Technology Futures

For many households, the WiFi router is probably an item regarded with a mixture of dread and fear. Once you get the thing configured properly, you generally tend to forget about it...except when the Internet stops working. Then the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) takes over the lizard part of your brain...and your first step is stare at the wretched device, hoping that somehow, the gods of the Internet will just magically get the Internet back on so you can continue sorting your Netflix DVD list and posting what you just ate to Facebook.

A new wireless home router called Soap started out as an Internet filtering device ("cleaning" the Internet for families), but as the product was developed, more features were added to provide a higher level of integration.

Unlike every other wireless router on the planet, Soap has a touchscreen interface to help simplify configuring it--no more really bad Web-based control screens that only a Unix geek could love. Soap also understands a wide variety of wireless protocols that allows it to talk to the rapidly expanding market of home automation devices. This may turn out to be its best feature if it works well.

I have been interested in the home automation market for a long time, and have always thought that the biggest challenge is integration and interface. If every device manufacturer makes buyers use a poorly designed one-off interface, homeowners will be quickly overwhelmed and frustrated at the effort involved in configuring and managing many different "smart" (or dumb) devices. If Soap delivers on the interface and configuration features, it will force massive changes in the wireless router market.

What does this have to do with fiber? Some Fiber To The Home equipment manufacturers are integrating WiFi routers into the fiber interface equipment. But the utility of a device like Soap far out-strips anything that can be built into a fiber interface.

This article has a good short summary of the battle over broadband. There are many players, including the FCC, Congress, the incumbents, the states, and local communities. The incumbent cable and telephone providers want their monopoly/oligarchy status protected, preferably by legislation. The FCC has the difficult task of reconciling user interests with industry interests, and is mulling over the idea of redefining "broadband," which almost certainly won't turn out well. The definition of broadband is vague today but that vagueness has enabled a flood of innovation in telecommunications, with a myriad of new services and industry disruptions. Codifying "broadband" will likely produce a stifling of new services and businesses, and could damage local economic development if it becomes more difficult for communities to get the telecom infrastructure they need to retain existing businesses and to attract new ones.

In San Francisco yesterday, Apple Computer announced that it was bringing both a new app ("Health") and a new developer interface for that app ("HealthKit") to the iPhone and the iPad. The app will give users a single place to store and track a wide variety of health-related information, including fitness activity, lab results, medications, and vital signs. The app is less important than the developer interface to the app, which will allow healthcare providers and healthcare services to push a wide variety of data into a single place, giving the user a single, integrated look at the state of their health.

While there have been much prognostication that Apple has "run out of steam" and has no innovation left in the company, this health-focused software takes the company in a whole new direction. The software Apple is releasing has the potential to make dramatic changes in the way health care is provided and the way we use and access health-related information. And most importantly, better information under our own control is likely to help contain health care costs over the long term.

But there is always a cost. Concentrating all this information in one place raises privacy and security issues, but I'd rather have all this information under my control than in a vast government database. Having said this, Apple will be storing all this information in iCloud for us. There is no free lunch here.....the convenience and information on one hand, the risk of mis-use on the other.

"U-verse stinks." That's not me, that's Netflix, according an article from Lightwave. Here's the interesting quote from Netflix:

"The surprising news is that AT&T fiber-based U-verse has lower performance than many DSL ISPs, such as Frontier, CenturyLink & Windstream..."

This was in a letter from the CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings, to stockholders. While this little spat between AT&T and Netflix is amusing, it highlights the vast divide between incumbent attitudes about what constitutes good service and what the customers of those incumbents regard as good service. The incumbents believe that good service is whatever they decide they want to give their monopoly-captive customers, while the customers think good service is being able to use Over The Top (OTT) services like Netflix without constant stuttering, re-buffering, and stalling out.

I mentioned this in an earlier post, but I was recently in a community that told me no one wants to live there anymore because of poor Internet service from the incumbent phone and cable companies. It's created an economic development crisis, because senior business managers that are being brought by existing companies in the town are choosing to live hours south of the community. And to make things worse, those same existing businesses are saying they can't expand and add jobs because their business Internet service won't support expansion.

Communities are at a crossroads: You can let the incumbent providers decide your economic development growth potential, or you can take control of your future and make some basic investments in competitive broadband infrastructure.