Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
Work from home opportunities continue to increase
DirecTV recently announced it was bringing more jobs to southwest Virginia, but these are not traditional jobs. Instead, these are work from home jobs. The company is establishing a virtual call center. Congressman Rick Boucher made a sweep through the region last month to announce the new job opportunities, which amount to 100 new jobs. DirecTV already employs more than 1100 home-based workers, and other major firms like Apple have been making heavy use of home-based workers for several years.
What does this mean for economic development? Several things jump out:
- Neighborhoods and rural roads are now business districts.
- These new business districts need affordable, business class broadband services, including not just Internet access but VoIP telephone service and the ability to support high performance VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) for access to corporate data centers.
- Symmetric bandwidth is essential for some kinds of work from home opportunities, and most existing cable and DSL residential services don't support symmetric bandwidth.
- Training and re-training the local workforce to qualify for these jobs should now be part of economic development activities.
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Entire country of Australia goes open access
Design Nine has been an advocate for open access for many years--long before it became fashionable. So it is nice to see that some places are finally figuring out that open access is the right way to do telecom. Via Ars Technica, the Australian government has announced a $38 billion (in U.S. dollars) plan to take fiber to most Australian homes and businesses. The government intends to operate it as a open access network, with private sector providers offering all the services. The article notes that the country has decided it will not impede economic development by allowing a single incumbent to make long term decision about how much broadband is enough.
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Apple's iPad is killing the netbook
The market for netbooks, those small, lightweight, and inexpensive laptops, was enjoying double digit growth until Apple announced the iPad back in January. Since then, sales have slowed dramatically. And the iPad may also begin to have an effect on desktop and laptop sales. This report only represents one household, but it sounds plausible to me: if you have a couple of iPads in the house, you don't need as many computers.
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Broadband fight continues in North Carolina
A knock down, drag out fight over the right of communities to control their economic future continues in North Carolina. Via Save NC Broadband, the City of Salisbury, North Carolina is struggling to put a stop to a state legislature proposal to ban community investments in broadband. The cable companies in North Carolina are encouraging the ban, and as the editorial notes in the link above, this is really about the right of communities to determine their own future. As is often the case, using a roads analogy helps put it in perspective: "... That's like letting one or two asphalt companies determine the future of North Carolina's roads."
Communities need modern digital road systems that will help retain existing businesses and assist with attracting new ones. It almost beggars belief that NC legislators want to cripple economic development and drive businesses into neighboring states like Virginia, where community fiber projects like nDanville have brought more than 550 new high tech jobs to Danville, Virginia in the past year. Danville's open access network does not compete with the private sector because all services are being offered by private sector companies, which creates a win-win situation. The City of Danville has lowered the cost of offering high performance broadband and created new business opportunities for private sector firms. This "third way" approach to broadband is a win-win approach to community broadband that neatly balances public and private interests.
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Boucher proposes online privacy bill
Congressman Rick Boucher (D) of Virginia's Ninth District has proposed an Internet privacy bill, which is co-sponsored with Cliff Stearns (R) of Florida. The bill has critics from both the business community and consumer advocates, which suggests it probably strikes the right balance as a place to start. I am constantly amazed at how casually people give up personal information like their birthdate, street address, and other information just to get some "free" service (e.g. Facebook). Not all companies abuse how they use that kind of information, but some do. One of the bill's primary requirements is to simply have firms explain better what they do with personal data. That seems like a good place to start.
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iPad vs. Kindle: A good review
Almost everything written about the iPad to date has been speculative and overwrought because most of the writers had little or no time actually using the iPad. Depending on what you read, you might come away believing the iPad was the worst device in the history of handhelds (...NO USB PORT MAKES IT USELESS!!) or the most important new device since the mainframe. Here is a thoughtful review that compares the iPad to the Kindle for reading books. My take: Kindle still has a bit of an edge, but as the software book readers for the iPad improve, the Kindle is toast.
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FCC says keep broadband services unregulated
Via the Washington Post, the FCC has indicated that broadband services will likely remain unregulated for the time being. The recent court ruling in favor of Comcast most likely brought the change in direction. An attempt by the FCC to regulate broadband service providers would likely bring many more lawsuits that could drag on for years.
Net neutrality advocates will be disappointed, but there are simpler and better ways to achieve net neutrality, and those approaches are already in place and working--Utopia is the country's biggest open access network, with net neutrality baked into the network architecture and business model. Utopia has fifteen service providers on the network, all competing on price and service quality over the open and neutral community-owned system. The Wired Road, in southwest Virginia, has five providers on its open and neutral network. Palm Coast FiberNET is just starting up, but has two competing providers on day one.
The FCC has done the right thing; trying to regulate twentieth century business models will not give communities and businesses the economic growth they need. Design Nine is a national leader in the design and development of open access networks. Give us a call for help with your project.
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The death of speech recognition
There has been a long running debate about artificial intelligence, with a large contingent of computer scientists always proclaiming that computers "smarter than humans" is only five years away. And there has been a small but persistent group of computer scientists who have insisted computers will never be "smarter than humans."
Here is an interesting read on speech recognition and why it has never caught on. The "computers will be smarter than humans" crowd will scoff at this and insist that speech recognition has little to do with artificial intelligence, but if you can't write a program to recognize speech, how are you going to write a program to make a computer "smarter" than a human? Our ability to hear and cognitively process the spoken work is absolutely staggering, and after thirty plus years of attempts to duplicate it, speech recognition is still lousy. Spend just a few minutes on the phone with one of those voice mail speech recognition systems (...say Customer service.... "Cus-tom-er ser-vice"...I'm sorry, I did not understand, say Customer service..."Cuuuusssttttommmer Seerrrrvvviccce"....I'm sorry, I did not understand, returning to Main Menu...) knows that speech recognition stinks.
Update (10/2011)
Apple's Siri voice recognition app on the iPhone 4S shatters whatever any of us previously thought about voice recognition. Siri does an incredible job of taking dictation and processing routine smartphone requests.
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Microsoft sides with Apple, supports HTML5 and H.264
Microsoft has announced that for Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), the company has a preference for HTML5 and the H.264 video codec. Flash plug-ins will continue to be supported, but IE9 will only have native support for H.264. This follows on the path blazed by Apple, which decided a while back not support Flash at all on the iPhone and iPod. The controversy has heated up with the release of the iPad, which continues the Apple strategy of no Flash support at all. With both Apple and Microsoft coming out against Flash, Flash is essentially dead, and Adobe has lost this battle. Some years ago, Adobe elected to "win" by buying up competitors and killing off their products rather than competing on price. As a result, professional graphics designers and Web designers have fewer pro-level tools to choose from and much higher prices. Adobe is now beginning to pay the price for its monopoly-style attempt to control the marketplace.
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FCC Commissioner says communities should be able to build broadband
Excerpt from Speech by FCC Commissioner Mignon L. Clyburn
SEATOA’s 9th Annual Conference
Asheville, NC – April 27, 2010
"...The theme of this conference “Expanding Community Networks,” is exactly what the National Broadband Plan is about – to ensure that broadband is made available to all Americans, no matter where they live..."
"...In addition to recommendations about improving providers’ access to infrastructure for building broadband, the Plan also acknowledges that in some jurisdictions, no provider is constructing a broadband network. Thus, the Plan recommends that Congress clarify that State and local governments should not be restricted from building their own broadband networks. I firmly believe that we need to leverage every resource at our disposal to deploy broadband to all Americans. If local officials have decided that a publicly-owned broadband network is the best way to meet their citizens’ needs, then my view is to help make that happen...."
"...last month I heard Lafayette, Louisiana’s City-Parish President describe the development of economic opportunities in his city, that were a direct result of the fiber network built by the community. Right here in North Carolina, I understand that Wilson and Salisbury are trying to invest in fiber optic systems, that they hope will transform their local economies..."
"...When cities and local governments are prohibited from investing directly in their own broadband networks, citizens may be denied the opportunity to connect with their nation and improve their lives. As a result, local economies likely will suffer. But broadband is not simply about dollars and cents, it is about the educational, health, and social welfare of our communities. Preventing governments from investing in broadband, is counter –productive, and may impede the nation from accomplishing the Plan’s goal of providing broadband access to every American and every community anchor institution..."
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