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Sprint Nextel Vs. 41 Schools and Non-Profits
netbuzz writes "A case of corporate bullying, or good network citizenship? Sprint Nextel has let slip the dogs of law on the FCC and 41 non-profits, most of them school systems, in an effort to get the FCC to stop granting these organizations special dispensation when they fail to renew their wireless spectrum licenses. These licenses were granted as part of the Educational Broadband Service. The school systems, many of them rural, argue that they don't have the staff or the resources to keep on top of the paperwork and shouldn't be punished for such bureaucratic lapses. (Some generate revenue by leasing unused portions of the spectrum to carriers such as Sprint Nextel.) The schools' argument may sound a bit like 'the dog ate my homework' to some, and Sprint Nextel makes a fairly compelling case that a greater good would be served if the FCC would stop enabling such tardiness."
Sprint Nextel makes a fairly compelling case that a greater good would be served if the FCC would stop enabling such tardiness.
Yes, because private "ownership" of spectrum is clearly a god-given right, and not a state-sponsored privilege. No, not at all.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
i think sprint means
"the public good would be better served by selling school spectrum to us so we can have better profits. you aren't a COMMUNIST are you!?"
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Sprint Nextel is one of the worst offenders when it comes to spectrum violations. The Nextel network has been illegally causing interference with public-safety radios for years now - and they have missed every deadline that has been set to clean it up. It started off because they were too cheap to filter their signals so that they wouldn't cause interference. Then they convinced the FCC to swap their scattered spectrum for much more valuable contiguous spectrum.
Sprint is the worst when it comes to spectrum violations and those schools should press the FCC to relieve Sprint of all Nextel's spectrum that's causing interference - without any compensation. Sprint would shut up pretty fast if that happened because one's a silly paperwork mix-up and the other's a wanton disregard for responsibility.
Sorry to nitpick, but the quote is "let loose the dogs of war." Aside from using a proper quote, slipping is an unintentional act..
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
but what sorts of things are the schools using this spectrum for exactly anyhow? Are we talking high schools here? Or universities? TFA doesn't really say much other than that the schools have allowed their licenses to expire. Also, I don't believe that Sprint/Nextel are just doing this to police the FCC laws, there has GOT to be an angle. Companies that big aren't stupid (okay, some are) they wouldn't just dump a bunch of money worth of lawyers on this unless there was a chance for positive return.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
1. Buy calendar
2. Mark date that license has to be renewed
3. Renew license when that date arrives
3. ???
4. No loss of spectrum!!!
Seriously, anyone who pays monthly bills generally figures out a simple, cheap system like this. Nothing to remember except checking the calendar.
I do not believe that the school system's repeated failure to renew on time is the most important issue here. The disturbing thing is that these educational systems have been forced to generate revenue by leasing portions of the spectrum to corporations. When educational departments are driven to things like this, what message does it send - scream, even - to the people? Right now, I am thinking it is along the lines of:
"We do not give two shits about education for the masses. We would rather funnel all of the money that we receive from taxpaying people into bombs, missiles, tanks, warplanes, weapons of mass destruction, et cetera."
When you take thirty seconds and look up government expenditures, it is actually plain as day. Here are the figures for defense versus education in 2004:
Defense: totalled $456 billion.
Education: totalled $88 billion.
source (warning: there may be some flash nasties at this site, but the figures are likely elsewhere on the 'net as well.)
If that does not anger the average person, I honestly do not know what will. While I was perusing the figures, I thought these two were also rather telling:
Also from 2004, cumulative, the amount that our government took in from taxes:
Individual Income Taxes: totalled $809 billion.
Corporate Income Taxes: totalled $189.4 billion.
I would say that there is a bit of a disparity there. I will leave it up to everyone to draw their own conclusions as to why.
"We may face a scorched and lifeless earth, but they're accountable to their shareholders first."
The article claims that some school districts are making money from on-leasing their unused spectrum. I would have thought that keeping your licenses up to date for something that provides you with income is just good sense.
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...having just missed their first quarter profit numbers. But their revenue is still fine, 10B a quarter...
The Army reading list
And don't be surprised if after they get these frequencies allocated to themselves they do nothing with them - just to make sure a competitor doesn't have a chance to use them.
These guys have a long history of bad actions - assume the worst and they won't disappoint you.
You have made a mistake. The proper term for an evil nasty has been officially changed from 'Communist' to 'Terrorist'. I am really surprised that you missed the memo. Please correct the verbiage in any future correspondence.
I'm assuming the numbers you are quoting are for spending by the FEDERAL government. The vast majority of money for K-12 education in this country comes from either the individual states or property taxes at the level of individual school districts. In my home state, education makes up more than half the annual budget, and practically nothing on national defense. So while I agree there is an argument to be made about how much money to spend on the military vs education, quoting numbers solely from the federal budget is going to distort the true relationship between military and education spending.
If they aren't going to renew a license to spectrum they just want to lease out rather than use, they should lose the spectrum. Giving the school spectrum most likely was not done so they could make money off of it. It was most likely done so they could use it for networking.
Just as a baseline rule, I would be highly suspicous of a private corporation's arguments that strictly enforcing a regulation against non-profits and public entities somehow benefits the public good. Corporations are obligated to act in the interests of their shareholders, not for the public good. There is almost always some matter of consequence that will benefit the corporation that the corporation is not disclosing; in this particular situation, it is not difficult to speculate as to Sprint Nextel's less altruistic motives. I'm not saying that Nextel necessarily has the weaker argument, but I would certainly be more skeptical of their assertions than the article summary.
In my area, Nextel moved in (several years ago), and "bought" rights to the 800 MHz spectrum. The funny thing was, they came to my business, and said "We see you're using the (currently free) 800MHz spectrum for your truck to HQ communications... How would you like to buy our nifty phones that do what you're doing for free?"
Obvious answer - hell no.
Shortly thereafter, Nextel serves us with a notice, telling us that the 800MHz spectrum we're using has been bought by them, and that we are no longer legally allowed to use those frequencies. Therefore, its "logical" that we purchase their system now, or face FCC violation fines.
Who's the one being hurt here Nextel? Yeah, after that, we have refused to do business with Nextel, and will continue to badmouth them whenever there is an opportunity.
A corporation, doing what it's designed to do, never ever ever serves the greater good unless "the profitable thing" happens to line up with "the greater good".
And seriously, licensing of radio frequencies has come up a number of times on this site previously. I'm always inclined to say that frequency licensing is really stupid and can be solved in another manner these days.
The top 5% of earners paid 53% of the income tax
The top 1% of earners paid 33% of the income tax
The bottom 50% of earners paid less than 5% of the income tax
Don't believe for a second that the tax code leans too heavilly on wealthy people, or that wealthy people are generous with their taxes. The truth is that the top 5% of "earners" are so fantastically wealthy that even with cooking books, taking every deduction, and accounting tricks, the tax% of a #hugenumber still fairly large.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
"If you want to quote numbers, you should be complete. Below is a summary"
You make me laugh. I'll add "complete summary" to my lexicon now.
Some parts you left out from wikipedia:
The recent invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan are funded outside the Federal Budget (through supplementary spending bills), so they are not included in the military budget figures listed above. In addition, the United States has black budget military spending which is not listed as Federal spending and is not included in published military spending figures. Other military-related items, like maintenance of the nuclear arsenal and the money spent by the Veterans Affairs Department, are not included in the official budget.
The current (2005) United States military budget is larger than the military budgets of the next fourteen biggest spenders combined
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in 2003 the United States spent approximately 47% of the world's total military spending
and just for kicks:
military spending is responsible for 12.4% of off topic discussion
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
If you leaf through the FCC's list of enforcements for failing to renew licenses, some of it reads like the NYSE 100 Telecoms Hall of Fame - with companies like Sprint et al. featuring with reasonable freqency (and others, such as DirecTV). The interesting thing is if an individual or a small firm forgets to renew their license, they get slapped with the same fine as a multibillion dollar multinational telecoms company that should know better. A $10,000 fine for an individual or small firm can be devastating, but for a big multinational, it's probably cheaper to only bother to renew when the enforcement notice comes than employ someone to keep track of the paperwork.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
"Sprint Nextel makes a fairly compelling case that a greater good would be served if the FCC would stop enabling such tardiness."
So, what exactly do they mean by 'Greater Good'? So far as I can tell the greater good in this case is a larger profit for Sprint Nextel, less revenue for the school district, and higher taxes for land owners. What goodness am I suppose to be excited about?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Schools are generating revenue through a variety of, uh, clever means. They lease vending machine space to junk food vendors. This amounts to a hidden tax on the society because schools are now promoting obesity, which results in taxpayers and parents forking over more money for health care down the line. Similarly, the schools are not exactly going to be market efficient spectrum brokers. Public schools should receive their funding from the same source that they receive their mandate. Except in Kansas, where they probably don't believe in radio waves anyway, and they could use the excuse to interact with science.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Well, I don't like Sprint-Nextel, but I do think they at least have a case here. Sprint-Nextel isn't trying to pull licenses out from under these schools, they are pointing out that schools allowed the license to lapse, and the FCC retroactively said "That's OK, we'll renew it for you." This is highly irregular. If these schools were really making all that much money off these licenses, it really does seem like they should have been able to keep up on keeping licenses current. Note, in some cases, it wasn't like the license had lapsed for thirty days or something, but had lapsed years ago.
On the other hand, Sprint-Nextel doesn't have much use for these licenses either, so I could see the court to telling them to take a hike.