Technology Futures

The Kansai Electric company in Japan has deployed new equipment that enables them to transmit 1 terabit of data per second over their company fiber lines.

Use of the Internet is booming in the United States. A new study released by the U.S. Census Bureau shows big changes from 1997.

Taiwan joins the growing list of countries that have nationwide strategies for providing some kind of broadband everywhere. The government has inked a $209 million dollar agreement with Intel to build an island-wide WiMax network.

Taiwan is much smaller than many U.S. states, but nonetheless, can you point to a single U.S. state that has put any significant funds behind a statewide broadband initiative?

Neither can I.

Some might view it as a cynical marketing ploy, but Apple Computer has taken its own products off the main portion of its home page and replaced it with a photo of Rosa Parks. It is a worth a moment just to reflect on the courage of this woman, and how insignificant all our gadgetry and Internet toys are compared the what she did and how much she made America a better place.

What I and others have been predicting for years is starting to come to pass. As the number of broadband providers has narrowed to a duopoly of the cable and phone company in most regions, these firms are starting to muscle out third party service providers. VoIP startups are the first target because both the phone and cable company want VoIP customers of their own, and the simplest way to do that is to simply block all VoIP data packets except their own. Evidence of this is clearly visible as hardware manufacturers begin to sell VoIP blocking appliances.

CNet reports on the looming battle between Google and book publishers, who are outraged that the search company intends to scan millions of books and make them available to search online.

An Israeli company has developed a new process for generating hydrogen right in an automobile, which completely solves the conundrum of transporting, storing, and fueling vehicles with pressurized hydrogen. The system uses metals like zinc or aluminum and plain water. The process heats the metal to a high temperature, where it combines with the oxygen in water to create a solid oxide. What is left behind is hydrogen, which is burned to propel the car.

I was at a talk the other day, and the listener was going at some length about iPods and how the devices were changing the way people did things (as I often write about in this column). But this was a group of about 40 community leaders and economic developers, and one of them, in exasperation, finally blurted out, "Some of us don't have iPods."

The speaker stopped and asked for a show of hands, and it turned out only two people in the room owned an iPod, and one of them was the speaker.

Here's the problem.

In New Hampshire, economic developers did a study of business ownership and found that 18.5% of all private, non-farm employment in the state was tied to microenterprises. A microenterprise is defined as a business that employs between one and five people, including the owner, and requires no more than $35,000 in start up capital (Business NH Magazine, March 2005).

So in New Hampshire, a fifth of the economy is based on companies with less than five people!

The WiFi system that covers the biggest area in the country is not in a major city like New York, Philadelphia, or San Francisco. It is in rural Oregon, in a county of just 11,000 people. Not only that, the system is generating substantial revenue, suggesting that there is plenty of money to be made in broadband in rural areas when the whole community gets on board.

The Washington Post has an interesting article that I think is a must read for rural communities. It is about a rapidly growing trend away from the typical "sprawl" subdivision and towards denser neighborhoods that include low rise and mid rise condos carefully mixed with downtown amenities like stores, libraries, restaurants, and other pedestrian (i.e. cars not needed to get around) destinations.

There is something both wierdly ironic and deeply depressing when American companies happily work with repressive regimes like China and now Myanmar, selling them Internet hardware and software for the express purpose of suppressing free speech (hat tip to Instapundit)

The notion of a national ID number is being considered for a variety of reasons: the Social Security number was never intended as a national ID number, but is used that way, the illegal immigration crisis is due in part to the difficulty of identifying valid U.S. citizens, and law enforcement, insurance agencies, and health care providers all like the idea of having a better way to keep tabs on people.

Meanwhile, we have Google and the credit card companies tracking and aggregating information on everything we do.

Japan has announced a plan to roll out mobile Voice over IP services nationwide in less than two years, leaving the U.S. in dust. The new system will handle data speeds of 15 megabits/second, or 15-25 times faster than typical wired DSL and cable servie in the United States and nearly a thousand times faster than typical 3G cellphone data services.

The Rural Telecommunications Congress 9th Annual Meeting is over, but I'm still catching up on presentations. Matt Wenger of PacketFront, a company that specializes in the network hardware and software needed to manage communitywide networks, presented an interesting model for promoting innovation and paying for the network.

Palm has announced the new Palm TX, yet another version of its venerable PDA. Over the years, Palm has struggled as the company failed to update its software, released too many overlapping models with a confusing mix of features, split the company into two different hardware and software firms, and then pulled them back together.

Another nail was hammered in the coffin of analog TV yesterday with Apple's one-two hammer slam. The company rolled out a new version of the full size iPod that stores and plays video. They also rolled out a new version of iTunes (works on Windows and Macs) that allows you to store video on your Mac or Windows computer just the way you store music.

Hilda Gay Legg gave the morning keynote address at the RTC conference today. Until very recently, Legg was the Federal Co-Chair of the Appalachian Regional Commission. She has had extensive experience working with rural communities and as a sociologist, really understands rural America. She had a lot of interesting comments:

Pete Johnson, the Federal co-chair of the Delta Regional Authority (the Mississipi delta of several states and 10 million people) spoke at lunch abou the importance of infrastructure to the health and vitality of communities. He made several points in the early part of his talk:

I am attending the 9th Annual Rural Telecommunications Congress Annual Conference, which is one of the oldest community technology meetings in the country. The group is meeting in Lexington, Kentucky this year, and has a record attendance of more than 400 people.