Technology Futures

There is a fair amount of disinformation being bandied about on the issue of community-managed telecom infrastructure. Read this article [link no longer available] by the deceptively name "Heartland Institute" for an example of a very one-sided view of community investments in telecom.

Here's another view. The context here is a proposed community telecom project in Illinois, where the incumbent telecom providers have spent millions to try to convince citizens and community leaders that the sky will fall if communities make investments.

Part of the disinformation campaign involves selective reporting. Bristol, Virginia's widely cited fiber to the home project has been misleadingly reported as bleeding red ink, but the way this is done is by looking at only the first two years of the project, where capital costs were correctly projected to be high. By looking at just the first two years, it's easy to show the project is "losing money" and cheating taxpayers. But the real facts are a bit more difficult--as the project moves into year three, Bristol has a big backlog of consumers and businesses clamoring for service, and the project expects to move into the black ahead of schedule.

Another problem with community infrastructure projects is that they fall into several different categories in terms of business models and levels of investment. Some articles that purport to "prove" that community projects are moneylosers by comparing two entirely different business models--one theoretical and one actual. It's very confusing unless you know what is going on.

We just are not far enough along in most real projects to have reliable data, and that's one of the tricks being played--it's entirely too early to tell if most of these community efforts are going to work over the long run or not. But if anecdotal reports from happy customers are any gauge at all, I'm not greatly worried.

And you always have to compare these theoretical doom and gloom stories with the actuality of most rural communities--little or limited DSL service, lack of choice, high prices, poor service, or some mix of all four.

Finally, the biggest trick of all is to take private sector ROI measures and use them as a yardstick for community projects, claiming that if these projects "don't make money," they aren't worth doing. When was the last time any community used ROI to develop support for a community project? The answer is, "Never." Because it just doesn't make sense in the context of "community good," which is why these things get started in the first place.

What's the ROI on a town park? What's the ROI on the community library? What's the ROI on garbage collection? We don't try to measure community services based on return on investment because that's not why we do them in the first place.

Should community telecom infrastructure projects be based on sound business models? Absolutely, and they should not require long term injections of funding from general tax funds. But that's not the same as trying to treat them as a private sector business.

Don't fall for the tricks.

In a deeply disturbing ruling, the National Transportation Safety Board has ruled that car manufacturers must put black box data recorders in new cars and trucks. The boxes will record speed, acceleration, braking, direction, and other data that could be used to reconstruct accidents, among other things.

The problem with this is that the data does not belong to the vehicle owner--it can be accessed by third parties without your consent. Traffic safety experts like to talk at length about how the data is valuable in analyzing accidents and improving vehicle safety. Fair enough, but forcing private property owners to both buy the system and to give law enforcement officials, officers of the court, and other third parties access to the data without the permission of the property owner is not acceptable.

Expect a big fight over this one, and there should be a big fight. This is abusive technology--the fact that we now have the technology to monitor and collect this kind of data does not mean we should automatically force everyone to use, at great loss to our privacy.

AOL has announced that it is dumping its broadband customers in nine states. AOL has been in decline for years, and this is one more indication that the company is completely adrift. AOL's foray into broadband service was a mystery to me in the first place, since they had to resell access purchased wholesale from other providers.

I don't think AOL has ever really understood what it is about. For too long, it thought it was an access company because people bought AOL accounts to get Internet access. But I could told them that was doomed in 1997, if they had wanted to listen. Dial-up is over--growth in dialup peaked at least two years ago, and the DSL, cable, and other broadband providers have been taking AOL's customers since then.

AOL, in my mind, has always been a content company, but I don't think AOL has ever really embraced that as a strategy. They had it too easy for too long, with the Internet build-up dumping buckets of cash into their coffers while the Internet was hot. The problem for AOL has always been that it never was and still is not an Internet access provider. They've always maintained their own personal coccoon for users that was designed and developed long before the Internet took off, and they've never figured out an exit strategy. AOL's Web browser used to drive Web designers nuts because it was so bad--bad because AOL squeezed Internet data through an AOL sieve and still does. No one else does that anymore.

For certain kinds of users, AOL provides a good environment. They've done a nice job of providing a family-friendly interface, as one example. But unless they can finally let go of their legacy systems and reinvent themselves, the company will slowly go out of business.

The FCC has ruled that VoIP is an interstate service, in response to a petition from Vonage, one of the best known national VoIP providers.

This is very significant, because it snatches VoIP out of the clutches of state by state regulation (we've got 50) that could have easily sunk the service before it got started. State regulation would have been a nightmare, and at the least, would have increased the cost of service. At the worst, some VoIP companies would have just quit the business and potentially sunk the industry. There is no way VoIP could be competitive if each VoIP provider had to deal with 50 different sets of taxes and regulation.