Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
Re-assembling Ma Bell: The customer is the loser
Art Brodsky has an interesting article about the T-Mobile/AT&T wireless merger. Brodsky illuminates a wide range of interlocking business relationships that are helping to push the merger forward, even though it would create what amounts to a duopoly in the cellular business, with AT&T and Verizon having about 80% of the U.S. market locked up.
What's next? Why, expect that in about two years, Verizon and AT&T will begin discussing a merger, because it will be so much better for their customers if they don't have to shop around and have to deal with the time-consuming research required when you have choice. And don't forget that in the landline business, AT&T and Verizon also own a majority of the U.S. market for phone and leased lines.
I was working for AT&T both before and after the 1984 break up, and there was nothing efficient about a company with a million employees. Prices for services were artificially high and there was no incentive to innovate. Even a duopoly is bad for customers, as whoever the two firms that own the duopoly market are, once they have driven out any competition, what's left is simply making it uninteresting to switch to the other provider. And this is best done by keeping prices at both firms high and relatively equal. Lots of profit and low customer churn.
The biggest loser is rural America, which needs high performance, affordable broadband to keep rural communities economically viable. What is troubling is the willingness of rural legislators to vote for laws and mergers that go against the interests of their own constituents.
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First NC, now Tennessee: Dumb Internet laws
Tennessee legislators just passed a law making it illegal to transmit an image that could "..frighten, intimidate or cause emotional distress" to someone who sees it." And the person who suffers "emotional distress" does not have to be the person you sent it to. Suppose you send out a picture of a cat hanging desperately from the branch of tree to a friend. That friend forwards it on. Twenty forwards later, some cat lover sees it and is emotionally distressed that the poor cat is in danger. They look at the original sender of the email, report it to Tennessee law enforcement, and bingo, you are put in jail for a year and fined $2500 (you would have to be a resident of Tennessee).
Who writes comes up with these laws? Did they even think to ask a lawyer who specializes in constitutional law for an opinion?
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Facebook facial recognition: "Creepy..."
PCWorld calls what Facebook is doing with facial recognition "creepy." The social networking site has rolled out facial recognition software that tries to tag photos with your face in them without asking permission.
How many times do we have to keep going through this? I think I'm going to start a list of "Nerds Gone Wild" where time and again, some nerd at one of these companies decides it is really cool to violate everyone's privacy just because they stayed up late, drank a lot of Red Bull, and whipped up some crappy code. If you are interested, here is how to turn the, uh, "feature" off.
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Cisco says data traffic continuing to double every two years
Cisco, the world's largest manufacturer of active Ethernet equipment, says that the historical trend of broadband data demand doubling every two years is continuing. The company expects the typical bandwidth need for fixed point broadband access (e.g. DSL, fiber, cable) to increase from 7 megabits now to 28 megabits by 2015. This paints a grim future for PON networks, which typically are designed to provide about 30 megabits of bandwidth to the home, meaning most PON networks will be obsolete in just three years. I think this is one of the reasons Verizon put a moratorium on extending their FiOS (PON) networks: they realized they were painting themselves into a corner with respect to bandwidth.
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Is Apple about to take on Amazon and Netflix?
Apple's annual WorldWide Developer's Conference (WWDC) starts on June 6th, just a few days from now, and speculation is building that Apple will finally tell the world just what it plans to do with the million square foot data center it has built in rural North Carolina. Among the fevered discussion is the idea that Apple intends to announce a TV and movie on demand service. If they do, it could change the whole playing field for on demand video streaming, which is largely owned by Netflix. TV shows and movies that are tightly integrated with the wildly popular iPad could very quickly cut into Netflix's business, and make Amazon's toehold in this area more tenuous.
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Disruption continues: Good-bye to the cash register
That sound you hear is of the cash register business drying up. Square, a company that has developed a "soft" cash register for the iPad, is very likely to capture a big chunk of the traditional cash register market, which has been dominated by mostly small and medium-sized firms that customize mostly Windows-based computers. Part of Square's innovation is a small dongle that attaches to the iPad and reads credit cards. The market that is most likely to embrace this approach is the food industry; waitstaff can carry and iPad directly to the table and enter orders on the fly, reducing wait time and errors. This won't work for all stores, as you can see from the comments (grocery stores are not likely to find this useful, among others).
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End of the world: NC governor refuses to veto anti-broadband bill
Governor Perdue of North Carolina has indicated that she will not veto the anti-community, anti-economic development, anti-jobs, anti-rural anti-broadband bill recently passed by the North Carolina legislature. Instead, she will signal her "displeasure" by allowing it to become law without signing it.
This may not be the end of the world, but it is certainly a catastrophe, first and foremost for rural communities in North Carolina, who have been thrown under the bus by their own representatives, and second for other states and rural communities in the U.S. Expect that the incumbents, emboldened by this success in North Carolina, will try to purchase more laws in other states.
For those that remain unconvinced this is a problem, read this letter from a major North Carolina high tech software firm (the hugely successful Red Hat Linux). Here is the bottom line from the article:
"...One of the most difficult and expensive line-items in this multi-million dollar project was securing a broadband link to the site in rural Chatham County. I spent more than two years begging Time Warner to sell me a service that costs 50x more than it should, and that's after I agreed to pay 100% of the installation costs for more than a mile of fiber. .... Community broadband initiatives reach more people faster, at lower costs, leading to better economic development. Take it from me: had I been able to spend the time and money on community broadband that I spent in my commercial negotiations, there would be more jobs in Chatham County today."
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nDanville Medical Network wins ICF Founders Award
The nDanville Medical Network has won the Intelligent Community Forum Founders Award. The Medical Network is part of the larger nDanville fiber initiative, which was the first municipal open access network in the United States; the network began adding its first customers in 2007. Medical customers on the network have averaged 30% less cost for connections while being able to double the amount bandwidth, for a total overall cost reduction of more than 50%. The high performance fiber has enabled transmission of CT and other medical imaging scans between the hospital and the medical imaging center in another part of the city.nDanville is a client of Design Nine.
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"Broadband Buffoonery" in North Carolina
If it seems like I am writing a lot about the situation in North Carolina, it is because the broadband fight there has national implications. This short article from DSLReports does a good job a summarizing just how awful the situation is. Right now, only the Governor can stop it, as the legislature (both houses) has passed this monstrosity.
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U.S. Broadband Goal: 1/75 as good as Lithuania!
Via Stop the Cap!, some Lithuanian broadband customers are getting bandwidth increases that can range has high as 300 megabits, up from the current 100/40 bandwidth for the Premium plan. There is no price increase for the improved performance.
Since the U.S. Broadband Plan targets 4 meg as entirely adequate, we can imagine a catchy slogan: American broadband! 1/75 as good as Lithuania!
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