Technology Futures

We get asked constantly, "Isn't fiber risky? What if wireless is better?" Fiber is a highly stable, very reliable forty year hard asset that you can take to the bank, because unlike nearly every other kind of community infrastructure (roads, water, sewer), you can increase fiber capacity without digging new ditches or having to hang more fiber on poles. You just change out the equipment at each end, which is a fraction of the cost of building new fiber.

Fiber is future proofing your community and your economic development future.

Wireless, by comparison, once the capacity of the existing radios is reached (which happens every three to four years), you have to replace pretty much everything. Do a fair thirty year life cycle comparison of fiber and wireless, and fiber is cheaper.

Infinera just announced that they have been able to push eight terabits of data across 800 kilometers of fiber, and they expect to be able to do that across 2,500 kilometers of fiber in the near future.

Fiber is a good investment.

Both LinkedIn and Twitter have been rolling out "enhancements" to their interfaces to make them look, feel, and behave more like Facebook. I'm already suffering from information overload, so giving me even more places to look for and access even more information than I already have seems to me to be more like a bug than a feature. And Facebook fails utterly at coherent interface design, so the mad rush to be "just like Facebook" really is a bug, not a feature.

Business Insider reports that only Apple, Samsung, and HTC are making any money manufacturing and selling smartphones. All the other makers, including RIM, Nokia, and Motorola are losing money. This means that the cellular companies are able to buy most smartphones for less than the cost of making them; this is called a death spiral. This may explain why Google is trying to prop up Motorola; if they don't, the only Android company left standing is Samsung, which then effectively has Google by the short hairs.

The whole cellular marketplace is a tightly knit mess. As more and more people switch to smartphones, more traffic, often by several orders of magnitude, is dumped onto the cellular networks. With traffic doubling every two years, it means that the cellular companies have to keep dumping more money into upgrading and replacing radios. And pushing smartphones onto their customers accelerates the process.

The vision of a world with "big" broadband provided by the cellular companies is just that: a vision...induced by smoking giant bongs stuffed with baloney. Cellular networks are essential infrastructure....for mobility access. And in a few areas, they serve as a barely adequate stop gap for the lack of fiber connectivity.

But communities need to be playing the long game. If you want to believe you can hitch your community's economic future to wireless, go ahead. But with hundreds of communities now making investments in fiber, trying to attract businesses and trying to retain your existing businesses with the notion that wireless is secure enough and affordable enough for serious business use is weak tea....don't smoke the baloney.

The storm of the century may have blown over by November 6th, but if power is still out in some places in the northeast, I wonder what the Plan B is for voting if all the local governments have are coal-powered (i.e. electric) voting machines? If all the old manual voting machines have been recycled for scrap, how will they handle the power outage? If they still have the old manual voting machines in storage somewhere, do they have a well-designed contingency plan to haul all those machines to each voting precinct and train the poll tenders to set them up and use them on short notice? If there are no manual voting machines, or if there is not time to get them all moved to the precincts, do they have a paper-based voting system ready to go that can be verified and audited?

Just because you can use a computer to do something does not mean that you should. The convergence of the storm of the century and a presidential election may well expose the weak underbelly of our excessive reliance on electronic gadgets for things that could be done with virtually fail-safe mechanical or manual systems that work even if there is no power.