Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
Design Nine-built network brings a new era to a rural community
Those of us that have reasonably decent broadband connections at home and at work often forget there are still large parts of America that are still on dial-up. Design Nine just completed the first part of a USDA-funded Community Connect project in Grayson County, Virginia. Grayson County some of the most rugged terrain on the East Coast, and is home to Mount Rogers (elevation 5,729 ft), one of the highest peaks east of the Mississippi River. The Wired Road received the USDA grant to help the rural community of Grant, Virginia get better access to broadband. No reasonably priced fiber was available near the community, so Design Nine engineered a complex, multi-point 300 megabit microwave link from Galax, Virginia, where The Wired Road has its main network site.
The project renovated the historic, 100 year old Grange Hall in Grant, which included major improvements to the building, as well as a radio tower, a fiber link from the tower to the Grange Hall, and the design and implementation of a ten seat computer lab designed specifically to support distance learning and business people who needed broadband access. The computer lab has been extremely popular, and is saving local residents time and money, as they no longer have to drive long distances to get broadband access.
The second phase of the project is nearing completion, and will bring fiber to the home connections to 100 homes in Grant. Network connectivity on the fiber network is being provided by the 300 megabit radio link, which is capable of supporting TV service in the future.
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USB wall plate
Now this is a good idea--a replacement AC outlet cover that includes two USB ports. There have been some replacement duplex outlets around for a while, but they require a little more work, as you have to re-wire them into the outlet box. This RCA wall plate is simple--unscrew the existing wall plate, replace it with this one, and you are done. You have two USB ports and 1 AC port. I will note that the replacement outlet devices preserve both AC outlets.
Technology News:
Clueless teens dumping Facebook for Twitter
I had to read the first sentence of this article twice because I thought it must be a joke:
Teens, after being friended by parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles on Facebook, have moved to Twitter to get a little more privacy.
Trading Facebook for Twitter? Really?
Apparently those teens have not studied Twitter very carefully, as all tweets are entirely public; so public, in fact, that Twitter recently agreed to hand over all tweets to the Federal government and DHS, which now apparently monitors tweets for subversive activity. DHS recently denied two British tourists entry to the U.S. because of a couple of jokes they had posted on Twitter. Apparently re-posting a quote from the TV show Family Guy now marks you as a terrorist.
It may take a while longer, but I think people will eventually begin to understand that posting every trivial thought and picture from your life online is not the way to gain privacy.
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"I think that Facebook is the biggest waste of time..."
A guy named Jake Reilly dropped all electronic communication, including the phone, for ninety days, calling it "The Amish Project." This story is really interesting, as he ran into all sorts of logistical challenges, some of them amusing. For example, he'd meet a girl in a bar, she would give him her phone number, and he'd have to explain he could not call her. And the girl would think he was lying to avoid telling her he did not like her. To keep in touch with friends, he resorted to putting sticky notes in the elevator at work and leaving chalk messages on the sidewalk in front of their office or their home. Perhaps most telling, he realized that Facebook was an enormous drain on his time, and that by staying off it, he had a lot more time to actually visit people in person and talk face to face.
Read the whole thing.
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Knowledge Democracy:
Georgia Legislature: Let's drive businesses out of the state!
Via MuniNetworks, some Georgia legislators are getting substantial campaign contributions from the incumbent telephone and cable providers to pass a law making it illegal for communities to create competitive broadband infrastructure. The big win in North Carolina last year, where the legislature did pass such a law, has spurred similar efforts in Georgia and South Carolina.
Technology News:
nDanville fiber spurs economic development, attracts commercial supercomputer
The City of Danville, Virginia is beginning to see some big wins with their steady expansion of the City-owned open access fiber network. Back in the early 2000s, the City Utilities Department had begun installing fiber on City utility poles. Danville Utilities provides electric power throughout the City and large portions of three surrounding counties, with a total service area of nearly 500 square miles, and the fiber was an early smart grid initiative that provided the Utilities Department with better management of substations and power use.
In 2006, the City retained Design Nine to help develop a business plan and network architecture that would open the City fiber to commercial use. This led to the first municipal open access fiber network in the U.S. in 2007, and was arguably the first Gigabit municipal network; true Gigabit circuits were available on day one of operations--the nDanville network is active Ethernet.
Funded with revenue from anchor tenants like the City and the K12 schools, the network has expanded slowly, but from the beginning, the fiber network was part of a larger economic development strategy to re-invent the City, which had seen the loss of thousands of textile jobs in the late 90s. nDanville fiber has sharply reduced costs for connected businesses, especially in the medical community, and a commercial supercomputer facility is coming online in downtown Danville--the location determined in large part by where nDanville fiber is available.
The whole story is here.
Newsletter:
SOPA and PIPA meet OPEN
The truly awful SOPA and PIPA bills have been stalled, but Rep. Darrell Issa of California has introduced OPEN, the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act, in the House. OPEN has been written more narrowly to target only offshore counterfeit and bootleg sites, and does not give the Federal government the expansive powers to arbitrarily shut down any site; SOPA and PIPA managed to eliminate both due process and free speech in a single bill.
If you click through to this article to get more information, the interesting stuff is at the end, where writer indicates that the bigger picture is that Silicon Valley (i.e. Internet techies) are really in a war with Hollywood (i.e. 20th century film and TV distribution models). The Internet is enabling lots of competition with the traditional Hollywood film and TV studios and distribution companies, and SOPA and PIPA were going to help shut down any perceived competition.
I do not think it is quite that convenient a meme. Instead, I think Hollywood is at war with itself, and right now, the dinosaurs of that industry still have the upper hand. Movie and TV content producers and developers that embrace new distribution forms (which the dinosaurs don't like) have much to gain.
But as I have been saying for years, traditional TV is already dead. Hollywood is still in denial.
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Knowledge Democracy:
SmartFlix: Deconstructing education, one brick at a time
I just stumbled across SmartFlix, which is the education and training version of NetFlix. You can rent a wide variety of training and education DVDs by mail, just like NetFlix. They have many different topics available, ranging from the mundane (cooking videos) to the more sophisticated and esoteric: welding, machine lathe operations, and knifemaking. A lot of the skill-related topics (e.g. welding, machining, etc.) used to be offered as courses in high school and community colleges, but some time in the past twenty years, most of those "live" classes were eliminated. And today, many U.S. manufacturers can't find anyone who knows how to weld or run a lathe.
Technology News:
Apple has just disrupted another industry
Apple's announcement yesterday of an improved iBooks application for iPads and iPhones may seem like a kind of ho-hum sort of thing, but it is potentially as big a deal as the introduction of the iPod was a few years ago. Remember that there were all sorts of digital music players on the market prior to the introduction of the iPod; they were uniformly awful to use. The iPod set a very high bar for usability that resonated with customers.
The iBooks announcement was less about the bookshelf app itself than about the accompanying application called iBooks Author. Apple is giving this application away for free, and it sets a new standard for the ease of creation of ebooks. iBooks Author makes it much easier for textbook authors particularly to embed multimedia content in an ebook.
Apple has cleverly paved the way for the sale of millions of iPads that will replace conventional textbooks in both K12 schools and in higher education.
But while that is interesting and brilliant, it's not the real story.
The real story is that iBooks Author allows writers and teachers to create ebooks and sell them directly through the iBooks store without the services of a publisher. Uh oh. Text book publishing is extremely lucrative, with very high prices for the books, and very low royalties paid to the actual authors of the books. Now, text book authors can, albeit with a bit more work, cut out the publishers completely and reap much larger income by selling directly to students via Apple's iBooks service.
Newsletter:
The future of the Internet is fiber
Here is an interesting statement from the Roku folks:
"Generally we recommend a network speed of at least 1.2 Mbps, but to view live events, like Major League Baseball games, you’ll want at least 3 Mbps. For HD viewing, we recommend 5 Mbps.”
Notice that they are saying a single channel of live HD requires AT LEAST 5 Meg of bandwidth. Roku does not say, "...up to 5 Meg," or "...5 meg when no one else in the neighborhood is sucking all the bandwidth down watching a movie." They are saying, "...if you want to watch live events in HD, you need 5 meg of bandwidth per stream." By per stream, that means if two of you in your home are watching two different live events, you need 5 Meg x 2 = 10 Meg of bandwidth. That will never happen over DSL, and even on cable networks where they are now advertising wildly inflated bandwidth promises ("...up to 15 meg with SuperIncredibleGinormousCableBoost technology...."), just a few people trying to watch an HD broadcast in the same neighborhood are going to slow things to a crawl.
It's worse for business. The ever-increasing cost of travel, coupled with much improved technology is pushing videoconferencing quickly into a "must have" business requirement. Our videoconferences with clients here at Design Nine often includes four different people in four different locations. Using the Roku standard for picture quality, each location would need 4 x 5 Meg = 20 Meg of bandwidth...at each location. Just for a routine business meeting.
Within ten years, 90% of the homes and businesses in America will have fiber, and much of it will NOT be supplied from the incumbent telephone and cable companies.
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