Technology Futures

I get asked all the time a variant of the same question: "Isn't this whole Internet thing just about done?" What they are trying to ask is if most of the interesting stuff has already happened. If we were talking about the impact of the automobile, then we are only at about 1920, when Henry Ford began mass producing cars and they really started to become affordable.

Another things people ask me is, "What can you do with all that bandwidth?"

Well, how about making things? Dremel, a major manufacturer of hobby and consumer power tools, has announced it will be releasing a 3D printer in time for Christmas. For $1000, you get a small, well-packaged 3D printer with the software you need to start making stuff. And you will want that fast Internet connection to start downloading and uploading the CAD files that are used to drive the 3D printer.

I first became interested in 3D printing twenty years ago when I read The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. Stephenson, in that novel, predicted very accurately a world where nearly anything could be made on the spot in your home by a device no larger than a refrigerator. In the book, carbon, which is basically clean, cheap dirt, was used as the raw product, so most finished "printed" items were made of diamond.

The fun is just beginning....onward to infinity and beyond!

Following on the ridiculously over-priced acquisition of the smart thermostat company (Nest) by Google--they spent BILLIONS on a thermostat, we are now seeing . If you read the language about the ZEN thermostat, they are taking a direct swipe at the over-priced and over-rated Nest thermostat.

Good for them. Competition is a wonderful thing, and Google will never, ever get their money back because competing products like ZEN are going to crush Nest.

The ZEN appears to support heat pumps, which are widely used in the southeast and the south...but here's the thing....heat pumps don't do well if you are constantly changing the temperature. They are most efficient if you set the temperature to one thing and leave it. That's what I do, and I have very modest heating and cooling bills. During the heating season, if you start monkeying with the temperature, the "auxiliary" heat kicks in, which is just an electric heater built into the heat exchanger. And that electric heat makes your electric meter spin like an out of control merry go round.

So the ZEN thermostat is attractive, but I cannot come up with a single reason to buy one, other than the cool factor. And I'm way beyond cool.

I don't want smart dishwashers and smart-aleck dryers and obesity-checking snitch refrigerators sending everything I eat to my doctor whether I want it to or not. Just because those things CAN be done does not mean they should be done. And it makes everything cost more.

Here is a short article on the technical characteristics of G.fast, the "solution" that is supposedly going to allow the telephone companies to compete with the cable companies.

Don't want to click through and read it? Here is the short summary:

• G.fast is marketed as "up to a Gig." Riiiiiiight. The emphasis should be on the "up to." If you are less than 300 feet from your telephone company's DSL cabinet (hardly anyone is), it is technically feasible to deliver "up to" about 700 Meg, but the real bandwidth is likely to be only about 100 meg.
• If you live farther away from the DSL cabinet, the bandwidth quickly drops drastically, to as little as 22 Meg at 3900 feet. In my neighborhood, I'm farther than that, and many of my neighbors are a mile or more away.
• The service is highly asymmetric, meaning there is much less upstream bandwidth than downstream bandwidth. So if you want to work from home, it's no better than cable, which means business videoconferencing will be marginal at best, along with connecting to the corporate VPN and moving large files around, data backups will be painfully slow, etc.

The article talks a lot about how great its working in Europe, but Europe is not the U.S. Cities are much denser generally in Europe, so more residences are going to be closer to the DSL switches. G.fast sounds good, but it does absolutely nothing for rural broadband, where distances from the DSL cabinet are measured in miles, not feet, and where the ancient copper cable plant can barely handle existing "little broadband" DSL, much less the very demanding G.fast. To get speeds of hundreds of megabits out of G.fast, you not only have to be close to the switch, the copper cable between your home and the switch has to be perfect, meaning brand new.

Hilariously, the article touts a test in Britain where they got 700 meg speed.....woohoo....wait for it....with a wopping 57 feet between the switch and the user. Fifty-seven feet.

That's all you have to remember about G.fast: 57 feet.

This is my sixty-fifth article about the death of TV, and I see now that we are at the end of the beginning. Why? ABC News recently began broadcasting a news channel on Apple TV, which is significant in its own right, but ABC has just announced that they are now including local news from Boston, Honolulu, and Albuquerque on that channel. One of the two things that keeps most people tied to their hideously antiquated cable and satellite subscriptions is access to local news (the other is live sports). With this new access to local news via the Apple/ABC partnership, it is going to be easier than ever for households to ditch the over-priced "TV" subscriptions.