Technology Futures

I sat through a presentation by an electric utility on their BPL (Broadband Over Powerline) offering. The company is committed to being able to provide broadband connectivity to their rural customer base, which is terrific. They should be commended. But the service starts at 256 kilobits for $30 and ends at 3 megabits for $90. The system requires that the electric company install repeaters at least every 3500 feet, or about every half mile, throughout the entire service area--active electronics spaced more closely than DSL (another copper-based technology). And fiber signals can be transmitted tens of miles before needing repeaters. The firm has been testing the system for more than two years and is still not ready to offer it because it is susceptible to noise, which reduces the available bandwidth (fiber has no noise or interference issues). The representative called the system "very complex," and said, "...it looks simple, but it is very complicated, as we are finding out." What may save the experiment is that the firm intends to roll out smart grid energy conservation and meter reading services, and the savings there may help pay for the equipment and maintenance. But the local region will still have "little broadband" compared to other rural areas rolling out fiber (which also supports smart grid uses).

The CrunchPad may be available soon, and it is likely to be just one of many competitors to the newly emerging tablet market. The Amazon Kindle will be remembered as the first, but like many first to market devices, it may not outlast the competition. The CrunchPad is an inexpensive (projected to sell for $299) tablet designed primarily for Web browsing, but it is likely it can or will do more over time. The obvious other application would be viewing PDFs, which would put squarely in competition with the Kindle, which was designed primarily for ebooks.

We are all going to end up with a tablet, and the big loser will be laptop makers. I don't really need to lug around a five pound laptop while traveling. I need to check email, access the Web, and do presentations--all things an inexpensive tablet can do with low power processors and no hard drive.

Expect to see lots of new business models emerge around the tablet as well. AT&T got the religion early with the enormous success of the iPhone, which has captured an enormous segment of the mobile Web traffic out of all proportion to its market share--because it does a great job as a Web browsing device. AT&T is planning a tablet device that either has 3G wireless connectivity built in and/or simply accesses the AT&T wireless network via a companion AT&T cellphone.

Amazon's business model is based on selling books. And I'd be amazed if there are not some news publishers looking at including a tablet as part of a newspaper (newstablet?) subscription. In fact, a smart newspaper would look at selling newstablets at a lost (e.g. $99) and then drastically cutting the cost of a daily news subscription.

We're still only baby steps into the Information Revolution and the Knowledge Economy, but low cost, high performance broadband access is going to make the world go round. Communities that lack the telecom infrastructure to enable these emerging devices are going to see their business and jobs growth head into negative numbers.

Sirius XM has released screen shots of its iPhone app for the radio service. The iPhone software will be free, but there will be a $3/month fee to listen to a select group of Sirius XM channels. In other words, for a very modest $36/year, you get Sirius XM on your phone.

Some pundits are pooh-poohing the development, but the iPhone software opens up new possibilities for Sirius XM subscribers without the requirement to buy the specialized hardware. The most likely new subscriber base will come from home-based listeners who want access to Sirius XM in the house but don't want the bother of buying the radio add-ons. If you have an Internet connection, in home WiFi, and some sort of iPod/iPhone stereo (there are hundreds of them), you can drop your iPhone in the base and listen to your favorite Sirius XM channel. This is already being done, using some of the Internet streaming services, but Sirius XM's paid content brings a lot of content you can't get for free.

This gets Sirius XM out of the car and into homes, at a reasonable cost. And it begins to move the company away from dependence on the satellite distribution model, which has always been a limiting factor.

Here is a story about the state of North Carolina trying to entice Apple to place a 100 job server farm in the state. With unemployment in North Carolina nudging 11%, state officials are smart to try to attract Knowledge Economy businesses, and server farms are a growth industry. The massive amounts of data being stored "online" have to reside in a physical place, and the companies that are making a business out of this (e.g. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and many smaller firms) have several requirements.

They have to spread these data centers out for security reasons--fires, floods, and terrorism can happen almost anywhere, so no reputable firm wants to store all its data in one place. So they have multiple data centers, each storing complete copies of all the data. Second, spreading the centers out helps speed data to and from its destination. Different data centers will deliver data to customers based on customer location.

When picking sites for these server farms, these companies are, of course, looking for tax benefits, but your community won't get on the short list unless you have local fiber, good fiber routes out to major Internet switchpoints, and reliable electric power.

All things that are relatively easy to get started on if you want businesses of the future.