Technology Futures

Via Jon Hunt's excellent Broadband Policy Watch Web site, Google has rolled out a Google Fiber for Communities Web site. There is not much new information; Google is still promising that they will select a community before the end of the year. Of interest is the focus on microtrenching. This is a technology that Design Nine has been using for several years. We particularly like the Teraspan products.

I just spent a few minutes clicking around trying to find the Web site of a particular business. After four or five attempts to click through on links that I *thought* would go to the actual Web site of the business, I gave up. Every link took me to another link farm or worse, actually just clicked back through to the same page I left. Of course, each time I clicked, another list of Web ads got loaded into the page I landed on, and that's what much of the Web has become--just a snarled mess of link farms.

Save NC Broadband reports that the attempt to halt community-owned and municipal broadband in North Carolina met its final defeat this year. The effort to get a bill passed that would essentially prohibit municipalities from taking control of their own economic future dragged on through the entire NC legislative session, and someone could probably write a pretty good horror movie script from the saga.

Like all popular Internet services, Facebook has enjoyed rapid growth over the past three or four years, as the service added many hundreds of thousands of users a week (or more--millions in some past months). But that growth has finally stalled out, as everyone who wants to be on Facebook already is. Geometric growth is a wonderful thing, but there was always a finite limit to that growth. Even more telling, the amount of activity by registered users has also dropped.

Microsoft has killed the Kin. Don't know what the "Kin" is? Neither does anyone else. It is (was) a "social media-centered phone for teenagers." But among other problems, the monthly contract for a Kin phone cost as much as the most expensive smartphone (e.g. Blackberries, iPhones, Droid phones). And darned few parents are going to spring for a pricy phone, and a pricey voice plan, and a pricey data plan just so their kid can call for a ride after soccer practice.

Broadband Properties has published my article The Third Way for Broadband. This provides a concise description of how and why open access business models work for broadband networks. Note that the open access business model is NOT inherently one that requires a community-owned network. A private sector broadband provider, including an incumbent (e.g. Verizon, Comcast, etc.) could also adopt this model and do very well financially.

Hulu has announced a new subscription and ad-based service called Hulu Plus for $9.99 per month that will provide access to the full season of many "TV" shows. That's a heck of a lot less than the Apple iTunes Store, which sells shows for one or two dollars. Think of Hulu Plus as an alternative to paying for a cable or satellite subscription.

With all the hype over the new iPhone in the last couple of weeks, the iPad has fallen off the radar of the press. But the tablet computer is flying off the shelves. Apple has sold three million iPads in 80 days. Or in other words, the company is selling a million iPads every three weeks. And the product is not even available in many other parts of the world yet, so the sales curve is likely to accelerate through the end of the year.

I just left a meeting in which a frustrated local business owner talked about the problems he is having purchasing adequate bandwidth to support a new service his company has developed in the past six months. Bottom line: He's faced with packing up the business and moving the the 100+ employees to northern Virginia if he can't solve his bandwidth problem. The fundamental issue is that because of a lack of open access infrastructure to his building, he has to buy bandwidth at extremely high prices from one of two incumbent providers.

Although hardly anyone knows it, Barnes and Noble has a tablet-based book reader. Amazon's Kindle was dominating the market for tablet book readers until the iPad was announced, and Barnes and Noble and Sony were running far behind Amazon. Even so, the market for book readers was relatively small because they cost several hundred dollars--less than the iPad, but not that much less.

AT&T sold out of its entire stock of the new iPhone in one day with the largest online sales in the history of AT&T. It now appears that more phones will not be available for a couple of weeks. Phones can still be ordered from Apple. If this summer is anything like that last three summers of iPhone releases, there will be shortages until early fall.

Twenty-two senators have sent a letter to the FCC asking the agency to set the bar higher for broadband in rural areas. The senators pointed out the target of 4 megabits/second bandwidth for rural areas but a much higher target of 100 megabits/second for urban areas of the country.

Given that rural projects like Utopia and The Wired Road are already delivering 100 megabit fiber connections, this seems like a reasonable request.

The nDanville fiber network is almost three years old, and is beginning to get national recognition here. Design Nine has been working with the City of Danville on this effort since 2006. We did the early business and financial planning, vendor selection, and open access network design. More about nDanville is available on their Web site.

Jeff Daily of App-Rising makes an important point in this article that I have been writing about for some time: "broadband" and "the Internet" are not the same thing. Broadband is the network, the transport system, the road. The Internet is just one of many services that can be transported over that road. Unfortunately, legislators don't always understand the distinction, and many incumbents are happy to feed the confusion to get state and Federal rules designed to prop up their monopolies.

Fiber everywhere is the simple goal the national government of New Zealand has set. In ten years, the government intends to have a minimum of 100 megabit fiber connections to 75% of homes and businesses in the entire country. They are doing this by going open access. It's a very simple model.

Dallas County, Texas lost its IT systems for three days when a broken water main flooded the basement of the building where all the county's servers are housed. The servers were fine--they are located on the fifth floor. But the UPS and other electrical equipment supplying power to those fifty floor servers were located in the basement, where water flooded in from the broken main.

Via the excellent Community Broadband Networks, the City of Chattanooga's Electric Power Board is going to roll out fiber-delivered Internet as part of the utility's triple play services (voice, video, and Internet). Customers will be able to purchase symmetric Internet access packages with speeds up to 150 megabit/second (again, symmetric).

The New America Foundation has an excellent summary of what has been going on in North Carolina. It should be of interest to anyone who thinks communities and regions have a right to determine their own economic future. The industry-financed fight in North Carolina may show up in any number of other states in the next couple of years as community broadband efforts not only mature but excel.

Lately, visiting some of my regular "regular read" blogs, I'm finding not only fewer posts but notes from the bloggers that after five or six years, they are turning the blog off or just posting a lot less. The comments all seem to run in the same direction: "I've said everything I have wanted to say." And regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I am posting a lot less than I was three or four years ago. Part of the change is due the the growth in Design Nine; we're planning and building more networks in more places around the country than we were three or four years ago.

AT&T has announced changes to its U.S. data plans for iPhones and iPads. Most current iPhone users pay $30/month for an unlimited data plan. A bit pricey, but you know what you are paying every month, and you don't have to worry about surprise charges on your next month's bill (I've had an iPhone for two years).