Technology Futures

Just when you thought it could not get any worse with the Diebold voting machines, new information has come out indicating that the electronic voting machines can be opened with a minibar key, or in fact, almost any kind of cheap key that is often supplied with office desks and other types of furniture.

It has been previously demonstrated that someone with physical access to the machine can, in about a minute or two, alter the vote count of the machine. But that meant being able to open the locked machine quickly. And that is apparently quite easy if you have some of these cheap keys.

Microsoft has released details of its long-awaited music player, and it is pretty interesting. It's called Zune, and is obviously trying to beat the iPod by adding stuff that the iPod does not have. Included extras are WiFi networking, a slightly bigger screen, and an FM receiver. It comes in three colors, including brown, and I have to say that from the pictures, brown seems like an awfully unattractive choice.

The iPod has long been criticized for not having an FM tuner, but I do not think this is a particularly big selling feature. Other music players have offered this and it has not helped their sales. The underlying issue is that once you have all your music loaded on a portable music player, FM radio seems tedious and bland by comparison.

The Zune Marketplace (think iTunes Store) will selll music and videos, and the WiFi features allows you to share music and movies on a "sample" basis with nearby friends; it is not clear exactly how the "sample" sharing will work. In any case, it will be interesting to see how Zune does.

eBay's purchase of Skype, the Internet phone service, appears to be reaping dividends in terms of new features for the phone service. Skype has been making more frequent upgrades to the software and service, and in the process, is redefining the telephone.

We used to think of the telephone as an object. It is now a piece of software and an associated service, completely independent of a particular physical object. You can run Skype on your computer with a headset, but manufacturers are also producing "Skype phones" which have the basic Skype service protocols built in, so you can plug them into your computer but use the phone to dial calls just like an "old fashioned" phone.

The company is taking many different features and services and combining them into a unified interface--something other companies are trying to do but with less success. Skype seems to be taking a page from Apple and focusing intently on designing really good software to make the service easy to use from beginning to end. The company has excellent help tips and instructions, and the newest version of Skype with videoconferencing recognized my camera without making me do anything to set that feature up.

Skype is adding SMS, file sharing, conference calling, video calls, and voicemail, among other features. And Skype can also call to "old" telephone landlines. Some of these things cost money, but Skype is pursuing the now classic Internet model of giving part of the service away for free. With eBay's deep pockets, Skype may well come to dominate the phone space, whether we like it or not. Internet advocates are working on an Open Source equivalent called Gizmo, which has many of the same features, but Gizmo, which relies on volunteers to add new features, may not be able to keep up with a steady stream of new features coming from Skype. But free does not always mean good. I've tried to use Skype's conference call feature, and the quality is mixed, as is just person to person Skype calls, because the service is heavily dependent on the quality of your Internet connection and all the connections between you and the person on the other end. Skype is one reason the phone companies are calling for a two tier Internet with toll booths. The phone and cable companies want to extort, er, I mean, charge Skype fees for carrying their traffic. But that's not a solution, it's just another problem, mostly for users.

What is likely is that the notion of having a single "phone" number or even just one or two phone numbers, is long gone. We'll have to have multiple voice services and accounts to accommodate friends, family, and business associates. As long as we can forward our phone calls from one "number" to another, we should generally benefit from a very rich set of features....if we can figure out how to use them all.

Apple unveiled its iTunes movie download service yesterday, which is very nicely done from a customer experience perspective. But many people are likely to be frustrated with download speeds. Apple talks about 30 minutes to download a feature length movie, but the company noted that is if you have a 5-6 megabit cable modem connection. About 60% of broadband users have cable modem connections, and many of them are supposed to be three megabits/second or more, but few actually deliver that. The cable companies coyly use the phrase "speeds UP TO 6 megabits," meaning snowballs in heck will likely freeze solid first.

My home is on an Adelphia system now owned by Cox, and I rarely see speeds of much more than 1 megabit/second. Sometimes I see more, but last night, as an example, I was barely getting 500kilobits/second. The problem with cable and wireless systems that promise huge speeds is that you share that bandwidth with other local users, so the theoretical maximum the marketing people love to tout is just that--theoretical--as in, if you are the only person on the Internet in your local area. Which almost never happens unless you work the night shift and tend to be up at 4 AM.

We observed this phenomenon many years ago when I was still running the Blacksburg Electronic Village. In the afternoon and evenings, people go home and get online, and do so much more now than then. So if everyone pushes back from the dinner table about 6:30 PM on Friday night and decides to download a movie instead of going to the video rental store, you won't be getting that movie in anything like 30 minutes. It will more likely be a couple of hours, or even longer. Dedicated download enthusiasts will start downloads the night before and go to bed while pulling the movie down.

This is why cable and phone company promises of 5, 10, or even 30 megabit speeds are grossly inadequate. Apple's highly compressed movie offerings don't even match current DVD quality; they had to do this to make it possible to download them at all over current broadband systems. But as more and more people demand to watch movies in HD format, the current copper-based "broadband" network in the U.S. (i.e. cable modem and DSL) is simply not up to it. A high quality HD video stream requires 18-20 megabits/second for a single movie, and if you two of you in the household want to watch different movies at the same time, you are right up to around 40 megabits/second, just to watch a TV show or movie.

And despite promises of 54 megabit and 108 megabit wireless systems, those are the theoretical maximums, not the real world average throughput. For any wireless system with multiple users (almost all neighborhood systems), a simple rule of thumb is to divide the maximum throughput by 10 to get the likely "good" bandwidth you will see most of the time. So a 54 megabit wireless system might be able to deliver 5 meg/second when usage is moderate. On Friday nights, you might be lucky to get 1 megabit consistently.

Communities need fiber, for business and for entertainment, and to make the system pay, you need both kinds of content. As Design Nine helps more and more communities design true Open Service Provider Networks (OSPNs), our financial models consistently show that you can't just build out to business or just to residential neighborhoods and make the network pay for itself. You need to bring both market segments into an integrated business plan.