Technology Futures

The big players on the Internet--Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and others--are making changes in the way they push their data and services around the Internet. Stung by revelations that the NSA has been vacuuming up their customer data, these firms are adding new encryption to their data streams between data centers and between their data centers and customers. As they should. Communications on the Internet has been too open to snooping for a long time, and this is overdue.

I've been talking about this for fifteen years. New data, from an article at Forbes, suggests that demand for office space may have peaked in the U.S, and that what may be the trend in the future is work from home and business from home activities. According to the article, the number of people working from home as self-employed has risen 14% in the past decade.

Neighborhoods are business districts, and need to be treated as such by economic developers.

This means that you want to be able to deliver business class high performance affordable broadband into your neighborhoods, and that generally means you want fiber, with business class symmetric service available. Places like FastRoads in rural New Hampshire are already doing this (a Design Nine project), and not surprisingly, a lot of homes (er, business locations) are signing up for 50 meg service--well beyond what cable and DSL is able to offer in most places.

It's not that communities should stop paying attention to downtowns and business parks....just the opposite. But if your community's economic development strategy does not have goals and objectives focused on supporting neighborhoods as business districts, you are missing some business attraction and job creation opportunities.

The Wall Street Journal has a article on the shortage of wireless spectrum and the problems it is going to create. It's short--just click over and read it.

On LinkedIn, the question was raised (yet again): "Does anyone really need a Gig of bandwidth?" Someone wrote, "Just remember, services have to be available to be adopted." Now we get to the meat of the issue. It's not about the number....i.e. 100 meg, 1 Gig, etc. The real question is, "Do you have enough bandwidth to do what you want to do?"

From an economic development perspective, the question is critical: "Does your community have the bandwidth needed to support your existing businesses and to attract new businesses?"

For a community, you want the answer to that question to be, "Yes!" Arguing that some number (some amount) of bandwidth is "good enough," as the incumbents do, is to put the community's future in the hands of a third party. It is extremely risky.

The availability of services also reaches deep into the argument about "broadband adoption." The push for "broadband adoption" by the incumbents is a thinly veiled statement that says, "We think our customers are too stupid to use the bandwidth we have, so we want taxpayers to fund training at the local library." It cleverly shifts responsibility for durable, high performance networks from the incumbents to the taxpayers..."....if only those pesky taxpayers would fund lots of training, everything would be fine."

I started doing "broadband adoption" in 1993, when the number of connected households in the country was zero, as in 0% had Internet access. I never observed a problem getting anyone to use as much bandwidth as they could afford if the content and services they were interested in was available.

So as we keep peeling away a few layers of this onion, we get to the problem of the current incumbent "walled garden" business model. While some of the incumbents are now realizing triple play is dead, they are grudgingly moving toward the multi-service model, but still want to retain the walled garden..."No one gets to our customers without our say-so." So the walled garden has a few more services, but they are all branded and re-sold by the incumbent...meaning no competition, and limited choice of pricing and services.

The most important thing, to me, about delivering a Gig of bandwidth to every customer is that you can then stop worrying about bandwidth, because you have plenty. You know that you can deliver any service, at any level of priority and support, to any customer. And that lets the marketplace determine what is popular and what pays the bills. If you have a network where bandwidth is a scarce commodity (i.e. DSL and cable networks), then you have to punish your customers if they use too much bandwidth.

I prefer the Doritos model: "Use all the bandwidth you want....we'll make more"