Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
Amsterdam gets it on community fiber
EuroTelcoBlog has a story on Amsterdam's community fiber initiative.
The Dutch city has committed to running fiber to every home and business, and is starting with 40,000 homes, or about 10% of the city. So over the next seven to ten years, everyone in the city will have access to community-managed fiber and a wide variety of private sector services--in other words, competition and choice. This citation from the city-issued report shows how serious the city leaders are:
"This enables our city to compete with other European cities. The fiber network delivers to Amsterdam an innovative and freely accessible infrastructure, suitable to support growth in demand for the next 30 years or more. In this way we ensure a wide open marketplace for innovative service-providers and economic growth, as well as a fast track for the smarter and cheaper delivery of care, education and other public services."
The project is particularly interesting because of its organizational component. A stock corporation has been formed (something I've argued for for years), and the city holds one third of the stock, local housing corporations hold one third (probably the equivalent of our HUD-style housing efforts), and private investors hold one third. It is a public private partnership, and telcos and other telecom players could invest in and profit from the shared infrastructure. The private sector ownwership componenent neatly sidesteps the "unfair competition" issue tossed around so casually in the U.S.
For American towns, cities, and regions, this is the competition. And there is another message here as well. There is a lot of DSL in Europe, and Amsterdam has said, with this initiative, "We don't think DSL is good enough."
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The golden age of newspapers
The media loves nothing better than stories about itself, so there is much handwringing in the media about the drop in newspaper circulation. I predicted this in 1994 at a meeting of newspaper folk who came to Blacksburg to hear about the newfangled Blacksburg Electronic Village thing.
What I told them then has not changed--newspapers have a golden future ahead of them if they would only stop thinking their job is to print the news on paper and toss those clumps of paper in people's driveways.
What papers have is an organization designed to edit and filter the news, and that is what is valuable, not the fact that they have a big machine designed to spread ink onto dead trees; the printing press is a byproduct of the news process, not the news process itself. But newspapers have trouble seeing that.
I talked to a newspaper person recently who asked, "How do we get young people to read the paper?" The short answer is, "You can't." They expect to get their news online, and so newspapers have to abandon paper and move to a new model of news distribution, using the Internet. And the paper has to do more than just stick articles designed for paper on the Web.
Why is it the golden age of newspapers? Because in a world awash in information, most of it suspect, an organization that does a good job of telling what the most important stuff is has nothing but opportunities ahead of it. But newspapers have to let go of paper, and dropping the word "paper" from their name would be a start.
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Video iPod content set to explode
Anyone who thinks that the new video iPod is strictly a novelty item for teens and twenty-somethings should probably think again.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is a video worth? Could it be ten thousand words (about twenty pages)?
That sounds about right to me. Zoom and Go, a popular travel site, is putting their entire library of travel videos in iPod format. According to the site, that is about ten thousand videos.
Travel and tourism is a huge business, and travelers are interested in the best places to go, to stay, and to eat. Watching a short video clip of a hotel, restaurant, or attraction is far more compelling that reading about it, or even browsing a few pictures on a Web site. Imagine, as you are getting ready to leave on a trip, downloading directions, hotel information, video maps, and restaurant information straight to your iPod, and having, essentially, an interactive tour guide every step of the way.
It's just an early example of what will be a flood of video-enabled information designed for portable devices. One of the advantages of the iPod, oddly enough, is that it does NOT require an Internet connection. The one-button downloads and fast synchronization of files from your desktop machine make it incredibly easy to download gigabytes of information and then use it anywhere, without the fuss of finding a hotspot or cellphone connection.
As I wrote recently, Step One of your region's revitalized economic development plan may be to buy all your leaders iPods, and then show them how to use them.
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The Internet Monroe Doctrice
Some bloggers are calling this simple four part statement a "Monroe Doctrine" for the Internet. The United States has made it clear that it is not going to give control of the Internet to the U.N. Good. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
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Sony hacks a computer near you
This article talks about Sony's Digital Rights Management (DRM) software that comes on Sony music CDs. The DRM works in part by installing a bunch of secret software on your PC, without your permission! In other contexts we call that computer trespass and/or illegal behavior.
This is just one more example of a long term trend in the music industry to treat customers--all their customers--as thieves, even in the absence of evidence. It's no wonder CD sales are down--who wants a music CD that takes over your computer, installs secret software, and changes your working environment in unpublished ways?
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Free speech fight on the Internet
Congress is fighting over a bill that would protect bloggers from having to file onerous reports on their activities. Part of the fall out of the 2002 campaign finance law is strict regulations on campaigning and candidate support. The problem arises because the law is so vague that a private citizen with a lightly read blog who endorses a candidate for election would fall under the regulation of the Federal Election Committee.
Most of the original sponsors of the bill agree that they never intended to try to regulate the speech of private citizens, but instead were trying to limit the influence of well-organized groups. But the Law of Unintended Consequences kicked in on this one, as it seems to so often when legislators are involved.
Blogging, in principle, is no different than the pamphleteering that was so popular in the early days of the country. Tom Paine, one of America's greatest political writers and analysts, was a blogger. He wrote down his own thoughts, published them at his own expense, and distributed his thoughts to interested readers. That's blogging, and I don't think a Federal Commission should be telling us what we can and cannot write.
What baffles me is how this has become a partisan issues. Both conservative and liberal bloggers stand to lose from limits on free speech. It is almost always the case that if you seek to limit the speech of your opponents in the U.S., the laws come back around to bite you. What might look like clever political strategy today could be disastrous a year from now. More voices is a good thing, and I don't see the need for limits on speech. Right or left, the more the merrier--that is what America is all about.
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Red light cameras cause accidents
Red light cameras, which are used at busy intersections to catch people running red lights, are being turned off. Aside from some very serious privacy issues, the cameras cause accidents. Intersections with red light cameras are getting 10% to 20% more accidents than before the cameras were installed.
The problem is that once people know the cameras are there, they tend to stomp on the brakes as the light changes, for fear of running the light and getting a ticket. The result is an increase in rear end crashes, as the hapless person behind them (also probably trying to sneak through the light) runs into the brake stomper.
It is a good reminder that technology sometimes creates problems rather than solving them. We always need to look carefully at the promises of vendors before buying new stuff.
On the privacy side, the red light systems have been heavily marketed by private firms that "manage" them system and take a cut of every ticket issued. This is a great pitch to make to cash-strapped government--more tickets, more revenue, and all costs outsourced. But there are some things that should never be delegated to the private sector, and law enforcement is one of them. Getting paid to write tickets invites abuse.
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WiFi is not a "right"
The mayor of San Francisco has proclaimed that WiFi is a "right." Here are his exact words, from a recent Yahoo! article.
This is a civil rights issue as much as anything else...It is to me a fundamental right to have access universally to information.
WiFi is a lot of things, but I'm pretty sure that it is not a civil right, anymore than libraries or roads are a civil right. Libraries provide information, but I don't think we have a "right" to them. Television and radio provide information, but I don't recall a debate in the 1920s about "radio rights" or in the 1950s about "TV rights."
People like Rosa Parks, who really did have something to say about civil rights, are diminished by this kind of hyperbole.
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Good-bye to long distance
The FCC has approved the SBC-AT&T merger and the Verizon-MCI merger. What these deals really mean is that long distance as a service is dead, dead, dead, as I like to say.
The baseline for telephony service is now nationwide flat rate calling, or some variant of that that includes a lot of long distance minutes in the base rate and something around or below five cents a minute if you go over.
AT&T and MCI have dwindled in recent years to nearly nothing because they could not look past the long distance cash cow. Both companies had millions of customers paying around twenty or twenty-five dollars a month for long distance service, and it was easy money.
But the whole long distance business was built decades ago on private, long distance networks that connected to local switches. It was a big, expensive business to build all those trunk lines, so even after Ma Bell was deconstructed in 1984, there were really only three major players--AT&T, MCI, and Sprint. Most other long distance companies just bought wholesale and resold capacity.
Like everything else, the Internet has been the big spoiler. What has happened over the past several years is that most long distance traffic has been switched over to packet-based Internet trunks, which is cheaper and easier to do, and the old dedicated long distance networks became irrelevant.
The death of long distance has been inevitable, but it remains to be seen if it these mergers do any good. We have fewer and fewer companies owning a larger and larger share of telecom services. I remain steadfast in believing, as many others do, that the only way out of this marketplace monopoly (not a good thing) is distributed ownership of networks. Communities and governments have to get involved in creating open service provider networks to create a balance to the monopolies we have in most communities.
If we don't do this, the future of many communities will be increasingly grim, as high telecom costs will make these places noncompetitive from an economic development perspective.
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Funding fiber: A simple solution
There is much handwringing by local and state governments and the Feds about the "lack of money" to spend on broadband infrastructure. But it is pretty hard to take all that seriously. When politicians say, "There is no money for that," what they are really saying is that there are other things they would rather spend it on, and often for no good reason.
This report on the ever expanding oil well style gusher of gas taxes is a perfect example.
Governments are collecting more than $58 billion a year in gas taxes, and spending it on all kinds of dubious "transportation" projects, many of which are pork, pure and simple.
And communities are in on it. So it is really us that are making bad choices. A community, cannot, on the one hand, complain about disappearing jobs and lack of economic growth, and then on the other hand, encourage their elected reps to throw gas tax dollars at old economy projects or, worse, civic projects that have only a slight relationship to jobs and Knowledge Economy economic development.
Let's take 10% of our gas taxes and build fiber roads with the money. What we need is the equivalent, at the Federal level, of the Interstate highway system, where the Feds, in cooperation with the States, built interstate highways. We need that again. The natural role of the Federal government is interstate fiber highways, with exit ramps in major towns and cities. States and local governments can use their own 10% portion of gas taxes to build middle mile connections to local communities.
With that kind of middle mile and backbone infrastructure being built, the private sector will, in most places, be happy to provide local (first mile) connectivity.
$5 billion dollars, at an average of $10,000/mile for fiber construction (I'm taking advantage of volume to drive the average cost down), we could build 500,000 miles of backbone and middle mile fiber.
That's not just a start, it is what we need to do, and right now. And we would not even notice that little 10% shift in transportation spending...it's pocket change for state and Federal government.
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