Customer service.  It’s as fundamental as apple pie, patriotism and motherhood.  Just about every corporation, not for profit and government office touts it as a core mission. YET, when do we really see it in practice?  In fact, could you say cable service and customer service in the same sentence?  Is this an oxymoron?

Full disclosure. I am a Comcast cable customer. I very much enjoy their high speed Internet and cable service – though not enough to migrate to their phone service. Their products are excellent. 

But their service, well, that’s another story.  In fact, most communications companies, including wireless, are sadly lacking when it comes to quality of customer service and support. Call your wireless service provider and try to talk to a live agent. 

Recently, a friend of mine who is quite ill showed me a tool he is using to manage his health care costs. He logged on, entered his password, and voila, all his medications, some key medical data (blood pressure, blood tests, etc) and procedures popped up on the screen. He said the information has been invaluable in his on-going saga with the insurance companies and the endless claims, appeals, and re-appeals he’s had to submit.

When I asked him the source of such information, he said it was provided by health care providers to insurance companies who in turn contracted with data warehouses to store such information...

During the past several weeks, much has been written about the FCC’s recent ruling that set aside one third of the wireless airwaves that would let consumer use wherever cell phone or wireless device they want.  The auction is set to occur in the first part of 2008. 

As consumers we’ve experienced the frustration of signing up with a wireless carrier and not being able to choose the any type of cell phone or services that are available in the marketplace.  Rather, we are restricted in our buying choices to whatever the carrier offers.  And, we can only sign up for those mobile services that they offer.  Witness the frenzy that was generated when iPhones came out.  You could hear the collective groans of technophiles who lusted after the phone but had concerns about speed, reliability and coverage of AT&T’s network. 

An interesting aspect to spectrum licenses is the sense of property rights that have attached to them.  Once I own the spectrum license, I control access, use, and any other rights associated with it, short of a national emergency.  It’s very similar to getting the rights to build a toll road.  Once you build it, you can control the terms and conditions of use; assess user fees and other charges.  They can even control who can ride on your road – no trucks or heavy loads, because of the wear and tear on the infrastructure. 

The same is true with owners of spectrum licenses.  Wireless carriers have jealously guarded access to their networks.  Wireless carriers argue that they have to do so in order to recoup the billions of dollars they’ve invested in building out the infrastructure.  Last year when some carriers suggested that they might charge heavy users such as Google and eBay a premium for carrying their traffic, there was a loud outcry from a consortium of businesses and consumer groups.  The property owners wanted to hike the tolls big-time.

Therefore, the importance of the FCC decision to set aside one-third of the spectrum for open access is a big deal.  But, such prime real estate, one 22 megahertz chunk – actually six separate pieces of spectrum that can be added together – will cost mucho bucks.  Some estimates project the value at $2.5 billion.  It will take very deep pockets to not only win that license; it will take even deeper pockets to build out the networks. 

What does all this mean for the consumer?  The open access spectrum will enable consumers to choose the services they want and the devices they’d like.  And more competition is a good thing. 

From a practical perspective, deployment may take some time.  Broadcasters will not be vacating the space until 2009.  The actual infrastructure build-out may take a couple of years.  That doesn’t mean that companies are sitting on their hands waiting for the next couple of years to pass by.  Wireless related manufacturers and service providers, from chip to routers to network management software, are gearing up.  There is a lot of R&D and investment dollars being placed, not only in the U.S. but in Europe and Asia. 

With bigger pipes, some of the encryption technologies could be more easily deployed enabling consumers to do all sorts of transactions from their banking to buying goods and services.  And, with bigger capacity, their will be a bigger demand for richer, more interactive content.  The cell phone will become a complete two way communicator including audio, multimedia and text.  All this translates into the cell phone needing more capacity, more battery life, better screens, and more memory while still preserving a user friendly form factor. All of this translates into opportunities for existing and start up companies to provide solutions to a broad range of complex and vexing problems.  And herein lays the opportunities for smart investors.

  According to the 1996 Telecommunications Act and subsequent legislation, broadcasters are supposed to give back the airwaves they now use once the availability of digital signals reaches a certain threshold.  The 700-MHz spectrum, long occupied by the NTSC standard saw no significant change since the black and white to color TV transition took place in the early 1950s.

Today, more than 85% of households in just about all of the nation’s 210 TV markets receive it through digital signals.  Now that broadcasters have attained this threshold, the broadcasters return the spectrum.  Right?

We’ve all become accustomed to stories about credit card and identity theft. Regrettably, these events seem to be happening with regularity. In late March, Associate Press reported that hackers stole data from at least 45.7 million credit and debit card holders who shopped at TJ Maxx and Marshalls.

''It's not clear when information was deleted, it's not clear who had access to what, and it's not clear whether the data kept in all these files was encrypted, so it's very hard to know how big this was,'' said Deepak Taneja, chief executive of Aveksa, a Waltham, Mass.-based firm that advises companies on information security. The case has led banks to reissue cards to customers as far away as Sweden and Hong Kong.

While it’s bad enough to have one’s identity stolen and credit rating compromised, imagine the damage that could be done to the release of your personal medical records. In the electronic age, medical facilities are rushing to digitize patient records. It’s not unusual to see nurses sitting in front of keyboards in patient examination rooms enter data in the presence of the patient. Johns Hopkins has established a network that enable virtual consultations between doctors as far away as Asia while they simultaneously look at digitized images of patients’ X-rays. Insurance companies now transmit much of their health care claims, patient records, etc. online. This in turn has pushed the private sector to establish private medical record banks and health information exchanges.

One such exchange is the Medical Information Bureau, a not for profit life insurance organization, which provides information on behalf of its members. Wal-Mart, Intel and other companies announced that they were creating a huge database that could store the personal health records of more than 2.5 million employees and retirees. While the companies promise “stringent privacy policies and procedures,” I am not comforted. That’s a whole lot of terabits floating around in cyberspace.

It also raises concerns. Making available information more easily also has a downside because it also makes it accessible to hackers. The reasons for the big digital push? U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Social Security Administration, Veterans Affairs, and others are pushing hard because of policies such as HIPFAA, Medicare prescription drug program, homeland security, and bottom line drivers such as efficiency and cost savings. The problem is that there is no clear strategy to protect the privacy of patients.

A recent GAO study stated that the administration had a “jumble of studies and vague policy statements but no overall strategy to ensure that privacy protections would be built into computer networks linking insurers, doctors, hospitals and other care providers”. The GAO is the investigative arm of Congress. The Secretary of Veterans Affairs who supervises one of the nation’s largest health care systems said “I concur with the GAO findings.” Mark A. Rothstein, chairman of a panel that advises the government on health information policy “essentially agreed with the GAO findings. Health privacy has not received adequate attention at the Department of Health and Human Services. “A sense of urgency is lacking”. While doubts about privacy and adequate security could slow the adoption and use of electronic medical records, another fundamental problem emerges. Consumers cannot opt out. You cannot tell your health care provider or insurance company not to digitize its records.

Consumers are truly at the mercy of the privacy policies that the government implements, if and when they get implemented. And consumers are totally dependent upon the quality of the security systems, and information sharing practices of the companies.

So what does this mean? The federal government needs to aggressively move forward with implementing its privacy policies. The Federal government should, however, leave the spericic compliance methodologies to the organizations, both public and private. Trying to micromanage this details would be counterproductive. establishing privacy and security policies/objectives will require federal, state and local governments and private organizations to significantly upgrade their security technologies and practices.

Obviously, both the government and private companies need to adopt new standards, new technologies because what they have now is clearly not working. And therein lies the opportunities for new technologies and new and existing companies. The market opportunity is huge.

We live with an 800 pound gorilla that casts a large, large shadow over our region – the federal government. Sometimes, its fed-centric presence provides comfort in the form of economic largesse and job stability. Other times, it can make us all too aware that DC is a target of those who wish to harm the United States. In either case, the gorilla must be fed – and its appetite is enormous. Finding ways to keep it going and alive is an all consuming task. It also drives the wheels of business research, sales and delivery of services.

Recently, the federal government announced that it plans to upgrade its telecommunications infrastructure. Federal spending on upgrades will jump to over $16 billion in 200, and an estimated $21 billion per year by 2010. That’s a whole of lot of bananas, and businesses are clamoring to participate in the feedings.

Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) recently issued a request for information (RFII) to build the Grid Bandwidth Expansion project – the GIGBE – a global network based on optical networking technology. A look at DISA’s wish list can make you salivate. It includes optical switch, both OOO and OEO; ultra long haul amplifier and regenerator gear; multiservice provisioning platforms that handle Sonet, all manner of Ethernet, and ATM; high performance IP routers; and network management components. All this must operate with a near 100% reliability and offer interoperability and non-blocking architectures. See DITCO Contracting Opportunities.

This is the wish list of just one federal agency! This is not to be confused with the DoD’s Global Information Grid – the GIG – which it also plans to deploy to support communications world wide. Other agencies such as Department of Transportation, the U.S. Courts, the Department of Commerce and Department of Health and Human Services, among others, have all announced or are getting ready to announce similar initiatives. If you’re interested in learning more about what other agencies are looking at, a conference featuring CIOs and other officials from twelve government agencies will take place in McLean, VA in late February. You can find more info on the TeleStrategies Federal Network 2007 Conference here: http://www.telestrategies.com/fednet/agenda.html.

The decision to upgrade the government’s telecom infrastructure did not happen overnight. It has been on-going for the past ten plus years – conducted over countless number of interagency meetings. I participated in some of those discussions when I was the General Counsel for the Department of Commerce, and as the number two person at Small Business Administration. The federal government spent a good part of the 1990’s and early 2000’s pushing the delivery of more information, products and services on line. Their electronic mandate had a ripple impact on state and county governments. And it had a huge impact on businesses that did business with government or interface with the government. But as more of these services went online, the federal government realized that it needed fatter pipes, more reliable pipes, and a never ending supply of storage capacity to store all that data – all that communications. Accordingly, the delivery of hardware, software and services will occur over the next decade. It will spur the R&D of next generation technologies which will be incorporated into the infrastructure.

What does this mean for us? The federal government has always been a test bed for new technologies and in recent years, a hotbed of billions of dollars worth of purchases. This next generation of activity kicks it up a notch and signals new growth. It means there will be plenty of business opportunities for communications equipment manufacturers, service and software providers and systems integrators. It also means new companies will get formed, and new technologies will get launched, and new opportunities to invest will emerge and amplified.