Pennington Gap Broadband Planning Project

The National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors (NATOA) has called for a range of policy changes and investments that includes a guaranteed right for local governments to invest in broadband and fiber as the preferred mode of access.

Fuel prices may be a proximate cause of airline financial problems, but insanely inefficient reservation systems and insulting fee structures are structural problems that less expensive fuel won't fix. I just spent over an hour and a half trying to make a simple change to an existing flight reservation. A full hour was spent on hold, with periodic updates from the reservation agent, who said the change was being "processed." The call was finally disconnected by a recorded message telling me to hang up and try again. Huh? An hour and a half just change a few bits in a computer, and it could not be done!

The cost of the flight doubled, and there was no change in the locations, just a change in the time. So the airline strategy is to treat customers with contempt and bad service--at the same time. It's baffling, and one can only conclude that airline executives never have to deal with their own reservation systems.

Design Nine has been named as one of the top 100 broadband firms in the United States by Broadband Properties magazine.

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Apple's second generation iPhone was released for sale last Friday, and promptly broke every consumer electronics record. Apple and AT&T sold an astounding one million phones in just three days, making it not only the most popular cellphone in history but the most popular consumer electronics device ever. Even more incredible, there are still long lines of buyers waiting for phones--according to numerous reports, all 1800 AT&T stores are completely sold out, and most Apple retail stores are out of stock.

What accounts for the phone's popularity? It is not the hardware; the phone has some incremental improvements over the previous model, but nothing groundbreaking. A combination of lower price and an open platform seems to be the appeal. As the iPhone was released, Apple also rolled out thousands of free and low cost applications and programs for the iPhone, making the phone not just a phone/PDA but a true platform that can be customized by the user. This is the key difference now between the iPhone and most other cellphones. The Palm Treo and the RIM Blackberry have had this ability, but both devices have been relatively expensive. More importantly, both the Treo and Blackberry have small, cramped screens and low quality interfaces. The large, very high resolution iPhone display is startlingly clear and easy to use compared to any other portable device.

Samsung and LG have rolled out new phones that look a lot like the iPhone, and cellular providers like Verizon are advertising them heavily. But you can only have what the cellphone provider will let you have on those phones, and many of the add-ons come with steep per month subscription fees. The iPhone App store offers hundreds of free programs, and hundreds more programs that average about $5 in cost. Over time, the other cellphone providers will have to move to this model, or everyone will end up as an AT&T customer and an iPhone user.

Tennessee legislators have done a very simple and very smart thing. They have passed legislation that allows small electric cars with limited speed (e.g. up to 35 mph) travel on roads where the posted speed limit is 40 mph.

This may not sound like a big deal, but it is, as it opens the possibility for a lot more people to purchase small electric cars (think "golf carts with doors") and use them for around town commuting and errands. These small cars are inexpensive, economical to operate, and don't use a drop of gas. With the right attitude at state and Federal levels, they could contribute to a significant reduction in the use of imported oil over time. Every state should adopt a version of this law--according to the article, only three states (Tennessee, Montana, Washington) allow this use right now. At the Federal level, relaxed licensing and safety standards would also accelerate the use of alternative energy vehicles. A car that can only go 35 mph does not need to meet interstate highway safety standards.

Seagate, a big manufacturer of hard drives, has released a new hard drive that breaks yet another capacity record--the firm now has a 1.5 terabyte hard drive. This is 1500 gigabytes. It was less than fifteen years ago that I agonized over the enormous expense (at the time) of buying a one gigabyte drive. It cost a whopping $1200. This new Seagate drive, with 1500 times the capacity, will probably cost less than a third of that old 1 gig drive.

Comcast has been reprimanded by the FCC for blocking certain Internet services without telling customers and without regard for the level of use. Service providers can be as arbitrary as they like in managing their Internet access services, but they have to tell customer what they are doing. A service-based network would not need to penalize customers for doing something they enjoy, but they would probably pay more. Today's broadband model is upside down for service providers because they make the most money when a customer never turns their computer on; they make the least if the customer is on the Internet all day long. That is the exact opposite of every other business in the world, and it's why broadband is such a mess in the U.S. Fortunately, communities like Danville, Virginia are changing that model.

Google is busying driving cars with cameras mounted on top all over England, taking pictures of every single house in the country. Google promises to obscure significant details, which has led to bizarre photos with people's faces blurred out. A lot of British citizens are outraged, since anyone with a Web browser will be able to snoop around the front of your home from a distance. It sounds like a lovely tool for burglars, who will no longer have to risk driving through neighborhoods to case houses--they can do it from the safety and security of their own home.

Ditto with nosy neighbors, stalkers, and anyone else who might be disgruntled or angry. It's hard to understand what value Google is adding here. One might argue this might be quite useful for stores, who want customers to be able to find them easily, but the main effect of this new Google service would seem to be just another opportunity for Google to sell ad space. Google's corporate motto (Don't be evil) more and more just seems to be a sick joke. Google seems determined find a way to usurp every kind of information in the world, turn it into proprietary intellectual property, and then sell ad space.

The Pew folks have rolled out another hilarious study that suggests most dial up users don't want broadband.

I have observed this phenomenon for fifteen years now--much longer than the Pew folks. It is very simple, really. People that have never had a broadband connection are, in fact, likely to believe it is something that they don't want or need.

But here is the problem. The Pew folks have never asked broadband users if they would go back to dial up. And you need to ask that question in order to be able to understand the survey results of the dial up question in the appropriate context. We all know the answer we would get from broadband users: no one wants to go back to dial up. In fact, I've been asking that question to rooms full of people for many years, and I have never had a single broadband user stand up and say, "Oh yea, broadband is waaaay too fast for me. I'm switching back to dial up next week."

You need to query both groups with the complementary version of the same question if you want to be able to draw any useful conclusions.

We are beginning to see the broadband coop as one very viable form of governance for community broadband efforts. Coops are a great ownership and governance model because they firmly vest the enterprise in the community--every subscriber is also a shareholder in the enterprise, and shareholder/members are able to vote and select board members. The Ripton Broadband Coop serves rural customers in rural Vermont via wireless, using an open access, open service model. Two service providers are selling services on the network.

T-Mobile has announced $10/month VoIP (Voice over IP) phone service. It's an interesting twist on VoIP, with the company leveraging portions of its wireless cellular network to reduce the cost of providing the service. It is, however, a landline service, and you have to have T-Mobile cell service AND a broadband connection at your home. But you can't beat the price, which looks pretty good compared to an average $40-$50 per month cost of old-fashioned copper-based local/long distance bundles.

We already have too many people driving around with cellphones glued to their ears, not paying attention (clue: driving seven miles under the speed limit, wandering back and forth across the lane). Now Chrysler has announced they are building in support for WiFi in some of their automobiles. Great....now we'll have people driving while talking AND watching YouTube at the same time.

The FCC has finally released new definitions of broadband.

• First Generation: 200 Kbps up to 768 Kbps

• Basic Broadband: 768 Kbps to 1.5 megabits per second
• 1.5 Mbps to to less than 3 Mbps
• 3 Mbps to less than 6 Mbps
• 6 Mbps to less than 10 Mbps
• 10 Mbps to less than 25 Mbps
• 25 Mbps to less than 100.0 Mbps
• 100 Mbps and beyond

This is a major improvement over the old definition of "200 kilobits" as broadband. By this old definition, the country has very high levels of broadband penetration, but made the U.S. the laughingstock of the rest of the world. In much of Europe, residential broadband tends to be north of 40+ MEGABITS, or about 200 times more capacity than the FCC definition.

The graded scale is useful because it can provided benchmarks to measure progress in a community or region. If the FCC has provided targets, that would have been even better. For example, a ten year target could be to have 90% of businesses and homes in the "100 Mbps and beyond" category, and indeed, U.S. community broadband projects like the one in Danville, Virginia are deploying "100 Mbps and beyond" today.

This article provides more data on the fast-shifting but likely permanent change in how we decide where we want to live. We are probably seeing the biggest shift in housing since the end of World War II and the rise of the suburb. Suburbs are not going away overnight, but the cost of commuting to and from often rural subdivisions has caused sharp drops in the value of homes in such locations, and there will be a counterbalancing increase in the value of homes closer to work and shopping--welcome back, downtown neighborhoods.

Smart communities will aggressively begin rehabilitation of neglected older neighborhoods--street and sidewalk repairs, park improvements, fiber to the home--as this will help draw workers and families that want to reduce or even eliminate commuting costs. It also suggests a tremendous opportunity to finally bring back Main Streets, which have been struggling since the sixties as commerce moved out to the edge of town.

The "new" Main Street will be focused primarily on business and professional companies and food/entertainment--things to do after work and places to eat for business professionals. Class A office space on Main street and Main Street business incubators will draw businesses looking for "quality of business life," where walking to work, walking to lunch, and easy access to professional services (copy services, banking, accounting, legal) are all within a few steps of the office.

And as always, downtown fiber will make this work.

According to The Register, the airlines are planning to use mobile phones to cut costs and to sell ad revenue. As you book a flight, you will give your mobile phone number to the airline. They will use this to push information on the flight to you (not so bad), and once you get to the airport, they may even check you in electronically via your phone, which is already underway in Japan. What could get ugly is the the notion that they could also push ads to your phone once you get in the airport, so the idea is that you'll pay a fortune for a a cramped seat and then get spammed at the same time. If you have flown recently, you may have noticed some airlines have put ads on the seat back trays, so as you "enjoy" your free beverage (snacks seem to be out completely now on some airlines) you get to read the ad on the surface of the tray.

Apparently, multitasking (reading email, watching YouTube, texting, talking on the phone--all at the same time) is making us stupid. Literally. Our brains are being rewired, and not in a good way, according to this article.

It is more, apparently, than just a time management issue. How many times have you heard someone remark, only half-joking, "I need to get out of the office to get some work done."

It is why "email free Fridays" and other boycotts of technology are beginning to take hold. Our fixation on technology is causing the slow death of relationships. We are still in the infancy of all these gadgets and services, though, so there is still hope that we will learn better how to use all this stuff appropriately. Put in the context of the development of the automobile, it is really only about 1925. We have a long way to go.

Paper ballots will be used to collect votes in many elections this fall. There will be a drop in the use of electronic ballot equipment because of security problems, and more states are using paper ballots that are optically scanned because they are easy to use, ease to scan, and provide an auditable paper trail. The biggest shortcoming of the electronic equipment is the lack of a paper trail that can be used to verify results. Unfortunately, this shortcoming was widely noted in this column and in many other sources early in the rush to avoid any more hanging chad incidents.

Sprint's new WiMax initiative with partner Clearwire is stalling because the high capacity wireless access points don't work very well when backhaul (the connection from the wireless radios/antennas is over old-fashioned copper phone lines.

Do the math....

If Sprint/Clearwire is promising 3-6 megabits per user over a wireless connection and the copper phone line feeding it is a T1 line (1.5 megabits), customers are going to be very disappointed. Clearwire may become a valuable customer of communities that are building out fiber networks.

The Pure Electric Vehicle is just what we need. If this car actually gets built, it has the simplicity, low cost, and small size that could potentially win millions of buyers. The designer is promising to sell it for $9,999, meaning it will only cost the equivalent of four tanks of gas 8^). Kidding aside, for the price, a lot of households could quickly justify the cost of this vehicle as a second or third car.

The car is exactly as it is named, a "pure" electric vehicle, meaning it runs on batteries--no complicated hybrid gear trains, fossil fuel engines, or esoteric batteries. The car uses off the shelf sealed lead acid batteries, meaning they are cheap and easy to make. The car has a top speed of 65 mph, which is fine for around town errands and commuting, and could easily be recharged while sitting in the company parking lot from a cheap solar panel in the back window.

Clearwire has announced plans to operate its proposed national WiMax network as an open access system, and major players like Sprint, Comcast, and Time Warner have apparently already agreed to become resellers on the network. It will be interesting to see how this turns out, as an enormous investment will be required to build the national infrastructure required to meet the promised goals. One of the backers of Clearwire is Sprint, which is losing cellular marketshare rapidly, and may regard Clearwire as its last chance to keep from being broken up and sold.

A national wireless network makes sense only if the operator truly operates it as open. The dangerous part of the proposal is that Clearwire can make any rules it wants, and can change them anytime it likes. If most of the U.S. ends up relying on a single network owner for mobile access, is that a good thing? Again, it *could* work, if competitive service providers truly get treated equally.

Note also that the article talks about very realistic bandwidth projections of 6 megabits down and 3 megabits up for the WiMax system--excellent for mobile access but that kind of bandwidth won't support much video or other high bandwidth, multimedia services, like movie downloads, live HD events, and videoconferencing. We'll still want and need fiber to the premise (FTTP).