Technology Futures

Here is an excellent article [link no longer available] on how the telcos are strangling communities and denying them the economic development benefits that come from affordable broadband.

Some community broadband projects have now been around long enough for useful data to emerge. This article cites the St. Cloud, Florida effort, where local officials are saving residents and businesses millions of dollars on broadband. The officials there correctly note that that money, instead of being shipped out of the community and usually out of state, is now freed up and being put to work within St. Cloud--an enormous economic development benefit.

Here is the last paragraph of the article, which sums up the current situation:

These corporations say that they’re shutting down homegrown broadband efforts to safeguard the best interests of American free enterprise. But, as Dianah Neff, Philadelphia’s chief technology officer, asked in a recent column for ZDNet: “When was the last time they were elected to determine what is best for our communities? If they’re really concerned about what is important to all members of the community, why haven’t they built this type of network that meets community needs or approached a city to use their assets to build a high-speed, low-cost, ubiquitous network?”

When I tell people that the target for broadband ought to be 155 megabits or better, many scoff at me, even though I have plenty of information that shows we need that much for the things we all want to be doing in less than a decade.

Unfortunately, the FCC continues to prop up the incumbent telephone and cable companies by calling broadband anything faster than 256 kilobits. This allows the incumbents to tell poorly informed elected leaders and economic developers in our communities that cable modem and DSL service offerings exceed Federal government recommendations by a wide margin, when in fact the 1-3 megabit throughput of DSL and cable modems is woefully inadequate. Not knowing anything else about the issue, many leaders decide they don't need to do anything, since the community "already has broadband."

It's video that will drive much of the bandwidth needs, and with high definition (HD) programming becoming more common, you need, depending on whom you ask, somewhere between 3-8 megabits for a single HD video stream. With the average American household having 3.68 televisions, you have to design your network to support four of those video streams simultaneously, or somewhere around 40-50 megabits/second just to watch TV. And you have to be able to handle approximately a 3x "burst" capacity when you decide to watch a video downloaded via the Internet.

But my figure of 155 megabits is still setting the bar awfully low. Our Canadian (CANARIE) friends are already doing advanced testing of immersive, multi-party videoconferencing with enhanced audio services called High Definition Ultra-Videoconferencing. The system uses 3.5 gigabits/second in each direction--or about 22 times more bandwidth than my recommendation of 155 megabits/second.

Of course, it takes an all fiber system to do this. Fiber continues to be the best futureproofing a community can undertake, as it can handle whatever bandwidth needs we want to throw at it, just by swapping out the electronics at the ends.

Wireless is a great way to start a broadband project in your community, but it's not either/or and wireless is not the end game--it's fiber, to every home and business.

The IEEE (Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers) has issued a new white paper stating that "U.S. prosperity is at risk" if it does not become a national goal to invest heavily in Gigabit networks. The organization went on to say this:

Failure to act will "relegate the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure to an inferior competitive position" and undermine the future of the U.S. economy.

The IEEE is a fairly staid body that rarely gets involved in political issues, so when this group speaks out, it's worth paying attention. How about your community? Are your local leaders and economic developers paying attention to this?

It's great to see some thoughtful broadband coverage in local newspapers. This article from the Rock River Times [link no longer available] of Rockford, Illinois makes the case for communitywide telecom infrastructure. The paper makes the point that transport systems have always been important to communities and economic development, starting with canals and then the railroads. Government has always been involved, to one extent or another, and the railroads are a good example of a successful public/private partnership that reaped great results.

Today, communities need a digital transport system that can be used to deliver a wide variety of services offered by lots of vendors--just the way traditional roads work in our communities.