Technology Futures

I'll be part of a Webinar on broadband stimulus funding, and my portion will address the kind of planning that may be needed for community broadband grant requests. Here is the link for more information; note that registration is required (but the seminar is free).

This misleading article suggests an astroturf effort to discredit community broadband projects.

Some incumbents may be fearful of the stimulus funding because it will enable many community projects to meet build out goals much more quickly than originally planned, and to show that they can be financially viable.

There is a mixture of disinformation and truth in the short article, combined skillfully to paint with a very broad brush.

The disinformation part is the phrase "taxpayer funded." We actually don't ever recommend funding these efforts with tax revenue, and I know of very few community projects that have taken that route.

The "truth" part is the that community WiFi projects, as a whole, have not done well and cannot meet future capacity requirements. But by not differentiating between fiber projects (e.g. Danville, Lafayette, LA, The Wired Road) and modest but inadequate WiFi efforts, they cleverly manage to make it sound like all community projects are the same, and that all have failed.

nDanville's first year of operations as an open access, open service network has collected only one complaint: service providers want the project to hook up customers faster!

The Wired Road has cut costs dramatically for the Carroll County Public schools and increased bandwidth to individual schools by as much as 60 times. The local hospital has received one of the first fiber connections, and cut their Internet costs in half and tripled their bandwidth. The first residential wireless customers are being added this month, and sixty buildings in downtown Galax will get fiber next week. Lafayette, Louisiana has begun offering superb "future proof" fiber connections to residents and businesses after winning a long legal battle.

Well planned community efforts are going to reshape the telecom landscape, and the incumbents are worried. They need not be, as they can always come on open networks and compete to keep their existing customers and try to win new ones.

According to Broadband Reports, a bill is being considered by the Pennsylvania legislature that would make it virtually impossible for communities in that state to use stimulus funds for any kind of broadband infrastructure--even in areas that are unserved or underserved by incumbents.

Part of this is just poor information gathering by legislative staff, since there are myriad ways to structure community investments in broadband to benefit the private sector. Design Nine has been helping communities do this for years, and it is straightforward to create win/win situations that allow local governments to make targeted investments that create private sector job and business opportunities.

Ed Dreistadt reports on a New York Times article that says that TV is doing "fine," despite the fact that other old media like newspapers are dropping like flies. As Ed notes, some of us are not so sure. I'm regularly bumping into people that are telling me they hardly watch TV anymore. They get news online, and they can download most TV shows and watch them whenever they want. And of course, a lot of what we used to watch on TV can be accessed as short snippets on YouTube or the network sites. Why stay up and watch Saturday Night Live when you can simply check the blogs on Sunday morning, see what was funny, and then watch just the funny segments on the NBC Web site?

I have been predicting the death of TV for a long time, but it is happening faster than even I expected. I really don't know how the cable TV companies will stay in business, and the bad economy will likely accelerate the problem. If you have to cut household costs, which would you cut first? Internet or TV?