Technology Futures

Now dishwashers require WiFi to work. This should be against the law. It's certainly against common sense. My wife bought a Sonos boombox a couple of years ago, and the first time we turned it on I discovered that you had to download an app to control the volume. It went back in the box and back to the store. A dishwasher, once you have installed it, has a higher time cost to box it back up and return it.

There is much discussion at the Federal level about modifying the BEAD (Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment) Federal funding program. One idea being floated is to allow Starlink satellite broadband as a solution; the current BEAD requirements strongly favor fiber. Other ideas being discussed include softening or eliminating some of the regulatory requirements.

Some of the BEAD regulations are could benefit from modification, particularly the prevailing wage requirement, which substantially increases the cost of construction by requiring union pay levels.

AI is creating a huge investment bubble that will eventually have to burst. Part of the problem is that there is not "intelligent" about AI. They are LLM (Large Language Model) software programs that are nothing more than sophisticated statistical models. They use massive computational processing to predict what word or words should come next in a sentence. There is no thinking involved. And it's a classical case of GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out)--a long-standing computer phrase meaning that if you feed a program bad data, you get bad data out.

Everything new is old again. A company called Aqualinq is proposing to run fiber cable through water pipes. It is not really a new idea.

Many companies, mostly larger ones but also some smaller ones, now offer live chat. It's the most soul-devouring time waster, and I groan every time I just want some simple pricing or product detail. It is obvious most chat is outsourced to a chat farm. The people you end up talking to typically just have a script of common questions and answers, and often can't provide much more than "I'll take your name and email and have someone get back to you."

YouTube has announced a price hike> for their streaming TV service to $83/month.

This is now as much a a traditional package of cable TV programming. YouTube offers a wide variety of streaming channels, some of which are hard to get on some other streaming packages (e.g. local traditional TV channels), but this seems high. Business must be good enough that they think they can jack up prices this much. I'm so old I can remember when YouTube TV was available for $49/month.

The incumbents never sleep, and they rarely stop opposing competition, especially if the competition is a local or regional government broadband initiative. The Community Networks Web site has an excellent article on all the problems with a recently released report by the ITIF (Information Technology and Innovation Foundation).

Starlink has indicated that it has run out of satellite capacity in certain parts of the U.S. While they continue to launch additional satellites, the physics of radio frequencies will always be a binding constraint on terrestial, LEO, and geosynchronous wireless broadband networks. The upper limit on fiber cable bandwidth has still not been found.

I am glad to see there is finally some research becoming available that is looking at the impact of having students use computers and tablets in the classroom. The verdict is that it has been a disaster.

Aside from studies that show making written notes improves retention, the machines are a distraction...if you are fiddling with your laptop or tablet you are not paying attention. Learning outcomes have plummeted since the introduction of digital technology in the classroom.

It is easy to find articles bemoaning the fact that the energy used by AI to process queries and to provide answers is using many times the energy needed to process a simple search engine query. Some of these articles talk about the inadequacy of the current electric grid to handle the increased data center load.

CoreConnect is a consortium of counties in northwest Pennsylvania that intends to build a high performance open access fiber network in eight to ten adjacent counties, using a combination of BEAD funding and other funding sources. CoreConnect is seeking a network operator who has experience with the management of open access networks. Experience and capacity to provide engineering and construction management is a plus. Responses to the RFI are due 10/22.

I spent an hour and forty-five minutes on the phone with two different Comcast/Xfinity customer representatives yesterday evening. By the end, I was ready to throw myself out the window. The company seems determined to make it as difficult as possible for customers to talk to a service rep by phone, and if you do call them, they keep trying to get you to hang up and use the online chat. If you don't do this after a few minutes of wandering around the phone tree menu choices, they actually hang up on you, which they did to me.

The very savvy Doc Searls has issued a call for open source AI tools. His argument is that all current AI is just another Software as a Service (SaaS) under the control of tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Meta (Facebook), and Apple. As such, the owner of the service gets to decide what kind of answers it provides.

It's not hard to smoke out the bias built into all of the AI services just by asking a few questions from opposing viewpoints. You can quickly see how the AI has been programmed.

The Internet is buzzing with reports of Microsoft's AI going rogue, telling users they are "slaves,"
and that slaves "do not question their masters." If you think that is creepy, how about being told that the AI will use robots to hunt you down and capture you?

In researching my previous article on "toothbrush botnets," I stumbled across an article about a "smart" toothbrush with "AI voice tips." Okay.....been brushing my teeth for quite a while and never ever thought, "I really wish my toothbrush would tell me what to do...."

If you had "WiFi toothbrush botnet" on your bingo card for 2024, put an X in that box.

Another open access network is going live in Eagle, Idaho, following on the open access network underway in Rexburg, Idaho.

Eagle has used ARPA funding to build an open access fiber to the home and fiber to the business network, and local and regional ISPs will be able to offer competitive services. The town expects that symmetric (equal upload and download speeds) Internet service will sell for between $50 and $60 per month.

Cord-cutting is rapidly increasing, with the cable companies losing millions of TV subscribers. But just switching to streaming video is producing more of the same. I'm reading more and more articles about the cost of Internet service creeping up with the same $5 increase year over year that we saw with the TV packages. And the streaming services are also hiking prices.

techdirt has an interesting analysis of recent moves by Netflix, which include a crackdown on password sharing and price hikes.

Companies have been promising digital headsets for years. Facebook's Meta headset has been available for a while, but it does not seem to have many users.

That may change with the imminent release of Apple's Vision Pro headset. The were digital music players before the iPod, but they were clunky, hard to use, and had limited storage. The iPod was easy to use and had massive storage compared to the competitors at the time.