Here's two bits of breaking news:
* The Federal Communications Commission has scheduled a hearing for Monday morning at Harvard Law School to discuss network traffic-shaping practices, otherwise known as the carrier policies behind the alleged blocking of peer-to-peer Internet traffic.
Officials from both Comcast Corp.--which has been widely accused of blocking, but has only admitted to delaying some traffic--and Verizon Communications are on the agenda as speakers. A second class action lawsuit was just filed against Comcast in connection with its traffic-shaping practices.
* As we were wrapping up the newsletter this morning, the Telecommunications Industry Association was announcing its 2008 Market Review and Forecast. One initial surprising stat is that the report shows the growth of the U.S. telecom industry speeding up from an 8.3% growth rate in 2007 to 9.3% in 2008, before slowing down in the following years.
On the surface, that looks to be a remarkably different take than the tone of uncertainty and gloom that has hovered around some 2008 forecasts thus far. You can count on us to take a closer look at this annual report in the days to come. Dan
For more:
- check out this story about the FCC hearing at Telephony
Related articles:
- Verizon recently said it wouldn't delay P2P traffic--unless it had to do it.