Technology Futures

The FCC has finally released new definitions of broadband.

This article provides more data on the fast-shifting but likely permanent change in how we decide where we want to live. We are probably seeing the biggest shift in housing since the end of World War II and the rise of the suburb.

According to The Register, the airlines are planning to use mobile phones to cut costs and to sell ad revenue. As you book a flight, you will give your mobile phone number to the airline. They will use this to push information on the flight to you (not so bad), and once you get to the airport, they may even check you in electronically via your phone, which is already underway in Japan.

Apparently, multitasking (reading email, watching YouTube, texting, talking on the phone--all at the same time) is making us stupid. Literally. Our brains are being rewired, and not in a good way, according to this article.

It is more, apparently, than just a time management issue. How many times have you heard someone remark, only half-joking, "I need to get out of the office to get some work done."

Paper ballots will be used to collect votes in many elections this fall. There will be a drop in the use of electronic ballot equipment because of security problems, and more states are using paper ballots that are optically scanned because they are easy to use, ease to scan, and provide an auditable paper trail. The biggest shortcoming of the electronic equipment is the lack of a paper trail that can be used to verify results.

Sprint's new WiMax initiative with partner Clearwire is stalling because the high capacity wireless access points don't work very well when backhaul (the connection from the wireless radios/antennas is over old-fashioned copper phone lines.

Do the math....

The Pure Electric Vehicle is just what we need. If this car actually gets built, it has the simplicity, low cost, and small size that could potentially win millions of buyers. The designer is promising to sell it for $9,999, meaning it will only cost the equivalent of four tanks of gas 8^). Kidding aside, for the price, a lot of households could quickly justify the cost of this vehicle as a second or third car.

Clearwire has announced plans to operate its proposed national WiMax network as an open access system, and major players like Sprint, Comcast, and Time Warner have apparently already agreed to become resellers on the network. It will be interesting to see how this turns out, as an enormous investment will be required to build the national infrastructure required to meet the promised goals. One of the backers of Clearwire is Sprint, which is losing cellular marketshare rapidly, and may regard Clearwire as its last chance to keep from being broken up and sold.

Once again, fairly small countries are far ahead of the U.S. in thinking about broadband. Malaysia has announced an ambitious but entirely doable plan to take fiber to major areas of the country, with the Federal government paying about 30% of the cost in a deal with the biggest telecom company in Malaysia. In the U.S., it would be the equivalent of the states making deals to write checks directly to the incumbent providers (which some states already do).

Spit (Spam over internet telephony) may be worse than spam, according to this article. As more and more businesses and people make the switch to VoIP telephone services like Vonage, the spammers are gearing up for the mother of all dinnertime sales call efforts. But wherease the Do Not Call list mandated by Congress managed to get those annoying POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) sales calls under control, Spit will be coming from servers in China, Nigeria, and other lawless areas of the globe, beyond the reach of U.S regulators.

Every year about this time, I write about wireless. I'm at the beach, and have to use the local wireless service. It works great at 6 AM, when no one else is up, but once all the other people in the neighborhood start logging on, the service gets slower and slower. Wireless is a shared medium, like cable modem service. A wireless access node with, for example, 20 megabits of bandwidth, shares that bandwidth among all users.

VPNs, or Virtual Private Networks, are fast becoming a major issue with respect to broadband. A VPN is a way for a remote user (e.g. from home, traveling) to be connected to the corporate or business network as if he or she was in the office. It gives the home-based worker or business traveler complete access to all the documents and services he or she would normally have sitting at their desk.

Despite high oil prices, small businesses created 61,000 jobs in May. Too many communities discount small businesses in their economic development strategy, and fail to include small businesses needs in their broadband planning. Big industrial companies get lots of attention, but those firms are the ones shedding jobs. Fast, nimble small firms can adapt more easily to changing economic conditions and changing customers needs.

Chicago ComEd electric power customers may end up paying an extra $3 per month to help fund a Smart Grid data network that will allow ComEd to better control power use and to speed diagnosis and identification of power outages.

Comcast has announced that it will start slowing down the traffic of its broadband users if they are using too much; "too much" generally means running P2P (peer to peer) filesharing applications like BitTorrent, which can run for hours or days while sending or receiving large files (like movies or music).

Telehealth services are the sleeper when putting together a business model for community broadband projects. Telehealth services, which will be focused primarily towards the elderly but will also provide additional mobility and freedom for those with chronic health conditions, will have a substantial positive impact on the financial health of a community or municipal open services, open access broadband network.

Expect to see lots of these around town in the next several years: the Smart Car is a gas-sipping commuter and errands vehicle that would fill the bill nicely as a second car in a lot of households. Next: let's see the electric version of this car, and I don't want some complicated "hybrid," I just want a cheap electric motor and some batteries. I'll plug it in at night, and stick a solar panel in the back window to get free charging during the day while it sits in the office parking lot.

Comcast, which has been criticized of late for apparently trying to throttle peer to peer (P2P) file sharing traffic, seems to be shifting focus by investing in a P2P business start up. This is a good sign. As I and others have argued for a long time, we need to shift away from the "bucket of bits" model of broadband and move toward a service-oriented business and network model. P2P file sharing is just another service.

Google has announced its long promised Google Health service, which stores your medical and drug records on Google servers. You get to set your own userid and password, and Google makes a big deal about the high level of security on their servers. But I don't think the biggest privacy concern is from hackers--I think Google CAN keep the servers secure.

Steve Cisler passed away today from complications due to cancer. Steve was an early pioneer in the U.S. community networking movement, and helped many of us in the early nineties as local community network projects were starting up. Steve was at Apple Computer then, and he was able to provide important and often critical funding and equipment for local projects. One of Steve's contributions was to provide an Apple Web server to the Blacksburg library near the start of the Blacksburg Electronic Village.