Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
A primer on cloud storage services
Here is a lengthy article, but if you are interested in cloud storage services, it is an excellent primer on the advantages and risks. Cloud services, in many ways, is no different than the old mainframe computing environment, gussied up with a snazzy interface. Here are my own thoughts on the topic.
- Cloud computing is already the latest industry buzz phrase. If you thought "Web 2.0" was mostly baloney, strap on your kidney belts, because "cloud computing" or "cloud services" is going to be tacked on to every half-witted IT start-up for the next three years. Like all IT bubbles, 90% of these lame-brain services will fail.
- If you are storing something valuable in the cloud, make sure it is backed up somewhere else, since the failure rate of these cloud businesses is going to be very high. We're already seeing these ventures fail, and by fail, I mean that if you are lucky, you get an email giving you a week to get your data off the cloud server. If you are unlucky, the cloud just stops working, and your data is gone forever.
- What this means is that either the cloud can be part of a well-thought out disaster recovery plan, or it can be an integral part of your workflow, or both. But putting all of your trust in a third party with your data stored who knows where would be foolish. You still need local backups and backups that give you physical access to your own data. There is still nothing cheaper as a backup strategy than a portable hard drive, or a set of them.
- The cloud works best when it is as close as possible to the users of the cloud. Netflix is a cloud-based service, and a major cost, if not the biggest cost that Netflix has is just hauling the video bits across the public Internet to customers. If Netflix mounted servers on modern, high performance, community-owned fiber networks, its transport costs would go down dramatically, and it could instantly deliver content in HD format instead of low-resolution SD format.
- As more cloud services become available, the value of community-owned fiber networks will increase dramatically; cloud services will be relatively high margin compared to the old "triple play" model. The incumbents don't really have a strategy to provide high performing cloud services on their antiquated DSL and cable networks. Example one is the fight Comcast is picking with Netflix. Comcast is going to lose that one, because they are basically admitting their network can't handle what their customers want.
Community-owned broadband networks have a bright future and will be the engines of economic development if they can weather the collapse of the incumbents. The fight in North Carolina is, at core, a rearguard action by the cable companies to prevent that collapse by making competition illegal at the economic expense of the communities they purportedly serve.
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Is "Facebook depression" an actual problem?
Is "Facebook depression" really a problem? Or is just an excuse for media outlets to scrounge up some news on a slow news day? I'm reminded of all those teasers for the local 11 PM news: "Your local news at 11--The dangers of dryer lint! Could it be causing the heartbreak of psoriasis? Tune in to find out!"
Uh, huh.
I'm not going to lose a lot of sleep over Facebook depression.
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NC legislators to businesses: Don't come to our state!
Just when you thought you had heard it all, North Carolina legislators are about to pass a law declaring the state a broadband-free zone. An amendment to a very bad broadband bill will declare that "broadband" is any service that is "occasionally capable of achieving 768kbps downstream and 200kbps upstream." This is 1/5 of the feeble national goal of 4 megabits downstream and 1 megabit upstream. If there was ever a declaration of war against economic development, this is it. If it were 1920, it would the equivalent of outlawing paved roads, on the theory that "our daddies rode horses, and that's good enough." If it was 1930, it would be the equivalent of outlawing community sewer systems, on the theory that "I grew up using an outhouse, and that's good enough."
Meanwhile, city leaders in Chattanooga, Tennessee and southwest and central Virginia are rubbing their hands in glee.
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Why wireless won't make fiber un-necessary
Ars Technica has an article on problems with WiMax and cellular wireless networks. As customers increase their use of high bandwidth services, the wireless networks can't keep up, and the result is that companies like Verizon and Clearwire have started reducing the amount of bandwidth they make available to subscribers. Clearwire's much ballyhooed WiMax network, just a few years old, is already congested and inadequate. And the much hyped 4G cellular data networks are not going to perform any better. The things that people want to do with their wired and unwired devices is accelerating faster than the ability of wireless networks to keep up. The problem with wireless networks is that you basically have to replace everything component in the network except the tower to add more bandwidth, so you are looking at something like 80% of the cost of the original investment to get an upgrade. With fiber, you can add bandwidth incrementally to individual customers who need it at very low cost, and if you did have to do a systemwide bandwidth upgrade for all customers (very unlikely), you would be looking at only about 20% of the original investment.
Wireless networks simply don't work without fiber. But fiber networks don't need wireless. It's simply physics, and marketing hype loses out to physics every time.
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It's 1970 all over again in the telecom industry
AT&T wants to buy T-Mobile, which would make AT&T the biggest cellular provider in the U.S. Meanwhile, CenturyTel wants to buy Qwest. The 1984 breakup of Ma Bell and the 1996 telecom deregulation is slowly being undone as telecom in the United States is re-aggregated into enormous monopolies with antiquated business models based on maintaining a monopoly by any means possible. The incumbents are not going away, and I continue to believe the telecom giants could be turned into viable, useful businesses if they changed their basic business models, but that does not seem to be happening. When small companies like Frontier (which has buying up big chunks of Verizon's rural service areas) and CenturyTel are able to buy much bigger incumbents, it is a sign that these businesses are failing. Meanwhile, legislators are eager to prop up these businesses with legislation of the kind trying to be passed in North Carolina that prohibits communities from trying to take their economic future in their own hands. It is an absolute disaster for rural America.
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Doing the job that telecom incumbents won't do
Via Fred Pilot at Eldo Telecom, Geoff Daily makes the argument that "all broadband is fiber." Geoff has it exactly right. Just yesterday, I met with a community leader who asked, appropriately, "What if we spend all this money on fiber and wireless turns out to be cheaper and better?"
Daily reminds us that all wireless networks eventually dump their traffic onto fiber networks in order to work properly. If wireless were the solution, the backhaul for wireless networks would be wireless, not fiber. And we can take that even further, as the "little broadband" solutions of DSL and cable modem would not work at all if they did not aggregate their traffic onto fiber cables.
Fiber is the future of economic development in America's communities. Economic developers and community leaders that ignore the importance of affordable, high performance broadband availability are putting their community's economic future at great risk.
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Death of TV, Part XXVII: ABC, NBC, CBS... and Netflix!
The old TV empires are crumbling fast, and Netflix is speeding their demise. It just outbid all the other networks for a new original, uh, "TV" series called
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Knowledge Democracy:
iPad users crash cable TV system
Someone asked me just today if we really will need all the bandwidth that fiber offers, with the unspoken inference that DSL and cable modem service seems to be working just fine.
Uh-huh.
I came back to my hotel after dinner and found this article: TimeWarner rolled out its new "watch TV on your iPad" service and it's network was promptly overwhelmed by people who thought, "Hey, what a great idea...just what I have been waiting for." The cable giant had to cut back the number of channels available to just fifteen (cut 50% from the original 30). So anyone who thinks 1950s-based copper networks are just fine, the second biggest cable company in the country had its network crashed by a very small number of iPad owners. What happens when everyone tries to watch TV on a tablet device? And no, DOCSIS 3.0 is not the answer to that question. Symmetric, active Ethernet fiber networks are the answer.
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Knowledge Democracy:
In the future, will everything cost 99 cents?
For about a week now, there has been a thread running around the InnerTubes about how the ebook readers are changing publishing. The Kindle is slowly taking hold, and though I was an early skeptic, there does indeed seem to be a place for a dedicated book reader. Amazon has made it so easy for authors to self-publish that many new authors are skipping the traditional New York publishing house route and simply putting their books on Amazon as an ebook. And money follows.
There are two sweet spots for pricing: 99 cents and a dollar and ninety-nine cents. At the former price, lots and lots of people will take a risk and try an unknown author. Amanda Hocking, in the past year, has sold almost a million ebooks--she doesn't make much on each sale, but she's made enough to quit her day job and work full time as a writer.
Apple started this with the ninety-nine cent music download, which was supposed to kill the music industry. What it killed was the record store. The book business has turned out a bit differently. The big box book stores (Barnes and Noble, Borders, Books a Million) killed the independent book store, and the big box book stores are killing themselves (see the sad slide to bankruptcy by Borders).
What's next? Well, the death of TV is already well underway, with the traditional TV channel business dying a slow motion death. Look for cable TV companies to follow in their footsteps.
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Lessons in disaster recovery, tsunamis, and meltdowns
We will probably not know the full story of the nuclear reactor problems in Japan for many months, but one news story I read over the weekend suggests that the the Japanese are re-learning the lessons of the Katrina disaster. Apparently the Japanese reactors survived the initial earthquake and tsunami without much damage--but whatever was damaged caused the primary cooling pumps to fail. No big deal, as nuclear power plants have extensive back up and redundant secondary cooling systems designed to take over if the primary cooling system fails.
If the primary cooling system fails, the reactor is usually shutdown immediately, meaning no electric power. Even when the control rods are in, heat can continue to be generated for some time, hence the need for secondary cooling. So here is the scenario. Primary cooling fails. The reactor is shut down, and secondary backup cooling systems are activated. Apparently all this happened just as it was supposed to immediately after the earthquake and tsunami. The secondary cooling pumps are powered by large diesel generators, which apparently ran for about an hour, then shut down.
Why did they shut down? The fuel was contaminated by seawater.
So what was the lesson of Katrina the Japanese missed? In the New Orleans area, many telecom, radio, TV, and computer installations were thoughtfully built on upper floors of buildings so that they would be immune from flooding. But the generators and fuel tanks that were supposed to power all those systems in the event of a power outage were all installed at ground level, because it costs more money to put heavy, loud generators and diesel fuel on an upper floor. So the hurricane winds blew down power poles and the power went out first. No problem. Emergency generators started up, and everything kept running. Until the water came and flooded and the fuel tanks and generators.
One small ISP in downtown New Orleans stayed up and running throughout the entire flood because they had installed a generator on an upper floor. They managed to truck in 55 gallon barrels of diesel fuel once their initial supply ran out.
Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
How is your community's disaster recovery plans? Many areas of the U.S. are flood prone, but everywhere I go, I see generators now--which were very rare ten years ago. But those generators are all on the ground. Is that okay for your area? What about a ten year flood? What about a 100 year flood?
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