Technology Futures

A flurry of articles like this are talking about ADSL2+, a new standard for DSL service over old copper phone lines. ADSL2+ is not only too long as an acronym, it offers too little, and ironically increases the digital divide, in my opinion.

In short, the new service will provide increased bandwidth over copper phone lines, but only if you are about one and a half miles from the telephone switch, as opposed to the three miles of the current DSL offering. ADSL2+ also will go further than the old three mile limitation, but only at low data rates--about four times dial up speeds.

So a few subscribers may get DSL service where they could not before, but only at much slower than "normal" DSL. And a few subscribers may get much faster service, but only if they are very close to the telephone central office. And it's important to remember that the distance rule of thumb is not line of sight, but cable feet; not only that, the ability to deliver DSL is highly dependent on the quality of the copper cable. In many rural areas, DSL just does not work on older cable plant, even inside the distance limits.

It's hard to see how this benefits anyone, even the phone company. It further segments their own customer base and prevents them from offering the same set of services to all customers. For example, some ADSL2+ customers might be able to get a single channel of high quality high defintion TV (HDTV), but others will not. How you market that is a mystery to me--"HDTV--it might work in your area, but maybe not!"

The phone companies are still very fixated on market share, rather than on offering good services in a competitive marketplace. So in their minds, anything that continues to allow them to lock customers up over copper is good, even if it's bad. Does that make sense to you? It doesn't to me either, but that's their strategy until they can figure out a way to justify running fiber to neighborhood.

As I've said repeatedly, the notion of having each provider overbuild their own infrastructure is not only expensive, it will simply create marketplace monopolies that serve neither businesses nor the community at large well. Whoever captures a community market first "wins," in the sense that there is little incentive for another company to come in and build out a new infrastructure.

The only answer is for communities to make investments to help level the playing field. Remember what happened to communities that were too far from an interstate highway? Business collapsed over a period of years. Communities need to make sure they are doing what is needed to stay on the Knowledge Economy highway.

In the Northern Neck of Virginia, broadband is being viewed (appropriately) as a critical economic development issue.

One of the most interesting items in the article is near the end, where an independent ISP that has been reselling DSL via Verizon infrastructure for some time is now in trouble. For a long time, Verizon said there was not enough business in the Northern Neck to justify the investment. So this independent firm sold DSL. Now that the market has been opened by its competitors, Verizon has stepped in and begun selling DSL for less that it charges for wholesale circuits to its competitors.

Verizon has every right to do that, and I don't think communities ought to waste time and effort trying to "get" telcos and cable companies to behave differently. They have to answer to shareholders, not the community.

But the article highlights clearly what communities are facing: a marketplace monopoly (rather than a regulated monopoly) in which the community has only one or two large broadband providers that are able to act in cartel-like behavior, setting prices and services options because of lack of competition. If affordable broadband is an economic development issue (and I think it is), then the community places its economic future in the hands of the big telecom providers unless the community itself makes some investments to level the playing field.

In the last paragraphk, the article quotes the county administrator of Westmoreland County, who worries about investing in the wrong technology. It's a valid concern, but it's not an excuse for doing nothing. And that issue is managed in two ways: communities need to plan for telecommunciations, just like they plan for everything else. Secondly, communities should invest in things that don't become obsolete quickly--telecom duct, fiber, tower sites, antnennas, and colocation facilities. Fear of the unknown (otherwise called ignorance) is putting the economic future of communities at risk. But ignorance is easily correctable--as I've said for nearly a decade--this is an education problem, not a technology problem.

Apple has upped the ante in the portable music player world. With a half dozen other hard drive-based models trying to steal market share from Apple, the world's premiere technology innovation firm has released two new iPods today that will display digital photos on a color screen.

The iPods are available with 40 gig or 60 gig hard drives, and will store up to 25,000 high resolution color photos or up to 15,000 songs, or a combination of both. Apple has neatly solved the problem of what to do with all those photos being taken with digital cameras.

Storing your photos on your iPod as well as your desktop computer is good from another angle--it provides you with backups of your irreplaceable baby pictures. You do make backups of all your important files, don't you?

Apple has taken the iPod one step further and provided a TV-out connector so that you display slideshows on a television or LCD projector. All this comes with the original functionality of the iPod, including text note storage and viewing, games, calendar, and address book, and all in a package the size of a deck of cards. All iPods work on both Windows and Macintoshes, including the new color iPods.

All through the nineties, and especially during the dot-com silliness, hundreds if not thousands of companies talked about the "killer app." Usually those who claimed they had it were making some thinly veiled sales pitch for some proprietary piece of software that they believed would make them kings of the world.

I argued, at the time, that the killer app was email, and I still think I was right. Email is one of two things that virtually everyone does online. The other is search, and of course, the founders of Google, if not kings of the world, are now insanely rich.

But Google was never designed to be the killer app; no one was sure where search tools were going to go; they just happened. Alta Vista, the first search tool that tried to index the Web, was really started in large part to show off the power of DEC's processors, which weren't doing well in the marketplace. Alta Vista's early lead was squandered and DEC was bought out by Compaq, which killed the once powerful company, and Compaq was bought by HP. Ho hum.

Broadband connectivity has largely escaped the killer app disease, but in an odd kind of way. The broadband giants (i.e. telcos and cable companies) have pretty much failed to recognize that broadband is not that interesting unless you can do something with it. The big connectivity companies of the dot-com era (e.g. Global Crossing, UUNet, etc.) all collapsed because they utterly ignored the very sensible question, "What will people do with the bandwidth?" Consolidation in the cable business has been driven in large part by the enormous debt wracked up by cable companies trying to get broadband marketshare in advance of having even the slightest idea what people would do with it.

The killer app for broadband is going to be Voice over IP, or in simpler terms, telephone calls. We're already at a point where you can pretty much buy WORLDWIDE flat rate calling for under $40/month. Free point to point telephony software drives that cost down to zero.

We ought to stop calling the phone companies, well, phone companies. They aren't anymore, whether they like it or not. They have no choice but to become broadband companies, and just one of numerous services they offer happens to be dialtone.

In his remarks to the Voice on the Net conference in Boston on October 19th, FCC Chairman Michael Powell has called VoIP a "revolution." Powell went on to call for "bare DSL" access, meaning you can buy DSL service without being forced to buy bundled telephone service.

He went on to say something even more remarkable by outlining what he calls the Internet Consumer Freedoms:

1. Freedom to Access Content: Consumers should have access to their choice of legal content;
2. Freedom to Use Applications: Consumers should be able to run applications of their choice;
3. Freedom to Attach Personal Devices: Consumers should be permitted to attach any devices they choose to the connection in their homes; and
4. Freedom to Obtain Service Plan Information: Consumers should receive meaningful information regarding their service plans.

The Consumer Freedoms that Powell outlines are breathtakingly simple yet incredibly important. They underscore the need for communities and organizations to have a competitive marketplace for broadband services--monopoly providers have no incentive to meet Powell's requirements.

It is exciting that Powell has laid this out so plainly. What's going on? Well, another part of his remarks calls for exclusive Federal regulation of Voice over IP. If the alternative is a mish mash of fifty different sets of state rules that are likely heavily influenced by corporate contributions, that may be the right direction, as long as Federal regulation is as light as possible. It appears Powell understands this.

download Michael Powell VoIP remarks).
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