Technology Futures

We recently hooked up a rural bed and breakfast just outside of Blacksburg. The B&B is in a beautiful setting but also happens to be on a rural leg of our Gig fiber network. They had formerly struggled with sub-standard DSL Internet connectivity for residents. Once they had the Gig fiber installed, they found that people were staying longer because they could actually enjoy the getaway and get some work done while they were there.

We get calls every week asking if Starlink is going to eliminate the need for terrestrial broadband solutions like rural fiber and fixed point wireless broadband.

The short answer is, "No."

Starlink is a substantial improvement over traditional geosynchronous orbit satellite Internet (e.g. Hughesnet, Viasat), but it is still going to have much higher latency than terrestial wireless, and its bandwidth will never get close to Gig fiber.

It is interesting how many press releases I have seen recently from incumbent providers explaining that nobody needs symmetric Internet, and that highly asymmetric service (e.g. 100 Meg down, 10 Meg up) is just fine. Both the cable and the phone companies are trying to get us to drink this Kool-Aid, but economic developers are finding out something different.

Apri 1, 2021

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, announced a new direction for the MacOS and the Mac-based office apps that are provided with the Macintosh operating system (Pages, Numbers, Keynote).

"We have realized that providing high quality software with carefully tested user interfaces is not returning enough value to shareholders. We took a long careful look at our software development process and realized we are spending entirely too much time and money on producing a quality product."

The incumbent telephone and cable companies must be really scared of competition from new fiber networks, because they are still peddling the old, tired "Who needs a Gig?" baloney to elected officials and regulators.

It is really a red herring argument, for two reasons:

Chattanooga's city-owned fiber network (via the City electric utility) is now ten years old, and they have published some results. The Gigabit fiber network delivered, on average, $261 Million PER YEAR in new jobs, retained jobs, lower unemployment, and reduced electric outages. Read the whole article for all the benefits.

The always thorough and analytical Steve Ross has a great discussion of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) broadband and why Elon Musk's Starlink is not going to be a one size fits all replacement for fiber in rural areas.

Mediacom essentially has confirmed what I and many others have been saying for more than a decade, which is the cable HFC (Hybrid Fiber Coax) network is twentieth century technology that is not able to support the growing demand for bandwidth.

Stop the Cap! recently cited a Mediacom customer who got a letter and a phone call from Mediacom to complain that the customer was using too much bandwidth.

Early reports from beta tests of Starlink, the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Internet service are very promising, with excellent bandwidth and lower latency than the traditional Viasat and Hughesnet systems. Lower latency is important because it means that some voice and video services like Skype and Zoom may be more usable. It could be a game changer for rural and remote rural areas of the U.S. There are many rural areas that it is going to take time to deploy fiber. In the meantime, Starlink could be a good bridge solution.

The "big three" of social media--Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube--have become the targets of increasing criticism around the way they choose to allow some users to post "acceptable" content while censoring other types of content. The companies' defense is to claim the protection of Section 230, a portion of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

Stop the Cap points out that Comcast is rolling out data caps in many parts of the East Coast. If you want to keep your "unlimited" plan, you can pay an extra $30/month. Bandwidth is so cheap for a company the size of Comcast that the only reason for doing this is to hike profits.

I would like to meet the person that convinced Google that there would be big demand for a phone app that lets you hum a song and have the Google InnerTubes tell you what the name and artist of the song is.

This strikes me as yet another example of bored Google software engineers without enough to do rolling out stuff that no one really wants. Does this really make anyone's life better?

Alex, I'll take "Things I never thought I would write about" for $500. A network security researcher has successfully hacked a coffee machine and was able to take control of it, make it beep constantly, have it refuse to make coffee, and spill water all over.

Smaller communities in rural areas are always trying to attract workers and families. Tulsa, Oklahoma decided to try paying them to move, and it is apparently working. The City offers $10,000 in cash for "entrepreneurs, remote workers, and digital nomads." It's an idea so crazy it works! The funds can be used to offset moving expenses and monthly expenses during the first year of residency.

The City of Huntington, West Virginia wants better broadband and had been begging the incumbents for years to improve service, with no success. The Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) granted the City $2.5M in funds to start building a Gig fiber network, and that woke the incumbents from a deep sleep.

According to an article in
Wired magazine, it is becoming commonplace for law enforcement to "wiretap" your smart speaker by asking Amazon or Google for transcripts and timestamps of recorded activity. Police have to file a search warrant or subpoena to do so, but users of such devices may not be aware that what the tech companies are recording and storing could be used by law enforcement.

The corona virus and the need for so many to work from home has highlighted what I have been telling communities for nearly two decades: neighborhoods and rural roads are business districts.

It is too soon to tell what will happen once most businesses are open again and people return to work, but "return to work" may have an entirely different meaning as businesses realize employees can work productively from home at least part of the time.

A lot of people who used videoconferencing only lightly or never at all have acquired a crash course in it over the past month. Because Design Nine and WideOpen Networks have had staff distributed around the country for years, it was not a challenge for us.

OneWeb just filed for bankruptcy. The company planned to put hundreds of Internet satellites into low earth orbit (LEO) to provide high speed Internet service. OneWeb promised Internet speeds of several hundred Megabits, but only managed to get seventy satellites into orbit out of a planned six hundred by the end of 2020. All 500 employees are expected to be laid off within weeks.

I have been writing for years (decades, at this point) about how important symmetric bandwidth is to the business from home, work from home segment of the economy. It would appear that the lockdown we are currently experiencing and the huge surge in work from home needs has been illustrating just how important symmetric bandwidth is. Related to symmetric bandwidth is Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology, which provides end to end encryption of an Internet connection between two points (e.g. a home based worker and their corporate network).