Technology Futures

When I tell people that the target for broadband ought to be 155 megabits or better, many scoff at me, even though I have plenty of information that shows we need that much for the things we all want to be doing in less than a decade.

Unfortunately, the FCC continues to prop up the incumbent telephone and cable companies by calling broadband anything faster than 256 kilobits. This allows the incumbents to tell poorly informed elected leaders and economic developers in our communities that cable modem and DSL service offerings exceed Federal government recommendations by a wide margin, when in fact the 1-3 megabit throughput of DSL and cable modems is woefully inadequate. Not knowing anything else about the issue, many leaders decide they don't need to do anything, since the community "already has broadband."

It's video that will drive much of the bandwidth needs, and with high definition (HD) programming becoming more common, you need, depending on whom you ask, somewhere between 3-8 megabits for a single HD video stream. With the average American household having 3.68 televisions, you have to design your network to support four of those video streams simultaneously, or somewhere around 40-50 megabits/second just to watch TV. And you have to be able to handle approximately a 3x "burst" capacity when you decide to watch a video downloaded via the Internet.

But my figure of 155 megabits is still setting the bar awfully low. Our Canadian (CANARIE) friends are already doing advanced testing of immersive, multi-party videoconferencing with enhanced audio services called High Definition Ultra-Videoconferencing. The system uses 3.5 gigabits/second in each direction--or about 22 times more bandwidth than my recommendation of 155 megabits/second.

Of course, it takes an all fiber system to do this. Fiber continues to be the best futureproofing a community can undertake, as it can handle whatever bandwidth needs we want to throw at it, just by swapping out the electronics at the ends.

Wireless is a great way to start a broadband project in your community, but it's not either/or and wireless is not the end game--it's fiber, to every home and business.

The IEEE (Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers) has issued a new white paper stating that "U.S. prosperity is at risk" if it does not become a national goal to invest heavily in Gigabit networks. The organization went on to say this:

Failure to act will "relegate the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure to an inferior competitive position" and undermine the future of the U.S. economy.

The IEEE is a fairly staid body that rarely gets involved in political issues, so when this group speaks out, it's worth paying attention. How about your community? Are your local leaders and economic developers paying attention to this?

It's great to see some thoughtful broadband coverage in local newspapers. This article from the Rock River Times [link no longer available] of Rockford, Illinois makes the case for communitywide telecom infrastructure. The paper makes the point that transport systems have always been important to communities and economic development, starting with canals and then the railroads. Government has always been involved, to one extent or another, and the railroads are a good example of a successful public/private partnership that reaped great results.

Today, communities need a digital transport system that can be used to deliver a wide variety of services offered by lots of vendors--just the way traditional roads work in our communities.

Much is being made of Disney's reluctance to push its content out to viewers via Internet-based television (IPTV). The Business Week article is typical--full of handwringing and hysterical headlines like "IPTV revolution may be on hold."

Maybe not. Maybe the revolution will proceed very nicely, thank you, without Disney. Disney and all the other Hollywood content providers will likely be last to the party, while independents with fresh ideas and world class production software from Apple running on cheap Macs will create break out shows.

If anyone thinks you really need the big studios to produce content, look at the current spate of reality shows. Not only are most of them really awful, the production values are pretty low. That's one reason why they are so appealing to the studios and networks--they are cheap.

Who hasn't sat on the couch late one night watching this dreck and thought, "Gee, I could make a reality show a whole lot more interesting than this?" You can, and people already are. The fake ads circulating on the Internet are the tip of the iceberg. The Volkswagen spoof was extraordinarily well done, and there are many other examples of high quality content out there.

The entertainment industry is trying to hold back the tide by running like a bunch of crybabies to Congress to buy some new laws so they can prosecute a few more grandmothers and 14 year olds for illegal downloads. Meanwhile, they are forcing Apple to sell their songs for exactly the same price, more or less, as you'd pay for the songs on a CD, while their distribution cost, courtesy of Apple's iTunes store, is now zero.

Movies are next. Look at the Blair Witch project--a hugely successful movie that made tens of millions of dollars. The whole movie was shot with cheap handheld cameras and edited on Macs. Today, the next Blair Witch movie could be delivered via a paid download using BitTorrent, and the makers of the film would pocket even more money.

There is also much handwringing in the TV industry about the business model. TV forces you to watch ads, but Tivo has already broken that model permanently. Ads on the Internet are already well-accepted and getting results. We'll see more options for content--a lot more stuff will move to the pay per view model, if prices are reasonable. As just one example, I'd rather have a quarter from 10 million people for a song I wrote than a dollar from a million people.

Is Hollywood and the music industry going to go away? Absolutely not. There will always be a demand for good, well made, high quality entertainment. But trying to jam the future through the broken lens of a business model pioneered by Thomas Edison is just sad. The entertainment industry needs to grow up and realize the Internet is making the pie bigger, and I'd rather have a piece of the bigger pie than spend all my energy trying to hold on the piece of the small pie.