Month: January 2018

The alleged “swatter” behind Thursday’s police killing of a Wichita, Kansas, man has been arrested.

The city council in Fort Collins, Colorado, last night voted to move ahead with a municipal fiber broadband network providing gigabit speeds, two months after the cable industry failed to stop the project.

Last night’s city council vote came after residents of Fort Collins approved a ballot question that authorized the city to build a broadband network. The ballot question, passed in November, didn’t guarantee that the network would be built because city council approval was still required, but that hurdle is now cleared. Residents approved the ballot question despite an anti-municipal broadband lobbying campaign backed by groups funded by Comcast and CenturyLink.

The Fort Collins City Council voted 7-0 to approve the broadband-related measures, a city government spokesperson confirmed to Ars today.

“Last night’s three unanimous votes begin the process of building our city’s own broadband network,” Glen Akins, a resident who helped lead the pro-municipal broadband campaign, told Ars today. “We’re extremely pleased the entire city council voted to support the network after the voters’ hard fought election victory late last year. The municipal broadband network will make Fort Collins an even more incredible place to live.”

Net neutrality and privacy

While the Federal Communications Commission has voted to eliminate the nation’s net neutrality rules, the municipal broadband network will be neutral and without data caps.

“The network will deliver a ‘net-neutral’ competitive unfettered data offering that does not impose caps or usage limits on one use of data over another (i.e., does not limit streaming or charge rates based on type of use),” a new planning document says. “All application providers (data, voice, video, cloud services) are equally able to provide their services, and consumers’ access to advanced data opens up the marketplace.”

The city will also be developing policies to protect consumers’ privacy. FCC privacy rules that would have protected all Americans were eliminated by the Republican-controlled Congress last year.

The items approved last night (detailed here and here) provide a $1.8 million loan from the city’s general fund to the electric utility for first-year start-up costs related to building telecommunications facilities and services. Later, bonds will be “issued to support the total broadband build out,” the measure says.

The city intends to provide gigabit service for $70 a month or less and a cheaper Internet tier. Underground wiring for improved reliability and “universal coverage” are two of the key goals listed in the measure.

On Wednesday, Delta Airlines flight 9771 flew from Atlanta to Pinal Airpark in Arizona. It wasn’t a full flight—just 48 people on board. But it was a milestone—and not just for the two people who got married mid-flight—for it marked the very last flight of a Boeing 747 being operated by a US airline. Delta’s last scheduled passenger service with the jumbo was actually late in December, at which point it conducted a farewell tour and then some charter flights. But as of today, after 51 long years in service, if you want to ride a 747 you’ll need to be traveling abroad.

Way back in the 1960s, when the white heat of technological progress was burning bright, it looked for a while as if supersonic air travel was going to be the next big thing. France and Britain were collaborating on a new kind of airliner that would fly at twice the speed of sound and shrink the globe. But there was just one thing they hadn’t counted on: Boeing and its gargantuan 747 jumbo jet. The double-decker airliner wouldn’t break the sound barrier, but its vast size compared to anything else in the skies helped drop the cost of long-haul air travel, opening it up to the people in a way Concorde could never hope to do.

Boeing was already having a pretty good time selling its 707 jetliner, but Pan American Airlines boss Juan Trippe wanted something special for his passengers, and he approached the aircraft manufacturer with a request for a plane that could carry twice as many passengers as its bread-and-butter long-haul model. In 1966, Trippe signed an order for 25 of the new passenger airliners. The first of these entered service in 1970, and the world would never be the same again.

Since then, more than 1,500 747s have left Boeing’s factory in Everett, Washington. Most spent their lives carrying passengers for airlines or carrying freight around the world. But some special variants have lived more exciting lives, fighting forest fires, carrying presidents—even ferrying space shuttles. The US Air Force uses a small fleet of E-4Bs as airborne doomsday control centers, and it even tried using one for ballistic missile defense, complete with a giant laser poking out its nose. More outrageous (stillborn) proposals even wanted to use 747s as mobile cruise missile launchers or as airborne aircraft carriers for little jet fighters.

The 747’s long career has seen it fly billions of miles, carrying billions of passengers, but it also had its share of tragedies. In 1977, a pair of 747s (one KLM, one Pan Am) crashed into each other on the runway at Tenerife’s airport. In 1980, the USSR shot down a Korean Air Lines 747 after mistaking it for a US spy plane. Terrorist bombs destroyed two 747s mid-flight—an Air India 747 in 1985 and a Pan Am 747 in 1988—and several more had been hijacked in the 1970s. Other disasters resulted from poor maintenance or human error. Terrible as those incidents were, they should be seen in context: 61 747s (out of 1,540) have been lost since 1970, more than half of which came without any loss of life—jumbos are estimated to have carried more than 3.5 billion passengers since 1970.

On a personal note, the 747 has been a pretty important aircraft in my life. When my family moved from South Africa to the UK in the late 1970s, it was onboard a jumbo jet. And I’m pretty sure the same is true for my move to the US back in 2002. This past summer I crossed the Atlantic in 747s twice, most memorably sitting in seat 1A on one occasion.

If this post has you hankering to spend some time airborne in a jumbo, fret not; although no US passenger carriers still operate the big bird, several hundred remain in service with other airlines, most notably British Airways and Lufthansa. And if you happen to be an oligarch or Saudi prince, Boeing will happily build you your own 747-8—but don’t expect it to be cheap!

Listing image by Mike Kane/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Some supporters of net neutrality are focusing their attention on Congress and vowing to vote out lawmakers who won’t join a legislative effort to reinstate net neutrality rules.

“If they don’t vote for net neutrality, let’s vote them out,” says the website launched yesterday by advocacy group Fight for the Future, which also organized recent protests.

The website lists which senators have and haven’t supported a plan to use the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to stop the repeal of net neutrality rules. The rules, repealed by the Federal Communications Commission last month, prohibit Internet service providers from blocking or throttling Internet content or prioritizing content in exchange for payment.

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) announced the CRA resolution shortly after the FCC vote, and 29 senators including Markey have pledged to support it. All of the 29 are members of the Democratic caucus.

The bill just needs majority support in the Senate, which could happen if all Democrats sign on and get some Republican support.

“House and Senate leaders cannot block a CRA with majority support from coming to the floor,” the “Vote for Net Neutrality” website explains. “Net neutrality is not a partisan issue, but many Republicans in Congress have been on the wrong side of it recently. That’s changing. In the Senate, we may only need one more Republican to vote for the CRA to get it passed, given that Susan Collins (R-Maine) opposed the FCC plan and signaled openness to a CRA.”

Messages to lawmakers

Fight for the Future urges net neutrality supporters to send tweets to lawmakers that say, “I will not be voting for anyone who doesn’t vote for the CRA to save #NetNeutrality.” The group is also gathering phone numbers from people who want text message updates about their representatives’ voting records on net neutrality before this year’s congressional elections.

US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has pledged to force a vote on reinstating net neutrality rules.

The House of Representatives has a bigger Republican majority, so about 20 Republicans would have to join Democrats for the CRA to be successful.

“That’s harder, but several Republican representatives have already criticized the FCC’s vote, and given that more than 75 percent of Republican voters support net neutrality, it’s doable,” Fight for the Future said.

The activists also want to stop Congress from passing legislation that only nominally protects net neutrality. Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) is pushing an “Open Internet Preservation Act” that would ban blocking and throttling but allow ISPs to create paid fast lanes and prohibit state governments from enacting their own net neutrality laws. Blackburn’s bill would also prohibit the FCC from imposing any type of common carrier regulations on broadband providers.

“Lobbyists are foaming at the mouth at the chance to ram through bad legislation that permanently undermines net neutrality,” Fight for the Future co-founder Tiffiniy Cheng said in an announcement yesterday.

Comcast reportedly fired about 500 salespeople shortly before Christmas, despite claiming that the company would create thousands of new jobs in exchange for a big tax cut.

Comcast apparently tried to keep the firings secret while it lobbied for the tax cut that was eventually passed into law by the Republican-controlled Congress and signed by President Trump in late December. The Philadelphia Inquirer revealed the Comcast firings this week in an article based on information from an anonymous former employee, Comcast documents, and other sources in the company.

The former employee who talked to the Inquirer “could not be identified because of a nondisclosure agreement as part of a severance package,” the article said. The Inquirer headline notes that Comcast was able to implement the firings “quietly,” avoiding any press coverage until this week.

Ars asked Comcast today if all 500 fired employees had to sign those nondisclosure agreements, but we didn’t receive an answer. We also asked why the firings were necessary given that the tax cut was supposed to create more Comcast jobs, and we asked if Comcast has specific plans to create jobs in other areas.

Comcast gave us this statement but offered no further details: “Periodically, we reorganize groups of employees and adjust our sales tactics and talent. This change in the Central Division is an example of this practice and occurred in the context of our adding hundreds of frontline and sales employees. All these employees were offered generous severance and an opportunity to apply for other jobs at Comcast.”

A Comcast spokesperson also confirmed the firings to the Inquirer.

“Thousands of new direct and indirect jobs”

The firings happened around December 15. On December 20, Comcast announced that, because of the pending tax cut and recent repeal of net neutrality rules, it would give “special bonuses” of $1,000 to more than 100,000 employees and invest more than $50 billion in infrastructure over the next five years.

“With these investments, we expect to add thousands of new direct and indirect jobs,” Comcast said at the time.

We examined Comcast’s investment claims in an article on December 21. As it turns out, Comcast’s annual investments already soared during the two-plus years that net neutrality rules were on the books, and the $50 billion amount could be achieved if those investments simply continued increasing by a modest amount.