Technology Futures

The Roanoke region recently competed for a Dell manufacturing facility, and lost out to North Carolina, which offered Dell a whopping $242 million in tax credits. That's an awful lot to pay for just one firm that could easily pick up and leave after a few years. Imagine what a few hundred small businesses with good business plans could do if given ten or fifteen years of tax relief.

But that's not the story today. In today's Roanoke Times, an article says that one of the issues with Dell was access to an airport that could handle long range 747 freighters--one of the biggest commercial airplanes made. Not only does Dell get parts from suppliers worldwide, they ship their computers all over the world.

This is a good example of how the global marketplace is changing things. Forty years ago, it was rare to make goods in one country and ship them to another. Most manufacturing plants made things for regional or national consumption. You can tell how much things have changed when ordinary items like paper towels and batteries come with packaging printed in three or four languages.

Geography is still important, but not the way we think. You no longer have to be close to markets, because the entire world has become a single, large marketplace. But while many products and services can be delivered via the internet, not everything can, so regions have to consider transportation facilities in a new way. In Roanoke, airport capacity was, according to the newspaper, not on the list. You can bet it is now.

Neal Stephenson, some years ago, wrote a prescient novel called "The Diamond Age," about a time in the near future when diamonds are, literally, cheap as dirt. Stephenson, who is arguably the best novelist of the past fifty years with respect to taking emerging technology trends and crafting intriguing storylines around them, imagined a world where even the most common of objects could be made from diamonds--kitchen knives, as an example, that are much sharper than razors but never need to be sharpened because of the, well, diamond-hard edge.

If it sounds far-fetched, think again. A company in Florida has been making gem quality diamonds for years, as one example. And industrial diamonds (much smaller than gems used in jewelry) are used everyday in mundane equipment like the saws used to cut slits in asphalt for traffic light control cables and telecom cables. Remember that diamonds are just a special form of carbon, one of the cheapest and most widely available materials on earth.

Now, some American scientists have developed a process to use diamond dust to create new, cheap, large screen flat TVs, using nanotechnology manufacturing techniques. These new TVs and monitors are probably several years away from production, but Stephenson's prophecies are beginning to emerge.

How about your community or region? Have you assessed current businesses for the emerging potential of the Diamond Age? Think it's so far-fetched that it's not even worth a little consideration? Remember that the raw material of diamonds is carbon. What's the most convenient and prolific source of carbon in the world?

Coal......have any coal mines in your area?

The Roanoke Time business section reports that a GE plant here is hiring 30 new electrical engineers to meet growing demand for power inverters. Inverters convert DC power to the AC power needed by the electrical grid.

GE is a major supplier of industrial inverters, and the company reports strong growth in wind energy generation is driving the company expansion.

How about your region? Have you done a systematic evaluation of the businesses in your area for potential growth in the Energy Economy? Could energy (hydrogen, solar, wind, tidal, nuclear) be an economic development strategy for your region over the next thirty years, as the world moves away from fossil fuels to other alternatives? As always, affordable broadband is going to the railhead and highway of these emerging trends. Are you ready? Do you have job force training and retraining programs in place? Are your high schools and community colleges teaching the high tech manufacturing skills that will be needed? Do those schools have a CNC program? Hint: if you don't know what that means, you're already in trouble).

Holman Jenkins, an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal, has an article (p. A21) about DSL and the future of that technology. Jenkins calls the '96 Telecom Deregulation Act a "DSL nuclear winter." That's probably a bit strong, but hardly anyone on either side of the linesharing issues of the telephone companies would say the law was crafted properly.

The original law forced the phone companies to share their copper lines with competitors, and it was only this fall that the FCC relaxed those rules. Again, no matter what side of the issue you are on (phone company or community), the outcome of the original ruling was to stall broadband investments by the incumbent phone companies.

As so many Federal initiatives ("We're from the government and we're here to help you..."), unintended consequences kicked in, big time. While the phone companies dithered, moaned, and complained, the cable companies upgraded their systems and captured 75% of the current broadband market, leaving DSL (the phone companies) with a paltry 15%.

Since the FCC changed the rules to free the phone companies from line sharing at wholesale prices, DSL costs have fallen dramatically--by as much as 50% in a lot of markets, and the service is generally priced below cable modem service.

But from a community perspective, the news has been bad and still looks bad. The marketplace, because of all this, has been effectively re-monopolized, but instead of a regulated public monopoly (pre 1996), communities are stuck with marketplace monopolies by the phone and cable companies.

To make things worse, in places like Pennsylvania, Verizon says it must be consulted before communities start their own broadband services. Even worse, lawmakers like Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell (D) thinks it is just fine to give a private company control over the future of rural communities.

The solution is for communities to stay away from the service end of the business. Treat broadband infrastructure just the way communities manage roads--build digital roads, but let private companies deliver the services while paying a use fee. That opens up rural communities to smaller providers and real competition, but keeps Verizon safely away from meddling.