The Oregon Health Network (pdf), one of the largest projects funded by the FCC’s Rural Health Care Pilot Program, launched its network operations center today in Beaverton, Oregon.

OHN has a stated goal of bringing low-cost, high speed broadband to primary healthcare stakeholders in Oregon, potentially linking over 300 non-profit health care facilities, both urban and rural. Oregon Health Network seeks to be one tenant in infrastructure that also could be used for a wide variety of other governmental, educational or business applications (rfp).

The data capacity between each OHN user location and OHN exchange locations will be a minimum of 10 Megabits per second with an upgrade capacity in increments of 10 Megabits or 100 Megabits, up to 1 Gigabit, with future expansion to 10 Gigabits.

The Pilot Program will provide up to $20.2 million in funding for the project. The launch of the network operations center (NOC) will pull together multiple service providers into a single, consistent network to quickly resolve any network problems with a single call to the NOC.

“These critical improvements in the Oregon Health Network will further broadband’s role in delivering the best possible health care to Oregonians, no matter where they live,” said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski (pdf).

The FCC established the $417 million Pilot Program to increase patient access to care via telemedicine and support the transfer of electronic medical records. Nationwide, 62 projects are eligible to receive Pilot Program funding for telehealth networks serving approximately 6,000 health care facilities in 42 states and three U.S. territories, using broadband technologys.

At this time, 41 of these projects have either received funding commitments or developed requests for proposals to select vendors to build out their broadband networks.

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Don’t tell me that you’re innocent. Because it insults my intelligence.
– The Godfather

The FCC has asked Verizon for more details about their increased Early Termination Fees (pdf), reports PC Magazine. Verizon increased their ETF from $175 to $350 on some smartphones. A customer who cancels their two-year contract after 23 months still owes Verizon $120.

The FCC asked, “If the ETF is meant to recoup the wholesale cost of the phone over the life of the contract, why does a $120 ETF apply?”

The move comes after Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, asked that the FCC examine the issue. On Thursday, Klobuchar also introduced a bill that would limit the amount a mobile provider could charge for ETFs and require that they pro-rate the fees. Klobuchar’s bill would prevent wireless carriers from charging an ETF that is higher than the cell phone discount. If, for example, you received a $150 phone for free on a 2 year contract, then the termination fee cannot be more than $150.

The FCC wants carriers like Verizon to pro-rate their ETFs, provide more clear and conspicuous information about ETFs, and put the current ETF balance on monthly bills. Verizon currently pro-rates the $350 ETF by only $10 a month, which would require 35 months on a contract.

The FCC also requested more data about $1.99 data charges, which were referenced in a recent New York Times article.

“The phone is designed in such a way that you can almost never avoid getting $1.99 charge on the bill. Around the OK button on a typical flip phone are the up, down, left, right arrows. If you open the flip and accidentally press the up arrow key, you see that the phone starts to connect to the web. So you hit END right away. Well, too late. You will be charged $1.99 for that 0.02 kilobytes of data. NOT COOL. I’ve had phones for years, and I sometimes do that mistake to this day, as I’m sure you have. Legal, yes; ethical, NO.

“Every month, the 87 million customers will accidentally hit that key a few times a month! That’s over $300 million per month in data revenue off a simple mistake!

“Our marketing, billing, and technical departments are all aware of this. But they have failed to do anything about it—and why? Because if you get 87 million customers to pay $1.99, why stop this revenue?

Verizon must respond by Dec. 17.

The CTIA says the Klobuchar bill is pointless:

“This legislation is unnecessary simply because wireless carriers already pro-rate ETFs,” CTIA president and CEO Steve Largent said in a statement. “That was the response of a highly competitive industry to consumer demand, and this type of prescriptive mandate runs the very real risk of limiting consumer options in the future.”

Verizon has allowed pro-rated ETFs since 2006, Sprint and T-Mobile followed suit in late 2007, and AT&T implemented the same policy in 2008. Discounting the ETF balance monthly was only provided after the threat of legislation. Consumer complaints about Early Termination Fees prompted the the Cell Phone Empowerment Act of 2007.

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Clearwire CEO Bill Morrow promises WiMAX smartphones by Christmas of 2010.

Perhaps it will resemble the one announced this week by a trio of companies to build a WiMAX smartphone based on Android. That smartphone will support VoIP over WiMAX as well as other IP communication technologies and involves Beceem Communications, D2 Technologies and ECS.

The smartphone will make use of D2’s mCUE converged communications client powering the ECS T371 mobile device, based on the OMAP-3430 processor (the ARM Cortex-A8) from Texas Instruments, paired with Beceem’s BCSM250 WiMAX modem.

“Together with Beceem and ECS, we’ve shown how a complete ecosystem dedicated to mobile VoIP over WiMAX can help device manufacturers and unified communications/VoIP providers get new products to market more quickly, efficiently and effectively,” said Doug Makishima, chief operating officer at D2 Technologies.

D2’s mCUE VoIP software provides voice, IM chat, presence and video calls over WiMAX, as well as multi-radio, multi-network seamless voice call handover.

An Android WiMAX phone has the air of inevitably about it. The interesting bit is how Comcast might use it. Get your Hulu here — for $12.95/month.

Yankee Group expects global WiMAX subscriptions to grow from 3.9 million today to 92.3 million in 2015.

Android, Broadcasting & Cable, Cellular News, Corporate News, Gadgets, Mobile TV, Municipal Wireless, VoIP & IP-TV, WiMAX News | No Comments »

To track his wandering cat, Mark Spezio rigged up a cat collar with a lightweight GPS logger.

Here’s what he discovered about KooKoo’s secret habits. Amazon has a wide variety of GPS trackers that cost under $100.

In other GPS news, TomTom announced this week which cities have the worst traffic in the United States. The results were calculated using data from Speed Profiles, which aggregates the actual speeds that millions of anonymous, GPS-enabled drivers over the last two years.

Seattle has the worst traffic in the United States, with an average of 43% of its roads showing heavy delays. Rounding out the top five cities after Seattle are Los Angeles (38%), Chicago (37%), San Francisco (35%) and New York (31%). The “Bay Area” of California has the most cities in the top 30, with San Francisco, San Jose (29%) and Oakland (28%).

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SmartSynch announced Wednesday night that it has a plan for allowing universal communications between appliances, smart grids, and utilities, regardless of which communication protocol is used.

Their GridRouter is an Internet Protocol-based universal router with an open platform that can communicate with public and private networks whether they be using WiMax, municipal Wi-Fi, or a proprietary network system, explains C/Net.

The vast majority of utility wireless smart grid networks are built on proprietary wireless technology. But the trend from smart grid network companies, like Silver Spring Networks, Cisco and SmartNet, use network gear based on IP.

Earth 2 Tech says utilities could connect their existing proprietary networks to the GridRouter without having to upgrade their entire system, and use existing off-the-self IT management tools to do it.

Smart Grid technologies come in many flavors:

• The Wi-Fi Alliance announced in November, that it has a smart-grid task force reviewing how its standards might be modified to become the best choice for smart grids.
• The IEEE has formed a new 802.16 study group to investigate Smart Grid, public safety, avionics, airport surface communication, and surveillance applications. The new “GRIDMAN” Study Group hopes to develop a project authorization request (PAR) and supporting material for approval by IEEE 802 at the March 2010 IEEE 802 session.
• Grid-Net, a collaboration between GE, Intel and metering companies, is using WiMAX to link smart meters to utility companies.
• Google Power Meter uses the TED device which comes with a display unit, and connects to appliances via Zigbee. It has also partnered with AlertMe, which uses ZigBee instead of Wi-Fi for home devices to communicate with a central hub and smart meter.
• Zensys, founder of the Z-Wave Alliance, says the ZigBee Alliance mesh standard is too expensive for home or smart metering. Z-Wave operates at the 900mHz band. About 350 devices from 170 manufacturers now support Z-Wave, a wireless mesh technology that allows home devices such as lighting, appliances, entertainment centers and security systems to interoperate.
• HomeGrid Forum, a global, non-profit trade group promotes the United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU-T) G.hn networking standard. This profile can take advantage of all the existing wires available in the home (power lines, phone lines and coaxial cables) that are required for Smart Grid and other lower bit rate applications.

SmartSynch’s upgradable GridRouter is built to allow utilities to add multiple communications technologies from difference companies and make them all interoperable.

Related Smart Meter stories on Dailywireless include; DOE Announces $1.6B for Smart Grid Projects, Obama Announces $3.4B in Electric “Smart Grid” Grants, Smart Grid Gets Unwired, Smart Meters on The Stimulus Channel, Obama Announces $3.4B in Electric “Smart Grid” Grants, WiMAX SmartGrid Coming to 700K Australians, Home Networking: A Universal Spec?, Google Power Meter, M2M: Big Deal, Wireless Power Standard Emerging, and Sprint Announces Smart Grid Ambitions, ABI: Stimulus Means Big Bucks for Wireless, The Smart Grid: Licensed or Unlicensed Spectrum, Cellular-enabled SCADA, Smart Grid: Dumb or What?, Smart Grid: It’s Alive!, Google: Smart Power R US, 900 Mhz Telemetry, Traffic Cameras and ITS and the Corpus Christi Cloud.

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Comcast has agreed to buy a majority stake in NBC Universal from General Electric Co, creating a media superpower that would control not just how TV shows and movies are made, but how they are delivered to the home, reports the NY Times. Here’s how it unfolded.

GE cleared the way for the deal by securing Vivendi SA’s agreement to sell the company its 20 percent stake in NBC Universal for $5.8 billion. In May 2004, NBC acquired Vivendi Universal Entertainment to create NBC Universal. NBC assets including broadcast networks NBC and Telemundo, cable networks Bravo, CNBC and MSNBC, and television stations in major markets around the country. VUE assets included the Universal Pictures movie studio, theme parks in Hollywood and Orlando, and cable networks such as USA Network and SCI FI.

The cable heavyweight will own 51 percent of the venture, and General Electric will own 49 percent. Jeffrey Zucker, who has been president and CEO of NBC Universal, will lead the joint venture. Comcast plans to contribute about $6.5 billion in cash. The deal valued NBC Universal at about $30 billion.

Comcast is the largest U.S. cable service provider with 25 million television subscribers in 39 of the fifty U.S. states and 15 million broadband customers. The NBC acquistion would enable the cable giant to deliver programming to TV sets, personal computers, or mobile devices.

But the deal is controversial. Some think the NBC acquisition is visionary while others say it compares to the disasterous AOL/Time Warner merger in 2001. Critics, including some of Comcast’s own shareholders, suggest there is too little overlap between the businesses to draw out meaningful savings.

For GE, the deal allows it to concentrate on its industrial business, and could be the first step in a full break with NBC Universal, ending a relationship that stretches back to the dawn of television.

The Comcast businesses that will be part of the deal — including E!, Versus, the Golf Channel and 10 regional sports networks — are valued at $7.25 billion

The deal is likely to be scrutinized by government regulators, namely the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission, notes C/Net.

Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.), who heads the Antitrust and Competition Policy Subcommittee, said he will hold a congressional hearing to assess the merger’s impact on diversity in programming and on how people access media content on the Web.

“A vertically integrated Comcast/NBC would not only control marquee television and movie content, it would also control the primary avenues for distributing that content: a major television broadcast network, a major cable system operator and a major broadband Internet access provider,” said Mark Cooper, research Director at Free Press (pdf).

Politicians taking sides on Net neutrality issues and the national broadband plan may find it easy to bash Comcast over media ownership, a la carte billing, retransmission consent, and cable prices. The deal may also have an effect on online video services, such as Hulu, which is owned by NBC, News Corp., and Walt Disney Company.

In 2002, Tina Fey, the head writer and a performer on Saturday Night Live pitched a show that became 30 Rock, originally as a sitcom about cable news. NBC Entertainment president Kevin Reilly felt that “Fey was using the news setting as a fig leaf for her own experience and he encouraged her to write what she knew.”

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