Technology Futures

I continue to be amazed that we seem to be abandoning the phone, which continues to be highly reliable, in favor of email, which is much less reliable.

Twice in the past couple of weeks two different people commented that I had been "out of touch." In both cases, they had sent me email. For different reasons, both emails had gone astray, and they assumed I was ignoring them. But I just had not received the emails. In one case, the email was delivered several days late--no apparent reason--it just happened. In another case, the email was sent to an account that I do not check daily.

But neither individual thought to pick up the phone and call, and I've seen this happen enough that it seems to be a trend. All sorts of things can happen to email--it can be filtered as spam, we can delete it accidentally when trying to select multiple messages, it can be discarded by a server if an attachment that is too large. The sender can have a typo in the address that sends it to the wrong person, as just a few examples.

Some of my colleagues and I find text messages useful to verify the availability of someone. Text messages are unobtrusive and represent a completely different communications channel that works well most of the time.

It is strange that in a time of so many communications options, we still have trouble communicating.

Now rumors are circulating that Yahoo! may partner with Google to avoid the likely ignominious end of the company via a Microsoft acquisition.

Google has already started preparing for an anti-trust challenge if Microsoft is successful, so it is hard to see how Google could argue that hitching Yahoo! to behemoth Microsoft is bad but hitching Yahoo! to gargantuan Google is good.

Whatever the outcome may be, it sounds like users of free services are in for less choice and more ads. The alternative is to simply stop using "free" services and pay for things like personal email accounts, which cost a pittance these days. It is easy to find email accounts for under $100 per year, and those accounts come with a wide range of features and services that are not always available with the free services, and are ad-free--well worth the money to some.

The City of Danville, Virginia has a backlog of businesses waiting to get connected to its brand new open multi-service network (also sometimes called an open service provider network). Two service providers are offering business services on the network, and a local provider is delighted with being able to offer fiber services to its existing customers.

Two years ago, the City decided to leverage its existing city fiber infrastructure to make it available everywhere, but with a special focus on being able to provide any level of bandwidth a business wanted, and the city's fiber infrastructure is able to deliver it. Danville has a very simple definition of broadband:

Broadband in Danville is any amount of bandwidth your business needs to be competitive in the global knowledge economy.

Notice there is no number attached to that definition; any time a community defines broadband as a specific number (e.g. broadband is 2 megabits, or ten megabits, etc.), from an economic development perspective, the community is telling some businesses, "Don't locate here because we don't have the capacity to serve you." It's no different than not having enough water or sewer capacity.

More information about the project is on the nDanville Web site. Disclaimer: Design Nine is providing broadband architecture and consulting services to the City of Danville for the project.

I had been hearing favorable reviews of the new "Terminator" TV series, but am usually busy with other things in the evening, so I have not been able to catch it at its broadcast time. So I downloaded the pilot from iTunes--the first episode is free.

It took about thirty minutes to download the forty minute episode. We watched it on a widescreen 15" laptop set about four feet away, which gave us a larger apparent screen size than the 27" television on the other side of the room. Did I mention there were no commercials? Nothing like watching a one hour program in forty minutes. It was a good show, and I'm ready to pay two bucks to watch the next episode. In fact, for what I am now paying for cable TV, I could download and watch 25 hours of paid TV, at two dollars per hour--commercial free.

There were some shouts of horror from certain parts of the household when I mentioned discontinuing cable service, but it is getting harder and harder to find a reason to turn the TV on.

However, watching video over the Internet comes at a steep price for the DSL and cable providers, who lack the capacity to handle this if everyone starts doing it. This article is very technical, but the bottom line is that the current copper infrastructure lacks the capacity handle the switch to getting what we call "TV" over the Internet.