Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
It's always about the bandwidth (or lack of it)
In this article that speculates about an Apple TV upgrade, there is an interesting tidbit that validates what I and others have been saying for a long time: HD content chews up bandwidth:
"...In turn, consumers would see a similar increase in streaming requirements. Xbox Live can stream 1080p video, but it requires 8-10meg broadband, which leaves an awful lot of people out in the cold. It has the option of downloading instead, but if you're out in the sticks on a 2meg stream you're looking at more than eight hours to download your film at 1080p. You'd best plan your Friday night viewing before leaving for work on Friday morning."
The discussion about the Apple TV is whether or not Apple will include the ability to show movies in HD 1080p format. The short answer is, "Not likely," because streaming 1080p movies and TV shows over the Internet requires a massive chunk of bandwidth--8-10 megabits. And that's REAL bandwidth, not the marketing happy-talk that always begins with "....up to..."
Notice that if you wanted to download that movie over your average 2 megabit connection, it would take more than 8 hours! And if you are on a cable modem connection with a few of your neighbors also trying to do the same, it would take a little longer, like never (ditto with a wireless connection).
The answer is simple: we need to switch to open fiber.
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Broadband equals economic development
Here is a short note from an entrepreneur and venture capitalist in Florida who really gets the importance of broadband. He lists four critical reasons why broadband is important.
- Businesses can't survive without affordable, high capacity broadband.
- Broadband is now essential to K12 schools and higher education.
- Healthcare providers are now often the biggest users of broadband in a community, so lack of affordable, high performance broadband increases the cost of healthcare and limits delivery of healthcare services.
- Broadband is good for the environment. Energy conservation, preservation of the environment (e.g. storm and run off water monitoring, water quality, etc.), and energy management requires monitoring and connectivity.
Here is a question for community leaders and planners: Look at the four categories listed above and ask this question: "Do we want a large telephone or cable company making the decision about what kind of infrastructure is available in our community for business, health care, education, and the environment?"
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Staying connected: broadband and time off
I went on a three day hike on the Appalachian Trail with one of my kids who is off to college in a few weeks. We had a glorious time hiking one of the most remote and isolated portions of the entire AT, which also happens to be one of the most scenic (right here in southwest Virginia). I had no laptop with me, no broadband access, and cellphone coverage so sketchy that we only managed a couple of quick text messages to the wife assuring her we had not fallen off a mountain.
For three days, I was off the grid, and it was wonderful. And nothing bad happened because I was not checking email three times a day. I need to do that more often, and I predict that in the near future, more of us will be deliberately planning and arranging "off the grid" broadband-free vacations. In past years, our beach trips have slowly become something less and less appealing to me because I seem to have to spend a couple of hours every day working. People call and say, "I know you are on vacation, but...." It's the "but..." that I have learned to dread. "...but could you just take a quick look at this document I just emailed?"
It was not that long ago that we measured response time to memos and reports in days and weeks, and now we measure it in hours. Just recently, I had someone call me up at 11 AM, quite upset, that I had not responded to an email they sent at 9 AM. On that particular day, I was out in the field and had had neither the time nor a broadband connection. But somehow we have come to assume 24/7/365 instant access to the 'net.
It's not healthy, and we should all take a deep breath and smell the flowers along a trail through the woods more often....without our cellphones and laptops.
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WiMax: Death by LTE?
WiMax, which was going to solve everyone's broadband problems three years ago, may already be dead, without ever really being deployed in any meaningful way. This short article suggests that Clearwire is thinking seriously about switching from WiMax to LTE for its primary wireless deployment technology.
LTE (Long Term Evolution) is, depending a couple of different variants, a 3G or 4G cellular wireless technology that has much higher bandwidth than current 3G cellular wireless systems. As is usual, the makers of LTE equipment are touting very high (read: exaggerated) upload and download speeds that are always predicated with the handy phrase "up to..." But like all wireless technologies, you have to share that bandwidth with everyone else using the same tower/access point, so your mileage will vary greatly. A convenient rule of thumb for evaluating actual wireless bandwidth is to take the maximum "up to" number and divide by ten. The result is more likely what most users will see in practice.
Will LTE be an improvement? Very likely. But it means replacing your current wireless device with a new one, among other problems. Mobile phone manufacturers like these changes in technology, as it forces millions of people to buy new phones. But companies like AT&T are not even done building out adequate 3G networks using the "old" 3G technologies. The transition will be slow. And we will still all want fiber. Nobody is going to be delivering HD movies on demand over an LTE wireless network, no matter what the vendors claim the "up to" bandwidth is.
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How smart is Boulder SmartGridCity?
Here is an article that alleges that Boulder, Colorado's SmartGridCity project is in deep trouble. The article has a long laundry list of problems, but what jumped out at me is the list of so-called "partners." If you look at the SmartGridCity Partners page, you can see the root problem of this project is too many cooks. Just the administrative overhead of supporting this list of high priced consulting firms would sink any project. And the descriptions that accompany each partner reads like one of those buzz-phrase generators you find online. Here are a sampling of the buzz phrases:
- ...intelligent distribution assets
- ...fully integrated...solution
- ...intelligent network
- ...drive innovation
- ...fully integrated
- ...best of breed
- ...connecting customers to...investment decisions
So you have at least seven companies with seven proprietary and very likely incompatible technology "solutions" that are going to use taxpayer dollars to try to do a mash up of their stuff that will somehow save money. These kinds of efforts never work, in part because if you start with seven complex technologies, it is impossible to make them less complex by combining them. Fifty years of software development studies have shown this over and over again. It's not that different than Fred Brooks' mythical man month treatise, in which he showed that adding more workers to a software project already late just makes it later--in large part because adding more workers makes the development process more complex. The same principle is likely at work here. Adding more complex power management software to an already complex design makes it even more complex and, as study after study has shown, more error prone.
Here at Design Nine, we call ourselves "broadband architects" or "information architects." We work the way the traditional architect works--we do a clean, coherent high level design for our clients first, develop the financing and funding strategies needed to show the client how it will pay for itself, and then and only then do we go out to vendors.
My guess is that Smart Grid City ended up with seven or more "design" firms all trying to gain an advantage for their own stuff, and Boulder ended up with a mess. It's as if you wanted a house built, and instead of having an architect produce the design and supervise the construction, you told the plumber, the carpenters, the electrician, and the drywall guys to get together and come up with something. It's called "design by committee," and it is never pretty.
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Schedule for broadband stimulus awards
The U.S. Departments of Commerce and Agriculture have announced a schedule for the disbursement of remaining broadband stimulus funds. Commerce expects to release a round of awards in mid-August, and USDA and Commerce will announce additional awards in September, with all funds awarded by the Congressional deadline of September 30th. For communities that have put broadband plans on hold, the uncertainty will soon be over.
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Financing broadband and the open access red herring
A common theme, when discussing the financing of broadband, is to claim that the open access business model "has not been proven." True open access has only been around in the U.S. for about three years, and the opponents of open access are creating a double standard. Apparently, to "prove" open access works, communities that take that route have to be in the black within a year or two, and really, it would be better, apparently, if they were in the black on day one.
What's the double standard? The double standard is that private sector telecom companies take years to get into the black, and routinely run up billions in debt that won't be paid back for a long period of time. That's apparently okay--communities will be held to a higher standard, though.
There is a second, very sly argument running alongside the "prove it works" argument. It is this: "Open access is bad because it has not been proven." Okay...let's accept that premise for a moment and now let us ask the question that no one asks..."What business model should be used instead?" The business model that open access opponents want to use is the tired old monopoly triple play, which has, over the past fifteen years, failed utterly to get "big" broadband to U.S. residents and businesses.
So the open access opponents want everyone to use a "proven" approach: triple play, which has been proven not to work. Sly, no?
Open access projects like Utopia, nDanville, The Wired Road, and Palm Coast FiberNET are thriving--in those communities, increased competition has brought lower prices for telecom services, and the efforts are generating enough funds that all those communities continue to expand their networks to more customers.
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U.S. Broadband: Still almost as good as Latvia
Via an Akamai report (registration is required to get the report), Latvia has moved up to fifth place in the average bandwidth rankings worldwide. The U.S. is down at number 22, with a net negative drop of about 1% in bandwidth over the last quarter and 2.5% drop in bandwidth over the past year. According to Akamai, the average broadband connection in the U.S. is about 3.8 megabits/second, which would reflect the fact that the cable companies dominate the broadband marketplace in the U.S.
It is worth noting that the FCC just set a new standard for the definition of "broadband," which is 4 megabits down and 1 megabit up. This reflects the continuing focus on broadband as an "entertainment" service (that's what some cable companies call it) rather than a business service. With more people and businesses trying to work out of the home, symmetric bandwidth has become essential to economic development. The continuing acceptance of a bigger pipe into homes and businesses and a much smaller pipe upstream reflects a lack of understanding about business and job needs for broadband services, which need the symmetric bandwidth.
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Wal-Mart smart tag worries overwrought
The InterTubes are a a-flutter with articles about Wal-Mart's plans to use RFID smart tags on clothing. The little tags are readable via wireless handheld devices, and the new system will allow Wal-Mart to manage inventory better. Every article I have read, including this reasonably well-balanced one from USA Today, talks about "privacy concerns." But USA Today, near the end of the article, provides the necessary information to understand just how big the privacy threat is: not very big. The RFID tags will be removable, and will probably just be embedded in or attached to existing price/product tags. So when you take the item home, you cut off the product tags as you usually would, and Wal-Mart can no longer 'track' your item. And they could only track it if you went back in the store, and so on.
I have a lot of issues with privacy, especially with "free" Internet services that track what I do online. I'm planning a camping trip and have been using several search engines to find some camping items. And lo--almost every Web page I look at now seems to have ads from camping supply stores, meaning that the search engines have a dossier that is actively updated with the results of my searches. That I don't like at all, and no, I don't find it "convenient" that the search engines helpfully pepper me with targeted ads.
But the Wal-Mart tags? That I'm not at all worried about.
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U.S. Broadband: Almost as good as, um, a lot of other places
Via the Twitter feed BroadbandReport, a new study suggests that the U.S. ranks 23rd in the world in broadband deployment. Strategy Analytics, the company that developed the report, is using a new set of metrics that look at five different indices to come up with the ranking.
The U.S. will continue to rank low for years, as the market here is very different here than in the rest of the world. Most of other countries are much smaller, making the scale of the problem much smaller. South Korea, which ranks first in the study, is smaller than almost every state in the U.S. And most other countries take a government-heavy, top down approach to broadband, which works better in other places because there is really only federal government and local governments. Here in the U.S., we have a middle layer of government (states) that are largely autonomous. And I'm not arguing for a more extensive top-down approach in the U.S. Topography, geography, and local business conditions vary so widely in the U.S. that dictating a one size fits all approach is likely to have a lot of unintended consequences.
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