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In fact the battle is not between the United Nations and ICANN, it is between the International Telecommunications Union and ICANN. Please bash the correct international institutions!

For those who wish to see the actual text that governments are considering, it can be found on the official website of the WSIS here. Note that the paragraph in question is 14h, which has basically two options, one that gives more of a role of the International Telecommunications Union, and another that basically affirms the role of ICANN.

In fact the battle is not between the United Nations and ICANN, it is between the International Telecommunications Union and ICANN. Please bash the correct international institutions!

For those who wish to see the actual text that governments are considering, it can be found on the official website of the WSIS here. Note that the paragraph in question is 14h, which has basically two options, one that gives more of a role of the International Telecommunications Union, and another that basically affirms the role of ICANN.

I found it quite enlightening to read the Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action for the summit. The most interesting aspect of this document is the apparent riders that were added to the document later in the draft process [in brackets]. Some selected quotes:

We are resolute in our quest to ensure everyone can benefit from the opportunities ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) can offer...all stakeholders should work together to:...(list of items)...;foster and respect cultural diversity;[recognize the role of the media]...

Governments, as well as the private sector, civil society, and the United Nations and other international organizations have an important role and responsibility in developing the Information Society and, as appropriate, in decision making processes...[The media has a special role in the Information Society]...

[Strengthening the trust framework, including [network and information security] authentication, privacy and consumer protection, is a prerequisite for the development of the Information Society and for building confidence among users of ICTs...

The document seemed like a table tennis match, wherein the countervailing issues had no apparent resolution. In particular, the conflict between the fair use access to free information and the digital rights management and security issues seems irreconcilable. I applauded the emphasis on free and open standards - but again find it hard to reconcile with other issues attached to the document.

This item I found particularly interesting:

Volunteering, [if conducted in harmony with national policies and local cultures,] can be a valuable asset for raising human capacity to make productive use of ICT tools and to build a more inclusive Information Society.

Given the subject of the document, 'Volunteering' in this context would be helping people to learn 'ICT' tools and perhaps building infrastructure. I can not fathom how this would be conducted outside of 'harmony with national policies and local cultures'. This does, however, open the door for suppressing the assistance given to particular groups in a state, if such assitance is not approved by said government. This contradicts the whole idea behind an inclusive Information Society, which this document seems, at first glance, to espouse.

The critical thing to understand with ENUM is that it mirrors the existing phone number hierarchy, beginning at the country code level. Consequently, the same entities that handle phone numbers, beginning with the ITU and ending with your local telco, are the same entities that have the authority to approve delegations within the ENUM (e164.arpa) domain.

The mention of Neustar in the article, whilst not explicit, is for Neustar to handle further delegations within 1.e164.arpa. But why should Neustar handle 1.e164.arpa anyway? Well, Neustar is the company that is currently entrusted with the NANPA (North American Numbering Plan Administration), which is the entity that the ITU has recognised as handling phone country code '1'. Obviously, it makes sense for Neustar to also handle this, and you'd think that it wasn't a big deal.

Curiously, it was enough of a deal for the US Government to formally request that the ITU or the RIPE NCC not delegate 1.e164.arpa to any entity back in April 2002. So at the present time, as the ITU hasn't received any requests to delegate 1.e164.arpa, the RIPE NCC hasn't created the delegation. Hence the original article trying to raise awareness of enum to 'merkins.

The critical thing to understand with ENUM is that it mirrors the existing phone number hierarchy, beginning at the country code level. Consequently, the same entities that handle phone numbers, beginning with the ITU and ending with your local telco, are the same entities that have the authority to approve delegations within the ENUM (e164.arpa) domain.

The mention of Neustar in the article, whilst not explicit, is for Neustar to handle further delegations within 1.e164.arpa. But why should Neustar handle 1.e164.arpa anyway? Well, Neustar is the company that is currently entrusted with the NANPA (North American Numbering Plan Administration), which is the entity that the ITU has recognised as handling phone country code '1'. Obviously, it makes sense for Neustar to also handle this, and you'd think that it wasn't a big deal.

Curiously, it was enough of a deal for the US Government to formally request that the ITU or the RIPE NCC not delegate 1.e164.arpa to any entity back in April 2002. So at the present time, as the ITU hasn't received any requests to delegate 1.e164.arpa, the RIPE NCC hasn't created the delegation. Hence the original article trying to raise awareness of enum to 'merkins.

Incorrect. Canada is third in the world for broadband deployment after Hong Kong (2) and South Korea (1). Japan is number 5.

Of course if you want to talk about speed as opposed to deployment, then Japan is at the top of the heap.

"The best argument I've heard for why the US is behind in broadband is the infrastructure cost because the US population is spread out compared to Japan (or even Canada, given that the bulk of the population is in a relatively narrow strip along the south of Canada)"

The other factor is federal money. A lot of federal money in Canada is used to enhance the availability of broadband access. This has not happenned in the USA. As a result, corporations who pay for deploying the networks do not want to enhance access at all as they prefer to have monopolies as opposed to having to dealing with actual competition.

One of them being the retarded use of XML on an _internal_ data pipeline.

Thanks for pointing out this obvious design flaw.
If they need to specify a syntax for internal purposes, why did they not choose ASN.1 (ISO/IEC 8824-1) instead?

LPI will tentatively be holding a number of events at the WSIS conference in December, including an open source workshop and a certification exam lab; it is also our intention to put a Linux "live" CD in the hands of every WSIS delegate. We will have at least six people at the conference, working to ensure that the delegations are capable of overcoming the anti-open-source FUD which is no doubt going on.

To that end, LPI has submitted a commentary on the WSIS activities, now part of the official WSIS documentation, that is stirring some interest. Anyone who is interested in helping LPI's efforts at WSIS is invited to subscribe to the LPI@WSIS mailing list.

The FSF is participating through the WSIS Working Group on Patents, Copyrights and Trademarks; RMS is on the group's steering committee and Georg Greve of FSF Europe is one of the co-ordinators.

• civil society news center
• Communications Rights in the Information Society
• german civil society
• Press Release to Free Software from German Civil Society (german only, sorry).
• UNO Documents: Draft Declaration (in english, arabic, russion, chinese, spanish, french...)

Heh,

It's even worse in ITU's World Summit on Information Society. The goverments are really fighting against each other on the governance of Internet and it's possible that it will be one of the topics, which will destroy the whole process (the funding for developing countries is still the best bet).

Register has a nice story about the Prepcom III, which ended up being a (almost) total distaster. (Anyway it was funny to participate and see f.ex. how the highly paid diplomats argue how spam should be spelled (SPAM /spam) etc..)

V.

You'll see that in all cases, the "S" stands for Symmetric.

In the same class is the ITU who have a similar model of charging. Among their standards is ITU-R TF.460 which defines coordinated Universal time (UTC). If you've ever wondered why leap seconds are so poorly implemented by your computer, this proprietary standard is part of the reason. It is evident that the original authors of the POSIX standard had not read it before they declared that a Unix time_t should indicate time in UTC.

Stolen from the Executive Summary of the report, I give you the top 30:

Korea (Rep.)
Hong Kong, China
Canada
Taiwan, China
Denmark
Iceland
Belgium
Sweden
Netherla nds
Japan
United States
Austria
Switzerland
Singapore
Finland
Malta
Germany
Macao, China
St. Kitts and Nevis
Estonia
Slovenia
Spain
Portugal
France
United Kingdom
Israel
Norway
Italy
Australia
New Zealand

ITU Report

Makes for a good read.

Yes, there are significant problems with biometrics over the Net. Most of these problems can be alleviated by adding a trusted human being to the equasion, someone to stand by the biometric reader and make sure nobody does anything obviously hinky with it. (In this case, the teller serves that function.)

...or so they say. In fact, many European politicians do know that allowing software patents and business method patents inevitably leads to countless trivial patents.

You wouldn't believe it, but here is what the Directive's proponents have admitted themselves:
"Arlene McCarthy, chair of the legal affairs committee, said earlier this month she was not prepared to consider any proposals for amendments that do not acknowledge the patentability of software."

In other words, they do want to conjure up a legal framework which scares even IT industry giants such as SAP, and not just small and medium enterprises, open-source advocates, academics and initiatives such as Attac that are of little importance to those prepared to discard or ignore any arguments made from what is just "the commie corner" in their view of the world.
(P.S.: I am posting the google links rather than the direct URLs, for as of this writing, FFII.org itself seems to be unreachable, at this crucial moment in time...)

The plenary vote on the new patents directive will be held within a few days, so please do contact some Members of the European Parliament (rather not just by eMail) right now and tell them that the introduction of software patents is a mistake their voters will never forget, no matter whether it is made knowingly nor out of ignorance.

Moreover, there is no need to rush to precedential judgment now, only weeks before the World Summit on the Information Society, which (according to proposals such as these) may well turn on its head overreaching IP laws.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but WRC is a conference organized by ITU.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but WRC is a conference organized by ITU.

The World Administrative Radio Congress (WARC) recommends international spectrum allocation. Note the use of the word recommends, individual countries can (and do) ignore ITU-T and ITU-R recommendations when it suits them. (The usual reason is when some national application such as military comms or a locally developed radio system is already using the frequency band).

From memory, the 2.4Ghz frequency band in which 802.11 operates is designated for ISM (industrial, scientific and medical) use. This is traditionally a license free application - but this is entirely down to the individual countries, who may chose to charge, or impose complex licenses.

Getting copies of the official publications, defining radio specturm allocation - the ITU-R Radio Regulations, is expensive. You can order online but they cost 600-750 Swiss Francs (around 300 US dollars).

The most widely used VoIP protocol is H.323. H323 allows negotiation of a compression CoDec. The base (worst) codec which must be supported is G.711 (64kb/s - this is what goes down an ISDN line - this is regarded as lossless digital encoding).

Latency is dealt with by using QoS. I make calls from Australia to Europe through a VoIP carrier at a cost of about 3cents/minute. The round trip delay appears less than 0.2 seconds. The recommended CoDec is G.723.1 which is 5.3 or 6.3 kb/s (switches dependent on complexity I believe). This CoDec gives speech quality better than a mobile network will give you.

The bandwidth is only required in the direction of speech - when there is silence going the other way the bandwidth drops to near zero (just comfort noise generation and control signals send down the line). Comfort noise generation is done by a funny little algorithm that tells the other end the type of "silence" (static) to produce.

The request line contained invalid characters following the protocol string.

Apache/1.3.26 Server at www.itu.int Port 80

Connection closed by foreign host.
[tom@cougaarforge tom]$
=========

They're running Apache and mod_php... can't be too bad :-)

Yours,

tom

There are those who would like to see the ITU take over from ICANN. I'm not sure that the ITU is the perfect organisation to do it. It is bureaucratic and is a group of telcos rather than including wider Internet interests. However, I do agree that it would be a lot better than what we have at the moment.

I for one could not imagine anything worse.

The ITU takes every available opportunity to put itself between enabling technologies and the people who could benefit from them.

Here's what the internet would look like under ITU:

1. Standards documents are copyrighted, redistribution is forbidden, and cost $1,000 and up from the ITU Publications office (go ahead, try to get a protocol definition off their site).

2. No individuals or companies have any representation or even a right to comment except at the request of their government.

3. Decisions are made by a collection of national telecom monopolies who have a strong vested interest in stifling any development that cannibalizes their core revenues (i.e., overpriced landline phone service).

4. Arbitrary complexity will be added to all communications protocols in order to ensure difficulty of reverse-engineering.

5. Absolutely everything will be regulated to death and beyond.

6. New technology adoption will languish several years behind competing environments. In fact, for this reason, I speculate that if the ITU does manage to gain any appreciable control over internet infrastructure, interesting activity on the internet will quietly migrate to a "same but different" network free of their stifling control.

Frustrated by the growth of the internet at the expense of the centralized data network they had been advocating, and livid at the way that techologies like VOIP have decreased the relevance of their constituent monopolies, for the last few years all the ITU has really done is schemed for a hostile takeover of the internet. It's as dangerous as dealing with a herd of angry dinosaurs: While they are rapidly growing technologically irrelevant, their bureaucratic and political skills are well-honed and they are both rich and ruthless.

In sum: ITU = enemy of the people, enemy of the internet, enemy of affordable communications, enemy of democracy. And I say this as a touchy-feely left wing one-worlder. If you're anywhere to the right of me you should be outside their gates with a torch and pitchfork.

broadband penetration statistics

though those are the numbers from last year, i think they're more accurate

GSM? WHICH GSM? Africa, US or European frequency?

GSM not as universal as most think.

ENUM in the News

EFA expresses security concerns over ENUM, SMH, November 27, 2002.

Enum's potential applications aren't as widespread as promised, New Architect, July 2002.

Internet Telephone Numbering System (ENUM) offers promise of a single point of contact for all communication devices, ITU Press Release, May 31, 2002.

Listing Again, The Economist, April 11, 2002.

Phone number-to-e-mail service raises privacy concerns, Computerworld, October 5, 2001.

Your Rights Online: A Number For Everything, Slashdot, September 4, 2001.

One number & and no escape anywhere, The Times, September 3, 2001.

Perhaps the running of the internet should become a United Nations function?

I was just thinking that perhaps it should be handed over to the ITU. If they can get the world's phone systems talking to one another, the Internet should be a piece of cake in comparison. (You ever look at telephony protocols? You don't want to. Trust me.)

Complexity: I've implemented SIP, H.323, et al., and SIP is just as complex as H.323.

Not true. I've developed two commercial SIP stacks, each about one man year. While I haven't developed an H.323 stack, I've worked with both the OpenH323 and RadVision H.323 stacks, and SIP is much, much simpler.

To wit, RFC 3261 is the largest RFC ever produced and even larger than the H.323 Recommendation.

I don't have a copy of the H.323 Recommendation because I'm not willing to buy it. However, the ITU's H.323 download page shows that the H.323 spec is 2,112,158 bytes in pdf format, while the latest SIP spec is 1,231,871 bytes. This non-conclusive evidence suggests that the H.323 spec is in fact twice as large as the SIP spec.

Add on all of the supporting RFCs and I-Ds, and you have a real mess. Folks even talk about the mess on the SIP reflectors.

H.323 has numerous annexes as well. Most SIP developers speak highly of the protocol, and while there are problems, I certainly wouldn't call it "a mess".

Interoperability: SIP is not more interoperable than H.323. Geez, I think their up to 13 or 14 interop events so far, and I've heard from those in attendance that SIP interoperability is getting harder and harder to achieve.

I have not seen these kinds of interoperability issues at the interops. I have seen many stacks fail the various torture tests, but this does not preclude interoperability. The only reason H.323 is just now achieving interoperability is because of the consolidation of the video conferencing industry into a single dominate vendor: Polycom.

Patents: There are no patents that I am aware of regarding H.323. There are, however, patent claims against some codecs used by H.323, e.g., G.723.1 and G.729, but those same codecs are also used by SIP.

One difference: H.323 requires support of patened codecs, building in a revenue source for those controlling the standard. SIP has no such codec requirements, although I agree that in practice those same codecs are used by many SIP clients.

Moreover, there are several patent claims against SIP (http://www.aful.org/wws/arc/patents/2003-01/msg00 082.html).

This is certainly a potential liability, and it is indeed "aful". Interestingly, those filing patents against IETF standards tend to be frozen out of the standards process, which hopefully acts as a deterant.

Microsoft: I agree that they will hurt SIP more than help. Note that Messenger is merely SIP-based.

Hey, we agree about Microsoft! Yes, Messenger is currently SIP-based (in a bastardized way), but as I said, MS is soon moving to more fully embrace SIP. It will be interesting to see what happens...

Before you go running in the streets naked yelling Eureka, consider the privacy implication of the said technology and other related issues. Google it. Thanks.

I have no idea why anyone would ever need a TB drive at home...but if it comes down to betting, I'll bet with history, and bet they will.

Easy. Digital video.

1TB = 500 hours of MPEG2 video.
1TB = 100 hours of HiDef video.
Avg TV viewing in UK approx 3hr/day/per-person = 90 hrs/month

Even with improved CODECs (H.264/MPEG4(part 10)) will improve the compressions by a factor of 2 to 3 for the same quality. It's deminishing returns after that for newer CODECs -- so far it usually been cheaper just to add a bigger disk.

Dish Networks demo'ed a dual tuner HiDef integrated PVR at CES which has 250GB of disk and that's targeted for this year...

I can see myself watching all my TV through a PVR and keeping favorite film/series on tap on a big disk.

--- Rahul.

The main concern is privacy not identity theft. See places like CASPIAN for examples of why identity linked databases for shopping tracking could be(and are being) horribly abused by these chains. The reason the finger print is even worse then the cards is that the finger print is linked directly to you and only you (barring forgery of finger prints of course) whereas with some cards you can put false or no information on signing up (although some require ID when signing up). If these fingerprints are correlated with any other database (IAO program anyone?) then suddenly anyone with access could know way more about you then you can imagine (think of the detectives that go through peoples trash to learn all kinds of neat things for an example of what I mean). The fact that your fingerprints are being linked to something as seemingly "irrelevant" as groceries is much worse then an ATM as it shows how pervasive we will allow this kind of tracking to be. Being paranoid doesn't make me wrong.

This is a link to the Matsumoto example (.pdf) of creating a fake thumb from gelatin.

explicit instructions on how to fake such a system are here:

http://www.itu.int/itudoc/itu-t/workshop/security/ present/s5p4.pdf

going AC because I'm sure some gevernment asshole will consider this a terrorist threat.

I for one would not trust this system with my credit card or atm card. The system can be quite easily fooled with some super-glue, a pcb board, and gelatin.

Bruce Schneier wrote an article about the process and which also has link to the presention given by the Japanese professor who came up with and tested the process.

How does the fact that it uses Biometrics make it secure? We all know that biometrics can be defeated rather easily. So what's the point? fingerprinting is easy to defeat. So are voice prints and eye scans. So someone please tell me how exactly this is more secure than the average linux PDA?

Since shortwave is more or less a party line with pure analog transmission,

There is plenty of digital traffic on HF.

what stops an unscrupulous person from spamming it and making it unusable to everyone else?

The ITU. Even though I do remeber Castro took 1510 WLAC here in Nashville, along with other stations on the East Coast, off the air around 1989 because of "TV Marti". (Sorry for no links. I'm lazy.)

Apparently Microsoft does not feel particularly threatened by the U.S. Department of Justice. Only by Snow White.

I'm not rusty on the JPEG algorithm.

I read through the legalese wording of the first 40 claims and even though it describes an algorithm that uses run lengh coding and huffman-like coding (more generic), the algorithm that is described in this patent is not part of Baseline JPEG as standardized in ITU-T T.81, ISO 10918-1, and MIL-STD-188-198A

Sony never should have paid. I guess that's what happens if you let lawyers run the world and bluff their way around court rooms. IANAL and I feel sorry for those who are.

I'd sell my Forgent stocks asap.

Sorta like the ITU?

They don't do licenses like the FCC, but they are in charge of band planning IIRC.

I dunno, though. The UN is a representative organization with no popular vote and many undemocratic states as members. On top of which, the ITU is not an operations organization at all--it runs standards bodies, things like that. I'd be very hesitant to hand it control of such a crucial thing. Perhaps the USA could operate the central DNS on behalf of the ITU?

Were these experiments performed for Starfleet? His presentation logo looks like the Starfleet logo.

There's very little inter-country bandwidth within Africa. This presentation says there was only 7.5 Mbit/s between countries in Africa (including the Arab states, like Egypt), but 170Mbit/s from Africa to North America. "African ISPs spend a much higher proportion of their costs on telecom costs (esp. international connectivity) than ISPs in developed economies."

Also see BalancingAct-africa.com, which covers ISPs in Africa.

Overall, it looks a lot like US internet services circa 1990. High per-hour prices, low bandwidths, long latency.

...we recommend that an intensive, international study be started at once, with a mandate to propose detailed and meaningful paths for the Internet's development, operations, and management. The goal of this study would be to help guide the formation of purpose-built representative organisations and policies that would be beneficial both to established Internet stakeholders and to the wide variety of organizations and individuals who are effectively disenfranchised in the current Internet policy environment.

That sounds to me an exact description of the International Working Party on the White Paper, the consultation process which led to the setting up of ICANN (and, which, incidentally, I took part in in Geneva).

What worries me is that if we do the whole thing again in the same way,

• There's a very high probability that we'll come up with something more or less exactly like ICANN;
• If we go round this cycle often enough, Governments (plural) are going to get pissed off, and the functions will either be put into the hands of the ITU or a new, intergovermental (or UN) body will be set up to take over.

It's a shame Jon Postel went and died on us; we moaned enough about him during his lifetime, but he died this job far better than ICANN have. Short of finding another individual as unmoved by commercial pressures, and as essentially fair minded as Jon was, we are stuck with a bunch of extremely wealthy conflicting vested interests, and a lot of hungry looking lawyers. The horizon to windward looks stormy.

It is widely reported that more than 3 billion people in the world have no access to a telephone at all. In fact, according to the Center for Media Education, 18% of Americans lack telephone service.

This makes the number of people online something like 15 to 16 percent of the population with telephone access.

You can find some more interesting information about telephone and Internet access around the world here and here.

For a little perspective, check out the brochure from the ITU World Telecommunication Development Conference 2002. A hopeful note, according to that link: "Africa now has more than twice as many main telephone connections as Tokyo and 85 percent of today's world population share 45 percent of all telephone lines (see Figure 1). In comparison, in 1984, 90 percent of the world's people used only ten percent of all telephone lines."

-Isaac

Look at the Short Message Service (SMS) which was meant for sending control messages between cell stations around the world on the GSM network. Suddenly people started using this SMS feature because of the nice way of noting people even if they were not nearby the cellphone. Then thee telecom industry started billing the SMS messages and they have now, here in Norway, over 70% profit for each message. That's over 60$ per minute if you compare prices to the bandwidth used by normal GSM voice-calls.

After this, they started introducing WAP. This time they thought that they should start earning money for each WAP request from the beginning, and they started the usual meetings for patent and similar stuff that so many times have totally destroyed the compareness to the free internet. The result was that the telecom operators wanted to have full control of all services, and they all ended up with no users using wap at all. Technically, the greediness of the telecom industry totally destroyed the WAP before it was even introduced. Now they are talking about the UMTS high-bandwidth network and they are still heading for the same failure as WAP since they want major control over all services.

Now, back to topic.

If Microsoft was a memember of the telecom industry:

You had to pay $0.1 for every Messenger message

You had to pay $0.00002 for every megabyte of data you sent using the OS

You had no rights to use e.g. windows media video unless you signed a contract of every-minute-fees

(Note that Cell-version of Microsoft Messenger have to charge a fee because of the greedy telecom industry requires them so).

As you can see, there is nothing better than seeing Microsoft trying to affect the Telecom Industry by moving the cell-platform for the Microsoft way. I am not saying that this would make it better, and I am not saying that it is comparable for the totally open minded and free Internet, but it's still a general leap ahead for the inevitable convergence of the Telecom and Internet industry.

There is a fundamental difference between an analog modem and a device that sends digital data like a cable-modem or isdn router. Sheesh.

Sure, they are different, but they are both modems, and they use some form of modulation (time or frequency domain) to send digital data over an analog channel.

Well, the ITU Telecommunication Terminology Database defines "modulation" as A process by which a quantity which characterizes an oscillation or wave follows the variations of a signal or of another oscillation or wave.", which sounds like a signal being imposed on a carrier wave.

BRI ISDN lines, however, use no carrier signal; instead, the voltage on the line, as I remember, directly indicates one of 00, 01, 10, and 11, so it's not a "modem" in the sense of something that modulates a carrier wave with a digital signal and demodulates the carrier wave to extract a digital signal.

DSL modems, however, do send signals over a carrier wave and extract signals from a carrier wave, as I remember. I don't know what scheme cable modems use, but they may also modulate a carrier signal.

All modern modems (including 56k, cable, etc.) are mixed-signal devices including an analog front-end along with digital processing.

Yes, but that has nothing to do with whether the digital signal is modulated atop a carrier wave or not.

There is a fundamental difference between an analog modem and a device that sends digital data like a cable-modem or isdn router. Sheesh.

Sure, they are different, but they are both modems, and they use some form of modulation (time or frequency domain) to send digital data over an analog channel.

Well, the ITU Telecommunication Terminology Database defines "modulation" as A process by which a quantity which characterizes an oscillation or wave follows the variations of a signal or of another oscillation or wave.", which sounds like a signal being imposed on a carrier wave.

BRI ISDN lines, however, use no carrier signal; instead, the voltage on the line, as I remember, directly indicates one of 00, 01, 10, and 11, so it's not a "modem" in the sense of something that modulates a carrier wave with a digital signal and demodulates the carrier wave to extract a digital signal.

DSL modems, however, do send signals over a carrier wave and extract signals from a carrier wave, as I remember. I don't know what scheme cable modems use, but they may also modulate a carrier signal.

All modern modems (including 56k, cable, etc.) are mixed-signal devices including an analog front-end along with digital processing.

Yes, but that has nothing to do with whether the digital signal is modulated atop a carrier wave or not.

Fortunately however, the ham bands are internationally regulated. The USA (or any individual nation) could not reallocate these frequencies to other services without securing those frequencies through ITU proceedings, which would be far more difficult than simply giving the FCC "heavy pressure".

It is important to remember that radio, particularly HF radio, knows no borders, and the FCC is not an international authority.

I'm just wondering if perhaps someone has patented the algorithms used to drive these soft modems. A Free Software implementation of a soft modem driver will thus be in violation of the patent then. As far as I can tell the ITU, the standards body that defines these modem standards, allows what the W3C calls RAND licensing, as they state in patent policy (excerpt):

2 If an ITU-T Recommendation is developed and such information as referred to in paragraph 1 [patents and other intellectual property claims], three different situations may arise:

2.1 The patent holder waives his rights; hence, the Recommendation is freely accessible to everybody, subject to no particular conditions, no royalties are due, etc.

2.2 The patent holder is not prepared to waive his rights but would be willing to negotiate licenses with other parties on a non-discriminatory basis on reasonable terms and conditions. Such negotiations are left to the parties concerned and are performed outside the ITU-T. [emphasis mine]

2.3 The patent holder is not willing to comply with the provisions of either paragraph 2.1 or paragraph 2.2; in such case, no Recommendation can be established.

It's paragraph 2.2 that worries me. If any patents exist on the modem standards implemented by soft modems that are thus RAND-licensable, any GPL implementation is impossible. I believe some of the compression algorithms used in some of the modem standards are already known to be patented, such as the infamous LZW compression algorithm held by Unisys that has caused the huge flap over GIF's a couple of years back.

I'm just wondering if perhaps someone has patented the algorithms used to drive these soft modems. A Free Software implementation of a soft modem driver will thus be in violation of the patent then. As far as I can tell the ITU, the standards body that defines these modem standards, allows what the W3C calls RAND licensing, as they state in patent policy (excerpt):

2 If an ITU-T Recommendation is developed and such information as referred to in paragraph 1 [patents and other intellectual property claims], three different situations may arise:

2.1 The patent holder waives his rights; hence, the Recommendation is freely accessible to everybody, subject to no particular conditions, no royalties are due, etc.

2.2 The patent holder is not prepared to waive his rights but would be willing to negotiate licenses with other parties on a non-discriminatory basis on reasonable terms and conditions. Such negotiations are left to the parties concerned and are performed outside the ITU-T. [emphasis mine]

2.3 The patent holder is not willing to comply with the provisions of either paragraph 2.1 or paragraph 2.2; in such case, no Recommendation can be established.

It's paragraph 2.2 that worries me. If any patents exist on the modem standards implemented by soft modems that are thus RAND-licensable, any GPL implementation is impossible. I believe some of the compression algorithms used in some of the modem standards are already known to be patented, such as the infamous LZW compression algorithm held by Unisys that has caused the huge flap over GIF's a couple of years back.