Technology Futures

One of the common arguments against running fiber to every home and business goes like this: "Once we all have a cellphone with data service, we won't even need a landline."

From a certain squinty distance, it sounds very reasonable, and some invalid data to support it usually goes like this: "And I know several people that don't even have a landline phone anymore."

Here are a couple of contrarian data points. While at the beach last week, in a flat area with few tall trees and in visual site of two cell towers, neither my phone nor my wife's phone worked reliably. And by that I mean you could not place a call consistently, if you did place a call it usually dropped in less than a minute, and you could not reliably retrieve voicemail. The landline phone became indispensable. And we had two different phones from two different manufacturers, so it was not just a device problem.

A more sobering example is the tragedy in London this morning. After the bomb blast, cellphone circuits became so jammed that the system essentially stopped functioning entirely.

All wireless communications suffer from the same unavoidable problem that gets down to basic physics, rather than system design--any wireless system uses a certain amount of bandwidth, and you can only spread that bandwidth among so many people. After that you run out. That limitation does not exist with fiber networks, as you can add more fiber as needed to provide nearly infinite (perceived) bandwidth.

Wireless vendors are always finding ways to squeeze a little more traffic onto a wireless network, and there are new systems like Ultra Wide Band (UWB) and frequency hopping that promise to improve bandwidth availability. But we are all going to want reliable communications, especially in emergencies, and that means we need both very capable wireless networks AND solid, high reliability fiber connections.

Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn) is talking about proposing a House bill that would allow for national video franchises. This is partly in response to the somewhat justified whining by the telcos that it is too much trouble for them to go to every town in America and ask permission to deliver TV programming over phone lines.

There are so many dumbheaded things here that it is hard to know where to start.

First of all, the telcos are trying to rewrite the rules in their favor after their main competitors, the cable companies, have already invested a lot of time and money in negotiating local franchises. So the cable companies might reasonably ask why the phone companies get to skip the hard part.

Communities will be furious because national franchises will likely cut them out of the sometimes lucrative franchise fee income. Most local franchise fees don't make sense because they are not tied to the cost of right of way management, the way they should be. Instead, it's an easy way to force a private business to collect taxes from taxpayers.

From another angle, franchise fees don't make much sense because satellite TV providers have avoided them completely, so you have a competitor that has neither local nor national franchise fees. So why create a national franchise fee?

The Federal government will probably love the idea, because by definition, a national franchise will involve a big fee, most of which will stay with the Federal government. The FCC will like it, because it helps justify the FCC, which is really obsolete.

Franchise fees ought to be tied to the cost of providing community property (right of way) to private companies, and nothing more. It should not be tied to the kind of content. Franchise fees should not be managed as a hidden tax initiative--it only creates local disincentives for private companies to offer service. Communities cannot simultaneously complain they don't have enough broadband options then turn around and insist that telecom providers become a local tax collector, which just raises the cost of service.

Communities could get out of the franchise fee business entirely by investing in a community broadband infrastructure and make it available to private companies for a fee based on some sensible metric (like number of customer served, or a small percentage of revenue). This creates a self-funding mechanism to support the broadband infrastructure, and does not inhibit small companies with innovative services from entering the marketplace.

The only winners in the franchise agreement game are lawyers, whose huge fees on both sides simply raise the cost of telecom for everyone, including local government. It's crazy for the Federal government to be trying to make this even more complicated, and in the process usurping more control from local authorities.

Podcasts (audio files you download and play on your computer or MP3 player) have become mainstream, and it is, once again, Apple Computer that has led the way.

Although most people have not yet downloaded and listened to a podcast, the new medium has been growing rapidly, with thousands of podcasters and listeners estimated in the millions. Just as Apple, using the iPod and its iTunes software, singlehandly rewrote the rules of music publishing, Apple has once again, using the same combo of the iPod and iTunes to rewrite radio.

Apple has not added any new systems or technology to the podcast medium. Instead, the company has done what it always has done--made finding and listening to podcasts dead simple.

Prior to integrating podcasts into iTunes, potential listeners had to wander from Web site to Web site, or visit mostly hard to use (by comparison) podcast link directories. Using iTunes, it is easy to browse and sample the thousands of podcasts already offered by the iTunes store, and downloading them onto your computer is a one click operation, where they are seamlessly categorized and ready for listening. Plug your iPod into your computer, and you can squirt a podcast onto your MP3 player so that you can take the podcast with you....instant, customized radio.

It has enormous potential for tourism, especially historical and music tourism. iTunes is free for both Windows and the Mac. Give it a try.

ITER is an international consortium that is planning to build a 500 megawatt fusion reactor by 2016. Fusion power is the holy grail of the energy industry because it uses relatively inexpensive fuel (hydrogen), creates little contaminated nuclear waste, and can generate large amounts of power.

Advanced engineering is underway, and one of the goals of the project is to use pre-qualified and off the shelf materials and components. The ITER fusion reactor will generate ten times more power than it needs to maintain the fusion reaction.

A usable fusion power plant would replace coal and oil power plants, and would have a dramatic impact on CO2 emissions, which may contribute to global warming. Fusion plants would also be pollution free. China, which uses a lot of coal that is causing pollution problems, is a partner in the project.