Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
Kentucky gets connected
The state of Kentucky has set a bold goal to get broadband to every business and resident by 2007. This news article discusses ConnectKentucky, the statewide initiative. The governor sees it as an economic development issue, worth as many as 14,000 new jobs statewide.
How about your state? Has the governor made broadband a strategic priority?
Community news and projects:
Six reasons communities should control their own destiny
Here is a must-read article [link no longer available] that does a better job at articulating the battle between communities and anti-muni legislators and telcos than anything else I have seen. If you are trying to convice legislators to support community projects, take them out to lunch and review the six points in this article with them.
Technology News:
40% of international phone calls
VoIP Weekly reports that 40% of international phone calls are now carried by VoIP services, up from 2-3% in 2000. The article also states that VoIP has killed the calling card market. College kids have been a key demographic for that market, and apparently tech savvy youth are very comfortable using free services like FreeWorld Dialup and Skype to make phone calls. It's also a boon for parents of college kids who may have been buying some of those calling cards. The article also expects the wireline (traditional) phone industry to see a 40% drop in revenue by 2008 as more and more customers move to VoIP services.
Technology News:
The RepRap Project
Years ago, one of my favorite authors, Neal Stephenson, wrote a book called The Diamond Age. Set in the near future, technology had progressed to a point where most homes had a refrigerator size machine that could make virtually any common household item, most often out of diamond. Why diamond? Because the raw material is as cheap as, well, dirt--it's just carbon. Advanced microfabrication at the molecular level enabled the machine to build an item layer by layer at the molecular level. One thing that was handy in the book was diamond knives that never got dull.
Sound far-fetched? It's not. Industrial designers have been using polymer-based rapid prototyping machines for years to create three dimensional objects out of a soup of light-sensitive liquid plastic. A laser, driven by CAD/CAM information, hardens the plastic layer by layer, and the object "grows" right out of a container of goop.
More recently, some scientists have been using modified ink-jet printers to spray bio-compounds onto a sheet of plastic to create things like cartilage-based ear replacements for people that have suffered injuries.
Now we have the Replicating Rapid Prototyping Project, or RepRap. This UK-based university effort intends to build an Open Source system that can build complex objects. We won't have these in our homes any time soon, but our kids may. The Open Source approach--making it available for anyone in the world to both use and improve--has the potential to transform the world economy. What are some of the implications? Well, China might not have the economic clout it has now if common household items can be fabricated cheaply near the user of the item. The current "consumption" society would change radically as anyone could acquire almost any common household object for the cost of the raw materials--the cost of shipping, advertising, distributing, warehousing, and retailing would disappear.
What would all those people do? Well, for one, there would be a big market for the one thing the machines can't do--create the designs. I also believe that handmade and handcrafted items of high quality would become very popular.
How about effects on other future weak signals? For one, RepRap machines would make colonization of the moon and Mars much easier. You'd simpy ship a few RepRap machines to the moon, feed in silicon, carbon, aluminum (moon dirt, basically), and nearly everything a growing moon colony would need would come out the other end. Ditto for Mars.
We're just a short ways into the a long cycle of enormous growth and change. Recall that the Industrial Revolution started in the early 1700s but did not really flower until the early 1900s, nearly two hundred years later. If you mark the start of the Digital Age at 1950 when the first commercial computers became available, we're only a quarter of the way into what I think is going to be another two hundred year cycle. If you can't imagine where your community should be in two hundred years, how about fifty? Are the majority of your community leaders still looking to the past for guidance?
Communities that learn to think in a future context, rather than a past history context, will thrive no matter what technology emerges.
Technology News:
Fiber is future proof
Via the CANARIE mailing list, there is news that NTT, the Japanese phone company, has broken new ground with Wave Division Multiplexing, or WDM. In "old" fiber systems, a single channel of information travels over a fiber pair. With WDM, you can have multiple channels of information on a single fiber.
One interesting consequence of WDM technology is that you can deliver two way communications over a single fiber, rather than needing two fibers (one for each direction). Typically, current WDM systems offer 10-20 channels over a single fiber. NTT researchers have successfully transmitted data over 1000 WDM channels on a single fiber, or about a two order of magnitude increase in capacity--over the same fiber.
That's why fiber is such a good, stable, long term investment. As the demand for bandwidth increases, you can keep adding more capacity to existing fiber by simply swapping out the equipment at both ends. Fiber is future proof.
Technology News:
Technology as narcissism?
As the gadgets to capture audio and video get smaller and lighter, and as the tools to edit that content and then distribute it via the Internet become easier to use, I think there is a danger of narcissism, or what I call the "look at me" phenomenon.
Lately I've been getting more email that goes something like this: "Look what I just did! It's great! Stop by my Web site and watch the video (or listen to the audio)."
The subtext is "Whatever I just did is way more important than anything you happen to be doing, so stop what you are doing and look at what I am doing."
Or something like that.
I don't have the time to watch everyone's video. Or listen to their audio podcast. I barely have time to do my own work, much less live/watch/listen to someone else's life vicariously.
I think this is one of the negative consequences of these emerging digital technologies--I record, therefore I am. There are people experimenting with wearable devices that make digital recordings of everything one does, in real time. But let's face it, hardly any of us are really all that interesting ALL THE TIME. And even if we were, who has time to watch it? Is the future of television 6 billion reality shows, each starring ourselves? Kinda makes George Orwell's future look good by comparison...8^)
Technology News:
Newspapers are in a death spiral
CNet has an article about the future of newspapers. It says that some papers, like the New York Times, have more people reading the paper online than on paper. But the papers are mad because they are giving away the content for free. They want to start charging for online subscriptions (note that a few papers, like the Wall Street Journal, have been doing this for years).
The papers have it wrong in several ways. In the first place, it's ads that cover most of the cost of newspapers, not subscriptions. An online edition has essentially zero distribution costs, compared to the massive expense required to print news on paper and distribute those paper copies. With the boom in online advertising, it seems like better ad management might actually make online newspapers profitable. But you'd have to let go of the idea that "real" news is better on paper.
The other problem most papers have is that their capacity to generate original news is extremely limited. Many mid-size local papers simply fill their pages with AP reprints, and sprinkle in a few local articles along the way. I'd like to see a paper embrace the blogging model, where you simply turn reporters loose with a well-designed blog framework. If you did so, you could fire most of the editors, who have a limited function in an online edition. The original purpose of editors was to decide what "fit," literally, in the paper. You don't need editors in the same way because you don't have limits in online publishing. Editors could still fill a vital function by keeping reporters focused and by identifying important stories, but my guess is most mid-size city papers could get by with just a couple of editors--and could cut costs substantially.
But I think some papers would rather go out of business first. Blogging is a tool, not a medium, and it's a tool that would work well for newspapers if they can let go of ink and dead trees.
Knowledge Democracy:
Is Amazon "Big Brother"
I purchase items online all the time, but I've never bought anything from Amazon. In my opinion, they collect too much information about their customers and use it in unethical ways. This CNet article notes even more intrusive data collection by the online giant.
Amazon is going to start using information on client purchases to recommend gifts, and tries to guess age, gender, and their birthdate. The article notes that this may violate child privacy protection laws in cases where Amazon is trying to guess that information for your children.
One of the things I don't like about Amazon is that the company is relentless in trying to get you to buy more stuff, masked in the guise of being "helpful." It's as if we aren't able to make up our own minds about what we might want or need--we now need giant marketing databases to help us make decisions.
I still maintain that my local independent bookstore is a better deal than Amazon. I can call them on the phone and place an order for a book, start to finish, in under a minute; they usually give 20% off special orders; they don't charge shipping; and the book usually arrives in 3-4 days. And I'm supporting jobs in my local community.
Knowledge Democracy:
Community fiber works
Princeton, Illinois provides some helpful data on a successful community fiber project. So why did the community decide to install 15 miles of fiber cable? Here's what the head of the municipal project said:
"Our primary goal was economic stability and some hope for economic growth," Baird said, noting that one of the largest companies in town moved out, taking with it more than 300 jobs. "We had some concerns from our customers that they were in the same boat because of a lack of telecom services."
Like a lot of other municipal fiber projects, Princeton has its own electric utility, meaning they already have much of the technical expertise to take on this kind of project. But Princeton did not create another city utility. Instead, they partnered with a local ISP to light up the fiber, and the private company handles billing and service. The ISP pays a fee to obtain access to the network, and the city expects to recoup its $350,000 investment in 18 to 24 months.
This is the right way to do it. The community builds the infrastructure, and provides it on a cost recovery basis to the private sector, which provides the service to customers, creates jobs, and pays taxes. Everybody wins.
Community news and projects:
Chicago fights Illinois
Worried that state legislators are going to write the best laws that money can buy and pass an anti-muni telecom bill purportedly authored by the phone company, officials in the City of Chicago are trying to speed approval of a citywide plan to offer public WiFi throughout the city. The Register has a story on it, and here's another. [link no longer available]
Chicago is considering what I recommend, which is a public/private partnership. Chicago will provide access to light poles and other public property for antennas, but a private company will manage the network and sell services. The City will get a franchise fee based on revenue. It's a win/win/win. Consumers get an alternative to DSL (and in many parts of the city, neither DSL nor cable modem service is available), poor neighborhoods get broadband access for the first time, jobs are created in the private sector, and the City gets some income.
The only possible glitch: local governments can't get greedy and turn franchise fees into "revenue enhancement" opportunities. The franchise fee should be based on the real cost to the government of providing right of way, plus a small amount for network expansion. If local government tries to use it instead as a hidden tax (no taxation without representation, right?), it will only hurt the effort.
Technology News:
Community news and projects:
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