Technology Futures

I wrote recently about Hughes Satellite's new pricing options that make it very attractive in rural areas where landline broadband may not be available. Hughes is also working on new technology that will provide much better quality of service for satellite broadband and will improve some of the latency (delay) issues that have been an issue in the past.

Hughes is putting a new satellite up soon that will have routing capabilities on the satellite itself. This is a dramatic and important change from the past, where the satellite has been a passive conduit and simply passed data packets from one earth station to another.

The new approach will have each packet examined on the satellite, and it is destined for another Hughes customer, it will be directed straight to that customer, rather than being sent up and down. For some traffic, this could cut transit time by 50% or more--a huge boost when talking about network latency. This will be especially popular for businesses managing several locations that use Hughes services, as Hughes can create a private network with much higher performance.

Innovations like these are making satellite increasingly attractive for rural areas. And with improved performance, satellite may have an important long term role to play in providing network redundancy.

The cable industry is showing off their next generation broadband cable modems, which promise much faster speeds. The cable companies are under some pressure from the fiber rollouts of the phone companies.

There are some problems, however. The new technology continues to rely on copper to the home, and in fact, the "new" technology simply involves using four TV channels instead of two to carry broadband data. It is still a hybrid system that uses a fifty year old cable TV design to carry data. It's main advantage is that it is cheap to upgrade.

The second problem is that the cable companies, like the phone companies, want to be the gatekeeper for advanced services. If you want VoIP service, they don't want to offer a choice of providers; they want to sell you their service, at their price, and this will become a bigger problem as time goes on and truly open systems start offering a much wider range of prices and services than closed systems.

Finally, cable companies are anti-economic development, in the sense that they see themselves as selling "entertainment," not business class services. I had a problem recently with my cable modem service and was told the normal repair time was two weeks because the Internet service I was buying was "entertainment" and did not require any faster response. This kind of attitude makes it either impossible to work from home or much more expensive. Some cable companies will sell a "business class" service for your home, charging much more for exactly the same service.

The bottom line for communities is simple: Do you want a large incumbent with its headquarters many states away deciding your economic development future, or do you want to more control locally? If your answer is the latter, local broadband investments can help energize economic development and actually provide funds for other community and economic development projects.

This New York Times article (registration required, link may disappear) says that schools that give laptops to students have been wasting their money. This was entirely predictable, because just putting technology "stuff" in the classroom was never going to change anything.

Unfortunately, I got an early lesson in that in Blacksburg in the mid-nineties when we had the first schools in the country with broadband in every classroom. I learned some hard facts from teachers, and figured out that if you want technology to have an impact on learning in the classroom, you have to do five things.

• You do have to buy some stuff, and every child has to have easy access to it, hence the focus on laptops for everyone. But this is only step one, and unfortunately, it is where most schools and school boards stop.
• You have to provide training--extensive and regular training--to teachers. Without it, few teachers will be able to make good use of the complicated technology.
• You have to provide adequate technical support. Unfortunately, there is never enough to go around, and teachers have enough to do without also having to install software, fix problems, and maintain dozens of systems.
• You have to provide classroom ready learning materials that fit the curriculum teachers are expected to teach. You can't just give teachers a laptop and tell them, "Use the vast resources of the Internet." The vast resources are the problem; teachers don't have time to develop entirely new sets of teaching materials from scratch.
• Finally, you have to physically redesign the classroom to use the technology. How can kids use a laptop all day long if there is no place to plug in chargers at their desk? Where does the LCD projector go? How easy is it to have kids use the projector to show off their assignments? And so on.

We can barely teach kids the three Rs these days. It is naive to think spending money on feel-good initiatives like laptops will have any effect without extensive structural changes in the entire learning process. But at least we are finally learning these lessons.

If you like to believe everything vendors tell you, WiMax will solve all our broadband problems, give us younger looking skin, and get rid of grey hair.

WiMax has been lurking for ages, a technology that has been "just a few months away" for at least three years. But it takes a long time to bring an entirely new wireless technology to market, with extensive testing required to make sure the systems don't interfere with other wireless systems, among other issues.

The approval by the FCC of the first WiMax laptop card is a good sign that we may finally be able to starting thinking about WiMax as a "real" system. WiMax base stations (the gear that powers big towers) is still very expensive, but there have been few ways to for users to actually receive WiMax signals affordably. Over the next several years, we will finally see a bunch of WiMax products enter the marketplace, and dropping prices.

Is WiMax the holy grail of broadband? Not by a long shot, but it is a much better technology than WiFi, which was designed for indoor use and short distances. WiMax was designed from the ground up to provide much more robust and interference-resistant signals over longer distances, with more bandwidth. It will gradually replace WiFi, and it will be interesting to see how it competes with EVDO, the cellular-based wireless technology favored, naturally, by the cellphone companies.

But fiber is still a necessity. Wireless services are not the first choice for businesses because of bandwidth, security, and reliability issues. And home use is being driven by high bandwidth video applications and services, which WiMax cannot support. We need well-designed fiber and wireless systems in our communities, and communities that design for both will have a significant economic development advantage.