Technology Futures

In New Hampshire, economic developers did a study of business ownership and found that 18.5% of all private, non-farm employment in the state was tied to microenterprises. A microenterprise is defined as a business that employs between one and five people, including the owner, and requires no more than $35,000 in start up capital (Business NH Magazine, March 2005).

So in New Hampshire, a fifth of the economy is based on companies with less than five people!

So here is a homework assignment. Go back to your local economic developers and elected leaders (who usually appoint the economic developers), and ask them these questions:

• How many microbusinesses do we have in our town/region?
• What percentage of jobs do these businesses account for?
• What programs are in the current economic development plan to help existing microbusinesses grow?
• What programs are in the current economic development plan to help local entrepreneurs start microbusinesses?
• What programs are in the current economic development plan to attract entrepreneurs from other areas that want to relocate and start a microbusiness?
• What amenities, services, and community attributes do relocating microbusiness entrepreneurs look for, and do we have a plan in place to get them and market them?

If you do not get satisfactory answers to these questions, your region may be ignoring the fastest growing source of jobs in the United States, with a 600% increase over the last decade in the microbusiness category.

The Washington Post has an interesting article that I think is a must read for rural communities. It is about a rapidly growing trend away from the typical "sprawl" subdivision and towards denser neighborhoods that include low rise and mid rise condos carefully mixed with downtown amenities like stores, libraries, restaurants, and other pedestrian (i.e. cars not needed to get around) destinations.

Sound vaguely familiar? These new developments are a lot like the old small town neighborhoods that surrounded and spread out from the Main Street shopping district.

Rural communities that want to attract entrepreneurs and families should be looking very carefully at zoning and land use issues to ensure that local builders and real estate developers are designing new neighborhoods and rehabbing old ones in ways that will meet the expectations of people moving from urban areas. And don't forget to include telecom duct under the streets and to every home.

Telecom is the not the big challenge for small towns and rural communities. It is land use issues. If you get your land use issues in order, and land use includes telecom right of way management, prosperity will follow. But if towns and rural counties continue to build low density sprawl that eats up farmland and forests, they will be behind the curve, and the communities will be less attractive to the people that want to move to small towns.

Why is this happening? One trend is baby boomer empty nesters. As the kids have grown up and moved out, baby boomer couples don't want to live in a faceless suburb where you have to drive miles to get a cup of coffee or go to the library. These affluent couples want to live closer to the action, closer to other people, and closer to amenities.

Is your town ready? If not, are you planning to get ready?

The notion of a national ID number is being considered for a variety of reasons: the Social Security number was never intended as a national ID number, but is used that way, the illegal immigration crisis is due in part to the difficulty of identifying valid U.S. citizens, and law enforcement, insurance agencies, and health care providers all like the idea of having a better way to keep tabs on people.

Meanwhile, we have Google and the credit card companies tracking and aggregating information on everything we do.

For an idea of how this might all work in the future, check out this funny but frightening demonstration.

The Rural Telecommunications Congress 9th Annual Meeting is over, but I'm still catching up on presentations. Matt Wenger of PacketFront, a company that specializes in the network hardware and software needed to manage communitywide networks, presented an interesting model for promoting innovation and paying for the network.

Wenger did not say "fiber should be free" in precisely those words, but that is what I took away from his remarks. Wenger argued that it is services that people are interested in--VoIP, video on demand, security, network backups, etc.--and that a connection-based business model (what everyone uses now) actually penalizes both users and service providers.

In a connection-based model, where you pay for a connection of a certain amount of bandwidth (e.g. a T1), if you use services that require a lot of bandwidth, you have to pay more, both on the service provider side and the customer side. So success in marketing your services, or using lots of broadband services, is discouraged.

Wenger pointed out that it is particularly bad for service providers; if they successfully sell lots of services, their costs go up, unlike practically any other business on the planet, where costs typically decrease as business volume increases.

Wenger insists that the way a communitywide broadband network should work is to charge a small fee (e.g. 5%) on the revenue of service providers. In other words, customers and service providers can connect to the network for free, but fees paid to the community network manager increase based on demand, rather than on bandwidth.

Sound crazy? It might be, except PacketFront already has it working in a community in Sweden, where more than 60 service providers are selling services over a community broadband network, and doing so successfully.