Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
West Virginia jumps to the head of the nation
West Virginia, just a few miles away from Blacksburg, has jumped to first in the nation with respect to intelligent, pro-community thinking about broadband.
The state legislature, unlike more than a dozen other states trying to cripple the ability of communities to promote economic development and to support existing businesses, is saying, "We don't want to do that."
Not only that, the state seems ready to give communities the tools they need to chart their own future. This article [link no longer available] has the details.
Here is evidence of West Virginia's sophisticated thinking:
David Levine, director of technology and transformation with the West Virginia Development Office, said creating a cohesive fiber optic network could create a competitive advantage and could help keep technologically inclined West Virginians from leaving the state to find work. "People will be able to work where they live," he said."
The bill would explicitly give communities the right to issue bonds to pay for telecommunications infrastructure--just as communities have done safely and securely for decades for other improvements like water, sewer, and schools. It would also explicitly give communities the right to act as a service provider.
A Verizon representative expressed skepticism over the bill. What a surprise--a phone company opposes competition. It's almost funny to see Verizon on the short end of the stick. I don't think they have expressed dismay in other states when last minute bills popped up that opposed community telecom projects. This second article notes that Ireland went from 18% unemployment to 3% unemployment because of an intense focus on telecom investments to support communities and open access networks. Ireland, which is about the size of West Virginia, has constructed a fiber ring connecting 123 towns and cities. Any service provider can use the network to deliver services.
Here's another quote that shows West Virginia legislators "get it."
Committee Chairman John Unger, D-Berkeley, said he and others did consult with Verizon, Adelphia and other companies, but he made no apologies for not releasing the bill to them before it came out of his committee.
"The special interest groups think they ought to see the legislation before the legislators see it," he said. "That's where everybody's got it backwards around here. They've got it backwards, because they think that the special interest group ought to draft the legislation and then show it to the Legislature, and that's not the way it should be."
The bigger question is why are so many legislators in other states falling for the contorted and misleading information being provided by the telcos and cable companies? And if Ireland has been successful in promoting economic development by building open access networks, why are our legislators seemingly dead set against it (except in West Virginia)?
So here's a slogan for you: "Our state--almost as good as Ireland and West Virginia."
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911 disconnect
The state of Texas has sued Voice over IP provider Vonage for not explaining to customers that 911 does not work over its service. In fact, 911 does not work over any VoIP service reliably, and the problem is likely to begin slowing the acceptance of VoIP.
Traditional landline voice service gives 911 operators direct access to a telephone company database that ties a phone number to a specific street address. This is relatively foolproof because landlines, by definition, only go to one location. But VoIP phone numbers are completely portable. While traveling, I can make calls on my "home" VoIP phone number from my laptop, thousands of miles from the address of record my VoIP provider has for me. So it's not just an accounting or database issue.
VoIP breaks the current 911 system, which was designed for a different day and age. What is likely is that regulators (like the state of Texas) will try to "fix" the problem with awkward legal requirements that don't really solve the problem, and will likely retard the diffusion of the new technology.
Instead, we need a new 911 system. One approach would be to see if GPS (Global Positioning System) technology can be used. GPS chips are becoming relatively cheap, and it's easy to imagine a handheld phone that always knows where it is, using GPS.
This is not farfetched because marine radios have been able to do this for years. A cheap handhelp VHF marine radio can be purchased with a GPS interface that allows the radio to send a distress signal with the exact location of the boat. The technology works and it saves lives.
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A fight brews in Texas
Save Muni Wireless is a Texas Web site set up to provide information about the fight brewing in the Texas legislature over municipal broadband. Like many other states, Texas has been targeted by the telcos--they want laws that take control of community futures away from the community and give it to the telcos.
Note that this is not really a true public sector vs. private sector fight. It's really about several large monopoly telecom providers that want to lock out both public sector investments as well as other competitors. How so? Many communities want to provision open access networks that would let local and regional private sector service providers come in and offer services in competition with the telcos and cable companies.
What's unfortunate is that there are so many legislators unwilling to do any due diligence on the topic. Among the myths be propogated by the phone companies is that "tax dollars" are going to be used for these projects. In twelve years of community telecom work, I've yet to see the first community suggest using tax dollars for any of these efforts, large or small. These projects would be funded with grants, bonds, and other non-tax sources, and the operation of the network would be funded by fees, not tax dollars.
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Kentucky gets connected
The state of Kentucky has set a bold goal to get broadband to every business and resident by 2007. This news article discusses ConnectKentucky, the statewide initiative. The governor sees it as an economic development issue, worth as many as 14,000 new jobs statewide.
How about your state? Has the governor made broadband a strategic priority?
Community news and projects:
Six reasons communities should control their own destiny
Here is a must-read article [link no longer available] that does a better job at articulating the battle between communities and anti-muni legislators and telcos than anything else I have seen. If you are trying to convice legislators to support community projects, take them out to lunch and review the six points in this article with them.
Technology News:
40% of international phone calls
VoIP Weekly reports that 40% of international phone calls are now carried by VoIP services, up from 2-3% in 2000. The article also states that VoIP has killed the calling card market. College kids have been a key demographic for that market, and apparently tech savvy youth are very comfortable using free services like FreeWorld Dialup and Skype to make phone calls. It's also a boon for parents of college kids who may have been buying some of those calling cards. The article also expects the wireline (traditional) phone industry to see a 40% drop in revenue by 2008 as more and more customers move to VoIP services.
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The RepRap Project
Years ago, one of my favorite authors, Neal Stephenson, wrote a book called The Diamond Age. Set in the near future, technology had progressed to a point where most homes had a refrigerator size machine that could make virtually any common household item, most often out of diamond. Why diamond? Because the raw material is as cheap as, well, dirt--it's just carbon. Advanced microfabrication at the molecular level enabled the machine to build an item layer by layer at the molecular level. One thing that was handy in the book was diamond knives that never got dull.
Sound far-fetched? It's not. Industrial designers have been using polymer-based rapid prototyping machines for years to create three dimensional objects out of a soup of light-sensitive liquid plastic. A laser, driven by CAD/CAM information, hardens the plastic layer by layer, and the object "grows" right out of a container of goop.
More recently, some scientists have been using modified ink-jet printers to spray bio-compounds onto a sheet of plastic to create things like cartilage-based ear replacements for people that have suffered injuries.
Now we have the Replicating Rapid Prototyping Project, or RepRap. This UK-based university effort intends to build an Open Source system that can build complex objects. We won't have these in our homes any time soon, but our kids may. The Open Source approach--making it available for anyone in the world to both use and improve--has the potential to transform the world economy. What are some of the implications? Well, China might not have the economic clout it has now if common household items can be fabricated cheaply near the user of the item. The current "consumption" society would change radically as anyone could acquire almost any common household object for the cost of the raw materials--the cost of shipping, advertising, distributing, warehousing, and retailing would disappear.
What would all those people do? Well, for one, there would be a big market for the one thing the machines can't do--create the designs. I also believe that handmade and handcrafted items of high quality would become very popular.
How about effects on other future weak signals? For one, RepRap machines would make colonization of the moon and Mars much easier. You'd simpy ship a few RepRap machines to the moon, feed in silicon, carbon, aluminum (moon dirt, basically), and nearly everything a growing moon colony would need would come out the other end. Ditto for Mars.
We're just a short ways into the a long cycle of enormous growth and change. Recall that the Industrial Revolution started in the early 1700s but did not really flower until the early 1900s, nearly two hundred years later. If you mark the start of the Digital Age at 1950 when the first commercial computers became available, we're only a quarter of the way into what I think is going to be another two hundred year cycle. If you can't imagine where your community should be in two hundred years, how about fifty? Are the majority of your community leaders still looking to the past for guidance?
Communities that learn to think in a future context, rather than a past history context, will thrive no matter what technology emerges.
Technology News:
Fiber is future proof
Via the CANARIE mailing list, there is news that NTT, the Japanese phone company, has broken new ground with Wave Division Multiplexing, or WDM. In "old" fiber systems, a single channel of information travels over a fiber pair. With WDM, you can have multiple channels of information on a single fiber.
One interesting consequence of WDM technology is that you can deliver two way communications over a single fiber, rather than needing two fibers (one for each direction). Typically, current WDM systems offer 10-20 channels over a single fiber. NTT researchers have successfully transmitted data over 1000 WDM channels on a single fiber, or about a two order of magnitude increase in capacity--over the same fiber.
That's why fiber is such a good, stable, long term investment. As the demand for bandwidth increases, you can keep adding more capacity to existing fiber by simply swapping out the equipment at both ends. Fiber is future proof.
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Technology as narcissism?
As the gadgets to capture audio and video get smaller and lighter, and as the tools to edit that content and then distribute it via the Internet become easier to use, I think there is a danger of narcissism, or what I call the "look at me" phenomenon.
Lately I've been getting more email that goes something like this: "Look what I just did! It's great! Stop by my Web site and watch the video (or listen to the audio)."
The subtext is "Whatever I just did is way more important than anything you happen to be doing, so stop what you are doing and look at what I am doing."
Or something like that.
I don't have the time to watch everyone's video. Or listen to their audio podcast. I barely have time to do my own work, much less live/watch/listen to someone else's life vicariously.
I think this is one of the negative consequences of these emerging digital technologies--I record, therefore I am. There are people experimenting with wearable devices that make digital recordings of everything one does, in real time. But let's face it, hardly any of us are really all that interesting ALL THE TIME. And even if we were, who has time to watch it? Is the future of television 6 billion reality shows, each starring ourselves? Kinda makes George Orwell's future look good by comparison...8^)
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Newspapers are in a death spiral
CNet has an article about the future of newspapers. It says that some papers, like the New York Times, have more people reading the paper online than on paper. But the papers are mad because they are giving away the content for free. They want to start charging for online subscriptions (note that a few papers, like the Wall Street Journal, have been doing this for years).
The papers have it wrong in several ways. In the first place, it's ads that cover most of the cost of newspapers, not subscriptions. An online edition has essentially zero distribution costs, compared to the massive expense required to print news on paper and distribute those paper copies. With the boom in online advertising, it seems like better ad management might actually make online newspapers profitable. But you'd have to let go of the idea that "real" news is better on paper.
The other problem most papers have is that their capacity to generate original news is extremely limited. Many mid-size local papers simply fill their pages with AP reprints, and sprinkle in a few local articles along the way. I'd like to see a paper embrace the blogging model, where you simply turn reporters loose with a well-designed blog framework. If you did so, you could fire most of the editors, who have a limited function in an online edition. The original purpose of editors was to decide what "fit," literally, in the paper. You don't need editors in the same way because you don't have limits in online publishing. Editors could still fill a vital function by keeping reporters focused and by identifying important stories, but my guess is most mid-size city papers could get by with just a couple of editors--and could cut costs substantially.
But I think some papers would rather go out of business first. Blogging is a tool, not a medium, and it's a tool that would work well for newspapers if they can let go of ink and dead trees.
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