search engines pay a tax to make sure their services perform at an acceptable speed. That’s the world US Telecommunications companies (telcos) such as AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner are trying to create.
The debate centres around the ongoing review of the US Telecommunications Act and the concept of network neutrality (net-neutrality). The telcos have been lobbying congress to allow them to introduce priority services ensuring that the fastest data transfers and best download speeds are sold at a premium rate. The telcos position is widely seen to be in conflict with the most fundamental assumptions about what the Internet actually is.
To the lay person, it may seem like a laughable proposition. As Cory Doctorow (FreePress) put it, “It’s a dumb idea to put the plumbers who laid a pipe in charge of who gets to use it.” And yet the US congress is swaying towards the view of the telcos, so what’s going on?
The debate was kick-started in November 2005 when AT&T CEO, Ed Whitacre commented, “Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?”
Whitacre’s argument boils down to the assumption that services such as Google and Yahoo are somehow freeloading on the infrastructure owned by the telcos. Cory Doctorow points out a fundamental flaw in his reasoning, “Internet companies already are paying for bandwidth from their providers, often the same companies that want to charge them yet again under their new proposals.”
As Doctorow and other commentators have observed, Internet users and businesses already pay proportionally for their use of the net, allowing the owners of the infrastructure to take a further cut distorts the market in favour of those with the deepest pockets and threatens innovation and the development of new services.
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, weighed in to the argument saying “Net neutrality is this: If I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can communicate at that level. That’s all. Its up to the ISPs to make sure they interoperate so that that happens.”
The debate in the US is split largely along partisan lines with Republicans favouring the telcos and Democrats siding with the pro-neutrality lobby. Since Whitacre started the debate, the telcos have promoted their case heavily using extensive television advertising and lobby groups. The pro-neutrality group (comprising the bulk of the industry) has organised itself with activist Websites such as save the internet and has signed up over a million individuals to its petition, but the campaign is not going well. On May 8th the House of Representatives passed the “Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act of 2006,” or COPE Act while defeating an amendment (the so-called Internet Platform for Innovation Act of 2006) that would have provided protection for neutrality. The next opportunity for progress comes this week when the Senate votes on Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2006 which also carries a neutrality friendly amendment.
Today, the legal Website Outlaw reported that two US Attorney Generals (Eliot Spitzer and Bill Lockyer) have backed the pro-neutrality cause. Spitzer wrote a letter stating that “Congress must not permit the ongoing consolidation of the telecommunications industry to work radical and perhaps irrevocable change in the free and neutral nature of the Internet”.
Whatever Spitzer and Lockyer’s influence, many commentators believe this kind of corporate influence on communications can only lead to economic censorship. As law professor and copyright activist Lawrence Lessig said in 2004 “The Internet was designed to allow competition and let the best products and content rise to the top. Without a policy of network neutrality, some of those products could be blocked by broadband providers”.
28 June, 2006
NSA To Harvest Social Networks?
Think carefully the next time you edit your Flickr or Myspace profile. New Scientist reported last week that the Pentagon’s National Security Agency (NSA) “is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks.” For many the move is hardly surprising given the ongoing erosion of personal privacy as a result of 9/11 and makes George Orwell and Philip K Dick’s dark imaginings about the workings of big government (they gave us the concepts of thought-crime and pre-crime respectively) a depressing reality.
Many are saying that it bears all the hallmarks of the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness program or the “blueprint for the total surveillance society” as it was dubbed by Lee Tien of the EFF. The program aimed to gather digital information from a variety of sources to aid in the tracking and capture of terrorists but was suspended in 2002 after a public outcry over privacy.
The New Scientist report speculates that the NSA plans to use semantic-web tools to plot connections between individuals. A paper promoting just such a process was delivered at the WWW2006 in Edinburgh last month. The paper, titled Semantic Analytics on Social Networks, described how conflict of interest in the scientific peer review process could be avoided by plotting the relationships between individuals, by analyzing the RDF tags of data from the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) social software service and the computer science bibliography website DBLP. New Scientist noted that the research was part-funded by Advanced Research Development Activity who spend the NSA’s research cash.
This news follows the report by USA Today on June 1st that the FBI had asked companies including Google, Microsoft and AOL (amongst others) to store Web usage histories for up to two years to assist with the investigations into child pornography and terrorism. Lee Tien observed that the Justice Department was “asking ISP’s to really become an arm of the government”.
In Europe, the adoption of similar approaches has been attempted with less success. In 2003 the UK All Party Internet Group (APIG) recommended that the government abandon plans to get ISP’s to store usage data for six years but should still ask the companies to keep data as and when law enforcers required.
The APIG report (PDF), which was delivered ahead of the consultation process for the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) Part 2, made the specific recommendation that
“a specific prohibition should be put into RIPA to prevent access to communications traffic data for ‘predictive use’. If particular patterns of behaviour were highly correlated to criminal behaviour then it might become possible for ‘fishing expeditions’ to detect these patterns to be seen a proportionate action. We agree that this type of access to traffic data raises considerable concern and do not believe it should be permitted under an ‘internal authorisation’ regime.
In September 2005 the European Commission adopted a proposal that would see telecommunications data held for one year and Internet data for six months and, last month, the European Court annulled the agreement which compelled airlines to submit private data on passengers flying to the US.
It’s not just us that thinks that the Global War on Terror has been used by governments on both sides of the Atlantic to infringe personal liberty with precious little evidence of positive results. Privacy groups have warned about the dangers of “automated intelligence profiling” citing the potential for inaccuracies, misuse and abuse.
Governments have hardly proven themselves capable custodians so far. In the UK recent blunders at the Home Office have seen thousands of individuals wrongly branded as criminals due to inefficient manual administration systems. Add government fecklessness to the huge quantity of incomplete, exaggerated and plain wrong data entered by ourselves about ourselves on social software sites and you could have the ingredients for a totalitarian, bureaucratic hell, worthy of Kafka.
12 June, 2006
CEO Carter To Leave Ofcom: UPDATED
This just in, Steven Carter, Chief Executive Officer of UK communication uber-regulator Ofcom will be standing down with effect from 15 October 2006.
Luke Gibbs of OfcomWatch covered Carter possible departure this back in January this year.
At the time of writing this article, Ofcom hasn’t given an official explanation of why Carter is leaving, just that he is.
As to the process of him leaving, the official Ofcom line is a little bewildering, “He will continue to lead on all operational and financial matters until that date (15 October 2006), but from 1 August 2006 will not be party to Ofcom’s economic, competition and policy decisions.”
What’s special about 1 Aug 2006? Given Carter’s contract prevents him from securing future employment whilst at Ofcom, is this perhaps someway for him to hasten taking up another role with another organisation? Carter’s contract also contains “appropriate gardening leave restrictions” up to a maximum of 12 months at the discretion of the Chairman.
The next role for Carter has been the matter of some conjecture, nay gossip. Given Ofcom is seen by a lot of the world as a leader in communications regulation, there are many possible roles. Amoung those mentioned so far have been BSkyB, and with James Murdoch rumoured to be shifting upstairs the position may be open. Hey … how about the FCC?
From 1 August, David Currie will act as Executive Chairman and will chair the Policy Executive, until a permanent replacement can be found.
Prior to joining Ofcom in 2003, Carter was at UK cable company NTL during its time of financial troubles.
More details on the story when we have them.
OfcomWatch
Ofcom
26 May, 2006
Spammers 1 Internet 0 As Blue Security Surrender
A promising anti-spam service by Israeli company Blue Security has been brought to its knees by a renegade spammer hell-bent on protecting his spamming industry
Created by Eran Reshef, Blue Security came up with what looked like a cunningly simple plan to mash up the mass mailers: fight spam with spam.
The company set up a ‘Do Not Intrude Registry’ (similar to the Do Not Call Registry for telemarketing) and invited members to download a small application called Blue Frog, which automatically sent out requests to spammers to stop sending junk e-mail.
Of course, spammers aren’t renowned for paying attention to opt-out requests, so Blue Frog came with a rather nasty bite to make sure they paid attention: the software bombarded spammers with requests from all 522,000 of its customers at the same time.
It seemed to work too – Blue Security claimed that “six out of the top ten spammers” had complied with their opt-out requests and after signing up to the free service, we found our spam dropping dramatically. But not for long.
Spammers fight back
Not surprisingly, spammers don’t like it up ’em and soon started fighting back with a counter attack, launching a campaign of extortion e-mail messages threatening to flood users with nonsensical spam and viruses unless they removed their name from the Do Not Intrude registry.
This was followed by a sophisticated denial of service attack using tens of thousands of hijacked computers which managed to knock Blue Security’s Website off the Web.
According to Reshef, a shady Russian-speaking spammer known as PharmaMaster then managed to bribe a staff member at a top-tier ISP into ‘black holing’ Blue Security’s former IP address (194.90.8.20) at Internet backbone routers – effectively rendering Blue’s main Website invisible to anyone outside of Israel.
Rather sinisterly, PharmaMaster told Blue Security in an ICQ conversation, that if he can’t send spam, there will be “no Internet.”
With Blue Security reduced to communicating through their secondary TypePad-hosted Weblog at bluesecurity.blogs.com, the spammer moved in for the kill, launching a ferocious denial of service attack that closed down the TypePad and Live Journal servers owned by Six Apart.
This resulted in thousands of blogs disappearing off the Web for a few hours, with the net operations of five top-tier hosting providers in the US and Canada also being disrupted.
The attack also shut down operations for around 12 hours at Tucows Inc., a Canadian Internet services company who helped manage Blue Security’s site.
Surrender
Faced with this endless aggro, Reshef has pulled the plug on his anti-spam operations, commenting, “It’s clear to us that [quitting] would be the only thing to prevent a full-scale cyber-war that we just don’t have the authority to start.”
“Our users never signed up for this kind of thing,” he wearily added, admitting that in retrospect he’d made the mistake of not anticipating that PharmaMaster would go “beserk.”
Commenting on the DoS attack on his server, Tucows CEO Elliot Noss declared it to be “by far the largest the company had ever seen,” adding that very few companies currently have the infrastructure in place to withstand similar full-on assaults.
“This attack really was like trying to take out a mosquito with an atomic bomb,” Noss added.
According to Six Apart, the FBI is investigating the attacks, but we won’t be holding our breath on seeing anyone behind bars.
Told You So
Speaking to the Washington Post, Todd Underwood, chief of operations and security for Renesys Corp, tried hard to stop himself from saying, “I told you so”:
“When the company’s founders first approached the broader anti-spam community and asked them what they thought of the idea, everyone said this was a terrible idea and that they would eventually cause a lot of collateral damage,” Underwood commented.
“But it’s also extremely unfortunate, because it shows how much the spammers are winning this battle,” he added.
Where this leaves the venture capitalists who invested more than $4 million in Blue Security in 2004 is anyone’s guess, but we’re saddened to see the outcome.
The fate of Blue Security’s initiative proves that steeenkin’ spammers still rule the Internet and until governments take a unified and global approach to prosecuting junk mailers, they’re free to do whatever they like.
17 May, 2006

Ofcom GSM Guard Bands License Awards Explained

Ofcom Awards Licenses For The GSM Guard Bands The frequencies 1781.7-1785MHz paired with 1876.7-1880MHz known as the GSM Guard bands have been made available to 12 licensees under the Wireless Telegraphy Act. They are national UK licenses, though the operators of the licenses will have to cooperate amongst themselves so that interference between themselves doesn’t occur. Ofcom expect the licensees to form an industry body that will self-regulate. Operators will also be required to register all radio equipment in the “Sitefinder” database (currently populated by the GSM and 3G operators).

Even though the licenses are only low power (sub 200mW compared to 10’s of Watts for traditional GSM systems), they are suitable for services such as in-building GSM, local area GSM (such as in a theme-park) or other constrained areas. There are 15 GSM channels available, each one being able to carry 8 voice calls i.e. 120 voice calls in total. Having a reasonable number of channels will allow multiple operators to co-exist in an area and also allow single operators to cover larger areas (in such a way that multiple GSM basestations won’t interfere with each other).

Though it is expected the main use will be low power GSM, Ofcom have not specified what the licenses should be used for and as such, can be utilised for any service, such as localised wireless broadband, as long as the GSM spectral masks are adhered to (which will ensure interference doesn’t occur with the existing GSM operators).

Ofcom Awards Licenses For The GSM Guard Bands Winning Licensees
The 12 companies winning licenses and the prices they paid were: – (note all bids in GB pounds £)

British Telecommunications PLC	275,112
Cable & Wireless UK ( England)	51,002
COLT Mobile Telecommunications Ltd	1,513,218
Cyberpress Ltd	151,999
FMS Solutions Ltd	113,000
Mapesbury Communications Ltd	76,660
O2 ( UK) Ltd	209,888
Opal Telecom Ltd	155,555
PLDT ( UK) Ltd	88,889
Shyam Telecom UK Ltd	101,011
Spring Mobil AB	50,110
Teleware PLC	1,001,880

Ofcom published the complete matrix of bids as the award was for between 7 and 12 licenses. It was a close thing at 8 licenses as a few bidders put in high entries for low numbers of licenses and dropped the amount as the license numbers increased.

Ofcom arranged the auction in a sealed bid process in a “what you bid is what you pay” arrangement, which lead to the lowest price paid as £50,110 by Spring Mobil and the highest £1,513,218 by COLT (30x as much). Some have argued that the highest bidders paid over the odds, but they are putting a good spin on it saying that it’s in-line with their mobile strategy. The total amount of the licence fees paid was £3.8million, not bad for Ofcom’s first spectrum auction.

Of course, compared to the license fees paid for 3G spectrum (around £6bn per license) it’s peanuts.

A license, but what to do with it?
Having a license is all very well, but now licensees must be wondering what they’ve got themselves into. Just because they can run a GSM service doesn’t mean anyone will use it, in fact it may well be difficult to get people onto your network.

It’s extremely unlikely the existing mobile operators are going to want to have anything to do with these new upstarts, they’ve invested millions (err, billions) to get to where they are today. The last thing they want is new entrants poaching customers or moving users off their networks when they move into, say, an office environment. They especially don’t want their customers doing it with equipment (i.e. handsets) that they’ve heavily subsidised.

Unfortunately, what this means is that the new players are going to have to issue new SIMs (Subscriber Identity Modules) and they won’t work on existing GSM networks, or users will manually have to select the new network when they’re in range. This makes it all very difficult, and users won’t bother if it’s hard.

Ofcom Awards Licenses For The GSM Guard Bands New entrants could enter into roaming agreements with the current operators, but unless Ofcom mandates this (which is unlikely) there’s likely to be strong opposition. Since some of the license winners already have GSM networks, they can offer localised services knowing there’s no interference problems with existing infrastructure.

Deals with foreign GSM operators?
One way ahead is for a licensee to make an agreement with a foreign operator and the localised network just becomes an extension of their foreign network, but then when users roam on to the network they’ll be subject to roaming charges which, as both Ofcom and the EU Government know too well, can mean very high charges for the end-user. If roaming charges do decline then this may well be a way forward.

There’s also a big potential opportunity for the Channel Islands GSM networks here, as they abide by UK numbering plans, so though they are considered “foreign”, their numbers look like UK numbers, including mobile ranges. They could offer roaming agreements and even offer SIMs which would still look like UK numbers.

So the future’s bright, but it will be an interesting few years to see if any of the new entrants can really pull anything off.

10 May, 2006

Unlocking the Digital Dividend – Policy Tracker Event
If you thought the switchover to digital television was going to be a challenge, spare a thought for the regulators, policy makers and engineers who are already tasked with trying to figure out the best way of re-allocating the spectrum freed up by switching off the analogue broadcasting signal.
There are a multitude of possible new uses for the spectrum released by switchover, including re-allocating (or re-gifting) it back to the very broadcasters who previously used it in order for them to deliver HD and other services.
Mobile providers are also launching a campaign to ensure an allocation for mobile TV over DVB-H, or extending 3G and rolling out mobile broadband services. Some countries may even look to allocate the spectrum to defence and/or emergency service uses. Or it could well be a mix of all of the above – although the resource is finite – hence the issue.
It was this re-allocation process that provided the focus for an event run today by Policy Tracker. Unfortunately, I was only able to attend the first couple of sessions – but the roster of speakers for the day looked very strong indeed. I hope that Policy Tracker will look to do more events, if they are of this calibre.
The first two sessions focused mainly on the problems associated with harmonisation. It is essential that adjoining states will have to work together to allocate spectrum, if there are not to be interference issues. The ITU’s Regional Radiocommunication Conference (RRC-06) which will be held in Geneva between May 15 and June 16, aims to provide the necessary regulatory framework for national regulators such as Ofcom as they look to re-allocate. This framework will not limit or determine the re-allocation but ensure licence holders meet certain requirements to ensure harmonious use – enforced by national regulators.
It was interesting to note that London’s geographical location – and possible interference in parts of France and Holland – will mean that any allocation for DVB-H services will effectively have to wait until 2012. Ofcom have already stated this – but pressure will surely start to mount when other European cities (where there are no associated interference issues) will start rolling out DVB-H mobile TV starting in 2007.
Interesting comments from Roberto Ercole of the GSM Association, who said that mobile providers were currently unsure about how the reallocation process would work. He said that the industry faced three key issues – regulatory uncertainty, not knowing whether mobile TV would come under the same regulations as broadcasting, and the possible fragmentation of markets due to allocations differing across regions.
Of course regulatory uncertainty is same for all those looking to unlock the digital dividend (although some argue that the broadcasters are well positioned because they already sit on the spectrum). Whatever happens its going to be a complex and highly political interplay between policy makers, regulators and transnational organisations such as the ITU.
There is a very difficult balance to strike, ensuring that there is enough incentive for potential users to keep investing and developing technologies whilst also ensuring that the released spectrum will be used in the most productive and efficient manner.
A particularly pertinent question from one delegate – that didn’t get an answer – what is that citizen/consumers will get from the re-allocation? Afterall it is citizen/consumers who are effectively having to pay to release the spectrum. Ofcom’s initial proposals on the issue suggest that this is a question that they will look to answer – so we’ll wait and see.
Luke Gibbs is a co-founder of OfcomWatch
10 March, 2006
Ofcom: Is the Internet Killing the TV Star?
Big glasses-toting Buggles sang about ‘Video Killing The Radio Star’ back in 1979, but new figures from Ofcom suggest that the while Internet may not exactly be killing TV, it’s certainly giving it a bit of a duffing behind the bike sheds.
The research reveals that ‘TV reach’ (defined as a minimum of 15 minutes of consecutive TV viewing in a week) declined between December 2003 and December 2005, with the biggest fall amongst young people.
Over the two years, TV reach fell by 2.9% for 16-24 year-olds and continued to decline by 2.2% over 2005, with reach falling by 1.9% among 25-34 year-olds.
Industry pundits are collaring the Internet as the reason for this decline, along with DVDs and gaming.
ITV1 slumped the most in multi-channel homes (i.e. homes with terrestrial and other channels), falling by 3.6% during 2005, while BBC2 managed to be the only terrestrial channel to increase its reach in multi-channel homes, rising 1.6%.
BBC channels hogged the TV action in multi-channel homes, snaffling 30.8% of the audience, way ahead of ITV at 22.6% and Channel 4 at 8.6%.
Digital growth
Digital TV is now accessible to two thirds of UK households, with 6.5 million viewers potentially launching a coastguard boat every time they turn on their sets.
Consumer broadband continues its exponential growth, exploding from zero to 10 million connections in just over seven years, with some 70,000 new connections being added per week.
Digital radio remains a boom industry, with sales of DAB radios passing two million in the third quarter of 2005, and pushed on by a busy Christmas, hitting 2.7 million by the end of the year.
Ofcom report
2 March, 2006