Technology Futures

A bill under consideration by the New Hampshire legislature would give municipalities and regions the statutory authority to use bonds to build out telecom infrastructure. This is exactly the right approach. For one, it's a familiar and successful model that has been used for decades to finance other kinds of public facilities (e.g. roads, water, sewer, industrial parks, etc.). More importantly, it recognizes that there is an issue of the common good here, and that community investments are important to the future of communities.

A lot of phones are beginning to look a lot like iPods, and I don't think that is a coincidence. By some estimates, Apple has as much as 80% of the portable music player market, and the latest entry, the iPod Shuffle, which is incredibly small, is enormously popular, despite a lot of naysaying from competitors who claim it lacks features. Apparently they don't read the reviews of their own products, in which a frequent criticism is that there are too many controls and widgets that are too hard to figure out.

Costa Rica's countrywide telephone monopoly is trying to make it a crime to make a Voice over IP telephone call. From the article:

"One Costa Rican official of an agency seeking to promote the Central American country's software industry said last week that ICE's proposal would be "disastrous" to the country's efforts to grow its software development and outsourcing businesses."

Google has wads of cash, and has to spend it on something. So the company has been experimenting with Orkut, a "social software" platform similar to other services like LinkedIn. It has also started offering Google Maps, which now works with more browsers. Unlike Mapquest and some other similar services, Google Maps is fast and produces legible maps. I've always found Mapquest an exercise in frustration; not only are the maps fuzzy and hard to read, the zooming feature is extremely slow.

Broadband legal policy expert Lawrence Lessig has a nice summary of the issues swirling around community investments in broadband.

There are many advantages to working out of the home, but snow days are not one of them.

Normally, the neighborhood cable network is reasonably responsive during the day, because kids and parents are at work. I can get done what I need to do without waiting.

But with six inches of snow on the ground and more falling, schools and many businesses are closed, and apparently many people have headed for the Internet, completely bogging down the cable modem service. It's very pokey, with long waits for simple things like loading a Web page.

Here is an excellent article on the growing movement in Washington to take another look at the 1996 Telecom Deregulation Act. There is growing agreement that a) the law worked poorly, if at all, and b) it's now beginning to make things much worse.

Unlikely advocates are emerging to support new legislation. The phone companies want to get into the TV business, which was formerly the exclusive playground of the cable companies. The phone companies are going to go straight to Internet TV. They can do this because more people are tossing dial up over the side of the boat every day and signing up for broadband. And the protocols for delivering video have improved immensely over the past several years. Broadband can deliver TV, at least in a limited way, but the phone companies have realized it is their only way out of the mess they are in--free or very low cost phone service via VoIP is killing them.

The cable companies always tend to be a bit behind, which is pretty damning when you think about it. Would you want to claim you are almost as forward thinking as the phone company? The cable companies want to get into the telephony business, and already claim to have millions of customers. This is a bad direction to head because as I just said, the phone business is dead on the vine. The cable companies have decided to pick some very rotten fruit.

The '96 Telecom Act complicates all this tremendously because the government, in '96, treated TV and telephony differently. Today, both those services are just a stream of electrons shooting down the broadband pipe. It's absurd to view telephony as something deserving of special regulation and a pile of really dumb taxes.

Communities lack a strong, clear voice in Washington, although a few legislators realize this is important stuff. The really smart thing to get rid of the FCC entirely, but there are too many sacred cows who depend on complex rules and complicated taxes. It's hard to know what the current administration will do; when free markets and special interest business monopolies collide, the results are not often pretty.

Esme Vos at MuniWireless reports that Arizona has been testing VoIP via wireless on highways, and that telephone calls have been made successfully at speeds of 80 MPH. The effort uses equipment from a company called RoamAD. The mesh network system is able to hand off the signal from one cell to another without losing the telephone call.

EWeek reports that a cellphone virus that originated in the Phillipines has been found on cellphones in the United States.

Add Florida to the list of states with bills pending to stop municipal and local government investments in telecom.

Across the country, legislators, prodded by the phone and cable companies, are trying to outlaw community investments in telecom. One of the problems is that the discussion is one-sided. There are few consumer and local government advocates getting involved in educating legislators about the benefits of local telecom investments.

Barry Moline, head of the Florida Municipal Electric Association, summed up the debate from the community perspective.

The New York Times (registration required) has a very biased article about Philadelphia's plan for citywide wireless broadband. The paper interviewed mainly opponents of the plan, and seemed to go to great lengths to interview those opponents, while trivializing successful community projects. Worth a read just to understand the anti-community sentiment out there.

WiFi Net News has a long but informative roundup of all the anti-community legislation in process around the country. While it appears some legislators are resisting teh lobbyist-led push to keep communities at the mercy of the incumbents, it appears that the Philadelphia project (where the City wanted to do a citywide WiFi effort) has motivated the telcos and cable companies to get busy to protect their marketplace monopolies.

While most of the news sites are calling this "anti-muni" legislation, I'm deliberately calling it something else--"antic-community" legislation, because I think that's a better term.

This is an out and out assault on the rights of communities to control their economic future. If the incumbents were open and honest about their plans and were offering good and affordable services, none of these community projects would be underway. But this is an issue of community survival. When Hong Kong is running fiber past a million homes, are communities in the U.S. supposed to sit back and be content with either twenty year old copper technology (DSL, cable modems) or nothing at all?

Affordable broadband is the economic lifeblood of communities. Without affordable broadband, the small businesses of America (remember that small businesses create 75-90% of new jobs) cannot compete in the global economy. While the incumbents are protecting marketshare, communities are becoming increasingly less competitive from and economic development perspective.

Finally, I think communities ought to be regarding their investments like they manage roads, and not like water and sewer. My first choice for communities is to build digital roads and let the private sector create jobs, deliver services, and use those roads to create prosperity in the community.

Creating a new municipal monopoly (i.e. the way water, sewer, and electric is handled) is my second choice. In either case, communities should have the right to make those choices.

A New York Post article talks about the growing popularity of cellphone jammers. The devices, which are illegal but can be bought on the street in New York City, are giving relief to people sick of loud-mouthed cellphone users. They seem to be especially popular with users of public transportation, where you don't necessarily want to listen to the details of someone's love life while taking the train into Grand Central Station.

Motorola has announced that it will build a GSM cellphone (the European standard now being introduced in the U.S.) that is also "Skype ready." This means if you are in a WiFi hotspot, you can make calls for free via the Internet. Not in a hotspot? Then the phone uses the old cellphone system.

Skype is a popular free VoIP service that was founded by two of the originators of popular peer to peer services including Altnet and Kazaa. Skype to Skype calls are free, and the company charges for calls made to the old telephone network (i.e. what most of us use).

It's not clear exactly what the future is for services like Skype. The company's software is proprietary, so they control their user base, unlike some other Open Source VoIP services like Free Word Dialup. Skype is popular right now because they have a more finished product that is easy to install and use. Some of the Open Source software is a bit rough around the edges.

I'll stand by my prediction that telephony as a business is dead, dead, dead. In the future, voice calls will be like email--we'll all have it and use it heavily, and it won't cost us a dime to call anyone, anywhere in the world.

Business opportunity: voice and video calls to the moon and to Mars will cost money for a while because of limited bandwidth. Real time calls to the moon will be just barely possible; the latency will make for a slight delay, but it will be manageable. Real time calls to Mars will not be convenient, as the latency will make it very difficult to have a conversation fluidly. According to my calculations, the latency to Mars will vary between about 4 minutes and 20 minutes, depending on the relative positions of the earth and Mars.

You might ask, "What happens to the phone companies?" The phone companies have to recognize that their only option is to think of themselves as access providers rather than service providers. And they are lumbering in that direction, albeit very slowly. The acquisition of AT&T and MCI by local dialtone companies gives the latter the long haul circuits to better serve the access market.

If you are interested in community broadband, you may want to take a look at the upcoming Digital Cities Expo, which will be in northern Virginia (Reston) in April.

The conference will have sessions covering the economic, legal, financial, technological, and infrastructure issues surrounding municipal broadband (Disclaimer: I'm one of the speakers).

The Indiana bill that would have restricted the rights of communities to invest in telecom has died in committee.

The Internet is providing an alternate channel for citizens and community leaders to deal with these issues. In the past, bills like this often got passed into law quietly before anyone even knew about them. Today, most legislatures post proposed legislation on the Internet, open to all to see, and lots of people have the opportunity to review this stuff before it is too late. It's a useful counterbalance to lobbyists.

Om Malik reports on news from law professor Larry Lessig that some VoIP services may be blocked or degraded on some of the incumbent networks. I predicted this many months ago--that the monopoly infrastructure carriers would eventually block VoIP because it competes with their own "antique" phone systems.

MediaCitizen has a good summary of the efforts of the big providers to squash municipal projects. The article itself has little new information, except for a nugget of pure gold, in a box about half way down the page.

He cites St. Cloud, Florida, which operates a large WiFi network for citizens. The average savings on broadband access exceeds the average tax bill for residents, and keeps $3 million to $4 million dollars per year in the local economy.

Add Colorado to a growing list of states that have bills pending in the legislature that would take the right to determine their own future away from communities.