Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
Privacy: It's all gone
Facebook and LinkedIn now appear to be exchanging subscriber information, as I just received a Facebook email suggesting that I friend two business associates. The only way Facebook could know I have any relationship with these people is if Facebook had access to LinkedIn subscribers. I only use Facebook for close family and a few friends, so Facebook could not have made the connection with these people (one of whom is in Asia) by doing a second and third degree of separation search. While the NSA data collection is troubling, we need to keep in mind that all the "free" services like Facebook and LinkedIn are "free" only because we give them permission to sell/give away/distribute our personal information. Anyone who complains that Facebook is giving personal information to the NSA is forgetting that you already gave them permission to do that when you asked for a "free" subscription.
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Knowledge Democracy:
U.S. Broadband: Almost as good as Russia!
Long time readers will recognize a running joke in the title of this post. Here is a very brief note indicating that fiber is being aggressively deployed in Russia. Meanwhile, in the U.S., we're being told:
- Cellular wireless will solve all our broadband problems....bandwdith caps? What are bandwidth caps?
- VDSL will solve all our problems.....all the phone companies are abandoning their copper cable plant? What does that have to do with anything?
- DOCSIS 3.0 will solve all our problems.....10:1 asymmetric bandwidth? Why is that an issue? You shouldn't be working from home anyway.
So take your choice, and if you need more bandwidth, maybe moving to Russia could be just the ticket.
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Netflix: One third of the Internet, and incumbents don't like it
Gigaom has an interesting and detailed article explaining why the incumbents hate Netflix. The popular movie and TV streaming service is an Over The Top (OTT) service that rides on top of (over) a customer's base Internet connection. Verizon is having a peering spat with Cogent, a long haul carrier that moves a huge chunk of Netflix's streaming data around the country, and it appears that Verizon is deliberately throttling Cogent's ability to push Verizon customer video streams onto the Verizon network, with the result that watching Netflix on a Verizon network may not always work well, with stuttering, rebuffering, and/or degraded picture quality.
Verizon's beef is that they have to haul the traffic but they don't get any of the revenue paid by Verizon customers to Netflix. One solution would be to do a deal with Netflix, which would offer Netflix better bandwidth in return for a cut of revenue, or to change the Verizon business model to stop trying to punish their customers for actually using bandwidth.
But we're in a very strange time, when the incumbent phone companies are trying to cut out their copper landlines completely in a transparent attempt to get everyone to buy their Internet access via the cellular network. But this will never work, as the bandwidth isn't there, even with LTE to support services like Netflix...hence the ubiquitous bandwidth caps on cellular service. If we could wave a magic wand and move all the Netflix traffic to the cellular network, the entire North American cellular network would stop working, as it simply has nowhere near the capacity (and never will) to take a third of all the Internet traffic that is being generated just by Netflix. We have not even added in the myriad of other streaming services like Hulu, AppleTV, SimulTV, and many others.
As always, part of the solution is to deploy fiber everywhere to break the bandwidth bottleneck, and you pay for the fiber deployment by changing to a business model that gives the bandwidth away and charges for the service. When you do that, and have dozens of providers offering hundreds of services, you have the cash flow to pay for the high performance, high capacity, AFFORDABLE fiber network.
Design Nine is building those networks today....and in both urban and rural areas, turning communities around the country into Gigabit Cities. It's just not that hard.
http://gigaom.com/2013/06/17/having-problems-with-your-netflix-you-can-blame-verizon/
Newsletter:
The sad situation for rural "broadband"
I like to distinguish between "little broadband" (i.e. DSL and cable modem) and "big broadband." What's the difference? "Little broadband" is typically able to consistently deliver only a few megabits per second down. In Blacksburg, as one example, DSL download speed is advertised as 1 megabit. The cable company here sells 20 meg and 30 meg packages, which work pretty well if there are not too many of your neighbors online at the same time. Performance degrades noticeably after 3 PM, when schools let out and kids come home and hit the computer, their tablets, and their smartphones. And don't try to work at home on a snow day. Little broadband also has constricted upload speeds, which makes working from home very difficult, as videoconferencing may not work when there is neighborhood network congestion, and the asymmetric bandwidth makes moving large files back and forth between home and the office very difficult if not impossible.
"Big broadband" is a minimum 100 megabit symmetric pipe, and the networks that Design Nine builds all start on day one with Gigabit pipes to every home and business. The only thing we design and build is Gigabit networks.
So what about rural broadband. The Daily Yonder has a great article on the sad state of broadband connectivity in rural areas, which still lags behind the rest of the country. The graphs show the disparity clearly, but rural areas still lag far behind more populous parts of the country. The good news is that it is possible to build Gigabit networks in rural areas and make them financially sustainable...we know, because we're doing it. Give us a call or drop us a note if you want to make your area a Gigabit community.
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Creating jobs, helping entrepreneurs: Space is a big deal
Read this short but detailed discussion of the space problem for start-ups and entrepreneurs by Melissa Thompson. Finding the right office space at an affordable price is a huge issue for small, entrepreneurial businesses. Many of them start in the home, but if they grow beyond a couple of employees, they will usually be looking for office space, and in my experience, many local and regional economic development organizations are not well prepared to help with this. The traditional business incubator may does not have the right size offices or facilities for start ups (many do, but not all of them that I have visited), and location is everything: entrepreneurs want to be in town, where good coffee and business-oriented restaurants are used as adjunct meeting space and brainstorming locations. And of course, affordable high speed broadband is essential because I can guarantee any new start up is going to make heavy use of videoconferencing.
Technology News:
New technique continues to increase the bandwidth of fiber
Researchers at Bell Labs have developed a "phase conjugation" approach to increasing the capacity of fiber cable, and were able to send a 400 Gigabit/second signal across 12,800 kilometers (7,680 miles) of fiber. This capacity and distance are significant because the length of the test cable is longer than the longest undersea fiber cable.
It also demonstrates what I have been saying for a long time: fiber future-proofs your community. A fiber construction project creates a new long term asset with a useful life well in excess of thirty years, unlike wireless, which is primarily electronic equipment with a life span of only 3-5 years.
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Apple's new interface for iOS 7
Wired has an interesting article about how Apple's new look for iOS 7 (the iPhone operating system) was developed. The new software was announced yesterday (June 10th), and few people have actually been able to use it hands-on yet. Developers were given beta copies of the new software, but the rest of us won't get to try it out until later this fall.
Technology News:
Google Glass: A safety hazard?
This article raises an interesting question that seems like an idea topic for a Master's thesis in ergonomics: Is wearing a pair of Google Glass spectacles a safety hazard? Based on my background in ergonomics, I'm going to say that "yes" is a safe bet. Google says they came up with the googly glasses so we don't have to look down at our phones, but is it any safer to be walking down the street reading a text on a virtual screen? Or driving while reading a text that appears to be on the road in front of you? We're about to enter an era with a whole new way to drive and walk distracted, and expect fatalities, unfortunately.
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The Kindle review
My kids gave me a Kindle a year ago for Father's Day. It was not a gadget I had lusted after, and it was a bit of a surprise. It's the cheapest one, with ads. After using it for a year, you'd have to fight me to take it away from me.
- The ads are completely unobtrusive. They are displayed when the Kindle is turned off, and most of the ads are for books. Once you turn it on, you don't see the ads again. So this is a non-issue for me, and makes this low end Kindle a bargain--great for someone on a budget.
- It has no physical keyboard, but you rarely have to use the little virtual popup keyboard, so this is also not an issue. And without a keyboard, the form factor is smaller--which is great.
- It uses e-ink, and has no backlighting. It means that in a dark room, you need to be near a light, but I've never found this to be a problem. It also means the battery lasts for weeks, because it has no backlight, like many of the more expensive Kindles. I don't bother taking the charging cable with me on trips, even week long trips, because the battery life is so long. No backlight also makes it extremely light...another bonus.
- Did I mention it is tiny? Much smaller than a paperback book, which I used to travel with all the time.
What I really like is the ability to walk around with twenty or thirty books in my reading queue, without the weight or the bulk. I've always been a voracious reader, and the Kindle lets me stack up what I want to read at less cost and with much greater convenience. My one gripe is not really about the Kindle itself, but that the airlines won't let us use it (or any other small device) during take off and landing. That is the one big advantage retained by paper books.
I'm skeptical about the whole interference thing. Somebody is pulling our legs on this, as I read these hair-raising reports that the plane's instruments all went haywire but stopped when the person in row 4 turned off their iPhone. Meanwhile, the airlines have replaced many pounds of paper flight documents that the pilots always had to lug around with iPads. Huh? Are our planes really so fragile that the tiny amount of RF energy emitted by a phone or a Kindle can cause a plane to crash? Really? Really?
Laptops are another matter, and there is a different safety issue with them, as they are heavy enough to become a missile if there was severe turbulence or a sudden stop during take off or landing. But it peeves me that I can't read with my Kindle during a large part of many short flights.
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