Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
Network neutrality and the future of communities
If you are not familiar with the phrase "network neutrality," it is time to start learning more about it, as the issue is moving front and center in the debate about the future of the Internet.
The current Internet is "network neutral," meaning that there is a gentleman's agreement among all network managers that they will allow anyone else's data to cross their network. If you send an email to someone in California, it might traverse several privately owned networks along the way. Network neutrality is what makes the Internet work.
But as I've been writing for some time, the Internet was never designed for video, and the crushing data load of video (hundreds or thousands of times more data than emails and Web pages) is forcing network managers to start considering alternatives to network neutrality.
It is the low end broadband providers (telcos and cable companies) that are suffering. As their customers now routinely download or stream audio and video from sources outside their own network, they have to carry all that traffic, raising their costs and affecting network performance (everything gets slower).
This BBC commentary is a good introduction to some of the issues (I don't agree with everything the author recommends), and here is a critical and important quote from the article:
The phone and cable companies want to be free to charge for new services and make more money, and they argue that it's not up to the government what they do with their networks.
I have to side with the broadband providers in this case. I don't agree with the author that the solution is to re-regulate telecom and turn these companies into de facto arms of the government. We've already tried that, and as the technology changed, it was less and less efficient.
The author talks about the undesirability of having two roads in every town--a well maintained private road (owned by the telcos and cable companies) and a "dirt road" for public use. But in trying to convince us of the correctness of his position, he fails to mention an alternative--that communities build and maintain roads that can be used by everyone, including the cable and telephone companies.
This model already works really well--with vehicular roads, on which an amazing variety of public and private vehicles share that road and its costs and everyone benefits from a single, publicly maintained community road system.
The author's alternative is to have the Federal government deciding for local communities what kind of broadband they need. That's not likely to work well, any more than it is to let the cable or telephone company decide what kind of broadband we need (where we are right now).
Think I'm wrong about relying of the Feds? Ten years after the 1996 Telecom Deregulation Act, the Federal government is still stubbornly insisting that "broadband" is 200 kilobits per second. That's about four times faster than dial up, about two to four times slower than what most of us have via cable and DSL, and about 500 times slower than what the rest of the world thinks is an acceptable broadband speed (100 megabits per second).
So communities have three choices:
- You can let the Federal government decide what is best for your community. And we already have plenty of information about how that is likely to work out.
- You can let a private company with headquarters many states away decide what is best for you community. And we have plenty of information about how that is working out.
- The community can set its own direction for the future, make its own investments, and make decisions locally about what is best for the community.
Which fork in the road is the right one for the economic future of your community?
Technology News:
Portable displays will let us ditch the laptop
For those of us that travel frequently, it's mostly a chore to lug around a laptop. Treos and Blackberries are fine for sending a short, urgent message, but many of us has real work to do in the morning or in the evening while on the road. For that you need a full size keyboard and display.
This new projector technology (in this example, built into a cellphone) would let us ditch the laptop. As long as we had a small, portable computing device like a Treo, this new display system would work very well with a small, portable keyboard (which would be much easier to lug around than a laptop).
Eventually, these small display systems may get rid of desktop LCD panels and CRTs as well. A tiny cube will sit on the desk and display onto a piece of stiff paper, a special reflective screen (like a miniature projector screen), or even onto the wall/cubicle. And add in the new projection keyboards, and our portable computing devices become the desktop--nothing else is needed.
Technology News:
Gas stations in space
NASA has announced a series of new cash prizes for companies that are able to introduce new space systems that meet the agency's specification. Like the popular X Prize that led to the creation of several private spaceship firms and the successful flight of Bert Rutan's SpaceShipOne, these new awards are designed to encourage the development of new space systems developed without the red tape and overhead of government research.
Among the new technology that NASA seeks is cheaper space suits, small reentry vehicles, lunar vehicles, and power generators that can produce power for the 14 day lunar night. But one of the most interesting requests is for new orbital fueling stations that would be able to fuel spacecraft going to and from the moon.
NASA has finally figured out, perhaps, that it can more done, quicker and faster, by leveraging the private sector. Outsourcing research, development, and production also creates new private sector jobs, and lets more states and regions get a toehold in the Space Economy. In the past, Florida and Texas have had a lock on space work.
Technology News:
E85 cars and trucks may save American automakers
USA Today reports that Ford and GM are going to accelerate the introduction of more E85 cars and trucks, which will run on a mix of 85% ethanol (from corn) and 15% gasoline. Ford is planning to work with ethanol distillers to increase the number of gas stations that offer the alternative fuel, starting in the midwest, where corn is plentiful and where most of the ethanol producers are located.
Brazil has been doing this for years, and most cars and trucks in the country run mostly on E85 fuel. But the net benefits for this approach are still subject to debate. Some researchers claim it takes more energy to make ethanol than to refine gasoline. But some of those studies have been done by the oil industry, which is not entirely impartial.
Because of Brazil's success, it is likely that ethanol will become a part of the vehicle fuel options available in this country, along with fossil fuels, hydrogen, electricity, and natural gas. The gas station, ten years from now, will likely have a variety of pumps and charging stations for a variety of fuels and energy.
Technology News:
Google wants all your files
Google's new version of its Desktop toolbar will copy the files on your computer to its servers, where you can search them. Ostensibly, this free service is designed to make life easier for people that have multiple computers (like a desktop machine and a laptop). By letting Google index all the files on both computers, you can find any file on either machine simply by searching Google.
Google promises it won't really peek at the files (although they must be read to be indexed), and that it will delete the files after thirty days if you are not using the service. And I've got swamp land in Florida I'd like to sell you.
Google may promise it will keep your files private, but I bet it is not keeping the indexes generated by the files private. It will use the indexes to better target advertising to you. So if you like fly fishing and have numerous files on your computer about fishing, Google will notice your index has many references to fishing and you will start seeing more ads about fishing tackle popping up.
Without careful configuration, the software will happily grab your income tax records, your business and accounting files, your love letters, and just about anything else on your computer.
Once Google has them, it becomes much easier for law enforcement or a civil suit to subpoena the records if someone decides they want to know more about you. A disgruntled employee or an angry neighbor could wreak havoc with your private life.
I would not touch this service, period. It's just too risky. And there are plenty of programs that will index all the files on your computer already--and they don't require turning over all your entire electronic data files to a third party.
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Knowledge Democracy:
Record industry sues woman who does not own a computer
The recording industry trade association (RIAA), according to this blog run by two lawyers, is suing a woman for illegal music downloads. There is just one small problem; she does not own a computer and has never had one in her house, period.
It's hard to figure out what is going on with these execs and why then continue to do such dumb stuff. You can't even make up this kind of silliness. It's a classic case of paranoia induced by a fear of change--you start seeing enemies everywhere, but the real problem is your own unwillingness to adjust to changing market conditions.
Owning a successful business (like a phone company or a record company) does not create an obligation on the part of government to choke off new distribution systems or to pass laws forbidding other entities to compete with you. It's ironic that companies that have benefitted so much from the free market system now want to prevent anyone else from using the same market mechanisms to become successful.
Knowledge Democracy:
Cheaper, faster computer memory from gecko feet
Nanotechnology has the potential to change the way all sorts of things work. This article about building computer memory using nano-size buckytubes is a perfect example. Memory is one of the most expensive parts of any digital device, and for little computers like iPods and other MP3 music players, the solid state memory or hard drive usually accounts for about half the cost of the components.
By using carbon buckytubes, which are very small hollow tubes to build a kind of mechanical on-off switch, scientists have been able to show how to build computer memory that is ten times faster than current semiconductor-based memory and that requires no power to preserve the current state--a big headache with much of the current memory designs.
The carbon bucktubes are so small that they can make use of Van der Waal forces--intermolecular forces that attract one molecule to another. It's the same principle that allows geckos to walk upside down on glass. Geckos don't have sticky feet. They have tiny hairs on the pads of their feet--millions of hairs--that are so small they actually interact on a molecular level with whatever material they are walking across.
A lot of nano-based materials are made of carbon molecules. We have plenty of carbon in the United States--it's called coal. If I was an economic developer in a coal region, I'd be looking closely at how to turn coal into the gold of the Nano Economy.
Disclaimer: No geckos were harmed in the writing of this article.
Technology News:
Do the phone companies owe us $200 billion?
A new book alleges that the phone companies owe every household in America $2000, or about $200 billion in total. Just released (disclaimer: I have not had a chance to read it yet), the book is already creating a lot of discussion online.
The dollar figures allegedly come from calculations the author has performed by looking at the increases in phone and broadband costs over the past decade and comparing them to what the phone companies promised to do in the mid-nineties.
As someone who worked for AT&T in the early eighties, both before and after the break up, I tend to be skeptical of phone company conspiracy theories. I saw so much bad management I have a hard time visualizing the kind of diabolical master plans some people want to see--a lot of it is just plain myopia and lack of vision.
But there is no denying some of the author's key allegations, because they have been rigorously documented by many sources--we rank 16th in the world for broadband deployment, and have some of the slowest, most expensive broadband in the world, by a wide margin.
Technology News:
Music players may cause hearing loss
An iPod user has filed a federal lawsuit against Apple alleging that the popular music players cause hearing damage. The suit claims that Apple knows the volume can be set too high--so high that it causes permanent damage.
But I believe the real culprit are the "earbud" style earphones that come with some iPods but are also widely available from other vendors, and they work with any CD or MP3 player. Earbuds fit directly in the ear canal, rather than over the entire ear. They not only block exterior noise, but also channel the sound directly into the ear canal.
It does not really matter what the earbuds are connected to, they are a recipe for disaster, as they have the effect of concentrating the sound energy in a very small space. As little as an hour of over-exposure to loud sound can cause permanent hearing damage.
Technology News:
How Google may fail
I worded the title of this article carefully; I used "may," not "will." Google may end up as de facto owner of the world's information, and I could be wrong. Time will tell.
Google's early success came by doing something well that no one else was doing--searching the Web. Google studied the behavior of early search engines like Alta Vista, and came up with better search algorithms. Everybody liked Google because it did something no one else could do--produce relevant search results.
Google then introduced ads linked to searches--again, a new idea and a new service no one else was doing. They did the world a great favor by proving that ads on the Web worked. So far, so good.
But somewhere along the way, Google, I think, has lost its way. Consider the warning signs:
- Google says it won't give the Feds search phrases to aid the fight against child pornography. As awful as child pornography is, I think turning search phrases over the government is stepping on a banana peel at the top of a steep hill. But barely a week after this principled stance by Google, the company lamely claims that cooperating with the Chinese Communist government to censor the Chinese version of Google is okay. Whatever self-delusional reasoning Google used on itself, they sold out a billion people to make a buck, and worse, proved that the company is internally inconsistent.
- For the last couple of years, Google has been rolling out new services like email and news, the better to extend its grip on advertising. But to make some of these things work, the company is relying on taking content from others, packaging it in new ways, and selling ads--with no revenue sharing with the content holders. This is a nice way to create a lot of enemies very quickly.Newspapers are roaring mad at the company for this tactic, and book publishers and authors are apoplectic at Google's scheme to scan every book in the world and make the results searchable--again, with ads plastered on every page delivered and no revenue sharing with the content owners.
- Google's value dropped $20 billion yesterday as expenses outran revenue. How could this happen? Google is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build a complete, nationwide network completely separate from the current distributed Internet structure--in effect, creating a walled garden where every service is a Google-branded "free" service that runs quicker and faster than services on the "old" Internet. But this is going to make ISPs madder than heck, and could lead to routing wars, where parts of the Internet become inaccessible.
- Finally, Google's search algorithms stink, in the sense that as the Internet has grown, they don't work like they used to. Other companies have developed alternate search approaches that work better (but they lack market visibility). Google may fast become the GM of the Internet, with stuffy, dull cars that a lot of people still buy but that no one really likes very much--nearly every Google search returns hundreds of thousands if not millions of search results--how stupid is that? And after all this time and all the money they have, they can't make search work better? Their eye is off the ball as they try to build all these other empires.
Google is not going away, but the company has moved away from its core competency, and that's always dangerous.
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