Technology Futures

Netflix had an outage of several hours that prevented their customers from accessing any streaming content. This article discusses whether Netflix is spending enough on infrastructure, but what has also emerged is that Netflix customers using the company's streaming services are now consuming 20% of all the bandwidth in the U.S. during peak evening hours. As I and many others have been predicting for years, video in all its forms is now driving use of the Internet.

Economic developers who dismiss the Netflix bandwidth trend as "not our problem" do so at their peril (and at their community's peril), as business use of videoconferencing is already routine. A year ago, Design Nine staff were rarely asked to make use of videoconferencing by our clients, but over the past several months, it has become commonplace for us to augment on-site meetings with video-enabled distance meetings. Internally, we coordinate the activities of staff in remote locations via video instead of the phone, and some days my videoconference use is probably higher than my use of the phone.

Meanwhile, communities that ignore the bandwidth tsunami and let their local businesses try to buy overpriced bandwidth via fifty year old copper infrastructure are putting their existing businesses at a competitive disadvantage (essentially inviting them to leave for a community with better infrastructure) and driving away new businesses. Design Nine's bandwidth costs have doubled in the past year, largely because of lack of competition. We have good service, but costs are increasing because in our business park, there is essentially a monopoly. I've spoken to one business owner down the street who has looked seriously at moving his entire business to Northern Virginia because of the lack of competitive fiber services here.

Fred Pilot makes an excellent observation in his excellent blog: he says that getting fiber to homes and businesses requires a change in attitude on the part of those homeowners and businesses--a shift away from passively accepting whatever an incumbent monopoly provider offers and moving to an ownership attitude. Fred talks specifically about using a coop structure, but the point is appropriate for any community-owned network governance structure, as ultimately, the residents and businesses of the community end up taking control of their own economic destiny by building a community-owned network business.

Taking control of a community's economic future requires work--more work than just quietly paying the cable or DSL bill every month and fuming over the high cost and the poor service. It means some community leaders have to learn new skills and take on the work of managing a new kind of community infrastructure. But most communities can do this; the world's best fiber network can be built in any community for far less than the cost of putting in a public water and sewer system. Communities routinely borrow tens of millions for water and sewer and successfully manage those complex systems and pay back the debt. This is still America, and we still have the ability and know how to have the world's best infrastructure. The real question is why are so many communities willing to accept third world telecom services?

Stop the Cap! has an article about the incumbent fight to kill the nation's most successful open access network: Utopia. Utopia's open access network has thousands of subscribers and fifteen providers on the network, including three TV providers. I've actually had the opportunity to see the Utopia TV provider offerings, and the picture quality of an all digital TV channel delivered via fiber is incredible.

Has Utopia had problems? Some early financial issues developed because the first firm hired to manage the network made some decisions that have since been corrected. The management firm is long gone, and Utopia took network management and outside plant maintenance in-house almost two years ago, with excellent results. The incumbents in the area--Comcast and Qwest--have been invited repeatedly to come on the network and offer their service to their existing customers, but instead, the first seem to want to simply try to force the competition out.

The situation is unfortunate, but is being repeated in other areas of the country, where incumbents are choosing to try to force monopoly pricing onto communities instead of competing in the marketplace.

Disclaimer: The Utah Infrastructure Agency has been a client of Design Nine.

Chris Mitchell has a short but pointed note about the fallacy of the "leave it to the private sector" policies that have received so much attention, mainly because the incumbents have pushed that approach vociferously over the past fifteen years. But Mitchell points out that it has largely failed, with many fewer ISPs than in the late nineties, and overall, fewer telephone and cable companies as the big telecom giants gobble up the smaller ones.

His final point is the most important one: to maintain some balance and to encourage real competition, there needs to be the opportunity to form and run community-owned networks that are "structurally accountable" to the community itself. Telecom and broadband services have become essential economic development infrastructure, and communities need to be able to control their own destiny. I don't subscribe to the notion that the incumbents are bad. I don't subscribe to the idea that they should be regulated out of existence. What I do believe is that community-owned broadband networks ought to be given a fair chance to prosper without the regulatory dead weight of prohibitions, restrictions, and statutory limitations on access to capital. The incumbents have had fifteen years to provide a modern fiber-based infrastructure to American homes and businesses, and they have, by their own admission, declared, "we can't do it." Fine.

Let's take them at their word, and unleash American innovation and enthusiasm to try something different, like open access networks, which have network neutrality baked in when owned and managed by a neutral third party like a community or regional consortium. Open access projects like Utopia have fifteen providers on the network, including three TV providers--that's real network neutrality and real choice, without the need for excessive regulation and complicated rule-making.