Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
Who needs Gigabit Nationwide?
The FCC has just released a new challenge to create Gigabit Cities throughout the nation. One might wonder why do we really need Gigabit fiber connections at our homes and businesses.
Here's a very specific example. On Sunday morning, I started to back up a measly 7 Gig of photos from my phone to my Dropbox account in the cloud. Forty-eight hours later, the upload is still going, and it's barely half finished. When the average home upload speed is often 1 megabit/second or even much less, it becomes a monumental task to back up our music, pictures, videos, and files to a remote back up service.
Technology News:
Death of TV: Part XXXVII: Apple TV still in the game
Apple has announced a modest upgrade to its underrated Apple TV box. The thing that caught my interest is that Apple TV now supports wireless Bluetooth keyboards. Why is this important? With the proliferation of special purpose boxes like the Apple TV, users are stuck entering things like userids, passwords, and other information using the extremely tedious and clumsy right/left/up/down arrows on the remote control. That gets old quickly. Being able to enter that information with a keyboard is a major change for the better in user experience. Despite that fact that I really like my Logitech Skype cam, I use it less than I would otherwise just to avoid the data entry. And once you attach a keyboard and mouse to something like Apple TV, well, you have a computer, as we once called them. Suddenly you can handle email, correspondence, light bookkeeping, and other "PC" chores on a box that costs $99 instead of $599. And you can watch what we used to call "TV" on the same $99 box.
Who loses? The cable companies, despite the fact that they have crushed the telephone companies' feeble DSL offerings, are about to collapse. IPTV via inexpensive boxes like Apple TV are about to destroy the cable TV industry.
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Knowledge Democracy:
The spammers have beaten me
I have turned off comments on this site. I'm being deluged with spammer requests for userids, and I simply don't have the time to even delete them, much less try to identify the occasional legitimate reader who really wants to post something. Commenting has always been light, so I don't think the quality of the site will suffer much. For those of you that have contributed in the past, my thanks.
Technology News:
Utopia network success story
Here is a short news item on how Utopia, the community-owned fiber network in Utah, helped one business cut costs.
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Community news and projects:
U.S. Broadband: Someday it will be as good as China is now....
The China Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has said that all new residences will be connected to fiber if an existing network is available, starting this spring, and the fiber will be operated on an open access basis, with residents able to choose from several providers.
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The death of telephone: Part II
Facebook is about to roll out voice calling between Facebook users, directly from its smartphone apps. Hmmm...lemme see...back of the envelope calculations here.....Facebook has, roughly, one BILLION users. If Facebook enables voice calling, Facebook is about to become the largest phone company in the world.
What does this mean for communities? It means that one more service is moving very quickly to an all-IP platform and away from the antiquated landline network. Telephone is dying, and dying perhaps even faster than TV. Fast, cheap broadband is going to be the community economic development engine, and communities that can't support the emerging array of thousands of new IP-enabled niche services are going to wither. It's a replay of the interstate build out, except that every community can have an exist on the interstate, because broadband is cheaper than roads. It's cheaper than water lines. It's cheaper than sewer systems. And there is plenty of money for broadband; it's just that in communities today, all that money is being stuffed in envelopes every month as payments to the cable and telephone companies, and the money is being carried by the Postal Service out of the community and typically out of the state.
Link: http://www.macrumors.com/2013/01/03/facebook-updates-ios-app-with-voice-messages-testing-voip-calling-in-canada/
Newsletter:
Fiber brings a $600 million data center
From the always excellent MuniNetworks, the story of how a tiny community out in the middle of nowhere attracted a $600 million data center. If you have never been to The Dalles, it really is an extremely isolated place. It's a beautiful town on the edge of the Columbia River. Fed up with lousy broadband, the community built its own fiber ring, and coupled with reliable electric power, that brought Google and its $600 million data center to the community.
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Startup Blacksburg (#bva) to accelerate business growth
Startup Blacksburg (#bva) met this morning to identify what the region needs to accelerate the creation of jobs and business opportunities in Blacksburg, Montgomery County, and the New River Valley. Using criteria established by Startup America, the area scores surprisingly well on most of the elements needed by startups and high growth potential companies. Montgomery County's Department of Economic Development provided coffee and bagels and has a sharp focus on helping startups and established businesses grow faster. The ED folks have some terrific new marketing materials that really do a great job of highlighting what a great place Montgomery County is to start or to grow a business. Startup Blacksburg is going to continue to meet to help startups and high growth businesses find the resources they need to create jobs and attract capital.
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Fiber still has no upper limit
We get asked constantly, "Isn't fiber risky? What if wireless is better?" Fiber is a highly stable, very reliable forty year hard asset that you can take to the bank, because unlike nearly every other kind of community infrastructure (roads, water, sewer), you can increase fiber capacity without digging new ditches or having to hang more fiber on poles. You just change out the equipment at each end, which is a fraction of the cost of building new fiber.
Fiber is future proofing your community and your economic development future.
Wireless, by comparison, once the capacity of the existing radios is reached (which happens every three to four years), you have to replace pretty much everything. Do a fair thirty year life cycle comparison of fiber and wireless, and fiber is cheaper.
Infinera just announced that they have been able to push eight terabits of data across 800 kilometers of fiber, and they expect to be able to do that across 2,500 kilometers of fiber in the near future.
Fiber is a good investment.
Technology News:
Death of Telephone, Part I: LinkedIn offers free voice calling to members
LinkedIn has announced free voice calling for its members. The business directory service has been adding new features recently, layering Facebook and Twitter style features on top of its basic resume and business contact services. In partnership with Plingm, a Swedish mobile VoIP provider (think Skype), any LinkedIn member will be able to initiate a voice call with any other LinkedIn member anywhere in the world. To take advantage of the service, you have to download the Plingm app for your smartphone.
This may or may not turn out to be especially useful, as mobile operators continue to try to discourage using the cellular data network to originate voice calls. If this became popular, who needs a phone number and the $25 to $40 per month cellular voice service? Instead, everyone would just want to drop the hugely profitable voice service and just pay for the cellular data service, which is causing the cellular providers nothing but headaches as they try to keep their networks upgraded to meet the ever-expanding demand.
Traditional phone service is dead, and the telephone companies are firmly determined to keep applying CPR to the rapidly decaying corpse as long as possible.
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