Technology Futures

James Carlini, who writes in ePrairie, an Midwestern online business and technology magazine, has a terrific article taking Illinois leaders to task for shirking their responsibilities to the the public at large and to businesses and communities in the state.

It's hard to improve on Carlini's thoughts, so I'll include just one item from the article. You can read the entire piece here.

" The big breakthrough that some people are touting is getting DSL for $14.95 a month. I no longer consider that as broadband capability. If DSL was at $14.95 five years ago, I would have said that was something. This is now a fire sale that’s five years too late.

While this is to keep interest in antiquated copper-based services, it’s not giving real bandwidth to the average consumer. Compare it with what’s being offered in other countries. We should be getting one gigabit for $14.95. Now that would be something.

Gigabit technology is based off fiber-optic infrastructure. No incumbent telephone company wants to install that to the house when they can keep milking copper, which has been paid for many times over across the decades.

Until the leaders of states get more up to speed with what’s really viable for securing their state’s global economic position, we will be stuck with half measures and the equivalent of eight-track tapes in an age of MP3 players."

I wrote recently about Seattle's plan to invest heavily in fiber. The work that the city has done now seems even more timely because a list of "Most Unwired Cities" came out recently, and Seattle holds the number one slot, just as the city has identified "wired" technologies like fiber as critical. One of the things everyone forgets is that "unwired" hot spots still have to get access back to the wired network, and fiber is usually the most desirable way to do this.

Their task force has recommended a communitywide digital transport system based on fiber, which the task force notes has a 40+ year life span and the lowest cost per megabyte of capacity of any system (e.g. DSL, cable modem, wireless, satellite). The city has a summary of the issues and a link to the plan online. Here is what the Chairman of the Task Force said about broadband:

"The task force believes Seattle must act now to foster the development of advanced broadband facilities and services for our community. Seattle cannot afford to dawdle. Broadband networks will soon become what roads, electric systems and telephone networks are today: core infrastructure of society. Lacking advanced broadband, Seattle is unlikely to maintain a competitive economy, a vibrant culture, quality schools and efficient government."

I'm not the only one concerned about Google's policy of storing everything you and I do on their servers--forever. This New Zealand article [link no longer available] also expresses concerns about the way Google keeps tabs on everything we do.

Google hides behind the polite fiction that keeping everything is a "service" they perform for us, but we don't get access to the data. The "service" they perform is to mine our searches, our email, and the newsgroups we browse and use them to sell advertising space.

One might argue that in fact, Google's ads pay for all the free services Google provides. Fair enough, and as a business, Google does provide useful tools and is making money with the strategy. The rub comes in when you look at how long Google retains personal data--forever. That repository, subject to government subpoenas, becomes a convenient way for the government and others to snoop in our affairs long after the fact.

Twenty years out of college, involved in a civil lawsuit, would you want the opposing side to enter into evidence all the Web sites and searches you performed in college, where the opposing side uses the data to establish that you have certain character faults, as evidenced by what you looked at twenty years ago.

The data itself may be innocuous, but it can and will be used in ways that will damage people's reputations and may cause harm. To protect yourself, it's a good idea to open up the cookies window in your browser every two or three months and delete most if not all of the cookies--especially the Google cookies and any URL with 'ad' in the domain name.

In what has to be a sign of desperation, SBC has dropped the price of its entry level DSL service to $14.95 a month. Claiming that the online registration "lowers costs," the telco is also giving customers a $99 credit towards home networking gear like wireless access points.

Nationally, DSL only has about 15% of the broadband marketplace, with cable a near monopoly with around 75%. Wireless and fiber offerings make up the other 10%. The biggest problem with DSL is that the ability of the phone company to deliver it to any particular home or business depends on the distance from the telephone switch, the quality of the copper cable plant, the phase of the moon, and local service techs who may or may not be able to fiddle with the line to make it work.

Cable modem service does not have those problems because the cable companies took on enormouse debt to rewire their service areas (and the debt is another issue). The phone companies tell political leaders that they are providing broadband almost everywhere by using the fictional device of counting an area as having DSL if they can provide the service to just one home in a zip code area, which is often huge. They usually know full well that many homes and businesses will never be able to get DSL with the current cable and equipment plant, but count the entire zip code as "having DSL."

So SBC has to do something to attract customers. The one thing the phone companies have going for them is bundling--they can offer local phone service, long distance, and broadband on the same bill, and not all cable companies are ready to do that. Dropping the price on broadband may bring a few people back to the phone company, and SBC will probably make a small profit by selling multiple services.