Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
Danville to be site of broadband and economic development conference
The city of Danville, Virginia has implemented a long-term comeback strategy. Danville's early investment in an open access fiber network has helped transform Danville's economy after this former tobacco and textile town lost its traditional economic base. At one time Danville had the highest unemployment in the state of Virginia. Today it is attracting new jobs and new industries - and its open access fiber network plays a key role in business attraction and retention. It will be held on November 8th and 9th, 2012.
THIS IS THE FIRST conference of its kind in this country - an event devoted entirely to the relationship between a community's economic vitality and the presence of advanced broadband networks. Nations around the world have recognized this powerful linkage and responded to it - as have a growing number of communities in the United States. Each event in this new conference series will be held in a city with an advanced broadband system. Each event will have an impressive array of speakers whose mission will be to help attendees evaluate the options and opportunities and develop the optimal, affordable solution for their communities. The first conference is in Danville, Virginia - the Comeback City that bounced back from devastation with a visionary broadband strategy that's creating jobs and attracting the businesses and industries of tomorrow.
Learn how once-struggling towns and cities like Danville are successfully deploying fiber networks that serve their citizens today and position their communities for tomorrow while others struggle against seemingly intractable forces and financial challenges.
Topics and Themes Include:
- DEVELOPING broadband strategies for the knowledge economy
- WORKING with economic development agencies
- DEVISING innovative financing methods
- DEPLOYING broadband to help foster vibrant communities
- OBTAINING government incentives and support
- BUILDING advanced broadband systems
- SHAPING regional strategies and solutions
- DIFFERENTIATING your community with advanced broadband
- COMPETING and cooperating in a high-bandwidth world
Conference Chairman: Jim Baller
The conference will be chaired by Jim Baller, President of the Baller Herbst Law Group and widely recognized for his expertise in communications and economic development. The FTTH Council called Baller "the nation's most experienced and knowledgeable attorney on public broadband matters."
Open Access Chairman and Conference Advisor: Andrew Cohill
Dr. Andrew Michael Cohill is president and CEO of Design Nine, a company specializing in municipal and community broadband planning and build outs. Dr. Cohill was director of the world-renowned Blacksburg Electronic Village at Virginia Tech, known as "the most wired community in the world." Design Nine has assisted dozens of communities with broadband planning, and the firm has more open access network experience than any other firm in the country.
Produced by Broadband Communities Magazine in partnership with the City of Danville.
Register now!
http://www.regonline.com/Register/Checkin.aspx?EventID=1106024
Newsletter:
Speedtests and why they mostly document imaginary bandwidth speeds
Here is an excellent article from MuniNetworks that provides an excellent overview of the problems with broadband speed tests. It is easy for service providers to spoof speed tests into reporting higher upload and download speeds than anyone actually gets on a daily basis.
Speed tests are a bit of a problem for community-owned networks, as they generally don't show the dramatic performance improvements of the local network, because the speed test servers are located somewhere else on the Internet. So it is hard to show just how much better the local network is compared to an incumbent network. The solution is for the community network to install a speed test server on the local network, where the full bandwidth can be shown without the latency of the public Internet.
Technology News:
Virtual grocery shopping
Shop for groceries at the bus station? That's something you can already do in South Korea, where the traditional grocery store is being nudged out of the way by an interesting new approach to shopping that combines a large "aisle" display and QR codes. A kiosk shows a typical array of products that would be found on one aisle of a grocery store. You hold up your smartphone, scan the QR code of the product you want, and that item gets added to your virtual shopping cart. The groceries are delivered later in the day, after commuters are home from work.
Technology News:
Fiber keeps bringing jobs and development to Danville
Danville's keen focus on a comprehensive plan to revitalize the downtown area started with creation of a City-owned open access fiber network five years ago. Downtown Danville continues to attract new development; the City just announced a $14 million redevelopment of a historic building that will bring 40+ jobs into the historic River District area of Danville, close to Main Street, shopping, and the Dan River.
Technology News:
Community news and projects:
Weather report: Stormy weather in the cloud?
The storm last Friday night on the East Coast caused such widespread power outages that it took down some cloud-based services, including Netflix. Some of the outages lasted as long as twenty-four hours, but in general, the cloud hosting providers got things back online quickly.
Here is the real problem: suppose your business is located in one of the areas where power won't be restored for a week. Your office has no power....for at least five business days.
- Can you keep going?
- Can you access all your cloud-based services via laptops?
- Do you have a generator that you can use to power up your office?
- If you have a generator, does it provide pure sine wave output so that all your cheap battery UPS devices don't keep flipping on and off?
- Do your VoIP phones work?
- Do you have network connectivity?
- If your network provider is still up, how do you power up your local router?
Sitting in McDonald's and trying to run your business off laptops, along with sixty other business people, is not a plan.
Newsletter:
Twitter was down? Who knew?
Twitter was apparently down for some time on Thursday. According to this article, Twitter addicts were devastated: "...my life is over." Really? Your life is over. Here's a clue: You don't have a life.
Twitter is a marvelous service, and it has proven to be extraordinarily useful in unexpected ways, like providing information during weather emergencies, earthquakes, and other kinds of crises. It's been interesting to watch how Twitter has changed the political landscape as well. But Twitter is a kind of information fire hose. I'm baffled by the amount of time some people apparently spend just reading and responding to tweets. I have a job, and I have a life outside work that does not involve tweeting in any significant way. Maybe the comments like "...my life has no meaning any more" are really ironic hipster jokes. I sure hope so, or as a society, we are doomed.
Technology News:
Knowledge Democracy:
The cloud bubble is inflating
Someone sent me a link to a new cloud-based service that takes your scanned receipts and stores them all in the cloud. Really? Really? As a long time business owner, I'll cheerfully admit that I do not enjoy keeping track of receipts, but I've never, not even once, thought, "This would all be a lot easier if I stored all these on a server far far away." Because we are reasonably well-organized from a bookkeeping perspective, all the company receipts get filed in one of a handful of file folders. Not even once a month do we need to dig a receipt out. When we do need to find one, it usually takes less than fifteen seconds.
It is starting to feel like deja vu all over again; specifically, it is starting to feel like 1998, when a lot of people were running around promoting some kind of "it's the next great Web idea." By late 2001, virtually all of the 1998 start ups were gone. A bubble is inflated by irrational expectations, and that's what I see happening now. Just because some kind of data or information can be stored in the cloud does not mean it should be. And there are only so many things we can reasonably afford to store in the cloud. Yes, we could scan all our receipts and put them in the cloud. But we'll have to pay for that, monthly, forever. The cost of storing the paper versions is about a buck a year for some new file folders, and a few of inches of space in a bankers storage box for long time storage.
As I have noted before, a lot of people are going to end up losing valuable data when their cloud service goes bankrupt and the servers disappear off the 'net, with no way to get their data back.
Technology News:
The brilliance of the Kindle
I was given a Kindle for Father's Day. I had thought about getting one for a while, but have become risk averse when it comes to new gadgets. There is always some new gadget that is supposed to save me time and money, and they almost never do. And I read a lot on airplanes, and they don't make you turn off your old-fashioned paper book during take off and landing. But I had a three day business trip just after the weekend, so I took the Kindle along.
I was hooked almost instantly.
- It was easy to read and easy on the eyes, unlike my iPhone. I hear people say they read books on their iPhone, but reading for more than a few minutes on an iPhone gives me a headache--small screen and the transmissive imaging technology are a bad mix. The Kindle (I have the cheap ad-supported one) uses e-ink, which uses reflective imaging, just like paper.
- It is small and light, and holds a charge for so long that you don't need another charger or even a charging cable. It really adds less weight than a single paperback book, and takes up a lot less space--another plus.
- Buying books is dead simple. I logged into my Amazon account via my laptop, bought a book for five bucks, switched to the Kindle, turned the WiFi on, and in less than 10 seconds the newly purchased book was on the Kindle.
- The ads are innocuous. When you turn the Kindle off, a full screen ad appears. When you turn the Kindle back on, the ad disappears. The ads never appear while reading.
Just as the iPad disrupted the market for PCs (PC sales have been declining since the iPad was released), and just as the iPod disrupted the music market, the Kindle has begun to disrupt the publishing market. Amazon has made it very easy for authors to self-publish ebooks via the Kindle, and the winners are readers, and the losers are the traditional publishing houses.
Paper books still have some useful qualities, but I can't think of a single reason to ever buy another paperback book. I hardly ever re-read paperbacks. Apple's approach to ebooks is entirely different, with that company focusing on the ability of the iPad to display and integrate text, video, audio, and images. I still don't have an iPad, because for business, the iPad still can't replace my laptop when traveling. But my Kindle will be with me on every trip. It is a marvelously-designed device.
Technology News:
Knowledge Democracy:
Why wireless can't replace fiber
As part of Verizon's restructuring of its cellular service to allow for shared data plans, the company is going to offer free texting, but overall, your monthly cellular bill could be higher. Verizon is getting rid of unlimited data plans and replacing them with "pay by the drink" plans that will meter bandwidth use. As little as a couple of hours of video streaming (think one Netflix movie) would push bandwidth right through the 6 gigabyte monthly package, leading to sharply higher charges for that month.
It's really a question of physics. It is much cheaper to deliver bandwidth over fiber, and always will be. As I have been saying for a long long time, wireless is important for mobile access, but we all need fiber at home and at work. Nothing is going to change that.
Technology News:
Verizon rolls out shared data plans
In what will surely cause an uptick in the sale of smartphones, Verizon has rolled out a shared data plan. This will be popular with families with teenagers who have been clamoring for a smartphone, as the parents (known to the kids as "the wallet") may be willing to pay the $10/phone base fee rather than the old $25 or $30 per phone data charge. AT&T is expected to roll out a similar plan.
Technology News:
Pages
