Technology Futures

The Supreme Court decision late last month (called Brand X) that cable companies do not have to share their lines continues to get debated across the Internet. I'm a contrarian here. While it's true that the cable companies enjoyed a monopoly position the marketplace for a long time, we changed the rules in 1996. They now have to compete, and I don't see the logic of expecting them to share their systems with their competitors. It's like demanding that UPS allow FedEx to use UPS trucks to deliver FedEx packages. In any context other than telecom, it would not receive even a minute of serious consideration.

Most of what has been written about the Brand X decision takes an adversarial, two position approach to this problem. Either we allow the cable companies to enjoy a de facto monopoly OR we force them to share their lines with their competitors.

But that's not the only two options. Both continue to perpetuate the worst aspects of the monopoly-based system we thought wasn't working in 1996. They still aren't working.

Another alternative is to build out community-owned and managed infrastructure and allow ALL service providers to share it, just as business competitors like UPS and FedEx share community roads. Last time I checked, this community-managed road sharing system has been working just fine for decades.

We need to stop letting the legacy providers define the debate, and insist on evaulating and discussing a wider range of alternatives.

Fujitsu has demonstrated its new electronic paper. It's a thin, bendable "sheet" that can display color images, and the current image is displayed even when the power is turned off.

The first company that is able to deliver an affordable product is likely to make billions, as this kind of product will allow numerous uses. Fujitsu's electronic paper has a major advantage because of its storage capability--it can be loaded with an image and then turned off. Electronic displays have not found wider use because of the power consumption problems.

One likely application would be shelf price tags in grocery stores. It is a major cost to keep these updated. With electronic paper that requires no power, grocery stores would rush to buy these. Larger versions will see wide use to replace paper ads and billboards on buses and subways, as just one example.

And of course, we'll all have a lightweight, wireless version that can pull Web pages off our desktop computer so we can read the morning news at the breakfast table.

Digital paper is a transforming technology. As I've said in the past, we are at the very beginning of the technology revolution. So far, many of our every day processes have been reformed but not transformed. There are tremendous business and economic development opportunities that will emerge in the next ten to twenty years as transforming technologies like digital electronic paper become commonplace. Does your local economic develop strategy have a futures componenent, where you are looking at future trends and weighing local assets for opportunities?

A private report by Informa Telecoms & Media shows that Asian countries are deploying fiber to the home faster than ever. In Japan, there are now about 2.5 million homes and businesses with fiber connections, and 10 million are expected by 2010. FTTH connections in the U.S total probably well under half a million, and that may be wildly optimistic. NTT, just one of several Japanese fiber providers, charges about $60 a month for a 100 megabit fiber connection, compared to around $45 a month in the United States for a copper-based "broadband" connection with an average speed of 1-2 megabits.

In South Korea, Korea Telecom (KT) has stated that copper "lacked the stability" for Internet-based television broadcasting, and has chosen to provide "guaranteed" 100 megabit fiber connections to customers. KT has also stated they are replacing DSL with fiber.

Here in the United States, we are fiddling with trying to shove a few megabits of data over copper electric lines and hailing it as "broadband." How much longer are we going to remain asleep as a country before we realize that broadband is a critical economic development issue, and that we can't afford to keep investing in twenty year old copper technology?

BC.NET, a project of the British Columbia provincial government, is deploying what they call Transit Exchange Hubs in communities throughout the province.

The Transit Exchange Hub is similar in concept to the MSAP (Multimedia Services Access Point), which I designed and implemented in 1999 as part of the Blacksburg Electronic Village. Both the Hubs and the MSAP build on a standard piece of Internet systems architecture called a NAP, or Network Access Point. What NAPs do is allow different networks (remember that the Internet is a network of networks, not a single contiguous thing) to exchange data.

What is different about the MSAP/Transit Exchange approach is that it pushes the NAP down into communities and regions. The benefits can be dramatic--network performance can increase substantially and the cost of intracommunity network traffic can go down significantly. So MSAPs reduce costs and improve network performance. For local applications that are sensitive to time delays like videoconferencing, voice telephone calls, or gaming, the MSAP can be critical to performance and usability by keeping local data local and not requiring Internet Service Providers to haul large amounts of data across their very expensive Internet backbone connections.