Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
Microsoft blesses IPTV
Microsoft has officially blessed IPTV by announcing that the next XBox revision would be able to act as an IPTV set top box. Content will be provided by certain broadband providers like AT&T and BellSouth. If this sounds like a marriage made in heck, it probably is. The most likely reason Microsoft has made this announcement is to try to counter the buzz that will likely emerge on Tuesday (January 9th) when Apple announces its own set top box. Apple provided a peek at this device months ago, and some analysts think it may make its debut tomorrow at the start of the annual MacWorld Conference. Others think it may not show up for a couple of months.
There are two things worth noting in these new product announcements. The first is that the industry is moving quickly toward IPTV using an HD format, meaning that if you want to watch anything, you will need an excellent broadband connection. You can't squeeze even a single channel of HD TV over today's DSL and cable modem systems without seriously degrading the image quality.
The second thing is the evolution of TV and the ongoing fight between the computer as TV and the TV as computer. Microsoft's model does not make much sense (the company sees the computer as the TV) because it means you have to have a very expensive box next to the TV. Does it really make sense to put an XBox costing $400-$500 next to every TV in the house? Apple's model is less expensive and should be much less confusing to use and to manage. You can have one computer, located anywhere in the house, that stores and manages video programming (using iTunes), and you can send the video program anywhere in the home using a cheap Apple set top box.
The cable companies and IP TV providers are also crafting solutions, but the cheap set top box is likely to win this war.
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Does GM have an electric rabbit?
GM may be poised to pull an electric rabbit out of its hat that could save the company. The car manufacturer has provided a preview of the Chevrolet Volt, an electric hybrid that has a good chance of beating the Japanese electric hybrids at their own game. GM has done something that is blindingly obvious, but for some reason has been avoided entirely by the Japanese carmakers: make an all electric drive train.
Hybrids like the popular Prius have both a gas engine and an electric motor, and either device can transmit power to the wheels. This improves performance somewhat. But it makes the car much more complex, with a dual power input drive train, and the complexity makes the cars pricey. But GM picked a much simpler design. The Volt has an electric motor to drive the wheels, and a gas engine that only charges the batteries. So the car has fewer parts, less weight (good for mileage and performance), and should be much less expensive. The car can go about forty miles on batteries alone, and according to GM, half the country has a daily commute of less than twenty miles, so a single charge can get you to work and back. If you do need to drive further, the electric generator kicks in to charge the batteries while you drive, extending car range to about 600 miles, at 50 miles to the gallon, according to GM.
You can also plug the car in the wall at night and charge the batteries that way, which might be less expensive if gas prices climb again.
This car could be a big winner for GM, and the Volt could end up being nearly everyone's second or third car. What would be really smart is if the company offered a stripped down version that lends itself to being modified by hot rodders--bigger electric motors, high powered batteries, "hot rod" computer chips, big sound systems, and all the other mods that would harken back to the nineteen fifties when it was a rite of passage to soup up a basic GM automobile.
Update: Reader Ed D. has provided another link with some pictures of the car.
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GPS mis-directions
In the "Not sure whether to laugh or to cry" category, MapRoom has stories of people following their "smart" GPS directions to ridiculous places. One German driver ended in a railroad station--with his car on the tracks.
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Fiber to the home through sewers
Getting fiber to the premise (FTTP) is always a challenge. In many communities, there is not space available on aging telephone poles, or the incumbents try to charge exorbitant make-ready fees to hang a thin fiber cable. Trenching is an alternative, but that can be more expensive and disruptive. CableRunner now offers an interesting alternative, which is to use existing sewer and stormwater drain infrastructure to run fiber through neighborhoods and into homes.
CableRunner's highly automated technology to mount fiber cables and junction boxes to the sides of sewer and drain pipes was pioneered in Vienna, Austria, where they have been doing this successfully for fifteen years. Vienna has a major project underway right now to provide fiber to every home and business in the city, and many of the cable routes are through existing infrastructure. Paris is also beginning to do the same thing
And there is one more thing. Vienna's project is an Open Service Provider Network (OSPN) that will offer the city's residents and businesses a wide choice of services with multiple providers in most service categories. It is just one more reminder of the global competition today: a city taking fiber to every home and business using an open access model. Vienna's goal is to be the best connected city in the world.
What is your community's telecommunications goals?
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January tech doldrums
We are in the January technology doldrums. New product announcements won't start to appear for another couple of weeks, and communities with projects underway need a couple of weeks back at work before moving forward. 2007 predictions articles are popular, with most of them listing the "top ten" trends for the year, or something like that. Most of the speculation is pure guessing, and hardly worth commenting on.
I have only two predictions for 2007. First, we will see some communities in the United States roll out true open service provider networks (OSPNs), where any and all service providers are invited to offer services on a level playing field. In those communities, we will see telecommunications costs drop by an average of 15% to 25% across the board, resulting in substantial savings for local governments, which will spend fewer tax dollars on telecom. Businesses will also be big winners in those communities, because money saved on telecom can be used to expand the business and/or create new jobs. And residents will also see savings that can be used for other purposes. Those communities will be particularly attractive to relocating businesses and entrepreneurs, because affordable broadband lowers the cost of doing business. And there is data to back this up. A CMU/MIT study released last year showed that communities with affordable broadband experience a higher rate of economic growth.
My second prediction is that many communities are going to be left behind, largely because local leaders are afraid of broadband and simply choose to wait. The longer that communities put off making investments, the harder it will be to catch up later.
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College football goes to the Internet
Arguably, there are way too many college football bowl games. If you just don't have time to watch them all over the next three or four days, don't worry. You can watch them via the Internet. All of the bowl games are going to be available on the iTunes Store and other online media stores within 24 hours of each game's finish. It is one more sign that cable and satellite TV as we know it are nearly dead. It also indicates that we are going to need a whole lot more bandwidth than we have right now.
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50% tax rate on business telecom
One big change in the switch to an all IP-based telecommunications system is that businesses may see lower taxes. Franchise fees, carrier line assessments, subscriber line charges, and other state and local telecom taxes often add up to nearly 50% of the cost of a business telephone line. Most or all of those charges disappear when a business switches to VoIP. Local and state governments may not like that, but over-taxing businesses just makes local businesses less competitive in a world economy (it is not accident that Asia is roaring ahead economically--business taxes in high growth Asian countries are usually much lower than in the U.S.).
High business taxes on essentials like phone service simply leave businesses with less money for new jobs and business expansion. Government can't have it both ways: high taxes on businesses and good economic growth.
But community broadband does not mean local governments have to give up revenue from telecom. Just the opposite is true. By designing a fairly structured open service provider network, more telecom users pay for the cost of right of way and community infrastructure, and the cost of providing the network (and some fair return to a government's general fund) is more evenly applied across the community, with a lower burden for businesses. As a bonus, the open competition of an OSPN community system tends to lower telecom costs for business.
With an open service provider network, everyone wins. Businesses get more and better telecom services at lower costs while paying lower taxes, citizens and local government pays less for telecom, and local government actually gets more revenue than it would with the crazy patchwork set of taxes and franchise fees in use now.
Sound interesting? Call us to talk about doing a financial engineering study of how your local government would benefit financially from an OSPN community broadband system.
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Lights, action, pass the butter
As I visit communities around the country and work with local economic developers and elected officials, I find great skepticism focused on my insistence that we need minimum acceptable bandwidth of 100 megabits per second to every home and business. These officials often scoff at the notion that their citizens will ever need that kind of bandwidth, and the example they often cite is elderly people in their community, who "will never need that kind of bandwidth."
Uh huh. Accenture is busy designing a new home to home video system that allows family members in different locations to enjoy meals together. The three essential ingredients are High Definition cameras, HD flat panel monitors, and a high performance broadband connection between the two locations. A single channel of high quality HD video requires 18 to 20 megabits per second each way, for a total of about 40 megabits per second.
This kind of system is well beyond the capacity of DSL and cable modem systems, can't run at all on WiFi, and would overwhelm the Passive Optical Networks (PONs) being rolled out by the phone companies.
Once in production, these systems are expected to sell for $500 to $1000, and have great promise in telehealth for the elderly. Regular contact with distant family members and with health care professionals promises to delay moving some older people into assisted living facilities or nursing homes for months or years, making the systems a real bargain--the typical monthly cost for assisted living or a nursing home is upwards of $3000 per month.
Is your community attracting retired people because of the good quality of life? These folks are prime candidates for this kind of system in a few years, and high capacity, affordable broadband is needed. High performance broadband is going to change our lives in many small and large ways, and communities need to invest in the right kinds of open service provider networks to ensure that their citizens and businesses have the right kind of broadband.
Economic development bonus: There will be lots of business opportunities for local entrepreneurs to install and maintain these new kinds of systems--if the community has the right infrastructure in place to support them.
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Is the 'net being ruined by spam and crooks?
The popular social networking site MySpace is beginning to have problems with spam, phishing, porn, and other kinds of unfriendly and malicious content. At the root of much of this is the anonymity of the sites. Anyone can register as a MySpace user, which has delighted sexual predators who use the site to find vulnerable underage children.
The phishing schemes are made simpler because you don't ever really know who you are talking to in a MySpace group or content area. So "someone" who appears to be interested in the same things you are might turn out to be a credit card crook from Asia. The business of spam and Internet fraud is accelerating as more and more parts of the world get connected. Go to a small, poor Asian country, and you can hire people for a $1 an hour to place spam on Web sites with discussion forums (which is why I had to disable anonymous posting on this site).
Eventually, we will evolve solutions to minimize many of these problems, but others may be with us for a long time.
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Microsoft's Vista degrades performance
Peter Gutmann, a well known software security expert from Australia, has posted a long piece on the some of the problems he sees with Vista. Gutmann's piece is not the typical anti-Microsoft rant; he has done extensive research and consulted with many other reputable experts. His focus on on Vista's new "features" that are designed to prevent unauthorized use of copyrighted content like videos and music.
The article is very long and provides extensive detail, but the key concept is that the Vista code that degrades the quality of music and video if the output device (like a TV or a stereo) does not have the same kind of software content management as Vista. In some cases, Vista will completely disable a video or audio card or certain other kinds of hardware installed in your PC if Vista decides it does not have the appropriate level of content protection.
To illustrate this, Gutmann cites someone who purchased a new HP Media Center computer that came with an HD video that would NOT play on the buyer's flat panel HD TV because the TV was not "Vista compatible." In fact, Gutmann says virtually all audio and video entertainment systems lack the software Microsoft expects.
Gutmann characterizes these new controls as a blatant attempt by Microsoft to monopolize all entertainment content, in the same way that Apple has monopolized music with the iTunes store. It is worth noting that Gutmann is equally unhappy with Apple and the way it has structured digital rights management (DRM) with iTunes content. And I have to agree; I still buy music the old fashioned way, by purchasing a CD, which does not have DRM limitations on it.
Gutmann sees a dreary future for PC users, and predicts that ultimately, Microsoft will fail, because we simply won't bother using our PCs to play videos and music....we'll buy cheap CD/DVD players for $50 that do not come encumbered with all this nonsense. Finally, Gutmann raises the spectre of real damage arising from Vista. Gutmann mentions a medical professional who says he cannot run the risk of having vital medical systems shut down autonomously because Vista software has decided some medical device does not have the correct DRM installed. That's something to think about the next time you or someone you know is checked into a hospital.
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