Technology Futures

A firm in Japan is rolling out gigabit broadband services to residential customers for $60/month. Back in April, FCC Commissioner Deborah Tate gave a talk and noted that the 100 megabit fiber connections in Japan were already showing signs of "congestion." The GigE service ought to improve throughput.

Meanwhile, we still have lots of people in the U.S. talking about DSL (at around 1 megabit) as "broadband."

Cisco has announced a new marketing effort to expand the availability of high quality videoconference facilities, or telepresence rooms. What is the difference between these rooms and older videoconference systems? Three things:

• HD quality cameras and monitors provide real "you are there" interactivity. No more grainy television monitors or YouTube style images blown up on an LCD projector.
• High performance, high capacity broadband connections that can carry multiple live HD video streams. How much is enough? Figure about 10 to 15 megabits per location, so if you have are having a conference with two remote locations, you need as much as 45 megabits of bandwidth.
• Dramatically improved audio. No more "I'm talking from the bottom of well" sound quality, where you can't really hear half the people in the room. Multiple microphones and sophisticated sound processing software make it easy to carry on conversations without shouting.

If you are trying to attract businesses to your town or region, you should have at least one well-equipped facility available for rent by the hour. It may be just the thing to get startups and entrepreneurs interested in more rural locations for their businesses. Every business park should have a telepresence facility, and every public library should have a meeting room available for both business and community use.

Here is an absolutely spectacular picture of Mercury from a new NASA space probe. It pretty much confirms that Mercury is not a place anyone would want to live, and it is an amazing example of technology in action. The physics of getting a space probe to travel across hundreds of millions of miles to be in exactly the right place at the right time is exacting and difficult; it's nice to know, in midst of this economic downturn, that we still have the capacity to get some very hard stuff done and done right.

The City of St. Paul is taking a serious look at fiber to the home as part of a community broadband effort for the city. A local group has started a Web site that has a lot of good information on it.