Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
PeekYou tries to aggregate even more "private" public information
Peek You is an information aggregator service that tries to pull together as much publicly available information as possible about someone and package it up neatly. Many of the items it will list take you directly to other sites that provide even more information. The service tries to list all of the available social media connections as well (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc.). The service also calculates a PeekScore, which is some kind of weighted value between 1 and 10 that is supposed to indicate how important you are in the online universe. I suspect most of us are going to end up on the low end of the scale. If you want to be nosy, this is a great service. I would expect that advertising and/or fees will eventually be used to support the cost of providing.
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No one can afford to have every service as a subscription
Adobe has announced Muse, "...a program for creating web pages without hand coding." Great. Except it costs $14.99 a month, or buy the CreativeCloud package for $49.99 a month. We're in the midst of a bubble where lots of companies think they are going to make lots of money by selling software as a service. But this bubble, like all bubbles, is unsustainable. No company or individual can afford to be paying what quickly adds up to hundreds of dollars a month for "cloud" services. It just does not scale. And expect many many disasters when most of these companies go out of business and a) you find that your data was stored in a proprietary format that cannot be easily moved to some other software, or b) all your data is just plain gone when the company goes belly up.
The cloud is extraordinarily useful for many kinds of applications, but there are two big assumptions: the network will always be there to access your data, and the company will always be there so you can access your data. As for the former, if some rogue state detonates an EMP device over the U.S. that takes out most networks and data centers, what do you do? If a major solar storm/EMP takes out most networks and data centers, what do you do? If you cloud company goes out of business, what do you do?
Backups, backups, and backups. Some of those backups need to be under your direct control. If all your backups are in the cloud and you can't access the cloud, what do you do?
We're building a house of cards here, and placing entirely too much trust in cloud-based services.
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Round up of the Broadband Communities Summit 2012
If you were not able to attend the 2012 Broadband Communities Summit in Dallas a couple of weeks ago, you missed a great conference. With an increased focus on both community broadband and open access networks, there were a lot of really good, solid session, especially the five sessions on open access, which I helped to organize.
Here are some of the key ideas, concepts, and take-aways that I noted from the conference:
- Micro duct vendor Teraspan noted that 2500 feet of day of microtrenching is easily possible in city streets.
- Jim Salter of Atlantic Engineering gave a lively talk, and noted that communities could expect a 40% drop in telecom costs because of shared networks. He said telecom prices in the U.S barely budged because of duplicated networks.
- Joe King, the City Manager of the City of Danville, Virginia, talked about the success of that community's open access, active Ethernet fiber network, which was started to spur economic development. The fiber has brought businesses back downtown, including international businesses and a commercial supercomputer facility.
- The Grant, Washington Public Utility District deployed community fiber to help rural communities, and the combination of affordable power and affordable fiber has brought seven server farms/data centers to one community in the PUD service area.
- The Grant PUD fiber network is open access, and has 23 providers offering a wide variety of services. The Metronet Zing network has 30 providers. This utterly refutes the idea that open access networks can't attract providers.
- The St. Joe Valley Metronet project noted that lack of affordable fiber stunts economic growth.
- The open access Utopia network in Utah covers 25% of the state's population, making it the largest open access network in the country. And it has five different video providers on network.
- The City of Eagan, Minnesota has found the combination of open fiber and a data center is powerful job attractor. And Eagan thinks community fiber is crucial to help preserve scare right of way.
- Kate McMahon gave a talk on planning and noted that unless city and town planners update policies specifically to address modern right of management, local governments will continue to mis-manage right of way. She noted that many planners avoid the issue by claiming "that's not our policy," but don't work with elected officials to revise those policies.
- Chris Mitchell noted that the supposed awfulness of community broadband "competing" with the private sector is a red herring argument, as many other muni services "compete" with the private sector, and no one complains about that--should libraries be closed because they compete with bookstores?
- Rick Smith of the City of Cortez says they opened up their fiber to leverage the excellent quality of life in southwestern Colorado, noting that the fiber helps attract businesses and entrepreneurs to smaller towns.
- David Shaw of Kirton & McConkie noted that three things are necessary for a successful community broadband project: political support, legal expertise, and excellent business and financial planning.
There was much much more, but those are some of the highlights. Start planning now to attend next year's conference.
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Broadband and the walkable city
This short article on the weak housing market has big implications for "big broadband," which few of us have right now. A major economist is predicting that the housing market may not recover for years, but coupled with high gas prices, walkable communities will be in high demand.
This has significant implications for city and community planners, but it is extremely difficult to ensure that everyone, or even a majority of workers, can walk to work. A better option would be to get "big broadband" to most homes so that more workers can work from home. Even the ability to work productively from home one or two days a week could cut the cost of commuting by 20% to 40%...nothing to sneeze at when gas is $4 a gallon.
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Design Nine is part of Virginia's Blue Ridge
Design Nine, located in Blacksburg, is part of Virginia's Blue Ridge. The Roanoke Valley Convention and Visitor's Bureau announced a new branding for our region: Virginia's Blue Ridge. We like it....it fits, and the region needs a recognizable brand. We're proud to live and work here...in Virginia's Blue Ridge.
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Walmart joins the cloud
Walmart has announced a partnership with Vudu. You can take your DVDs and Blu-ray movie discs to Walmart, and pay $2 to have them "converted" and stored in the cloud. If you want an HD (Blu-ray) version, you pay $5. Walmart does not actually read your discs; instead, they verify that you actually have a physical copy, then just enable that movie for your account from a previously stored digital master. Walmart also apparently stamps your physical disk with some mark so that you can just give it to a friend who takes it in a week later. The Walmart/Vudu site has remarkably little information; you have to create a Vudu account to figure out how it works and what the restrictions are.
Of course, if you want to stream your HD movies from the cloud, you better have good broadband at your house.
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North Carolina called a "tech turkey"
The Institute for Self Reliance has put out an interesting infographic highlighting the mis-match in North Carolina between the City of Salisbury's tiny fiber network and TimeWarner. State legislators passed a bill last year that essentially outlaws any community investments in fiber on the theory that TimeWarner needs to be protected against the supposed unfair advantage of local governments. My guess is that all the North Carolina legislators accomplished is to send entrepreneurs contemplating relocation to another state.
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Rotary trencher ideal for residential fiber drop installation
We have not seen this rotary trenching machine in action, but this short video illustrates that you don't have to spend a lot of time and money installing fiber drops--this machine looks like it is ideally suited for "last mile" (first mile) residential fiber installation. This pull-along machine is lightweight, can be carried in a van or pickup, is narrow enough to go through typical fence gates, and cuts a 7" deep slot for a fiber drop cable.
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It's not triple play, it's "century play"
In Sweden, home security offerings have been an important service on their open access networks, and start up companies have very successfully taken business away from the "big" security companies, which were slow to adapt using an IP network rather than phone lines. The network owner (e.g. the community broadband network owner) may only get a couple of bucks a month from provisioning a circuit for a home security customer, but add that to other supplemental $1-2 per month services like meter reading and you can quickly see 50% to 100% increases over the average revenue per user (ARPU) compared to triple play.
I'm still looking for the right term to replace triple play. It's definitely not quadruple play...it is more like "century play"....open access networks are rapidly evolving towards a model not unlike the Apple and Android app stores, where you will be able to buy services from hundreds of providers. We won't all buying 100+ services, but we will have hundreds of choices. Five years from now, most open access networks will probably have at least twenty or thirty providers offering various kinds of computer and data backup services because it is so cheap and easy to offer that kind of service on an open access, high performance network.
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The scourge of phishing
A lot of new phishing schemes are popping up....a family member mentioned that she got an email "from US Airways" telling her to check in for a flight....I've gotten hundreds of those in the past week.
I've gotten very official-looking messages from the IRS, from the Better Business Bureau, from AT&T, from Verizon, and other well known companies....all sent by automated bot-nets...Russian, eastern European, and Chinese gangs are using these phishing schemes to try to trick you to log in to a bogus "official" site and capture your user id, validate your email address, get passwords, and to try to trick you into entering your credit card info.
You can check these easily by rolling the mouse pointer over the links in the email. If you wait a second, your computer will pop up a little box with the actual URL of the link. You can usually tell by inspection that it is not an official link. But they are very clever....for example:
I have received a bunch of phony LinkedIn messages.
The correct URL for LinkedIn is www.linkedin.com
the phony URLs have been things like
www.linked.in
www.linkedln.com (the second 'i' is an 'l')
you can also look at the FROM email address. I just got a US Airways spam sent from an IRS.GOV account. I'm pretty sure US Air does not use IRS computers to send out their email.
The lost productivity costs of phishing are enormous. Many of these messages are getting through two layers of spam filtering here, and that means sifting through your IN box, checking each one to make sure it is not legitimate, and then deleting it. It may only be a few extra minutes a day, but multiply that by the millions of people getting these, and it adds up.
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