Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
Web sites need information and organization
I recently had to do some research work and had to visit about a dozen Web community and higher ed Web sites. The higher ed sites were community colleges and small four year colleges. Uniformly, all the sites were quite bad. Basic information like street addresses and phone number were either missing or hard to find. Different parts of the sites looked different and had different navigation buttons in different locations. Many pages with the right titles lacked useful information in the body of the page.
The community sites often had very little information about the community. Many of them simply had a few links to other sites, like local government and tourism. So it was actually quite difficult to learn anything useful about the communities from the community Web site.
Search engines index and rate sites based on the kind and type of information on the site, and ignore images. While good graphic design is important for the user experience, it is not enough. Web sites today are a primary marketing tool for organizations and communities, and yet, based on my experience, many well-funded organizations and communities spend little or nothing on what could be their best marketing tool. Communities that will quickly spend tens of thousands of dollars on color brochures are reluctant to spend a few thousand dollars on a high quality Web site that has a worldwide reach.
Most early business relocation research is now done via the Web, and if your community does not have a cluster of well-designed sites--community portal, K12 schools, higher ed, tourism, economic development, community groups--your business attraction efforts may falter.
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Broadband Information:
NASA may be ready to blast off
NASA may finally be ready to blast off, literally, with greatly expanded capacity, by going to the private sector for space transportation rather than owning and operating all its own space vehicles.
Faced with the problem of using the literally antique Space Shuttles (more than thirty years old in design) just to get food and supplies to the space station and many years from having a replacement, NASA appears to be finally shifting course.
Part of what enables this shift is technology. What was truly pioneering engineering and research effort twenty or thirty years ago can now be designed with inexpensive CAD/CAM programs on powerful and cheap computers. New materials and computer manufacturing allow small space start up companies to build sophisticated space vehicles quickly and economically.
Regions that have been investing in space (New Mexico, Texas, Virginia, among others) may see a small but steady economic development benefit as space startups win big NASA contracts for various kinds of space vehicles and equipment.
Technology News:
"Whaling" is newest kind of spam attack
"Whaling" is a new form of phishing attacks. It is called whaling because the spam emails are carefully targeted towards big fish, or whales. Spammers have been sending carefully crafted emails that look like an official U.S. Federal Court sub poena. Clicking on the link embedded in the email secretly installs a keystroke logger on your computer which then sends userids, passwords, and credit card numbers to the spammer.
We actually got one of those sub poenas about two weeks ago, and it certainly looked official. But sub poenas are usually delivered in person, and so after looking closely at the email and some of the links, we quickly determined it was spam.
Knowledge Democracy:
Broadband Properties '08: FCC--Bandwidth doubling every two years
FCC Commissioner Deborah Tate spoke on the last day of the Broadband Properties conference. She had some interesting statistics that should give pause to anyone who thinks that DSL and cable modem broadband services are "good enough." Commissioner Tate noted that:
- Demand for bandwidth has been doubling every two years for the last ten years.
- By 2015 (just seven years from now), the FCC thinks bandwidth requirements will be fifty times (50x) what they are today.
- In Japan, where they have had 100 megabit connections to homes and businesses available for several years, they are already observing congestion--meaning 100 megabit pipes are already filling up.
- Americans are watching more than 10 billion videos per month over the Internet.
Tate went on to enumerate that choice was important to buyers of telecom services, and she listed that choice should be available for services, for providers, and for equipment.
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Broadband Properties '08: Ft. Wayne leverages fiber
Graham Richards, the former Mayor of Ft. Wayne, Indiana, spoke at the Broadband Properties Summit about why Ft. Wayne pushed fiber to the home. Some of the services and benefits included:
A green affordable housing initiative cut monthly energy costs for lower income families, and the broadband network was used to monitor energy use.
The network enabled live video monitoring of latchkey children whose parents had to work. Parents could have high quality video chats with their children as soon as they arrived home in the afternoon.
Local schools were able to offer enhanced distance learning opportunities to their students, including afternoon and weekend mentoring with tutors (enabled by the fiber network).
Their vision was fiber everywhere: a community broadband network dedicated to equality of opportunity and universal access.
They began a pilot initiative to have the city use hybrid plug in vehicles to reduce fuel and transportation costs for city workers.
They set a goal of saving 5% of the city budget through IT/broadband and green strategies--helping to conserve taxpayers dollars.
While Richards was mayor, he was able to turn the economic growth of the city from a deep loss of jobs to a dramatic turnaround in jobs creation and new businesses, and he attributed it to setting a vision, sticking to it, and broadband.
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Broadband Properties '08: IP TV is is ready to go
At the Broadband Properties Summit, there was a case study on IP TV (TV delivered via broadband). DirecTV and an apartment owner in Alexandria, Virginia teamed up to provide competitive TV services in a large, 350 unit apartment building. Some of the highlights of the experiment:
Prior to the introduction of the new service, the biggest tenant complaint was about the incumbent TV provider service. The number one tenant demand was for more choice in selecting a TV provider.
After introducing the competitive DirecTV service, complaints are down and compliments are up.
The case study confirmed my longstanding bandwidth calculations about future network planning. A single channel of HD TV on the system requires 10+ megabits of bandwidth on the system, and live HD events (e.g. sports, racing, etc.) requires 15+ megabits of capacity per channel. This demonstrates the inadequacy of DSL, wireless, cable, and even FiOS to deliver next generation services.
Cat5e or Cat6 cable is needed from a distribution closet to each apartment, where a set top box converts the signal and sends it to the TV. The system performed so well that most residents did not realize it was IP TV. There have been claims that "IP TV doesn't work well compared to satellite and cable." We can put those to rest.
The take away for the talk was really about making sure that new homes and apartments are broadband ready. Most communities still do nothing to encourage builders and developers to build "broadband ready" homes and commercial buildings, which is a missed economic development opportunity, especially given the ease and low cost of doing this.
Technology News:
Broadband Properties '08: The state of broadband in the U.S.
Bruce Mehlman, from the Internet Innovation Alliance, which is a lobbyist group in D.C., had some interesting statistics on the state of broadband in the U.S. today. He spoke this morning at the Broadband Properties Summit.
293,000 new jobs are created with every 1% increase in broadband availability in the United States. This is a statistic that you might want to pass on to local economic developers and elected officials who may be skeptical about the benefits of broadband. It is easy to do the math to calculate how many new jobs would be created in your community from a community-wide commitment to universal broadband access.
About 66% of the homes in the U.S. are using the Internet, and 50% of those have broadband. This means two-thirds of U.S. home still have no broadband.
There is a $580 billion dollar global market for IT services, indicating there are lots of job and business opportunities for U.S. companies if they have affordable broadband infrastructure.
Think your local economy would benefit from a steel plant? It turns out that the number of people making a full time living from selling things on eBay exceeds the employment of the entire U.S. steel industry. Note to rural communities: this is a work from home opportunity that requires broadband.
Broadband is a green technology. By one estimate, universal access to broadband in the U.S. could create a billion ton reduction in greenhouse gases over a ten year period. Broadband is a net energy saver.
Another study estimates that the healthcare industry could cut costs by as much as 25% by making better use of broadband and IT. Note to rural communities: broadband may cut healthcare costs.
Skeptics of the demand for Internet-based video take note. YouTube did not exist four years ago, and today has 100 million viewers per day.
Broadband will not be affordable in most areas without a business model that creates and sustains competition.
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Broadband Properties '08: Gas prices are already driving work from home
Dan Rogers, an economic developer from Kendall County, Texas, just told a story about a conversation that just occurred last week. A middle manager who lives in Kendall but commutes about an hour to work out of the region related to Rogers that he had negotiated an agreement with his firm to let him work two days a week from home to save on the cost of commuting. He was able to do that because he has fiber to the home and can access the corporate network as if he were sitting in his office at the main company location.
Gas prices are going to start changing the way we make decisions about where we live and where we work. Communities with fiber have a better chance of weathering those changes successfully, as it gives both workers and businesses more options.
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Broadband Properties '08: Fiber is part of the ED toolkit
Dan Rogers, President of the Kendall County, Texas Economic Development Corporation, just spoke at the Broadband Properties Summit here in Dallas-Fort Worth. Kendall County is a rural area between Austin and San Antonio, and is part of the Texas Hill Country--a beautiful area of mostly very small towns.
Kendall County is served by a rural telecom coop that is deploying fiber to the home, and Rogers indicated it has had a significant impact on economic development. He now views fiber as a relocation "eliminator," as he termed it, meaning that communities without fiber services are eliminated early in the relocation process.
Rogers also said something interesting about retention. He indicated he viewed fiber as part of Kendall County's retention strategy. Businesses already in the region are telling him that they are able to stay because the high capacity fiber services are enabling them to get bigger contracts with companies that expect them to have the same kind of broadband connectivity that is available in bigger metro areas.
Rogers also talked about "big broadband" and "little broadband." He viewed "little broadband" as areas with copper-based DSL and cable modem services, and noted that he saw Kendall County as having a significant advantage because they had "big broadband," meaning fiber-based broadband.
The notion of "big" and "little" broadband is a useful shorthand for cutting through the fog of just what kind of broadband is available in a community, and could be a useful marketing slogan: "Bring your business to our community, where we have BIG broadband."
When an audience member asked Rogers what he would tell elected officials who are reluctant to make an investment in community-wide broadband, he had sobering advice: "Tell them they won't be able to bring in the kind of businesses they want."
Technology News:
Average Web page size triples
The average size of a Web page has tripled in the past five years, on track with other studies that show demand for bandwidth has been tripling at about the same rate.
For those that think DSL and cable modem services are "good enough," those copper-based systems can't keep up with demand that triples twice a decade. The cable Internet providers, despite their "up to six megabits" advertisements, would not be trying to throttle popular services like peer to peer filesharing if their copper networks were not groaning under the load. And that is today. Where does that leave communities in five years?
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