Technology Futures

The North Dakota legislature has done the right thing by making the data stored in vehicle black boxes solely the property of the vehicle owner.

When I tell people that the target for broadband ought to be 155 megabits or better, many scoff at me, even though I have plenty of information that shows we need that much for the things we all want to be doing in less than a decade.

Unfortunately, the FCC continues to prop up the incumbent telephone and cable companies by calling broadband anything faster than 256 kilobits. This allows the incumbents to tell poorly informed elected leaders and economic developers in our communities that cable modem and DSL service offerings exceed Federal government recommendations by a wide margin, when in fact the 1-3 megabit throughput of DSL and cable modems is woefully inadequate. Not knowing anything else about the issue, many leaders decide they don't need to do anything, since the community "already has broadband."

It's video that will drive much of the bandwidth needs, and with high definition (HD) programming becoming more common, you need, depending on whom you ask, somewhere between 3-8 megabits for a single HD video stream. With the average American household having 3.68 televisions, you have to design your network to support four of those video streams simultaneously, or somewhere around 40-50 megabits/second just to watch TV. And you have to be able to handle approximately a 3x "burst" capacity when you decide to watch a video downloaded via the Internet.

But my figure of 155 megabits is still setting the bar awfully low. Our Canadian (CANARIE) friends are already doing advanced testing of immersive, multi-party videoconferencing with enhanced audio services called High Definition Ultra-Videoconferencing. The system uses 3.5 gigabits/second in each direction--or about 22 times more bandwidth than my recommendation of 155 megabits/second.

Of course, it takes an all fiber system to do this. Fiber continues to be the best futureproofing a community can undertake, as it can handle whatever bandwidth needs we want to throw at it, just by swapping out the electronics at the ends.

The Free Press has released three useful reports on broadband that ought to be required reading for any citizen's group trying to convince public officials and economic developers that something needs to be done.

The IEEE (Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers) has issued a new white paper stating that "U.S. prosperity is at risk" if it does not become a national goal to invest heavily in Gigabit networks. The organization went on to say this:

Failure to act will "relegate the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure to an inferior competitive position" and undermine the future of the U.S. economy.

USA Today has an excellent article that summarizes the current debate moving through the courts about the future of cable television and the future of video programming generally. As usual, the FCC has muddied the waters here, with statements and policy decisions that seem to favor both sides of the argument.

It's great to see some thoughtful broadband coverage in local newspapers. This article from the Rock River Times [link no longer available] of Rockford, Illinois makes the case for communitywide telecom infrastructure. The paper makes the point that transport systems have always been important to communities and economic development, starting with canals and then the railroads. Government has always been involved, to one extent or another, and the railroads are a good example of a successful public/private partnership that reaped great results.

Loudoun County, which is located in northern Virginia, has created what may be a first--the county now has a paid position called Manager of Broadband Services. Funded from telecom use fees paid to the county, the new employee, Scott Bashore, will have the responsibility to advise the county on broadband strategies, set a vision for the county on the future use of technology, and will work closely with businesses to ensure the county has the right broadband infrastructure in place to support economic development.

Much is being made of Disney's reluctance to push its content out to viewers via Internet-based television (IPTV). The Business Week article is typical--full of handwringing and hysterical headlines like "IPTV revolution may be on hold."

Maybe not. Maybe the revolution will proceed very nicely, thank you, without Disney. Disney and all the other Hollywood content providers will likely be last to the party, while independents with fresh ideas and world class production software from Apple running on cheap Macs will create break out shows.

If anyone thinks you really need the big studios to produce content, look at the current spate of reality shows. Not only are most of them really awful, the production values are pretty low. That's one reason why they are so appealing to the studios and networks--they are cheap.

Who hasn't sat on the couch late one night watching this dreck and thought, "Gee, I could make a reality show a whole lot more interesting than this?" You can, and people already are. The fake ads circulating on the Internet are the tip of the iceberg. The Volkswagen spoof was extraordinarily well done, and there are many other examples of high quality content out there.

The entertainment industry is trying to hold back the tide by running like a bunch of crybabies to Congress to buy some new laws so they can prosecute a few more grandmothers and 14 year olds for illegal downloads. Meanwhile, they are forcing Apple to sell their songs for exactly the same price, more or less, as you'd pay for the songs on a CD, while their distribution cost, courtesy of Apple's iTunes store, is now zero.

Movies are next. Look at the Blair Witch project--a hugely successful movie that made tens of millions of dollars. The whole movie was shot with cheap handheld cameras and edited on Macs. Today, the next Blair Witch movie could be delivered via a paid download using BitTorrent, and the makers of the film would pocket even more money.

AOL has decided to jump into the VoIP marketplace. It might just save the company, which has been bleeding customers for the past couple of years as people switch to broadband.

The Internet continues to create earthquakes across the entire spectrum of society as established ways of doing things crumble under the unprecedented publishing capabilites of Internet-enabled information tools.

Elected officials, who have enjoyed a close relationship with mainstream media over the decades, are becoming increasing irrational over blogs. While the media has often had an adversarial relationship with elected leaders of one stripe or another, those elected leaders, the media, and political parties all have tended to play by a set of well-understood rules (I'm generalizing here--there are obvious exceptions).

But blogs have changed all that. Bloggers, publishing their own commentary for a worldwide audience (albeit often a small one), don't have to play by traditional rules. The blogosphere is creating an entirely new set of rules, and some politicians don't like it.

San Francisco leaders have introduced city legislation that would require bloggers to register with the city if they write about politics and candidates. What on earth are they thinking? Do they really think they can stifle criticism of city leaders and policies with this kind of heavy-handed approach?

To illustrate just how absurd this is, a transnational fight over publishing is brewing. Excerpts from a secret government hearing in Canada that allegedly is investigating fraud on the part of government officials has been published on a U.S. Web site, and Canadian leaders are seething because they can't do anything about it.

It's not at all clear who, if anyone, has committed a crime. The ban forbids publication. So the Canadian that passed the documents on may not have broken the law, and the American blog is not subject to Canadian law at all.

Ethics and the lack of them certainly play a role here, but it's always been difficult to legislate moral or ethical behavior.

For a sobering look at the future, this article on South Korea is a wake-up for anyone who thinks the United States is technology savvy.

Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs announced today that the company has purchased CBS Television, using Apple's enormous hoard of cash. The company has been debt-free for many years, and analysts have engaged in endless speculation about what the company might do with its billions of dollars. In the press conference, Jobs indicated that because of CBS' recent problems with Dan Rather and "fake but accurate" news, Apple was able to pick up the company "for a song," which was apparently a pun on Apple's hugely popular iTunes venture.

Jobs announced sweeping changes for the venerable broadcasting firm. The biggest change is that he will have CBS abandon traditional television. Jobs said, "The old television model is dead. CBS will be the first all-Internet broadcasting company, and beginning April 1st, 2006, the company will end it's current 50 year old broadcast method and begin offering all its content via the Internet."

Analysts were skeptical that even Apple could pull off such a big change, but Jobs indicated the huge success of the tiny new Apple computer, the Mac mini, has already begun to pave the way. The Mac mini, which debuted in the fall of 2005, comes standard with an S-video out port, meaning that the tiny computer can output high quality video directly to a television set. Said Jobs, "With all the broadband users in the U.S., we've got a ready market for video via the Internet, and we'll be providing a Tivo-like piece of software called iVideo later this summer. iVideo will revolutionize the way people watch TV, just the way iTunes and the iPod has changed music."

Apple has also had a longstanding relationship with Akamai, which has banks of servers located all over the United States and already streams video for companies like Apple, usually for annual meetings and other corporate functions. Jobs indicated that Akamai would indeed play a major role as part of the all-Internet CBS. Jobs also indicated that Pixar, the movie production firm he also heads, will design the production facilities for the effort. "Nobody knows more about digital film and television production than Pixar," he said.

We've added two new handouts to the Design Nine library. Ten things a community needs to compete summarizes a column from a few months ago about what amenities a community needs to attract businesses to the area.

Community broadband step by step compares community broadband development to the construction of a new building and the development of a new water or sewer system. It's easy to see that broadband development follows exactly the same processes that communities have successfully been using for years on much more expensive projects.

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.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

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.