Broadband

The usually excellent Stop the Cap! has a report on the truly awful anti-broadband bill making its way through the North Carolina legislature, but they lost me when they started blaming "free markets" as the problem. Uh, no, the problem is crony capitalism, where the incumbents spread campaign donations liberally to representatives of both parties, to obtain the best laws money can buy. That's not free markets.

Mountain View, CA (4/1/11)
The head of Google's Fiber Initiative, Milo Medin, announced today that all 1,100 cities that applied for Google fiber will be included in a second round of fiber buildouts by the search giant. Unlike Kansas City, which is getting Google fiber on very favorable terms, the other 1,099 cities will be required to sign a more restrictive contract with Google before the company will start constructing fiber. Among the terms in the contract:

It was an easy decision. Kansas City is an electric city, so they own the poles. So no costly and long dragged out pole surveys, no make ready and no pole attachment fees, and the ability to take fiber anywhere in the electric service area at very low cost.

I'm sure that Kansas City also offered to hang all the fiber using their electric utility crews and buckets trucks.

No mystery here....it's a smart choice.

I have always had the feeling that becoming an Amazon customer is a bit like joining the Borg: resistance is futile. But Amazon really does believe in customer service, and is particularly good at identifying trends and then developing services to meet the new market demand. Amazon is beginning a big push for their Cloud Drive service, which lets you upload files to an Amazon server and then access them from anywhere. In concept, it is no different that the file storage Apple has offered first via dotMac and now via MobileMe.

Via Fred Pilot at Eldo Telecom, Geoff Daily makes the argument that "all broadband is fiber." Geoff has it exactly right. Just yesterday, I met with a community leader who asked, appropriately, "What if we spend all this money on fiber and wireless turns out to be cheaper and better?"

The old TV empires are crumbling fast, and Netflix is speeding their demise. It just outbid all the other networks for a new original, uh, "TV" series called , which will star Kevin Spacey. Since you can watch Netflix on just about any device on the planet, there is even less reason to keep around one of those old timey television doohickeys.

Someone asked me just today if we really will need all the bandwidth that fiber offers, with the unspoken inference that DSL and cable modem service seems to be working just fine.

Uh-huh.

We will probably not know the full story of the nuclear reactor problems in Japan for many months, but one news story I read over the weekend suggests that the the Japanese are re-learning the lessons of the Katrina disaster. Apparently the Japanese reactors survived the initial earthquake and tsunami without much damage--but whatever was damaged caused the primary cooling pumps to fail. No big deal, as nuclear power plants have extensive back up and redundant secondary cooling systems designed to take over if the primary cooling system fails.

Here is a study that indicates that smaller communities with the right broadband infrastructure are "...emerging as major economic centers." What about your community? Does it have the infrastructure to attract new businesses?

The first iteration of the National Broadband Map is now available. This effort has been part of the broadband stimulus effort, and it will be updated regularly over the next three to four years as individual states provide more data to NTIA. The map zooms nicely, so you can get a pretty good local picture of what technology is available, and you can select which technologies you want to look at (e.g. fiber to the home, cable modem, wireless, etc.). With the exception of mobile wireless (i.e.

That quote is from Brian Depew with the Center for Rural Affairs, in Nebraska. The New York Times has an article today about how rural areas of the U.S. are being left behind with respect to broadband. Depew goes on to say:

The City of Chattanooga, Tennessee was recently selected by the Intelligent Community Forum as one of the Top 7 Intelligent Communities worldwide for 2011. This article by Robert Bell of ICF provides some of the back story and the amazing success of Chattanooga over the past couple of decades.

The Roanoke Times ran an article yesterday (Sunday) in the business section on two stimulus projects building fiber in the Blacksburg-Roanoke region. The two middle mile projects are not linked to any comprehensive last mile efforts, which is also the challenge for many stimulus-funded middle mile projects in other areas.

Virginia Tech has an excellent speed test. Try it and see how your connection rates.

The tiny Isle of Jersey will be getting Gigabit fiber to the home as part of an initiative by the incumbent Jersey Telecom to replace all copper-based services with fiber over the next five years. Maybe some U.S. incumbents should make a trip to Jersey (in the English Channel just off the coast of France) to learn how to construct a business case that allows dumping 100 year old copper technology for something a little newer.

Bob Frankston, who is smart enough to know why X.400 never worked the way the policy wonks thought it would, has an excellent and very readable short paper called Demystifying Networking that is one of the best overviews I have read on broadband, where we came from, and where we want to go. Take a few minutes and read it in its entirety.

The always excellent Muni Networks has an article that sheds additional light on Burlington Telecom. The article includes a response from Tim Nulty, who helped start the BT venture.

More information about the financial problems of the city-owned Burlington Telecom (Burlington, Vermont) venture are emerging. Opponents of community broadband will be eager to hold this up as the latest "proof" that community-owned telecom does not work.

A short note on the Google blog indicates that the community to be selected for the Google fiber opportunity won't be announced until "early 2011."

Skype has announced a new record of 25 million concurrent users, meaning 25 million voice and video calls simultaneously. It also means that all those Skype users are NOT using their cellphones or land lines to make voice calls. Skype video works extremely well if you have a good Web camera (good means you ought to spend at least $50-$75) and a decent Internet connection; if you have tried Skype video and found it fuzzy or blurry, it's probably your camera.