Johna Till Johnson

When it comes to telecom negotiations, most telecom managers have a difficult time. I see far too many contracts riddled with unacceptable clauses and limitations, shackling companies with sub-par terms and conditions, bloated pricing, and even obsolete technology.

[Negotiating telecom contracts]

Smartphones don't look particularly dangerous. But in the wrong hands, they can cause serious damage to a company's finances, reputation, and even long-term survivability. And those "wrong hands" aren't always the folks on the wrong side of the law.

Increasingly, law enforcement is targeting smartphones and other mobile devices as a way to catch criminals -- with potentially disastrous implications for businesses and other organizations that rely on mobile-enabled employees.

A few years back, I predicted that a cable company would supply the lion's share of WAN services to a Fortune 100 company within the year. Still hasn't happened, but there are increasing signs that 2011 could be the start of cable as a serious contender in the enterprise arena.

One reason I think so: the success of Cox, in particular. Cox's business services – specifically for to small-to-midsize businesses -- have skyrocketed in the past decade. In 2000, the company's business revenues were roughly $100 million; today they're over $1 billion. The company says it has more than 250,000 business customers, and is offering a mix of voice, data, Internet, hosted VoIP and Ethernet services.

As I predicted last month, a federal appeals court recently overturned the fines imposed by the Federal Communications Commission on Comcast in 2007. The ruling was overturned on the grounds that the FCC lacks jurisdiction over telco Internet access offerings.

This decision has a number of ramifications, which I'll go into shortly. But first: Some people are saying this ruling sounds the death knell to net neutrality.

As the old adage goes, "Be careful what you wish for -- you might get it, and wish you hadn't." Proponents of net neutrality might want to keep that in mind now that net neutrality regulations from either the FCC, Congress or both are a virtual certainty.

As with most wishes the impulse behind this one is laudable. As FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski puts it, the goal is "to ensure the Internet remains a free and open platform that promotes innovation, investment, competition, and users' interests." Amen!

Sounds like a crazy question, in this era of Facebook, Twitter and a "digital millennial" generation that's grown up never not knowing the Internet.

But there are worrying signs that the Internet's architecture may not be able to scale effectively much longer. I've written previously about the crisis in access capacity: Demand for access bandwidth is growing exponentially, while provider investment is growing linearly. The lines cross -- demand exceeds capacity -- sometime around 2012. And the solution isn't for providers (or even the government) to simply invest more money in access -- because Internet access is a break-even business at best, and a money-losing proposition in many cases.

Regular readers are probably familiar with my opinion on universal broadband service, but for anyone who's missed out, it's pretty simple: Love the idea, but fear the devil is in the details. Specifically, I'm talking about the details about who is going to pay, what they're paying for and how the money is to be collected. Oh, and then there's the question of who's going to build out the infrastructure.

Because universal broadband is a key initiative of the new administration, here's an early look at current thinking. There are two bills (House of Representatives and Senate) that differ in two key respects: The House bill proposes an investment of roughly $6 billion, while the Senate bill is for $8 billion; and the House bill earmarks roughly half of the funds to be administered by the Rural Utility Service. Both bills call for "net neutrality" requirements for infrastructure providers (a bit tricky because there's no agreed-on definition of net neutrality).

Love him or hate him, you've got to respect a guy who won't give up his BlackBerry.

I'm talking about our just-sworn-in President Obama, who famously refuses to give up his BlackBerry (rumors of his doing so are apparently greatly exaggerated). Seems he'd rather risk having his private noodlings publicly immortalized than disconnect from the world.

As President-elect Barack Obama begins fleshing out his agenda, one promising sign is that he considers Internet infrastructure to be key, judging from both his stated goals and the caliber of people he's asking to advise him on policy.

I couldn't agree more. But before we jump into policy discussions, we should probably agree on some definitions. What, exactly, comprises an ISP? Is it a telco that also offers Internet connectivity? A wireless provider? What about a content provider?

Are young workers today fundamentally different?

It's trendy these days to describe the so-called "millennial" generation -- those born between 1989 and 2000 -- as somehow fundamentally different, especially in their almost instinctive use of technology. Between MySpace, Twitter, cell phones and the ubiquity of the Internet, these kids have never known what it's like to be disconnected. They multitask all the time. And they really care what their friends think.