Technology Futures

Pete Johnson, the Federal co-chair of the Delta Regional Authority (the Mississipi delta of several states and 10 million people) spoke at lunch abou the importance of infrastructure to the health and vitality of communities. He made several points in the early part of his talk:

• Communities are competing in a global economy, not a local or regional economy.
• A key role of government is to provide basic infrastructure, and telecommunications is now basic infrastructure.
• Communities must look to the future (with the implication that too many are trying to hold on to the past).
• Technology is and must lead the way for every kind of initiative in rural America.

Johnson gave a brief history of the Delta region starting with the War Between the States, and up to the present day. He has been heavily involved in dealing with the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which caused heavy damage to infrastructure in the Delta region as far as 200 miles inland.

Johnson enumerated four areas of technology and telecommunications infrastructure investment that he sees as critical for rural communities.

• Distance learning has great potential to improve educational outcomes for youth in rural areas.
• Telehealth can similarly overcome disparities in the quality and quantity of services available in rural areas, which are typically underserved.
• GIS mapping systems are vital to rural communities to better manage infrastructure, help visualize buisiness and customers clusters as economic conditions change in rural areas, and to help focus where extra effort is needed, especially if a region is suffering from population contraction.
• Interoperability of first responder and public safety telecom systems, which have changed little over the past 40 years. The hurricanes revealed serious communications weaknesses in the current, very old system.

Google's new partnership with Sun is creating a lot of speculation, in part because the details of the agreement are quite vague. Sun has agreed to download the Google Toolbar with every copy of Sun's Java software. The Google Toolbar is unpopular with a lot of net folks (including me) because it actually inserts links into a Web document where there were none. In other words, the Toolbar changes the meaning of a Web page without the author's permission. And the links, of course, point to Google content.

As an example, if you have Google Toolbar running, as a page is being downloaded, the Toolbar scans it for text chunkls that look like addresses, and if it finds one, it creates a link on the page that takes you to a Google map. As Dave Winer points out, this is quite insidious, because the reader can't tell that Google has modified the page.

It's another example of how Google's actions are quite contrary to the company slogan, "Don't be evil." Changing Web pages to point to your company's content and ads is evil. Imagine if you found that Google was inserting links on your company Web site that pointed to your competitor. Hard to imagine? That's exactly what Barnes and Noble discovered earlier this year, when it found that the Google Toolbar was putting links to Amazon.com on the B&N Web site.

I was told recently that the MSAP (Multimedia Services Access Point) was outdated and no longer needed. The MSAP is a public peering point that we pioneered in Blacksburg in 1999. It is still in operation today, and vastly improves network performance within the community.

The MSAP is just a network data exchange point, which is old as the Internet. But what was new and different about what we did in Blacksburg was the concept that communities and regions needed to provide public peering points--for a whole variety of reasons, most related to lower costs for bandwidth and greatly improved quality of service for things like voice and video services.

But another reason is to make sure private interests don't have monopoly control over the network, as illustrated perfectly in this item.

Briefly put, two major backbone Internet providers (Cogent and Level 3) are squabbling and Level 3 has stopped allowing Cogent's traffic to cross its network. This means, in some cases, that you cannot send IP traffic from here to there. Sites lose traffic, businesses are affected, and performance is degraded. And businesses in affected communities can't do a thing about it.

Public peering points like MSAPs and RNAPs (Regional Network Access Points) won't stop the squabbles, but they can help mitigate the effects, and give communities and regions some control over their destiny.

Put another way, imagine if all roads out of your community were private toll roads that could be shut down at any time by a private company? Would that be good for business? Would it be good for the community? Would it help attract business and industry?

The answer, of course, is an emphatic no. But that is exactly the situation we have today with the Internet. As the Internet becomes more and more important to commerce, governance, and daily life, communities and regions cannot keep ignoring these issues.

USA Today reports that IP TV is booming, just as I have been saying. IP TV shows have been attracting audiences of half a million people, which many cable TV channels would kill to have. And advertisers are pouring billions into the new medium--they love it because their ads can be much more narrowly focused for specific audiences, and someone interested can click right through to the advertiser's site. This means the advertisers get real time data while the show is actually being watched; that's something TV can't do.

What does this mean for communities? It means that entertainment and economic development are converging, in the sense that it may be difficult to justify broadband investments built on a narrow base of business users, but if everyone in the community wants broadband to watch TV, the dollars are there to support a community digital road system. When World Wresting Entertainment can put on WWEHeat and attract 500,000 viewers without any advertising, the debate about broadband is over. It's here, and the broad base of users is ready for it.