Technology Futures

There is a conversation over on LinkedIn about whether or not home-based tele-commuting is a real thing or not. I don't think the concept of working from home is "wrong," but I would agree that it is over-hyped.

We are not all going to work from home in the future. I first started using IP-based videoconferencing in 1994, and use it now on a daily basis. It is a tool, and nothing more than that. It is not some magic device that eliminates the need for face to face interaction.

Having said that, we have done more than two dozen county-wide and city-wide surveys in the past six or seven years involving thousands of respondents, and it is very clear that there is a floor of ten percent for full time home-based workers and businesses. If you add in respondents who are working part time from home, we see as many as 40% trying to work from home part time--while most of this is routine nights/weekends type stuff, on top of that 10% full time workers, there is another 5-10% who actually work one day or more from home. So there is a baseline of around 15-20% of workers who are trying to be productive from home.

We interviewed a Fortune 50 company recently who had a goal of giving 20% of their workforce the option of working full time from home as a quality of life issue (e.g. young children at home, an elderly relative who needs care, etc.). They wanted a symmetric, non-blocking 50 meg connection between every home-based worker and the corporate network. They wanted to be able to support a minimum of 4-way uncompressed HD videoconferencing for each home-based worker.

I've been saying for fifteen years now that neighborhoods are business districts, and from a broadband infrastructure perspective, you need to design and build networks that can deliver business class services anywhere. The concept that you can put inferior fiber networks in neighborhoods to shove entertainment down a largely one way pipe is an antiquated business model

The "slow or non-existent" broadband service in and around Loch Ness in Scotland is driving tourists away, who flee in horror, not from Nessie, the once and future Loch Ness Monster, but from un-usable broadband.

Broadband is basic infrastructure for community and economic development.

I wrote this paper to help clarify what local open access networks actually do.

I have found that people continually confuse the local open access network with “service provider,” and thought that coming up with a new term might help.

Design Nine and WideOpen Networks will be at the Broadband Communities Annual Summit in Austin, Texas in April. Be sure to stop by our booth and say hello.

Best regards,
Andrew

Someone has come out with a Bluetooth-enabled baby bottle. As someone who has spent plenty of time feeding babies, I never thought even once, "I wish this baby bottle sent alerts to my phone." In concept, I kind of understand the notion that a "smart bottle" can help train a new parent about issues like letting the child suck too much air (bottle held at wrong angle), or lumps in the milk (did not mix powdered formula enough), but these are things you figure out very quickly on your own. I wonder how on earth you sterilize the "smart" part of the cap. For me, this falls in the same category as most other kitchen and household gadgets that seem interesting but end up stuffed in the back of the utensil drawer. Someone once gave me a long-handled barbecue fork for the grill with a built in meat thermometer. I left it outside by the grill once, it rained, the batteries leaked and corroded the battery contacts, and that was the end of that. I suspect this will do well for a while, as people are always looking for baby shower gifts, and this fits the bill perfectly. But most new parents are likely to end up using "old fashioned" glass baby bottles or the bottles that use the one use plastic inserts (which pretty much solve the sucking air problem).