Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
Sometimes, all this stuff just works
I now have the ability to access Google Maps from my Treo cellphone/PDA. I ran across a reference on the 'net about someone doing this, and in a couple of minutes I found the software; it is free. You also have to have Java installed on your PDA, and it turns out that IBM has a free Java distribution for Treos (IBM has really embraced the Free and Open Software movement).
It took about ten minutes to download everything and then upload it to my Treo, and two minutes after that, I was looking at a Google map of Blacksburg on my phone. I travel a lot to new places, and this software is going to make my life a lot easier. I have been experimenting with GPS navigation systems lately (a lot of rental cars come with them now), and I have been underwhelmed by my experiences with them. They are not only distracting to the point of being dangerous, but I find it takes a lot of fiddling to set up routes correctly.
The big attraction of GPS systems, is not, as you might think, the "you are right here" feature. If you are lost, it does not help much to know where you are lost. What you really want to know where to go. And a good map, downloaded on demand, is often all I need. I don't really want something shouting at me, in heavy traffic, "Make an immediate U-turn now!" And yes, one GPS I have used does that quite often.
Technology News:
Fiber transforms local economies
The magazine Killer App has a must read article on how fiber infrastructure has turned the rust belt economy of Wales (abandoned coal mines and steel mills) into a global powerhouse. The key: a steady investment in fiber over a period of years turned into a magnet for Knowledge Economy businesses looking for a reliable workforce, reasonable cost of living, and affordable broadband.
Oh, and there was one more thing. Wales had excellent electrical power because of the former demands of the steel mills. The region was able to attract large data centers because Wales had an unbeatable one-two punch: world class fiber infrastructure AND reliable electric power.
Finally, Wales has adopted an open access model, meaning they did not try to create a new government monopoly on telecom services. Instead, they are encouraging competition among service providers to ensure a rich variety of services that can meet any business need as well as keeping prices low (because of competition).
This is an article you may want to print out and send to every local elected official and economic developer--especially those that think telecom is somebody else's problem. It is an excellent case study of a region that pulled its economy out of a nose dive and successfully created economic prosperity.
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Community news and projects:
Rural Telecon: Broadband and local leaders
Ken Pigg, from the University of Missouri, has been studying community use of technology for more than a decade, and is among a handful of truly informed experts about community technology issues. At his RTC session, he talked about communities and the challenges they are facing as they try to grapple with the issue of broadband.
Pigg started off by noting that "...broadband is the base of the economy." I could not agree more, but we still have many economic developers making decisions for communities that have not yet figured this out. Ken went on to list three specific issues that communities have to deal with.
- Leadership -- Community leaders have to make a long term commitment to shared leadership and regional collaboration. Pigg noted that successful community broadband projects need local broadband champions to keep the community headed in the right direction. Communities also need to recognize that in a global economy, local political boundaries don't matter very much, and communities that can't work with their neighbors on issues like broadband are likely to face difficulties.
- Quality of Life -- Businesses interested in relocation are seeking specific quality of life attributes in candidate communities, and a successful economic development program needs to focus on more than water, sewer, and industrial parks. Workforce amenities--what employees and business owners do outside business hours--are now very important.
- Post deployment marketing -- Pigg noted that communities are still using the "field of dreams" model for broadband projects, in which they buy some stuff, deploy it, and then forget about it. A year or two later, they are inevitably disappointed when their "broadband" project has not produced any significant economic impact. Pigg says that providing local businesses with education and technical assistance (to learn how to make best use of broadband) now has to be central to an economic development strategy.
Pigg's main point was that local leadership (or the lack of it) can make or break broadband projects. Are your local leaders technology savvy? Do your economic devlopment leaders make broadband a central part of the overall economic development strategy, or are they constantly doing another "study" without ever making significant investments in community broadband?
Technology News:
Rural Telecon: Opening Keynote
I am attending the Rural Telecommunications Congress Annual Conference, and as usual, it is loaded with excellent speakers. The opening keynote was presented by two representatives of the EAST (Environmental and Spatial Technologies) education program. EAST may be the most innovative approach to K12 education in the country. Typically offered as a year long class in high school, EAST students are presented with real community problems and issues and are told to solve them.
To help them do this, a typical EAST classroom has $700,000 in hardware and software, purchased from participating vendors for about ten cents on the dollar. EAST students are given no training on any of these systems, because it is literally impossible to train teachers to be competent in such a wide array of systems. Instead, EAST students are expected to figure out how to use the systems themselves and to work together to use them as part of the class projects.
And indeed, it is expectations that sets the EAST program apart. Students are not given an option to drift along through the class. Instead, EAST sets high expectations in terms of time, commitment, and effort from day one. The EAST classroom more closely resembles a business work place, and has the kinds of software and systems used by businesses. The program focuses on students being in charge of their own learning and growth. EAST teachers are facilitators and managers. EAST teachers don't regard students as empty vessels into which to pour measured chunks of memorized "knowledge."
An EAST project described in the talk involved going out into rural Arkansas and conducting a door to door survey of households to assess broadband availability. Students then created sophisticated GIS maps to show the actual patterns of broadband availability and use, as opposed to the FCC method of simply saying a zip code area has broadband if an incumbent can deliver service to a single subscriber.
EAST programs are in 225 schools in five states, but the program started in Arkansas, where more than 145 schools use the EAST program. After hearing about EAST, I have only one question: "Why doesn't every school in America have an EAST program?"
Technology News:
Cisco patents the triple play
If you needed proof that the US Patent and Trade Office (USPTO) has problems, look no further. The USPTO just granted Cisco a patent on the triple play, which means delivering voice, video, and data to the home. Cisco does not have much a presence in the Fiber To The Home (FTTH) market because their gear is designed for corporate and institutional networks, and is not really the first or even second choice for community broadband systems.
Like a lot of companies, Cisco has apparently decided if they can't innovate, they can at least sue. The notion of "triple play" is so common that it is laughable to think it could be patented, but we're talking the Federal government here, in a perfect illustration of why you really don't want Federal bureaucrats helping too much with local broadband. You would likely end up with some Federal agency defining broadband as 256 kilobits, or about one one-thousandth of what other countries view as acceptable. Oh, wait, that is what we have--it is the FCC's definition of broadband.
Anyway, I digress. This patent is likely to be challenged early and often. There are numerous other companies that have been working in this field, and Cisco's only (weak) claim to the patent is that they filed it in 2000, before there were too many products on the market that actually implemented this.
Communities need to deal with broadband locally. The Federal government simply does not have the cash to rebuild the entire telecommunications infrastructure of the United States over the next ten years, so waiting for the Feds is an exercise in futility. But there is some good news: there is plenty of money to rebuild local telecom infrastructure. You just have to know where it is. And no, it is not at the state or Federal level.
Technology News:
Muni wireless: good, bad, or indifferent?
Network Computing has a short article with a headline that touts, "City governments are offering metro wireless services with speeds and latency that can't be beat." Sounds interesting, right? But if you read all the way to the end, where the article discusses the fabled WiMax, which will supposedly solve all the world's broadband problems, you find out that WiMax's multimegabit speeds drop to "1 to 2 megabits only at the outer edges."
So WiMax looks a lot like DSL--great if you live near an access point, but the farther away you are, the less you get from it, until even DSL or a cable modem connection is going to provide better and more consistent throughput. You have to read the fine print when looking at vendor promises.
I strongly encourage communities to invest in wireless, but only as part of an integrated strategy that includes both fiber and wireless, with wireless designed primarily for mobile uses. Over the long term, wireless can be more expensive than fiber when you look at the total life cycle costs, and if you are trying to design a system that pays for itself over time, it is difficult to do that with wireless by itself. An integrated fiber/wireless design, on the other hand, can actually return money to the community for other community and economic development uses. Design Nine specializes in helping communities and regions design and build such systems. Give us a call or drop us a note if you would like more information.
Technology News:
Google told to stop using other people's content
Microsoft's MSN search and news site is trying to avoid Google's fate in Belgium, where a court told the search company to stop filching newspaper articles from the Web sites owned by the newspapers. Google would show the first few paragraphs of an article, and then provide a link to the rest of the article, claiming fair use. But of course, there were ads on the Google page and so Google was benefiting from someone else's copyrighted content. The Belgian courts told the company to cut it out. So Microsoft, which apparently does the same thing, is negotiating with the newspapers over the issue. The obvious solution is to share ad revenue with the papers. Less money for the search sites, but then, they would be doing things fairly and legally, which should not be difficult concepts.
Technology News:
Community news and projects:
Broadband and electric power, not water and sewer
I have written extensively on the need for communities to be able to market affordable broadband and great quality of life to businesses, but there may be a third leg that can be added: reliable electric power. We take this for granted, but as businesses are increasingly powered by computers and network equipment, their need for reliable and resilient electric power becomes far more important than water and sewer.
Blackouts and brownouts play havoc with electronics, and even if businesses invest in UPSs (uninterruptible power supplies) you don't ever want to have to use them. Reliable electric power is particularly important to companies that provide hosted services to their customers, and more and more businesses are getting into this fast growing business sector.
If your region has a well-managed public utility or a good private utility, it is something you ought to be talking about. And if you have funds to spend on infrastructure, you may want to look at improving the local electric power grid--redundant electric feeds, multiple electric feeds into business parks, and so on.
Technology News:
GoogTube: will it change free video?
After days of rumors, Google has confirmed that it has paid $1.6 billion for YouTube, a tiny video startup that has never made a cent and that has only 67 employees. What is Google buying? In a word, eyeballs. Google's own video venture has been a huge flop, so the company had just two choices: abandon the lucrative advertising potential of free video, or buy the market, which is basically YouTube.
In just a couple of years, YouTube has become a cultural phenomenon and a political force, along with being a huge time waster and a terrible drag on office productivity. Instead of standing around the water cooler talking about what was on TV last night, office workers talk about what is on YouTube, then go right back to their cubicles and watch instead of working, and driving up the company's cost of bandwidth at the same time.
Google is looking more and more like Microsoft. Like Microsoft, they were not the first with a product (Apple introduced windows to computers before MS), but like Microsoft, they were able to capture a big chunk of the market through good marketing. Windows has consistently lagged behind competitors in terms of quality and features, just as Google's search is also long in the tooth. And like Microsoft, the company has had more hits than misses; Google's social software has flopped along with it's video. So the company now has to buy innovation from others. That has rarely worked well for Microsoft, which has lost billions in acquisitions of brilliant software that then quickly disappeared.
YouTube is not likely to disappear, but the transition to becoming part of the Google empire will open up opportunities for video competitors to gain marketshare. And in the search market, competitors are becoming more aggressive; last night, I saw a very hard-hitting Ask.com ad on TV. Google could fall even more quickly than it has risen, as ad dollars can be redirected with a few mouse clicks.
Technology News:
The "whoops" report: entrepreneurs are creating jobs
The Wall Street Journal reported today (page A18) that the U.S. Department of Labor has revised job figures for the period between March, 2005 and March, 2006. New jobs were undercounted, and Labor has added 810,000 more new jobs to the count to bring the three year total to 6.6 million new jobs. The Journal is calling this a "...whoops, we found a whole lot of jobs we missed."
The Journal believes that the Labor Department continues to undercount small business and self-employed entrepreneur jobs creation, an issue I have been writing about for years. The Census Bureau conducts two regular surveys. The Establishment Survey measure payroll jobs, and the Household Survey counts how many people are employed in a household. The problem is that Labor, along with doom and gloom analysts, tend to focus on the Establishment Survey, where jobs growth has been anemic--because the nature of business is changing.
The Establishment Survey has no way of counting self-employed businesspeople and entrepreneurs because these kinds of businesses have little or no payroll. And small businesses are moving more and more towards outsourcing many kinds of work that used to be done in house.
Bottom line: Communities need affordable broadband because the small businesses and entrepreneurs most likely to create new jobs have to have it to survive and grow.
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