Technology Futures

This bill was held over in committee for more work this year. Text as of March, 2005 is below.

HB 653-FN-LOCAL – AS INTRODUCED

2005 SESSION

05-0714

06/10

HOUSE BILL 653-FN-LOCAL

AN ACT relative to bonds for construction, development, improvement, and acquisition of broadband facilities.

SPONSORS: Rep. Maxfield, Merr 6; Rep. Osborne, Merr 12; Sen. Gallus, Dist 1

COMMITTEE: Municipal and County Government

ANALYSIS

This bill grants municipalities the ability to issue bonds for the development of broadband services.

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Explanation: Matter added to current law appears in bold italics.

Matter removed from current law appears [in brackets and struckthrough.]

Matter which is either (a) all new or (b) repealed and reenacted appears in regular type.

05-0714

06/10

STATE OF NEW HAMPSHIRE

In the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Five

AN ACT relative to bonds for construction, development, improvement, and acquisition of broadband facilities.

Be it Enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives in General Court convened:

1 New Section; Broadband Infrastructure Bonds. Amend RSA 33 by inserting after section 3-f the following new section:

33:3-g Broadband Infrastructure Bonds Authorized.

I. In this section:

(a) “Broadband” means the transmission, between or among points specified by the user, of information of the user’s choosing, with or without change in the form or content of the information as sent and received, at rates of transmission as defined by the Federal Communications Commission as “Broadband”.

(b) “Broadband carrier” means any provider of broadband services, except that such term shall not include aggregators of broadband services, as defined in section 226 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act.

(c) “Broadband infrastructure” means any and all equipment and facilities, including any and all changes and modifications and expansions to existing facilities as well as the customer premises equipment, used to provide broadband, and includes any and all software integral to or related to the operations, support, facilitation, or interconnection of such equipment, including upgrades, and includes any and all installation, operations and support, maintenance and other functions as may be required to support the delivery of broadband.

Central California is the location of yet another pointless fight over broadband. Forward-thinking public officials are trying to do something good for their businesses and citizens, and a predictable set of knee-jerk reactions to it pop up.

Fresno County wants to look at increasing the number of broadband access and service providers by building infrastructure and letting private sector companies use it to deliver those services. But the predictable hysteria about how government should not be in the service business has ensued. Last time I checked, the *only* thing governments do is provide services, so I'm not sure that's a very strong argument.

As Lawrence Lessig noted recently, public street lights did not put electric companies out of business. And I will further note that building public roads did not put construction companies and delivery services out of business.

Fresno wants to build broadband roads so that private sector companies can use those roads to deliver access and services. Now there are two ways to pursue that model. Fresno is going to buy access and services from the private sector and resell them to broadband customers. Customers like this because you get a single bill with everything on it, and you have a single point of contact for service and support.

The other way to do it is to let companies sell direct to customers. In this model, you may have several bills (e.g. one for access, one for VoIP, one for email services, etc.). And you have several different companies to deal with in terms of service and support.

Both approaches have some advantages and disadvantages--the former model looks better from a customer perspective for billing and support. The nonprofit network operator makes more money to cover expenses and to build out the network. But it's a more complex way of doing business, since the nonprofit operator has to be the middleman for everything.

A North Carolina paper has jumped feet first into blogging the news, with 11 news feeds written by reporters and staffers on the paper. The Greenboro News and Record thinks that the paper has no choice but to do this. I agree, as I wrote recently about this issue.

I've always thought the Web has great potential for newspapers, but they have to begin to see their role for what it really is--editing and writing, not printing black marks on paper. The Web is pure writing, and it frees newspapers to do that really well. Combined with the growing viability of advertising on the Web, newspapers can have a future.

But the most interesting thing in the article was that a newspaper is blogging. From the article:

Night cops reporter Eric Townsend, a 26-year-old who also contributes to a blog about traffic, said he's happy to post to the blog, but he thinks declining newspaper readership among the young is more a symptom of a decline in civic engagement than anything else. "Young people don't have a sense of involvement, a sense of community," he said. "It doesn't matter how many 'young' stories we do. I don't think blogs are the answer either."

What I see in under 30 people is an unhealthy attachment to their devices--their cellphones, their music players, their Gameboys--that keeps them tuned out and turned off from the world around them. Next time you walk down a town street, look at how many young people have on earphones--earphones that are blocking out the real world in favor of a world that they can manipulate.

Is this phenomenon important? It's too early to tell. But I do notice, as do many of my colleagues, the absence of young people at town meetings convened to talk about the future of the community. The ones that do show up are bright and engaged, and have typically have a lot to contribute.

The FBI wants to increase the cost of Voice over IP. The VoIP news article has a set of excellent questions that someone ought to be asking the FBI as they seek to extend existing wiretap requirements to VoIP companies. Not only will it increase the cost of commercial VoIP software by requiring those firms to install wiretap backdoors in their systems, the whole exercise is absurd. Here's why.

• As VoIP News asks, why would criminals use a commercial VoIP offering that was known to have a wiretap backdoor when they could just as easily use their own secure VoIP software. Dozens of VoIP software products are completely free and can be downloaded and installed easily.
• Some VoIP providers are located outside the U.S., beyond the jurisdiction of the FBI. Why would anyone use a higher-priced U.S. service if a less expensive offshore service with equivalent voice quality is available? Why would international drug rings ever use U.S. services if the FBI has their finger in them? One effect of FBI regulation will be to drive the entire VoIP business out of the United States.
• Wiretapping only the VoIP data streams of suspected criminals is, well, just dumb. If I were trying to investigate criminal behavior, I'd want to capture their entire data stream. And the FBI can do this now, just by going to the criminal's ISP with a court order and getting the ISP to re-transmit to the FBI every data packet coming from the criminal. This is trivial to do, does not require expensive new software, and is much more likely to provide useful information, since you'd also see email, Web sites, chat, IRC, and any other communications, along with VoIP conversations.

So what's really going on? Occam's Razor may be useful here (the simplest explanation is probably the correct one). Recall that this is the same FBI that just spend $170 million of our tax dollars on a "Virtual Case File" system that does not work. In other words, the FBI has neither good in-house technology advice nor do they seem capable of buying it. Like many other Federal government agencies, when the FBI wants technology, they run to the beltway bandits--the big consulting firms that inhabit the D.C. area, who have a built in conflict of interest when asked by those same agencies to both design and build systems.

West Virginia, just a few miles away from Blacksburg, has jumped to first in the nation with respect to intelligent, pro-community thinking about broadband.

The state legislature, unlike more than a dozen other states trying to cripple the ability of communities to promote economic development and to support existing businesses, is saying, "We don't want to do that."

Not only that, the state seems ready to give communities the tools they need to chart their own future. This article [link no longer available] has the details.

The state of Texas has sued Voice over IP provider Vonage for not explaining to customers that 911 does not work over its service. In fact, 911 does not work over any VoIP service reliably, and the problem is likely to begin slowing the acceptance of VoIP.

Save Muni Wireless is a Texas Web site set up to provide information about the fight brewing in the Texas legislature over municipal broadband. Like many other states, Texas has been targeted by the telcos--they want laws that take control of community futures away from the community and give it to the telcos.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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

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.

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."

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]

Certain parts of the 'net have begun talking about building your own TV. Back when I was a kid, one of my favorite pastimes on rainy days was poring over the Heathkit catalogue. Heath of Benton Harbor, Michigan had a whole catalogue full of electronic kits, ranging from simple transistor radios to things like electronic keyboards and color televisions. I eventually built a shortware receiver, among other home-designed projects.

But with the advent of the microchip, Heath went out of business. Electronic stuff got so cheap no one was interested in putting things together themselves. So why the sudden interest?

We're beginning to see "perfect storms" in several areas. The phone business is becoming a perfect storm. Skype's CEO announced the other day that the company has 29 million users and is adding 155,000 PER DAY. Skype is free for Skype to Skype calls, and they charge a small fee for completing calls to non-Skype users. Skype is using the Google model--mostly free service and offering an optional fee-based service. And we all know what happened to Google.

But Google was not disruptive in the same way that Voice over IP is destroying the phone business because there was no global search business before Google. But the steady increase in broadband users, excellent voice telephony software from companies like Skype, and monopoly pricing from the telecoms has created a perfect storm in telephony that will shortly also swallow the entire cellphone industry, since WiFi carries Skype and other VoIP calls just as easily.

Similarly, the television business is also on very rough seas that will build quickly to a perfect storm. Again, broadband winds have increased the wave height. We're very close to a time when some innovative and brash content developer says, "Heck with the TV industry. We're going to produce a "tv" show and broadcast it over the Internet." The show will be so compelling (I'm guessing a comedy will be first) that millions will download and watch it, even if the picture quality is a little fuzzy. Once we have a single breakout show, the wave height will only get higher and eventually the existing model for television will be swallowed by the monster wave of Internet TV. This storm could start anytime in the next year or so, and TV as we know it will hang for a few years, but with fewer and fewer viewers day by day.

One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

I still see many regions continuing to build shell buildings designed for manufacturing. It used to bring jobs to the area, so why not just keep doing it? The problem is that kind of strategy is competing for fewer and fewer jobs (as few as 10% of all new jobs) against more and more regions willing to throw enormous tax incentives at manufacturers. Meanwhile, more and more manufacturing is going to other countries.

We are just at the dawn of the computer age. I know that because we are finally seeing computers that are not just, well, computers. The $99 iPod shuffle, barely larger than a stick of gum, is thousands of times more powerful computationally than my first hand-built personal computer from 1977. And we don't think of an iPod as a computer at all, but it is. Cellphones are handheld computers that have been programmed to behave like phones (and cameras, and calendars, etc.).

I started thinking about this when I read about Asterisk, which is an Open Source software project that makes a cheap Linux or Macintosh computer behave like a PBX. PBX is an old phone company acronym for Private Branch Exchange, or a small telephone switch normally owned only by medium and large companies because they have been very expensive.

But now any small business can afford a PBX simply by downloading this free software and installing it. It works with most popular Voice over IP protocols, and interoperates with other common telephone equipment. It's an incredible piece of work that is the result of probably hundreds of people working collaboratively for the common good.

And it must scare the pants off companies like Lucent, Alcatel, and others that still make a lot of money selling telephone switches. The world we knew is crumbling around us, and dazzling new opportunities are emerging.

I've been reading a lot of historical fiction and nonfiction recently. I've slowly been ploughing through Neal Stephenson's three book opus on the late 1600s and early 1700s. I'm just finishing up book two, ,The Confusion. It's a fictional account of those turbulent times when the first global economy began to emerge and innovations like paper money changed the rules of nations and commerce simultaneously. Stephenson is a genius of a writer, rooting his story firmly in the real history of the time, including figures like Isaac Newton and Leibniz, both of whom had a profound effect on that era.