Technology Futures

A New York Post article talks about the growing popularity of cellphone jammers. The devices, which are illegal but can be bought on the street in New York City, are giving relief to people sick of loud-mouthed cellphone users. They seem to be especially popular with users of public transportation, where you don't necessarily want to listen to the details of someone's love life while taking the train into Grand Central Station.

Motorola has announced that it will build a GSM cellphone (the European standard now being introduced in the U.S.) that is also "Skype ready." This means if you are in a WiFi hotspot, you can make calls for free via the Internet. Not in a hotspot? Then the phone uses the old cellphone system.

Skype is a popular free VoIP service that was founded by two of the originators of popular peer to peer services including Altnet and Kazaa. Skype to Skype calls are free, and the company charges for calls made to the old telephone network (i.e. what most of us use).

It's not clear exactly what the future is for services like Skype. The company's software is proprietary, so they control their user base, unlike some other Open Source VoIP services like Free Word Dialup. Skype is popular right now because they have a more finished product that is easy to install and use. Some of the Open Source software is a bit rough around the edges.

I'll stand by my prediction that telephony as a business is dead, dead, dead. In the future, voice calls will be like email--we'll all have it and use it heavily, and it won't cost us a dime to call anyone, anywhere in the world.

Business opportunity: voice and video calls to the moon and to Mars will cost money for a while because of limited bandwidth. Real time calls to the moon will be just barely possible; the latency will make for a slight delay, but it will be manageable. Real time calls to Mars will not be convenient, as the latency will make it very difficult to have a conversation fluidly. According to my calculations, the latency to Mars will vary between about 4 minutes and 20 minutes, depending on the relative positions of the earth and Mars.

You might ask, "What happens to the phone companies?" The phone companies have to recognize that their only option is to think of themselves as access providers rather than service providers. And they are lumbering in that direction, albeit very slowly. The acquisition of AT&T and MCI by local dialtone companies gives the latter the long haul circuits to better serve the access market.

If you are interested in community broadband, you may want to take a look at the upcoming Digital Cities Expo, which will be in northern Virginia (Reston) in April.

The conference will have sessions covering the economic, legal, financial, technological, and infrastructure issues surrounding municipal broadband (Disclaimer: I'm one of the speakers).

The Indiana bill that would have restricted the rights of communities to invest in telecom has died in committee.

The Internet is providing an alternate channel for citizens and community leaders to deal with these issues. In the past, bills like this often got passed into law quietly before anyone even knew about them. Today, most legislatures post proposed legislation on the Internet, open to all to see, and lots of people have the opportunity to review this stuff before it is too late. It's a useful counterbalance to lobbyists.

Om Malik reports on news from law professor Larry Lessig that some VoIP services may be blocked or degraded on some of the incumbent networks. I predicted this many months ago--that the monopoly infrastructure carriers would eventually block VoIP because it competes with their own "antique" phone systems.

MediaCitizen has a good summary of the efforts of the big providers to squash municipal projects. The article itself has little new information, except for a nugget of pure gold, in a box about half way down the page.

He cites St. Cloud, Florida, which operates a large WiFi network for citizens. The average savings on broadband access exceeds the average tax bill for residents, and keeps $3 million to $4 million dollars per year in the local economy.

Add Colorado to a growing list of states that have bills pending in the legislature that would take the right to determine their own future away from communities.

I've been getting a lot of questions lately about community Web portals. There is a lot of confusion about what they are, the benefits of having one, and how to go about setting one up and running it.

It is being widely reported that Verizon has purchased MCI. This was widely predicted once the news came out that SBC was purchasing AT&T.

MCI, as you may recall, was the company that took on AT&T in the early eighties and caused the giant to be split up into seven regional phone companies, with long distance wide open. The result was that long distance rates began dropping, and local service prices went up.

But twenty years later, here we are again with essentially monopoly phone service, although it is now Balkanized. Although there are multiple phone companies, each enjoys marketplace monopoly in its own area.

There is good and bad news in all this. The bad news is that legal deregulation, as practiced by the FCC in 1984 (AT&T breakup) and 1996 (Telecom Dereg Act) does not work BY ITSELF. It is necessary but not sufficient. In both cases, it did not work as expected because the infrastructure to deliver services in communities remained in monopoly control of a single company.

As Alan McAdam, a Cornell economist, has shown in extensive study and research, the only way to counter these marketplace monopolies is to have shared ownership of the infrastructure, with property owners, the community, and the private sector all owning parts of the network.

What is the good news? The good news, of a sort, is that telephone companies are going the way of the dinosaurs. Anyone connected to the Internet has an IP address which uniquely identifies you...kind of like a phone number. The emerging ENUM system maps IP addresses to a personal identifier so that you can take your phone number with you wherever you go, and anyone, using any software that is ENUM-aware, can call you no matter where you are in the world--no phone company required.

It is going to take another five to ten years, but phone companies (including the cellular companies) will be reme

Dianah Neff, the CIO of the City of Philadelphia, has written an interesting article on municipalities and WiFi for CNet.

Philadelphia had ambitious plans to provide WiFi citywide until Verizon jumped into the discussion and got the Pennsylvania legislature to pass a law requiring municipalities to ask Verizon's permission before going into the service business (Philadelphia was exempted, but the whole debacle put the brakes on Philadelphia's effort).

Many of the VoIP services like Skype and iChat use "softphones," which means the phone is really a program on your computer. You still need a headset of somekind, but the whole set up is a bit clumsy compared to the time-tested "telephone" interface we've been using for, oh, a hundred years or so.

Engadget has an article on an inexpensive (about $45) VoIP phone that actually looks and acts like a phone. The neat thing is that you don't plug it in the wall, you plug it into a USB port on your computer.

Run, don't walk, to the nearest store and pick up a copy of USA Today. If you live in a rural community and are involved with economic and community development issues, you need to read the cover story today.

Small towns in the Great Plains are finally starting to give up "elephant hunting" and instead are using an "economic gardening" strategy. This is exactly what I have been saying in our Knowledge Economy Roadshow for the past several years.

This CNet article says that businesses are realizing the value of dark fiber, and are willing to pay for it.

Here is the money quote:

"....Ford [Motor Company] found that it would cost less to lay its own optical fiber lines than to subscribe to a service from the local phone company."

A quote from the Governor of Maine's State of the State address:

...Tonight I am announcing 'Connect Maine,' a broad and aggressive telecommunications strategy for this state. Connect Maine will give nearly every Mainer the opportunity to plug into the global economy from their community. It will ensure that 90 percent of Maine communities have broadband access by 2010; 100 percent of Maine communities have quality wireless service by 2008; and Maine's education system has the technology infrastructure that leads the nation.

The Space Economy continues its upward trend (literally). NASA appears to have awoken from a deep sleep with an ambitious new program to use the private sector to build next generation space exploration vehicles for low earth orbit (the space station), the moon, and Mars.

eWeek has a good article that provides a useful snapshot of anti-muni telecom investment legislation that is that is making the rounds of legislatures (Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana).

Back on October 31, 2003, I wrote about supercomputers as the economic development infrastructure. I suggested that regions that wanted to have a real marketing edge invest in a modest supercomputer cluster and rent it out to businesses that wanted occasional access to such equipment but could not justify the cost of owning it.

Add Indiana to a growing list of states that have legislatures turning their backs on communities. Legislations is being considered there that would prohibit communities from providing telecom services.

Even though I think that communities ought to stay out of the service business and limit their investments to telecom infrastructure, I think that decision ought to be left to the community, and not be pre-empted by the state legislature.

If your heartburn is not acting up now, it probably will be after you read this analysis by Om Malik. Malik, like me, see the phone companies as running scared, and part of the emerging phone landscape will be the re-monopolization of the existing "old" telephone network.