Technology Futures

One of the earliest deployments of broadband over power lines (BPL) was the City of Manassas, Virginia. But last week, the city voted to turn off the system. Manassas is an electric city, with its own electric utility department, which made it relatively easy for the city to try out the new technology several years ago. But the BPL service reached only a handful of households and businesses (a little over 500, or less than 4%) and was not able to compete with DSL and cable modem options.

The fundamental problem with BPL is that it is relatively expensive, and when you are finished with a BPL deployment, what you have is broadband over copper, with limited bandwidth and no easy way to upgrade. Kind of like DSL and cable modem services. Fiber becomes more compelling by the day, as the demand for capacity increases as video in all its forms becomes a more common application and as the cost of fiber networks continues to fall. Why spend a substantial portion of the cost of a fiber network on a very limited copper-based system?

The fundamental problem with BPL, from a community perspective, is that it does not enable economic development and jobs growth the same way that fiber does. If your economic development strategy is, "Come to our community, because we have anemic BPL," you are in trouble, because there are plenty of other communities competing with you that have already decided to go straight to fiber.

An article over at TechCrunch raises an interesting question. The backlit iPad (and all LCD backlit displays) can be hard on the eyes when trying to read continuously for long periods of time (e.g. when reading a book). The Amazon Kindle uses a different display technology (e-ink) that is reflective rather than transmissive. Reflective displays work better outdoors and are more like books in the way they work. Paul Carr, the author of the article, argues that eye fatigue and multitasking distraction could turn the iPad into a device that actually discourages reading. Hard to say, but time will tell whether the iPad displaces books, other e-book readers, or both.

A D.C. court ruled against the FCC's attempt to regulate how Comcast manages its network. The ruling dates back to a 2008 order that FCC imposed on Comcast, which was slowing down high bandwidth file sharing for some of its customers.

This is not likely to please very many people. Consumer advocates think Internet service providers need more regulation--they are unhappy about this. And the big incumbent service providers--AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, TimeWarner, and others--are upset that the FCC tried this in the first place.

As I have written in the past, network neutrality can be achieved easily by changing the business model for delivering services, and without the overhead of government regulation. Open access networks like Utopia, The Wired Road, nDanville, Palm Coast FiberNET, and others already have network neutrality, and these networks got there by building a single high performance infrastructure shared by all providers. Consumers get competitive pricing with substantial cost reductions, and providers compete based on quality of service and price. Network neutrality is achieved at the contract level by having the network infrastructure managed by a neutral third party. Everybody wins, especially buyers of services.

Prices go down and innovation is greatest when you have a single, maximally sized market space with many buyers and sellers. This is very easy to do, and as I noted, it is already being done.

Earlier this week, I wrote how Apple is forcing publishers to move away from Adobe's buggy Flash plug-in, which is used for multimedia content display. Today, this article comes out about how Apple's pricing for books in the new iPad bookstore has forced Amazon to change its pricing model. Amazon was telling book publishers what they could charge for ebooks using the Kindle distribution system. Publishers didn't like that, and Apple took a different approach, giving publishers more flexibility in setting the price of a book, and taking a straight revenue percentage for distributing.

Apple gets criticized for using its muscle to make deals, but the deals it makes usually end up benefiting both buyers and sellers. And the overall lesson is that Apple's general approach--open access to markets achieves success--is lesson that is slowly gaining headway in the broadband world.