Technology Futures

Ireland's research and higher education network, HEAnet, is getting configurable lightpaths. What are configurable lightpaths? It means that ordinary network users can configure a single wavelength of light on a fiber network from their computer or server to another computer or server on the same network (the computers could be hundreds or thousands of miles apart). A single lightpath can provide many gigabits of bandwidth with very little network delay, because the photons have a single path (lightpath) through the network. Much of the pioneering work was done in Canada and in Chicago, and a similar project has been underway in North America, called Starlight. Starlight already has fiber across the Atlantic and Pacific, and more schools, universities, and research labs are joining the effort.

This new kind of network system (it is entirely compatible with the Internet) is starting the same way the original Internet started, with schools and universities. It is already moving out into industry, with companies like Cisco developing off the shelf equipment to implement lightpath networks.

Lightpaths are one more reason for communities to start investing in fiber, now. Old-fashioned copper cable modem, telephone, and DSL networks don't support lightpaths and never will. Do you want your schools and businesses to be left behind?

This importance of this article really has little to do with the NSA. It is an excellent reminder, however, that reliable and resilient electric power drives IT--literally. Substitute 'our local IT firm' for 'NSA' and read the article a second time. The NSA is facing expansion difficulties because it cannot get the power it needs to run its IT infrastructure.

How about your community? Can you deliver reliable electric power--as much as needed--to any business? We can argue about what is causing global warming, but I do see a consensus that we are moving into a period of more unsettled weather--more heat, more cold, more storms--no one seems to disagree about that, although there are many opinions on the causes. All these weather extremes tend to put more stress on electrical distribution systems, and communities that have some of their own electrical generating capacity may have a unique and distinct advantage in the Knowledge Economy. In particular, communities with public power (municipal) electric are well positioned to be attractive to IT companies with power hungry computers and servers. Diversified local electrical generating capacity (e.g. hydro, gas turbines, coal, diesel, wind, solar, cogeneration) are even better positioned to leverage that infrastructure as an economic development advantage.

Are your economic developers including reliable power as part of the strategic roadmap? If not, why not?

This video of how to change the vote count on a Diebold voting machine is somewhat tongue in cheek, but illustrates how the vote count on a machine could be altered from inside the voting booth in a few minutes--no longer than some people spend pondering their votes.

Any community that has Diebold machines should be talking to the their lawyer right now.

The City of Boston has decided to develop an open access wireless network for the city. This project might actually succeed where many other communitywide wireless projects have struggled. Boston has decided to do some things differently.

The choice of an Open Access Network (OAN) or Open Service Provider Network (OSPN) (two terms that mean the same thing) means that local government officials are not going to try to guess winners and losers in the Internet services marketplace. A fundamental weakness of giving the keys of a communitywide broadband system to a single company means that a handful of local government officials have to be very smart, indeed, to project (typically) eight or ten years into the future and be sure that just one or two private firms will market, sell, and manage services over the community network perfectly.

I am not that smart. I would much rather build a digital road system and let any qualified firm sell services, at whatever prices they choose, and let buyers in the marketplace decide who has the best prices and services. That way, local or regional governments don't have to have the responsibility of picking winners and losers.

An Open Service Provider Network also lets local and regional governments neatly sidestep the thorny issue of creating a de facto public monopoly for services. By using public money to build a network and then selecting just a handful of service providers, there is created a potentially difficult legal challenge from other service providers who want to offer services in the community but have not been "blessed" by local government. An OSPN network lets any qualified provider come in and sell on an equal footing, and takes the government competition issue off the table.

An OSPN system encourages competition, which leads to lower prices for telecom services. When government picks the service providers, competition is diminished, and everyone, even local government, ends up paying more for services.

Finally, when managed correctly, an OSPN network encourages innovation by lowering the barriers for entry into a new marketplace. The current bandwidth model we use everywhere now discourages rolling out new and experimental services by creating up front (and often very expensive) fixed bandwidth charges before even a single customer is subscribed to the service. A correctly designed OSPN system should price the cost of transport based on the services offered along with other factors like time of day, Quality of Service needed, and yes, bandwidth. But transport charges in an OSPN network should be tied to revenue, which encourages innovation. If a service provider has few customers, network use fees are low. If the service is popular, network use fees go up in proportion to revenue. This also means that the network operator has income proportional to network use, unlike the bandwidth model which punishes network use.

Boston is to be commended for this approach, although I still remain skeptical of communitywide wireless. So far, use of these systems has been light for a variety of technology and economic reasons, but that is the subject of another article.