Technology Futures

Here is a brief video produced by Alcatel-Lucent on Chattanooga's fiber initiative. One of the people interviewed is a venture capitalist who has settled in Chattanooga, which is worthy of some notice--lack of capital is one of the biggest problems that many regions face when trying to jump start economic development. Most new jobs are created by small business START UPS, not existing small businesses, and start up businesses need angel and VC capital to create those jobs.

This story from MIT's Technology Review says that the amount of data we are storing is doubling every year. Doubling every year. So that $120 terabyte hard drive you bought to back up the baby pictures and your music library? You'll need another one in a year or two. Then four. Then eight. Hard drive densities keep going up, but they are not doubling every year.

The answer is more cloud storage, and the cloud, to be efficient, is going to have to move closer to the data. It is extremely expensive to drag data across the public Internet to get to a large data storage facility like Apple's, Microsoft's, or Amazon's, compared to a short trip across a locally-owned modern fiber infrastructure straight to a local data center. Akamai has made a business about putting data closer to users, but Akamai caters to the one way data direction (down) of major content providers like CNN. The next frontier is affordable two-way data storage, and communities that have affordable fiber coupled with local well-designed data and colo centers will find it easier to attract and keep businesses and jobs.

The buzz that Apple will introduce an Apple TV sometime this year continues. Speculation about the product includes claims that it will incorporate Siri voice recognition so that you can just talk to it and eliminate the remote control. Other theories include the idea that it will look and behave much like an iPad, and that it will essentially be a big iPad, with the ability to run most iPad apps.

If Apple does introduce a new "TV" device, I am pretty sure it will:

• Have a premium price initially. Apple never tries to compete with low cost commodity products.
• It will have some insanely great new features (like voice recognition that actually works), for which many people will be happy to pay a premium price.
• It will redefine the notion of a "TV," much to the regret of every other company that makes so-called "smart" "TVs," which are usually maddeningly complex.
• It will be so easy to use that every other "TV" immediately looks like some 19th century antique.

Oh, and one more thing....it will place enormous demands on existing broadband networks, creating even more problems for existing DSL and cable providers.

"My DSL is worthless on the weekends." Exact quote from someone I talked to yesterday. She lives in a rural part of Virginia, and DSL is her only broadband option. So many people are now routinely streaming bandwidth intensive video content that the local DSL Access Module (DSLAM) is overloaded and can't handle the demand. The local incumbent has a monopoly on broadband service, so there is no incentive to spend more to improve the backhaul from the DSL switch down the road from her house. Her service is better on weekdays because most of her neighbors travel to school or work during the day, and she does much of her work FROM HOME. But as the price of gas climbs past $5/gallon, living in a rural area and commuting long distances to work is going to become a luxury of the wealthy unless the bandwidth is there in rural communities and back roads to allow some folks to work from home. The rapidly rising cost of gasoline and the just as rapidly increasing demand for bandwidth on antiquated copper-based networks is about to create a perfect storm in rural communities that don't have a strategy for increasing the affordability and performance of broadband.