Technology Futures

Apple's new Tiger operating system will debut this Friday, and details are beginning to leak out. One of the most talked about features is called Spotlight, a new search engine built into the operating system. Spotlight will index and search virtually your entire hard drive--emails, PDF files, all word processing files, and "knows" about the file formats of things like images, which can have keywords and subject descriptors attached to them, but could rarely be searched.

But another weblog points to leaked information about Spotlight that is truly a major accomplishment. Apple has supplied a free audio and videoconferencing program for years (iChat) that works remarkably well--I use it all the time to videoconference from my office. With Tiger, iChat will support videoconference meetings of up to four people. That's a significant new feature, but the neat part is this:

"...You're doing a multi-party teleconference. A recording is made of that teleconference (each angle), and separate audio tracks are recorded for each participant. In real time, your computer transcribes each voice track and stores it as ancillary content on the recording, content that Spotlight indexes for you. At any time, you can type "meeting in San Jose" into Spotlight, and it'll take you right to the angle and track on which your co-worker Laurent talked about next week's meeting in San Jose."

Although we now have inexpensive tools to digitally record and manipulate audio and video, the dirty little secret is that, like home movies, no one had the time to do anything with them after the recording is made. The ability of Tiger to transcribe the audio from a conference and store the results as searchable text is revolutionary, and will make videoconferences much more useful as archival material.

Google's founders are fond of their corporate slogan, "Do nothing evil," but the lady doth protest too much, to borrow an old phrase.

I've written about Google's Gmail service, in which the company happily stores every email you have ever sent or received, mainly so they can snoop through your mail and figure out what ads to show you (e.g. correspond with a friend about an upcoming hiking trip, and you'll start seeing ads for outdoor gear).

Now Google has started storing all your search requests, for exactly the same reason--so they can build a profile on you and display more and better ads to you the next time you visit. Of course, they wrap this in a lot of blather about what a fine service it is--in case you want to go back and see what you searched for.

Uh huh. I've often thought, "Gee, I wish Google stored the phrase "camping equipment" so I could navigate through several Google pages plastered with ads to find that search phrase again instead of JUST TYPING IT OVER AGAIN."

The problem with these Google services is that you lose control of your own data. Once Google starts storing that stuff, it's really no longer yours, and it de facto becomes available to others--not just Google, but law enforcement, disgruntled employers and employees who may want to sue you, hackers, and of course, everyone at Google and by extension, every advertiser in the world.

These services are good for Google, but they aren't good for users. I can easily store a lifetime of mail on a $150 hard drive, so this argument that Google is doing something special for me is a weak one.

Amazon is the same way. I've never purchased anything from Amazon because they freely use your purchase information to build dossiers about what you buy that they share with advertisers. It's none of their business, and I believe both Google and Amazon are abusing the relationship they have with their customers.

I still get books cheaper and faster from my local independent bookstore, and I get better search results from Snap, which returns many fewer and more relevant hits than Google.

Clark McLeod, the CEO of FiberUtilities of Iowa and the head of OpportunityIowa, gave a stunning keynote address at the Digital Cities conference on Tuesday. What follows is a summary of his remarks.

The incumbent telephone and cable companies have monopolized both infrastructure and services, and they will do anything--ANYTHING--to stop threats to those monopolies. Nonetheless, the incumbents are not the enemy. The enemy is the complacency of American communities, who are letting the incumbents win the battle.

OpportunityIowa is a statewide effort to educate citizens and elected leaders about the importance of broadband to the future of the community, and it is trying to address the urgent need to help those citizens and elected leaders understand that broadband is tightly tied to economic development. The project has made over 1000 presentations across the state to educate communities about the issues.

OpportunityIowa has a simple answer to the question of why communities should invest in broadband: To reverse the downward economic trends (fewer and fewer jobs year after year); to build 21st century community infrastructure; and because community broadband is primarily a local problem. One of Iowa's main exports are college graduates, who leave the state and never come back because of the lack of opportunity.

McCleod says that education is the core problem (or the lack of it).

Communities need a fiber utility; it will drive the cost of telecom down. Creating a fiber utility (just the legal entity, not building anything) gets the attention of the incumbents and often has immediate positive results because communities that create these fiber utility entities often get better service quickly, even if they have not spent any money to build out a network. The first step for any community is to create the legal entity that could and would own and manage a community fiber network.

McLeod suggests that the legal entity be created without any commitment to actually spending any money or building any infrastructure. The mistake many communities make is to rush to build something without having an appropriate community legal entity in place.

Creating a fiber utility creates opportunities to educate citizens and leaders about the importance of broadband, and gives control of the economic future of the community to the community (rather than to the telephone and cable company).

McLeod noted that we have less competition today that twenty years ago, even though the 1984 breakup of the phone companies and the '96 telecom deregulation were supposed to create more. The two remaining long distance companies (AT&T and MCI) will be gone by the end of 2005. Thirty public CLECs formed after 1996 are all gone. The incumbents have completely infiltrated state and national legislatures. The FCC has no vision, and still defines broadband as 200 kilobits/second at a time when other countries define it in terms of hundreds of megabits/second.

The vision for Iowa includes:

• 100 megabit/second service everywhere in Iowa
• A network capable of handling converged IP services
• Ranked #1 in the world in fiber to the home
• Advanced services available at lower costs
• Broadband serving as an economic development engine
• Jobs, jobs, and jobs.

McLeod went to say that copper won't provide what Iowa wants, and that neither will wireless, noting that the phone companies abandoned their wireless systems twenty years ago because they could not provide the capacity that fiber could. He said although wireless broadband will not go away, that fiber is the first step because it enables pushing wireless out to the edges of communities, which is especially important for rural areas. In other words, where it is possible and practical, always do fiber first because it makes wireless work better.

The cable companies are not likely to make first (last) mile investments in fiber. Cable company debt in Iowa is four times what it would cost to build a new fiber network from scratch.

The fiber utility is now essential infrastructure:

• It is essential to the well-being and economic growth of a community
• It can be shared among many service providers and does not need to be duplicated
• Benefits everyone in the community as a whole by enabling new work and business opportunities and by lowering telecom costs for everyone in the community

Essential infrastructure, by definition, must be owned or controlled by the community (not private industry). 21st century infrastructure is the most important issue for communities, because it will make or break economic development--communities cannot grow and prosper without community broadband. It is less expensive than building and managing sewer and water systems, so any community can easily take this on.

Scott Wilkinson, a VP for Hitachi Telecom, gave a talk about broadband in Japan. The typical broadband fiber connection in Japan is 100 megabits/second, and typically costs about $58/month; costs have dropped 66% in the past four years. Most broadband connections in Japan are data only, so the "triple play" is not a big consideration. The connections support video on demand, which is very popular, but there is no broadcast television content. The connections work very well for video on demand, with near real time viewing (i.e. no long wait to download before viewing).

Fiber To The Home (FTTH) is growing rapidly in Japan, and the big loser is cable modem service. The electric companies in Japan are NOT offering Broadband over Powerline (BPL), but instead are selling fiber service, which should be a clue to communities that think BPL is the way to go.

ADSL is seen as a problem in Japan, even though it has a high subscriber base. ADSL and VDSL are both available and offer much higher data rates than typical DSL services in the U.S., but the distance senstivity is a big issue, as subscribers just a few blocks away from each other can end up with very different levels of service.

The typical range of applications in Japan are very similar to the applications and services in the U.S., but the Japanese service providers have found that when people are given more bandwidth, they use it, which refutes the telco argument that no one has a need for high bandwidth connections. One of the trends is more work from home and from remote locations; the high bandwidth supports high quality videoconferencing and actually often provides a better level of service than is available in some business offices. So affordable broadband has become an engine for new kinds of work opportunities.

Services in Japan are driving demand, not connections. As more services ae available, more people sign up for high speed connections. The installation fee for fiber averages $150, so that can be a source of funding to help pay for community fiber builds. Fiber systems in Japan are profitable, with fees distributed this way:

• Business expenses - 18%
• IP network cost - 22%
• Indoor wiring cost - 4%
• Outside line cost - 45%
• Profit - 11%

The 11% return is very good--much higher than for many other kinds of businesses, and shows that fiber networks can be operated with a positive cash flow and enough income to cover debt service.