Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
Why fiber is a safe investment
The Kansai Electric company in Japan has deployed new equipment that enables them to transmit 1 terabit of data per second over their company fiber lines.
That is 100 times faster than most of the fiber transmission electronics currently in use, and shows why fiber, while somewhat more expensive on the front end, is such a safe bet. Research in laboratories has actually achieved even higher speeds, but the Kansai equipment has actually been deployed in the field. Fiber can be upgraded without replacing the fiber and duct lines in the ground or on poles, which is a big advantage, and it makes fiber future proof.
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The Internet is booming
Use of the Internet is booming in the United States. A new study released by the U.S. Census Bureau shows big changes from 1997.
- 40% of all adults in the U.S. use the Internet to get weather and sports, up from 7% in 1997.
- 47% of U.S. adults use the Internet to get news and other information, up from 2% in 1997. This is why newspapers, in their traditional form, are in such trouble--half of all adults use the Internet to get news. There is no reason why newspapers can't get in on that action, but they would have to develop a new business model that is Internet-centric rather than paper-centric.
- In one of the most interesting pieces of data, more than 39 million households shopped online in 2004, up about 10% from the previous year. So there is a lot of money changing hands on the Internet, and local small businesses need to become more savvy about getting in the game, just like newspapers.
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Taiwan plans whole country wireless broadband
Taiwan joins the growing list of countries that have nationwide strategies for providing some kind of broadband everywhere. The government has inked a $209 million dollar agreement with Intel to build an island-wide WiMax network.
Taiwan is much smaller than many U.S. states, but nonetheless, can you point to a single U.S. state that has put any significant funds behind a statewide broadband initiative?
Neither can I.
The odd thing is that states continue to dump tens and hundreds of millions of dollars into traditional economic development recruitment strategies to bring (typically) Manufacturing Economy businesses into a state, rather than attending to basic infrastructure improvements that would boost the opportunities of thousands or tens of thousands of smaller businesses. And keep in mind that all the job growth is in those small businesses (25 employees or less).
So state leaders dump millions into a single business and ignore all the businesses already in the state. And in Virginia, the state has had to sue some companies that took millions in incentives and then did not create jobs or move.
There are no technology problems. We have a lot of leadership problems, though, and the only thing that will fix that is an ongoing program to better educate our leaders on the issues and what we expect them to do.
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Apple remembers Rosa Parks
Some might view it as a cynical marketing ploy, but Apple Computer has taken its own products off the main portion of its home page and replaced it with a photo of Rosa Parks. It is a worth a moment just to reflect on the courage of this woman, and how insignificant all our gadgetry and Internet toys are compared the what she did and how much she made America a better place.
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VoIP blocking will kill economic development
What I and others have been predicting for years is starting to come to pass. As the number of broadband providers has narrowed to a duopoly of the cable and phone company in most regions, these firms are starting to muscle out third party service providers. VoIP startups are the first target because both the phone and cable company want VoIP customers of their own, and the simplest way to do that is to simply block all VoIP data packets except their own. Evidence of this is clearly visible as hardware manufacturers begin to sell VoIP blocking appliances.
This is the strongest argument of all for community broadband infrastructure, which is offered as a level playing field for all service providers. Community leaders that simply hand over the economic development keys to a monopoloy broadband provider by doing nothing are consigning their communities to a slow death. Businesses will avoid regions where there is monopoly control of services (that is, all telecom costs will be higher there). New businesses will have a harder time starting, and entrepreneurs will pick up their families and move elsewhere.
The opening shots are being fired. The goal is to kill competition and create monopoloy markets where a private company decides what services your community and businesses get, and at what price. How will your region respond?
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Google and book publishers prepare to battle
CNet reports on the looming battle between Google and book publishers, who are outraged that the search company intends to scan millions of books and make them available to search online.
Google's argument is that what they are doing is no different than indexing Web pages, which is basically a full text "scan." But there is a difference. Web pages are inherently public in nature, even if a copyright notice is attached to the pages. A person or company that creates a Web site wants the public to be able to access it (if they did not, they would password protect it).
But books are different. Web pages are provided for free, and books are offered for sale for a fee. By scanning them, Google subverts the relationship between publisher and reader. The author is also left out, since he or she gets paid royalties from publisher sales.
It is outrageous, but Google is taking advantage of a peculiarity of copyright law which says it is up to the copyright holder to enforce copyright. In other words, Google can do whatever it likes until challenged specifically, book by book. It is a nightmare for publishers and authors, who must try to force Google to take a book out of the company's computers. And there is no protection against bootleg copies downloaded from Google and then distributed outside of the Google system (e.g. using Napster or some other filesharing program).
Google, of course, also plans to put ads on every book page coughed up by its search engines, further subverting the system by baldly trying to make a buck off someone else's work--and not paying for the privilege.
Meanwhile, Google's core product, it's search engine, is less and less effective. While the company is busy trying to capture every kind of content on the Internet for ad placement, they have done little to make their search engine better. My current favorite? It is Dogpile, a dumb name but provides surprisingly good results.
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Hydrogen fuel from solid metal
An Israeli company has developed a new process for generating hydrogen right in an automobile, which completely solves the conundrum of transporting, storing, and fueling vehicles with pressurized hydrogen. The system uses metals like zinc or aluminum and plain water. The process heats the metal to a high temperature, where it combines with the oxygen in water to create a solid oxide. What is left behind is hydrogen, which is burned to propel the car. Refueling consists of replacing the oxide byproduct (a powder) with a coil of metal and some water. Another benefit is that the automobile has zero emissions.
The effort is still in the prototyping stages, but the firm swears it will scale well to fit in a normal size automobile. It is further proof of the robustness of the emerging Energy Economy.
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The iPod Generation
I was at a talk the other day, and the listener was going at some length about iPods and how the devices were changing the way people did things (as I often write about in this column). But this was a group of about 40 community leaders and economic developers, and one of them, in exasperation, finally blurted out, "Some of us don't have iPods."
The speaker stopped and asked for a show of hands, and it turned out only two people in the room owned an iPod, and one of them was the speaker.
Here's the problem.
Nearly everyone under 30 already has an iPod, or intends to buy one soon. For them, there is no "change." They already do things differently than nearly everyone over 30, and there's the rub.
That room full of leaders is making decisions that will affect their communities and regions for years, even decades. But they are completely out of touch with the generation that is needed to keep those communities vibrant and healthy.
I can virtually guarantee that most of the leaders, in other meetings, have bemoaned, "Our young people are graduating from high school and moving away. We have to figure out how to get young people to stay."
The irony, as they say, can be quite thick.
Perhaps the first step in a community's updated economic development plan is to buy some iPods and give them to community leaders. How about your community: Is there an iPod gap?
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Counting the microenterprise
In New Hampshire, economic developers did a study of business ownership and found that 18.5% of all private, non-farm employment in the state was tied to microenterprises. A microenterprise is defined as a business that employs between one and five people, including the owner, and requires no more than $35,000 in start up capital (Business NH Magazine, March 2005).
So in New Hampshire, a fifth of the economy is based on companies with less than five people!
So here is a homework assignment. Go back to your local economic developers and elected leaders (who usually appoint the economic developers), and ask them these questions:
- How many microbusinesses do we have in our town/region?
- What percentage of jobs do these businesses account for?
- What programs are in the current economic development plan to help existing microbusinesses grow?
- What programs are in the current economic development plan to help local entrepreneurs start microbusinesses?
- What programs are in the current economic development plan to attract entrepreneurs from other areas that want to relocate and start a microbusiness?
- What amenities, services, and community attributes do relocating microbusiness entrepreneurs look for, and do we have a plan in place to get them and market them?
If you do not get satisfactory answers to these questions, your region may be ignoring the fastest growing source of jobs in the United States, with a 600% increase over the last decade in the microbusiness category.
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Rural Oregon county has biggest WiFi system
The WiFi system that covers the biggest area in the country is not in a major city like New York, Philadelphia, or San Francisco. It is in rural Oregon, in a county of just 11,000 people. Not only that, the system is generating substantial revenue, suggesting that there is plenty of money to be made in broadband in rural areas when the whole community gets on board.
Local governments are paying to use the system to automate parking meters, among other applications, and farmers are using it to monitor their crops and to communicate with their buyers.
The availability of the affordable system has spawned dozens of new users no one expected prior to the rollout, which is exactly the point--trying to predict the success of a comprehensive community broadband system by looking at what people and businesses are doing today is completely and utterly futile. It also proves my longstanding argument that feasiblity studies and market studies are of very limited value, because they can only measure what people are doing not. Affordable broadband changes use patterns and opens up new applications people don't think of until they actually have a usable system in place. In my experience, I have seen some broadband "feasibility" studies actually have a negative impact because the study predicts there won't be enough use.
The entrepreneur that owns the system nailed it when asked what the biggest obstacle was to rolling out these systems. His reply was, "Politics." It's not money, and it is not technology. When local governments work with entrepreneurs and businesspeople to support broadband, great things happen.
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