Technology Futures

Powell, Wyoming's community-owned citywide fiber network is up and running, and the town is starting to get phone calls from businesses interested in taking advantage of the affordable broadband and the fact that every home has a high performance fiber connection.

Powell community leaders report a Denver firm is visiting to discuss bringing 100 work from home jobs to the community. Here is the money quote:

"The citywide fiber optic network absolutely drove the decision...."

The latest Web phenomenon is Animals with Lightsabers, proving once again that no idea is too stupid for the Internet. This particular flash in the pan is not likely to last, as you can be amused by a squirrel with a lightsaber only so many times. The object lesson is that the Web and the Internet continue to dismantle traditional publishing. Once upon a time, this sort of topic was the domain of small, cheaply printed novelty books that tended to be popular as Christmas gifts but actually never got opened past about 2 PM on Christmas Day. They ended up in the remainder bin of the local bookstore three months later for $4.99.

Music stores are nearly dead, bookstores are dying, and the video store is next. Although some have engaged in hand-wringing over the loss of jobs related to these shifts in the industry, the new technology is creating new markets and work opportunities, often for better pay and bigger businesses. Just one example is the enormous new market for software for the iPhone, where one and two person companies are raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year working from home, selling software via the Apple App Store for $1.99. This market and these jobs did not exist less than two years ago, and the the opportunities created far exceed dusting records for minimum wage at the local music store.

The BBC has an article asking what happened to public WiFi. The big WiFi projects that attracted so much attention in the U.S. five and six years ago (e.g. Philadelphia, San Francisco) failed miserably and were shut down or dramatically restructured. Some smaller municipal WiFi projects, like the one in St. Cloud, Florida, had some early rough spots but are still active. But local governments, by and large, found that free WiFi was expensive to support and often very lightly used.

The BBC wonders if the new smartphones (e.g. the iPhone, Google's Android) will create a new surge of communitywide wireless demand. The answer is, "Probably." But looking five to seven years down the road, wireless Internet access will probably have shifted by then to WiMax or the recently opened 700 Mhz spectrum. And if I had to bet, the 700 Mhz could be the winner because it has sufficient bandwidth, the signal travels farther (fewer access points and less cost), and it penetrates trees and buildings better. WiMax, for all the hype, still has many of the shortcomings of WiFi because it operates in the same general frequency ranges.

While rural areas will rely heavily on wireless for primary Internet access until fiber reaches most rural homes, fiber will replace wireless over the long term for fixed point access. But we all want mobile access, and so wireless services are here to stay. But it is an expensive technology, and communities would be served best by investing in open access basic wireless infrastructure (tower sites, towers, rooftop access on public buildings and water towers) and simply leasing out that basic infrastructure to private sector wireless firms. On the fiber sides, communities should build open access fiber networks and lease out the capacity to the private sector--for both wireless and fiber, these are public/private partnership solutions that keep government out of the business of selling telecom services but ensure that communities have some control over their economic future.

Diebold has thrown in the towel on its troubled voting machines business. It has sold the whole division to its competitor, ES&S. Diebold electronic voting machines have been plagued with problems, and the company says it is writing off tens of millions in losses, due primarily to lawsuits from disgruntled local governments who bought the machines only to find out they are a security nightmare.

Those of us that warned for years that electronic voting machines were a recipe for disaster can take little comfort in being right. Unfortunately, taxpayers are the big losers, as local governments spent hundreds of millions of dollars on untested equipment, much of which has had to be replaced already. It is not that the technology is inherently flawed--indeed, there are a few simple ways to make electronic voting machines reliable and auditable, like producing a paper record of votes entered. Buying technology and relying entirely on vendor promises can lead to unpleasant surprises.