Technology Futures

The cable industry is showing off their next generation broadband cable modems, which promise much faster speeds. The cable companies are under some pressure from the fiber rollouts of the phone companies.

There are some problems, however. The new technology continues to rely on copper to the home, and in fact, the "new" technology simply involves using four TV channels instead of two to carry broadband data. It is still a hybrid system that uses a fifty year old cable TV design to carry data. It's main advantage is that it is cheap to upgrade.

The second problem is that the cable companies, like the phone companies, want to be the gatekeeper for advanced services. If you want VoIP service, they don't want to offer a choice of providers; they want to sell you their service, at their price, and this will become a bigger problem as time goes on and truly open systems start offering a much wider range of prices and services than closed systems.

Finally, cable companies are anti-economic development, in the sense that they see themselves as selling "entertainment," not business class services. I had a problem recently with my cable modem service and was told the normal repair time was two weeks because the Internet service I was buying was "entertainment" and did not require any faster response. This kind of attitude makes it either impossible to work from home or much more expensive. Some cable companies will sell a "business class" service for your home, charging much more for exactly the same service.

The bottom line for communities is simple: Do you want a large incumbent with its headquarters many states away deciding your economic development future, or do you want to more control locally? If your answer is the latter, local broadband investments can help energize economic development and actually provide funds for other community and economic development projects.

This New York Times article (registration required, link may disappear) says that schools that give laptops to students have been wasting their money. This was entirely predictable, because just putting technology "stuff" in the classroom was never going to change anything.

Unfortunately, I got an early lesson in that in Blacksburg in the mid-nineties when we had the first schools in the country with broadband in every classroom. I learned some hard facts from teachers, and figured out that if you want technology to have an impact on learning in the classroom, you have to do five things.

• You do have to buy some stuff, and every child has to have easy access to it, hence the focus on laptops for everyone. But this is only step one, and unfortunately, it is where most schools and school boards stop.
• You have to provide training--extensive and regular training--to teachers. Without it, few teachers will be able to make good use of the complicated technology.
• You have to provide adequate technical support. Unfortunately, there is never enough to go around, and teachers have enough to do without also having to install software, fix problems, and maintain dozens of systems.
• You have to provide classroom ready learning materials that fit the curriculum teachers are expected to teach. You can't just give teachers a laptop and tell them, "Use the vast resources of the Internet." The vast resources are the problem; teachers don't have time to develop entirely new sets of teaching materials from scratch.
• Finally, you have to physically redesign the classroom to use the technology. How can kids use a laptop all day long if there is no place to plug in chargers at their desk? Where does the LCD projector go? How easy is it to have kids use the projector to show off their assignments? And so on.

We can barely teach kids the three Rs these days. It is naive to think spending money on feel-good initiatives like laptops will have any effect without extensive structural changes in the entire learning process. But at least we are finally learning these lessons.

If you like to believe everything vendors tell you, WiMax will solve all our broadband problems, give us younger looking skin, and get rid of grey hair.

WiMax has been lurking for ages, a technology that has been "just a few months away" for at least three years. But it takes a long time to bring an entirely new wireless technology to market, with extensive testing required to make sure the systems don't interfere with other wireless systems, among other issues.

The approval by the FCC of the first WiMax laptop card is a good sign that we may finally be able to starting thinking about WiMax as a "real" system. WiMax base stations (the gear that powers big towers) is still very expensive, but there have been few ways to for users to actually receive WiMax signals affordably. Over the next several years, we will finally see a bunch of WiMax products enter the marketplace, and dropping prices.

Is WiMax the holy grail of broadband? Not by a long shot, but it is a much better technology than WiFi, which was designed for indoor use and short distances. WiMax was designed from the ground up to provide much more robust and interference-resistant signals over longer distances, with more bandwidth. It will gradually replace WiFi, and it will be interesting to see how it competes with EVDO, the cellular-based wireless technology favored, naturally, by the cellphone companies.

But fiber is still a necessity. Wireless services are not the first choice for businesses because of bandwidth, security, and reliability issues. And home use is being driven by high bandwidth video applications and services, which WiMax cannot support. We need well-designed fiber and wireless systems in our communities, and communities that design for both will have a significant economic development advantage.

This editorial from the LA Times discusses rumblings from the FCC that the agency may try to regulate "violence" on television, and may try to extend the agency's control to cable and satellite broadcasting--entirely new for the FCC.

The FCC is apparently using the recent catastrophe at Virginia Tech (right here in Blacksburg) as justification for extending its reach. But the editorial has it right. The FCC is not our "mommy and daddy." With hundreds of cable channels and millions of IP TV choices, and the rapid growth of alternative video programming, what the FCC should be discussing is getting out of the business.

When TV was available only via the scarce resource of over the air radio spectrum, there was some justification for having a watchdog agency. But with so many ways to get video programming today, the notion that a) oversight and control is still needed is archaic, and b) how on earth does the FCC propose to monitor literally thousands and thousands of "channels?"

This is a fundamental failure of government to adapt to change. Recall that this is the same FCC that believes if a single person in a zip code has broadband, everyone does. And we want these folks telling us what we can watch on TV?

It is tawdry for the agency to be using the deaths of my friends and neighbors as an excuse to expand the power of the Federal bureaucracy. If we don't like what is on a TV channel, we can change the channel ourselves, or just turn off the TV.

And I can tell you that in Blacksburg, most of us did just that once NBC started airing the demented ravings of the lunatic murderer and tried to call it news. We had better things to do, like attending funerals. The OFF button is a wonderful thing.