Technology Futures

Verizon wants to be deregulated in Virginia for phone service. The company asserts that there is ample competition and that the company should no longer be forced to charge set prices for certain services.

There is a lot of confusion about the "right" approach to community broadband, and part of the problem is a lack of clarity about the meaning of "open access" systems. At a high level, open access refers to a network that allows multiple services providers to compete for customers--the right way to do things, as opposed to closed networks typically offered by incumbent telephone and cable companies, who do not want competition (rightly so, from their perspective) on their own infrastructure.

The Wall Street Journal had a brief note about Google's new search engine, called SearchMash. It does what a lot of other search engines have been doing for a while, which is to provide more targeted results, with links to images, video, blogs, and even Wikipedia articles. A few cursory searches seems produced better results with less junk than I usually see in the first few pages of a Google search. SearchMash is also ad-free for now, which is a nice benefit. It is about time Google started to defend its home turf.

The Apple iPhone is being widely criticized for having relatively slow data service (about 256 kilobits/second) compared to Verizon's much speedier EVDO data service, which can run two or three times faster. The wireless wars have whipsawed back and forth over the past several years. Four or five years ago, many of us, including me, were enthusiastic about the potential of WiFi winning the wireless connectivity wars. But as the shortcomings of WiFi became clearer, Verizon began deployment of their EVDO wireless technology, which is piggybacked on top of their existing cellular network.

First, AT&T and the regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) were split up in 1984. Who knew then that there was a twenty-five year plan put into effect to put it all back together again?

The iPhone (picture gallery) utterly changes everything notion we have had about what constitutes a phone/PDA. Like many of Apple's previous design efforts, it will force every other portable device maker to rethink their own designs. But I think Apple has made one mistake that will really limit the potential of the device.

As expected, Apple is showing off (as I write this, the keynote is still in progress) the Apple iPhone. It is a combination phone, iPod, and desktop computer, running Apple's flagship operating system, OS X.

At the risk of being boring and/or repetitive, this changes everything, and just made every other cellphone obsolete. Palm is in deep deep trouble.

The Consumer Electronics Show is in full swing in Las Vegas, so there is a flood of new gadgets. One that caught my eye is iRobot, made the company that produces the very popular Roomba vacuum cleaners and sweepers. iRobot is a round, low mobile base with interfaces that make it easy to add all kinds of, well, robot type stuff. You really need to look at the pictures to get an idea of what is possible.

I'm not sure anybody really needs one of these things, but it has a certain appeal. Viewsonic has a new LCD projector with an iPod dock. What this means is that it is very easy to play video (stored on your iPod); you no longer have to do the cables and laptops and power cords dance just to play a video. You should also be able to do nice slideshows of your still photos stored on your iPod, again without all the fuss of hooking up a laptop computer.

Speculation has been raging for weeks that Apple will announce some kind of phone/iPod device tomorrow at the start of the MacWorld conference. You have to take Apple speculation with a grain of salt, since so many writers tend to have some kind of agenda with Apple. Just weeks before Christmas, journalists were writing excitedly that the famed iPod and the iTunes Store were in steep decline, citing suspect data that supposedly showed iTunes sales had dropped drastically.

Microsoft has officially blessed IPTV by announcing that the next XBox revision would be able to act as an IPTV set top box. Content will be provided by certain broadband providers like AT&T and BellSouth. If this sounds like a marriage made in heck, it probably is. The most likely reason Microsoft has made this announcement is to try to counter the buzz that will likely emerge on Tuesday (January 9th) when Apple announces its own set top box.

GM may be poised to pull an electric rabbit out of its hat that could save the company. The car manufacturer has provided a preview of the Chevrolet Volt, an electric hybrid that has a good chance of beating the Japanese electric hybrids at their own game. GM has done something that is blindingly obvious, but for some reason has been avoided entirely by the Japanese carmakers: make an all electric drive train.

In the "Not sure whether to laugh or to cry" category, MapRoom has stories of people following their "smart" GPS directions to ridiculous places. One German driver ended in a railroad station--with his car on the tracks.

Getting fiber to the premise (FTTP) is always a challenge. In many communities, there is not space available on aging telephone poles, or the incumbents try to charge exorbitant make-ready fees to hang a thin fiber cable. Trenching is an alternative, but that can be more expensive and disruptive. CableRunner now offers an interesting alternative, which is to use existing sewer and stormwater drain infrastructure to run fiber through neighborhoods and into homes.

We are in the January technology doldrums. New product announcements won't start to appear for another couple of weeks, and communities with projects underway need a couple of weeks back at work before moving forward. 2007 predictions articles are popular, with most of them listing the "top ten" trends for the year, or something like that. Most of the speculation is pure guessing, and hardly worth commenting on.

Arguably, there are way too many college football bowl games. If you just don't have time to watch them all over the next three or four days, don't worry. You can watch them via the Internet. All of the bowl games are going to be available on the iTunes Store and other online media stores within 24 hours of each game's finish. It is one more sign that cable and satellite TV as we know it are nearly dead. It also indicates that we are going to need a whole lot more bandwidth than we have right now.

One big change in the switch to an all IP-based telecommunications system is that businesses may see lower taxes. Franchise fees, carrier line assessments, subscriber line charges, and other state and local telecom taxes often add up to nearly 50% of the cost of a business telephone line. Most or all of those charges disappear when a business switches to VoIP.

As I visit communities around the country and work with local economic developers and elected officials, I find great skepticism focused on my insistence that we need minimum acceptable bandwidth of 100 megabits per second to every home and business. These officials often scoff at the notion that their citizens will ever need that kind of bandwidth, and the example they often cite is elderly people in their community, who "will never need that kind of bandwidth."

The popular social networking site MySpace is beginning to have problems with spam, phishing, porn, and other kinds of unfriendly and malicious content. At the root of much of this is the anonymity of the sites. Anyone can register as a MySpace user, which has delighted sexual predators who use the site to find vulnerable underage children.

Peter Gutmann, a well known software security expert from Australia, has posted a long piece on the some of the problems he sees with Vista. Gutmann's piece is not the typical anti-Microsoft rant; he has done extensive research and consulted with many other reputable experts. His focus on on Vista's new "features" that are designed to prevent unauthorized use of copyrighted content like videos and music.