International

I think there are some interesting new job opportunities that are going to emerge in the next ten years, and one would hope K12 schools and colleges start now with new and revised curriculums to meet demand.

BusinessWeek has an article on outsourcing that has some useful insights in it. The good: Outsourcing does not always save time or money. As many of knew when the outsourcing craze began to heat up, it is a lot of work to manage workers on the other side of the world who are 10 or 12 hours out of sync with your own office hours. In India, where IT outsourcing has helped fuel the economy, rapidly rising salaries and very high turnover (often above 50% a year) is driving U.S. businesses away.

In a victory for personal privacy, a German court has ruled that if a customer requests it, an Internet Service Provider (ISP) must delete the IP log data that shows what a customer has been doing on the Internet and when. In the U.S., unfortunately, we are headed in the other direction, with the Federal government anxious to make ISPs responsible for retaining such information--forever!

The magazine Killer App has a must read article on how fiber infrastructure has turned the rust belt economy of Wales (abandoned coal mines and steel mills) into a global powerhouse. The key: a steady investment in fiber over a period of years turned into a magnet for Knowledge Economy businesses looking for a reliable workforce, reasonable cost of living, and affordable broadband.

Microsoft's MSN search and news site is trying to avoid Google's fate in Belgium, where a court told the search company to stop filching newspaper articles from the Web sites owned by the newspapers. Google would show the first few paragraphs of an article, and then provide a link to the rest of the article, claiming fair use. But of course, there were ads on the Google page and so Google was benefiting from someone else's copyrighted content. The Belgian courts told the company to cut it out.

Swedish-Finnish telecom company TeliaSonera has started selling hybrid phones that will automatically make phone calls via the Internet when in range of a WiFi hotspot, and use the normal cellphone network when not in a hotspot. Some other dual mode phones have been available, but this is the first phone (manufactured by Samsung) that will switch automatically between the two. The firm is targeting in home use first, which is clever, because we make a lot of calls from home.

Here is a very short article about the falling price of DSL service in the U.S. Usually, when prices fall, it is a possible indicator that people are not buying enough of whatever is for sale, or that they supplier has "too much" of something. In the case of DSL, both is probably true. The phone companies have been investing heavily in upgrading their local phone systems to handle DSL, but with limited success, apparently, or they would not be cutting prices.

Ireland's research and higher education network, HEAnet, is getting configurable lightpaths. What are configurable lightpaths? It means that ordinary network users can configure a single wavelength of light on a fiber network from their computer or server to another computer or server on the same network (the computers could be hundreds or thousands of miles apart).

Prepare to be depressed. French Telecom has just announced that it is rolling out fiber service in major cities with download speeds of 2.5 Gigabits/second and upload speeds of 1.2 Gigabits/second. The cost? Seventy Euros, or about $85 US.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., the heads of the major telecoms are patting us on the head and telling us we don't need superhighways to our homes, that DSL sidwalks are just fine. A typical DSL connection in the U.S. is about two thousand times slower than the Gigabit service being rolled out in France.

In an interesting tale of two companies, Apple has dumped its experiment in offshoring telephone support to India after just one month. Meanwhile, Dell is rapidly expanding its offshore tech support. What's going on? Apple, while not perfect, consistently gets high ratings from consumers for support. Dell, on the other hand, has been receiving a steady stream of criticism lately for poor customer support.

Skip Skinner, the forward-thinking administrator of Wise County, Virginia, suggested do it yourself fiber to me three years ago. I've proposed it to many other groups since then, and everyone thought I was crazy.

While at the Digital Cities conference in Reston, Virginia earlier this week, I was able to get some detailed information about Vasteras, Sweden, where they have implemented the kind of open service provider communitywide broadband I advocate for communities in this country. Vasteras is a medium-sized city of about 80,000 people. In past eighteen months, they have run fiber to 7000 homes, 23,000 apartments, and 2000 businesses.

South Korea continues to be far more visionary than the United States when thinking about broadband and how it should be used. The city of Seoul, South Korea's largest city, has committed $830 million to the u-Seoul project. The 'u' stands for 'ubiquitious.'

I am not a big fan of me-too municipal wireless projects. Wireless technology remains in flux, with new equipment and systems coming online constantly. Interference and bandwidth issues have to be considered very carefully when designing these systems. And you have to know how you are going to pay for the network management and maintenance.

In other words, a community should not be planning a big wireless initiative just because "that's what they are doing in Philadelphia."

Here is my presentation from the morning keynote. Thanks for your interest. You can find more handouts and documents in the Library. If you are interested in the plastic microduct I passed around at the meeting, you can get more information about Emtelle FibreFlow here.

I'm at the Pacific Community Network Association Annual Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. I gave the opening keynote this morning. I am really impressed with the energy and enthusiasm for broadband here. Folks up here understand better than many U.S. communities that broadband--affordable broadband--is essential to their communites. The province of British Columbia has hundreds of local community technology projects--active, vibrant efforts that are providing access, training, and services to hundreds of thousands of people in rural communities.

Benedict College, in Columbia, South Carolina, is hosting a Technology Summit that is focused on how broadband and technology can improve and enhance life in urban neighborhoods and rural small communities. I'll be giving the opening keynote talk next Tuesday.

Northern Ireland is the first country in Europe to have 100% availability of broadband (typically DSL) to every home and business. Government investments helped get the job done.

But the real measure is impact. The CEO of the MJM Group, a highly specialized joinery firm in the country, had this to say:

"It would have been impossible to have achieved our export growth without broadband internet access which came to Rathfriland in 2004..."

This report says that Europe is starting to invest again in nuclear power [link no longer available]. Like the U.S., most of Europe stopped building nuclear power plants after the 1970s Three Mile Island disaster.

If you look strictly at deaths directly attributable to nuclear power and compare them to deaths from coal power, coal loses every time. There are mining disasters regularly, with the latest tragedy right here in Appalachia.

Here is a report from Denmark about how one group is trying to nurture and promote the growth of microbusinesses. Stick with the article to the end, and you will find a useful list of activities and projects that would apply in any community or region. Does your economic development game plan include these kinds of activities?