Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
Why fiber cable route diversity and redundancy are important
A submarine cable serving several African countries has been damaged. The cable is the only Internet route out of several west African nations, putting the entire country into a virtual Internet blackout, with slow, expensive satellite links the only way for data to move in and out of the countries. Here in the U.S., some counties and states are bigger than these countries, and route diversity is now a serious issue for relocating businesses.
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Why wireless is only part of the solution
AT&T has been having problems with its cellular data networks--both EDGE and 3G. I noticed that things were not working at all on the data side (phone calls were fine) on Monday and Tuesday, but since the release of the new iPhone last month, I've had chronic problems with pokey data access. Every time Apple releases a new iPhone, another million or two new users get dumped onto AT&T's network, and all these new users are busy playing with their phones, downloading apps, surfing the Web, and using more wireless bandwidth than usual.
AT&T just has not been able to keep up, and it's not a problem unique to AT&T--it's a wireless issue that will never go away. As more people use wireless, you have to constantly add capacity. As you add capacity and the network gets faster, it encourages people to use more bandwidth...so you have to add more capacity...and so it goes.
It is very expensive to add capacity on wireless networks. Fiber, by comparison, in today's designs, starts out with enough capacity to do virtually anything you would want to do in a household or small business, so you don't get onto the wireless treadmill of constant upgrades and expenditures just to keep up.
Video is voracious, and we now have have wireless devices like the iPhone that have the horsepower to play high quality video. But the wireless networks don't have the capacity to support that in any meaningful way. And if you built a wireless network capable of supporting lots of video, you'd spend more than you would on running open access fiber to every home and business.
Wireless is here to stay for mobility access, but it's not THE broadband solution...it's part of the solution, but only part of the solution. Open access fiber is now essential public infrastructure if communities want to attract new businesses and keep the ones they already have; integrated fiber and wireless networks like The Wired Road, nDanville, Utopia, and the Eastern Shore Broadband Authority are the future of economic growth in the U.S.
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Has Amazon killed the Kindle?
Amazon may have inadvertently killed its own Kindle ebook reader over the past week. The company discovered that pirated versions of Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm were available for sale on the Kindle bookstore. To comply with the copyright protection laws, Amazon removed the ebook versions from the online bookstore. But then Amazon also remotely deleted copies of the book from all Kindles and refunded the purchase price to the Kindle owners. So Kindle users woke up a few days ago to discover that Amazon had been rummaging around their Kindle, deleting stuff.
The outrage is understandable, and the issue highlights the difficulties of ebooks and copyright protection. Amazon was trying to comply with lawful request to remove pirated texts. And the difference between a paper copy of a book that has been printed as a pirated book and the same text as an ebook is that someone with a copy of a pirated ebook could, with some effort, but not a lot, make and distribute additional copies. So Amazon tried to protect the copyright owners but ended up alienating a lot of Kindle owners.
Amazon has since admitted it made a mistake and says it won't do it anymore, but the damage may already be done. It may dampen Kindle sales, but it may also dampen ebook adoption generally. Once unintended consequence: Kindle texts can be annotated with notes--the equivalent of writing in the margin of a paper book. When Amazon deleted user copies of the books, the company also deleted all the user notes, which were the rightful property of the Kindle owner. Oops....imagine if you had just spent hours reading that book and making notes for a term paper, and you wake up to discover all your work gone. You are not likely to buy another ebook for a long, long time.
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Google Voice nothing new
Google has announced a new service called Voice, which is supposedly a break through because you can give people one number and calls can then be routed wherever you like--home phone, cell phone, office phone, etc. It's a wonderful idea that VoIP telephone providers have been offering for years. Design Nine has used this kind of phone system for more than three years.
Google's promotion of this kind of service will help get more people interested in VoIP, but most people won't take advantage of it until they get better broadband connections that allow true open access networks with a variety of service providers. You can do most of the things Google Voice offers today with Internet-based companies like Vonage, but the quality of the calls varies widely with the time of day and your Internet access provider. The DSL and cable modem Internet providers hate independent phone service providers like Vonage because they siphon customers away from their own voice services. In a well-provisioned open access, service-oriented network, customers would have a choice of VoIP providers and most of them would have excellent voice quality because the network is designed specifically to support multiple providers at high standards of service quality.
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Will the Google OS challenge Microsoft?
The intertubes are abuzz with news about Google's announcement of its Chrome browser-based operating system. Folks that think it will be a Microsoft killer will be disappointed. The new entry to the OS marketplace will erode Microsoft market share at about the same rate competing software like Apple's OS X and the Unix-based Ubuntu. It's bad news for Microsoft, but the new software will barely put a dent in the Redmond company in the short term.
The good news is that more options are a good thing. Not everyone has the same needs, and having a variety of operating system choices, each with a different set of price points, applications, and features creates more competition, more pressure to continuously improve each OS, and more pressure to deliver more at reasonable prices.
Part of the reason Microsoft has been losing market share is because for a long time, there was a lack of competition. The company had little pressure to innovate, reduce prices, or add real value. With Google bringing yet another OS to market, Microsoft has to work harder to keep existing customers and to attract new customers. That is good for everyone.
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Open access networks will become the "normal" way to design and build networks
The NOFA (Notice of Funds Availability) for broadband stimulus funding was released last week; the document defines how to apply for those funds, and both private sector companies and communities can apply. On page 66, beginning at line 1470, the NOFA does something very important: it provides an explicit preference for networks that offer open access services (or open services) to end users. Here is the exact statement:
Reviewers will also consider whether the application proposes to construct infrastructure and implement a business plan which would allow more than one provider to serve end users in the proposal funded service area.
This means networks that offer competitive pricing from more than one provider get preference--this is huge, and could have important long term consequences.
The rules also do something else quite important on the same page (page 66, line 1463), where there is explicit preference for open access transport, which in telecom jargon is "interconnection." The rules say that companies that post their interconnection fees publicly and agree to nondiscrimination will get preference.
Why is the interconnection clause important? I have specific knowledge of one phone company that offered the exact same circuit/service to a community project at FIVE TIMES the fee they charge to other telcos. That is discriminatory pricing, and it is done to discourage competition and to keep community projects out of the "club."
When the dust settles on the broadband stimulus funding in a couple of years, these two little items buried on page 66 may turn out to be the most important part of the whole effort.
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Beginning of the end for Twitter?
Michael Jackson's death crashed Twitter and several other online services, demonstrating the popularity of these things. But Twitter may be about to peak, as one company prepares to sell Twitter followers to advertisers.
Twitter is most interesting as an experiment in computing and social networking, with an emphasis on experiment. Twitter's popularity could diminish just as quickly as it rose if tweets start to be dominated by messages like "Buy Sugar Cola--It's good for you!"
Blogging has already passed its heyday. Blogging is not going away--in fact, it has proved to be an extraordinarily useful method of writing and disseminating news, information, and opinion. But hardly anyone still believes everyone will blog, and most now understand that blogs are just one more writing tool, and nothing more--a good writing tool, but that's it. Good blogs prosper because of good writers--just like every other kind of tool. Owning an expensive paintbrush does not make me Michaelangelo, and thankfully, we've passed through that phase of blogging where people thought a blog made them a good writer.
We're still trying to figure out what the long term purposes and uses of Twitter are--it's an interesting new tool, but not all of us need to tweet all day long.
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Sanity in phone chargers
There are 185 million cellphones sold in Europe every year, meaning that at least that many cellphone chargers come with the phones. And it is likely that 185 million old chargers get tossed out or sit in drawers when that new phone is purchased. But over the next four years, cellphone makers of "data enabled" phones will standardize on mini-USB jacks for the chargers. It will reduce the waste, but also should lower the price of phones slightly, as it should be possible over time to skip including a charger with a new phone.
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Email--not all it's cracked up to be
There are two kinds of spam--the obnoxious stuff that is clearly junk, and then what I call "legitimate" spam, although the word "legitimate" is probably not the right word to describe it.
Every morning, I have to wade through a bunch of email from legitimate firms offering legitimate services--business seminars, webinars, conferences, deals on their products. All real stuff, but also stuff I'm rarely interested in.
Email is a powerful tool that really has transformed the way we work, but we still don't have good, well understood rules for using it. In my view, most of these companies are abusing their email privileges by bombarding me with their email promotional offers. They think that sending one email or a week or even one or two a month is no big deal, but every firm that ever glompfed onto one of my email addresses is doing the same thing, which leads to the daily clogging of my inbox. And what that means is that I rarely bother to read any of them.
And in our personal lives, we also still don't have a good grasp of when and when not to use email. Look at this mess with the Governor of South Carolina. Somehow the private emails between him and his Argentine "friend" became public, and they are barely safe for work. What the heck was he thinking? If you are going to have an affair, at least have the good sense not to document it in electronic missives that often end up being backed up in numerous places beyond your control. If anyone thinks that using a Gmail account with a fake name somehow provides some protection, think again. Any electronic service provided by firms like Yahoo, Microsoft, or Google never throw away anything, because those emails can be mined for marketing info.
I don't know if Sanford was using Gmail to correspond with girl friend, but if he was, I can almost guarantee that ads for cheap travel to Argentina were popping up every time he logged into his Gmail account.
I'm reminded of the crusty old sergeant in "Hill Street Blues," who ended the morning staff meeting with the same admonition every day: "Be careful out there." The Internet is a messy place--businesses that want to attract customers need to be careful about spamming--even if they have the best of intentions, and we need to be careful about whom we correspond with and under what conditions. Email, like diamonds, can be forever.
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Find an online degree, TED talks
Here is an interesting site that just started up--it provides a quick way of finding online degree programs. Whoever is running probably hopes to eventually get some advertising income from it, but nonetheless, it's a useful site. The site also has a blog, with only a few entries, but it has a list of 25 TED talks "that will change your life." I don't know about life changing, but some of the TED talks I've watched have been really good. TED stands for "Technology, Entertainment, Design," and is a small, invitation only conference held annually. The conferences tries to have a wide range of interesting people each year that are prepared to share ideas freely, and as I noted above, some of the talks can be quite good--the kind of lectures you wish you had in high school or college but rarely got to experience.
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