SAN JOSE -- Action by governments as soon as 2008 likely will be needed to address coming exhaustion of Internet Protocol addresses, the North American address authority’s chairman said Tuesday. China, Japan, South Korea and other states already are encouraging the inevitable but tricky shift to IPv6, said John Curran, chairman of the American Registry for Internet Numbers. The best estimate for exhaustion of the inventory of regional authorities like ARIN is March 2011, but that’s a moving target. It’s too early for action by the U.S., which prefers to wait for requests based on industry consensus, Curran told an ISPCon presentation.
Exports to China
A broadband over powerline provider focused on rural areas is using a federal loan for commercial deployments in three states, trying to erase doubts about the technology’s ability to provide access to underserved areas. International Broadband Electric Communications’ rollouts next month will be scrutinized by the BPL industry and the National Rural Telecom Cooperative to see if they get skeptical electric cooperatives to follow suit. Promoted as an ideal fix for broadband access to rural and underserved areas, BPL hit a bump in early 2006 when the NRTC found BPL inappropriate for “sparsely-populated rural” broadband and utility applications (CD Jan 26/2006 p2).
Discovery Communications will acquire HowStuffWorks.com, a site that explains how the human brain, roller coasters, lightning and other natural and manmade phenomena work. The site brings in 11 million monthly visitors and has grown by one-quarter the past year, Discovery CEO David Zaslav said. HowStuffWorks also has exclusive digital rights to 30,000 books, 800,000 images and 180,000 maps. Jeff Arnold, who will remain HowStuffWorks’ CEO, called the combination of his site’s content with Discovery’s video library “an accurate ‘video Wikipedia.'” Brief clips from current and future Discovery programming will be used for HowStuffWorks.com, which is also getting its own TV show, How Stuff Works, in summer 2008, the company said. Discovery also gets a “portfolio” of other content, including ratings and reviews from ConsumerGuide.com, GeoNova Group digitized maps, and medical education business QuickCompliance. Discovery will hold a minority interest in HSW International, a company separate from HowStuffWorks that has local language rights to site content in Brazil and China, Discovery said. The deal is expected to close late in the year, the company said. No terms were provided.
Correction: The U.S. Trade Representative asked the World Trade Organization set up a dispute settlement panel over trading rights and distribution services for music, video and publications in China (CD Oct 12 p10).
BERKELEY, Calif. -- The presidential campaign contributes to international forces raising protectionist risks, including conflicting technology standards, that could halt all communications and information technology innovation, a Silicon Valley CEO said Thursday. “So far it seems OK,” but “there’s always a danger of starting into a more protectionist environment,” particularly with political turnover -- including in China with the big Communist Party Congress starting next week -- and with the work of the World Trade Organization stalling, said John Chen, the CEO of database company Sybase.
Consumers, especially young ones, expect video everywhere, so there will be a market for mobile video, and the satellite industry -- fixed and mobile -- is ready to deliver it, said Ed Horowitz, SES Americom’s CEO. He took part in an industry trends panel Thursday at the Satellite and Content Delivery Conference and Expo in New York.
GENEVA -- Frequencies for advanced mobile wireless will dominate debate at the World Radio Conference, as the U.S. presses for globally harmonized bands for wider, lest costly deployment of technology while protecting WiMAX deployment at home.
Viacom was “reluctantly drawn” to sue Google’s YouTube, but won’t shirk regulatory and legislative battles involving copyright, including net neutrality, CEO Philippe Dauman made clear Monday. In a keynote to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Anti-Counterfeiting and Piracy Summit, Dauman said Viacom’s rising revenue from digital content, pegged at $500 million this year, was besieged by free online alternatives that made its licensed partners reconsider whether to keep paying.
Qualcomm will license TechFaith Wireless Technology Group to develop, make and sell subscriber units and modem cards using WCDMA and TD-SCDMA patents, the vendor said Monday. TechFaith will pay Qualcomm royalties at “standard worldwide rates.” Those prices are the same regardless of the CDMA standard used by the subscriber unit or modem card, it said. TechFaith is a British Virgin Islands-based subsidiary of China TechFaith Wireless Communication Technology.
As markets converge, the FTC and the Justice Department need better boundaries for their antitrust work, FTC Chairman Deborah Majoras told the House Judiciary Committee Antitrust Task Force on Tuesday. The agencies sometimes clash over high tech, telecom and other cases, she said.