Technology Futures

Fujitsu has demonstrated its new electronic paper. It's a thin, bendable "sheet" that can display color images, and the current image is displayed even when the power is turned off.

The first company that is able to deliver an affordable product is likely to make billions, as this kind of product will allow numerous uses. Fujitsu's electronic paper has a major advantage because of its storage capability--it can be loaded with an image and then turned off. Electronic displays have not found wider use because of the power consumption problems.

One likely application would be shelf price tags in grocery stores. It is a major cost to keep these updated. With electronic paper that requires no power, grocery stores would rush to buy these. Larger versions will see wide use to replace paper ads and billboards on buses and subways, as just one example.

And of course, we'll all have a lightweight, wireless version that can pull Web pages off our desktop computer so we can read the morning news at the breakfast table.

Digital paper is a transforming technology. As I've said in the past, we are at the very beginning of the technology revolution. So far, many of our every day processes have been reformed but not transformed. There are tremendous business and economic development opportunities that will emerge in the next ten to twenty years as transforming technologies like digital electronic paper become commonplace. Does your local economic develop strategy have a futures componenent, where you are looking at future trends and weighing local assets for opportunities?

A private report by Informa Telecoms & Media shows that Asian countries are deploying fiber to the home faster than ever. In Japan, there are now about 2.5 million homes and businesses with fiber connections, and 10 million are expected by 2010. FTTH connections in the U.S total probably well under half a million, and that may be wildly optimistic. NTT, just one of several Japanese fiber providers, charges about $60 a month for a 100 megabit fiber connection, compared to around $45 a month in the United States for a copper-based "broadband" connection with an average speed of 1-2 megabits.

In South Korea, Korea Telecom (KT) has stated that copper "lacked the stability" for Internet-based television broadcasting, and has chosen to provide "guaranteed" 100 megabit fiber connections to customers. KT has also stated they are replacing DSL with fiber.

Here in the United States, we are fiddling with trying to shove a few megabits of data over copper electric lines and hailing it as "broadband." How much longer are we going to remain asleep as a country before we realize that broadband is a critical economic development issue, and that we can't afford to keep investing in twenty year old copper technology?

BC.NET, a project of the British Columbia provincial government, is deploying what they call Transit Exchange Hubs in communities throughout the province.

The Transit Exchange Hub is similar in concept to the MSAP (Multimedia Services Access Point), which I designed and implemented in 1999 as part of the Blacksburg Electronic Village. Both the Hubs and the MSAP build on a standard piece of Internet systems architecture called a NAP, or Network Access Point. What NAPs do is allow different networks (remember that the Internet is a network of networks, not a single contiguous thing) to exchange data.

What is different about the MSAP/Transit Exchange approach is that it pushes the NAP down into communities and regions. The benefits can be dramatic--network performance can increase substantially and the cost of intracommunity network traffic can go down significantly. So MSAPs reduce costs and improve network performance. For local applications that are sensitive to time delays like videoconferencing, voice telephone calls, or gaming, the MSAP can be critical to performance and usability by keeping local data local and not requiring Internet Service Providers to haul large amounts of data across their very expensive Internet backbone connections.

The LA Times reports that there are now more cellphones than landlines. We went from basically zero cellphones about ten years ago. We are at a point now where most households have at least one cellphone.

We still have a few problems with cellphones, though.

• Cellphone service still costs too much. But now that the high growth days are over and the providers can't count on a steady stream of new customers to keep prices propped up, we should see some downward pressure on pricing. Until now, the companies have been increasing minutes as a way of moderating the apparent cost, but this is also a dead end. I call it the "AOL trick," in which the initial free minutes offered in the first month with AOL accounts exceeds the amount the actual number of minutes in a month. In other words, even the most loquacious of us, at some point, needs no more minutes.
• 911 service, after ten years, is still not well-integrated into cellular service. This leads to the headscratching decision by the FCC to demand that VoIP phones get 911 working in a few months. Huh? There are about 40 times more cellphones than VoIP phones, but VoIP providers have to do what cellphone providers can't or won't do?
• Cellular providers still hold customers hostage on phones. You can't pick a phone with the feature set you want, then go to a provider and have them enable it for their service. Instead, you have to take whatever phones they care to offer. Exclusive deals between manufacturers and providers often mean the phone you really want may never be available from your provider. This is a disgrace. We decided in 1984 that it was not a good idea to let the phone company tell you what phone you can use. Why do we still have this with cellphones?