Submitted by acohill on Fri, 02/12/2010 - 17:10
Here is an interesting story. Apparently, a Microsoft exec has proposed that all bloggers need to have a license before they can write on the Web. And Time magazine and the New York Times think this would just be spiffy. This is not likely to ever happen, but the fact that companies like Microsoft and old media think it is a great idea suggest that there is still much resistance to the changes the Internet has brought.
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 02/12/2010 - 09:34
The Intertubes have been buzzing for the past couple of days with what is actually a very modest announcement from Google that the company wants to play around with community fiber. Google wants to find out what people do when they have a fast connection, and what kinds of services they might be able to give away or sell if everyone has those kinds of connections.
Based on the RFP application Google has released, I am guessing that they will do this in only two or three communities, meaning the odds of being selected are very long. What seems a bit odd is that there are plenty of community fiber projects in the country Google could partner with to do the very same thing at much less expense. But Google probably wants to be able to track activity at a finer level of granularity than they would be able to do on a public network. One benefit I already see is that just the announcement by Google has created some healthy interest in open access networks.
Want to read more about why open access works? Download my paper.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 02/09/2010 - 14:55
In a shocking discovery, music publishers have found that the law of supply and demand works. Apple loosened up pricing rules for music on the iTunes Store last year. Record companies immediately raised prices. Buyers immediately bought less music. The record companies are shocked, shocked that buyers don't want to pay more. What could have gone wrong? Higher prices signal less supply, and in turn, demand tends to drop. Record companies might want to send a few of their high paid execs back to high school to retake an economics class.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 02/09/2010 - 14:40
The City of Portland, Oregon's municipal WiFi experiment is coming to an end. It was a public/private partnership between the City and a firm called MetroFi, which reportedly spent between $2 million and $3 million to build the network. But it never worked well, and residents reported it did not work well indoors. MetroFi went into bankruptcy in 2008, and the hundreds of antennas that were mounted on City property are now being removed.
It is yet another reminder that fiber always beats wireless. Wireless is expensive and has limited capacity, and in as Philadelphia found out in a similar project a few years back, wireless vendors always oversell the technical capacity of their products. In cities with lots of tall buildings filled with steel reinforcing bars, wireless signals don't travel very far.
Wireless has a role to play for mobile access and in rural areas where it will take a while to get fiber to every premise, but eventually, we will all have a fiber connection. As Portland has found out, wireless has a hard time competing with a wired connection.
Submitted by acohill on Sun, 02/07/2010 - 12:08
Apple, as the company has in the past, has begun to upset, er, apple carts. With the announcement of the iPad, Apple also announced a book section in the iTunes Store, with a business model that is exactly the same as the hugely successful music model they use. For both books and music, Apple will collect 30% of the sales price of the item, and the publisher/seller collects 70%. The seller of the item sets the actual price. This is called the "agency model."
Whose apple cart is upset? Well, it is Amazon, who has insisted on setting prices for publishers that sell books for the Amazon Kindle. This has irritated publishers, who think that popular and fast selling items ought to be priced differently, and conversely, slow moving items should be able to be reduced in price. It is a simple, time tested model that helps keep supply and demand in balance.
Amazon got away with it for a while because they had the only popular ebook reader. But now that Apple has announced the iPad, publishers are likely to abandon the inflexible Amazon. Look for the Kindle to appear in supermarkets in a few months, mixed in with those remainder books for $4.99.
What does this have to do with community and municipal broadband? Well-designed open access, open services networks let providers set prices, and simply take a revenue share that helps pay for network operational costs. This approach encourages innovation and competition among providers. Insisting on fixed prices (the Amazon model) drives service and content providers away.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 02/04/2010 - 09:36
A coalition of New Hampshire towns and other interested parties are encouraging state legislators to give New Hampshire towns and cities the right to bond for telecommunications infrastructure. Unsurprisingly, the incumbent providers are not excited about the notion, even though largely rural New Hampshire has tens of thousands of residents still on dial-up and one of the providers is having severe financial difficulties. The towns see it as an issue of economic survival. Who wants to live in a rural community, no matter how great the quality of life, if there is no broadband or only "little" broadband?
The towns have correctly distinguished between "little" broadband (DSL, cable, wireless) and "big" broadband. They want big broadband, because that represents the future of economic development and the ability of these towns to retain existing businesses and to attract new ones. Here is an exquisite irony: a fiber cable manufacturer in rural New Hampshire can't get the bandwidth they need to do what they want to do to manage the plant properly.
In exchange for bonding authority, the towns have wisely agreed to only build open access community broadband networks, in which all services for businesses and residents would be sold by private sector providers. So in rural parts of the state where the incumbents are saying it is too expensive to build a private network, the towns are saying, "Okay, we get it. We will build a shared network and let you, Mr. Incumbent, use it to reach customers you can't afford to build to on your own."
Why would the incumbents be opposed to that? It opens them up to competition.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 02/02/2010 - 09:36
The iPad continues to generate enormous discussion on the Intertubes; while I have seen a lot of commentary about how it might be used in higher ed, I have seen very little about how it might be used by kids. The most obvious higher ed connection is as a replacement for textbooks, which are murderously expensive. A college student with an iPad can carry around an entire library of textbooks and should be able to save a lot of money at the same time. Textbook costs ought to decline over time, not to the $15 dollar level, but perhaps by 50% from $60 to $30 (and many technical textbooks are pushing $100 or more).
But the iPad strikes me as the perfect computer for middle school and high school. Smaller, lighter, no moving parts, much less to go wrong, and with plenty of horsepower to handle routine school assignments, which are mostly typing essays and papers. And you could do a lot of interesting basic math with a program like Apple's Numbers spreadsheet application. Apple is selling its three productivity programs for $9.99 each (word processsing, spreadsheet, presentations), about a third of the price of the cost of them for a laptop. With the dock and keyboard and wireless printing to a shared printer, kids have everything they need for school at much less than you might spend for a bare bones Apple laptop. I know there are very inexpensive Windows laptops available, but they still come with all the drawbacks of a laptop--heavy, moving parts, more susceptible to viruses, expensive software, etc.
Like the iPod, the iPad is going to change the way we do a lot of things. And like the iPod, it will create a lot of new business opportunities.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 01/27/2010 - 16:35
I receive a lot of inquiries asking for help understanding open access. The broadband stimulus funding has raised awareness of this business model, and I have written a short paper explaining how it works and why. The PDF is attached to this article, or you can visit the Design Nine Web site to download it.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 01/25/2010 - 17:24
A short, good analysis of six industries that Apple's tablet computer could change. Apple is expected to roll out the device next week.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 01/25/2010 - 16:06
Some applicants for first round broadband stimulus funds report they have received their rejection letters today (1/25/2010). It does not appear that the letters provide any information about why an application was rejected, other than to note that it did not score high enough.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 01/25/2010 - 13:32
USDA/RUS has announced an additional $313 million on stimulus funds, going mostly to rural telephone company projects.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 01/21/2010 - 16:08
The Intelligent Community Forum announced their Smart Seven communities for 2010 yesterday.
One of Design Nine's projects, nDanville, was one of the ICF's Smart 21 communities this year, and got a mention for its success in attracting new jobs by building community fiber.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 01/21/2010 - 10:19
A story in the Financial Times (registration may be required) suggests investments in broadband are peaking. The article is a little misleading, because it suggests that this is a sign of "maturation." Maybe. Maybe not.
Broadband investments are peaking because cable and telephone companies have spent a lot over the past decade upgrading their antiquated copper-based infrastructure, and in their view, there is not a lot left to do. Yes, fiber to the home deployments continue to grow, but large parts of the U.S. have been redlined by the incumbents as "too expensive" for fiber. So most of this investment has been focused on what the FCC calls "little broadband," not "big broadband." Big broadband requires fiber.
Small and medium-sized businesses stuck on DSL are already calling it "tomorrow's dial up" (an exact quote from an angry business person in West Virginia). To attract jobs and businesses, communities will have to make basic broadband infrastructure investments in "big broadband."
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 01/21/2010 - 09:55
A new study by the Phoenix Center indicates that job seekers with access to broadband are more likely to find jobs. The study says it best to have broadband access, but even those still stuck on dial-up do better in their job searches than those with no Internet access at all.
The cost of broadband at home (averaging between $25 and $40 a month) also highlights the importance of libraries and public computing centers for job seekers. If you are out of work, you may have to cut out luxuries like broadband at home, so you need to a place to go to do your online job searches.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 01/19/2010 - 11:33
Steven Levy has a Wired article that illustrates some of the problems that Google, and by extension, all cellphone users face. The new Google Nexus One can be purchased unlocked and without a cellular contract. You can then (in theory) go to any provider and get a service contract. Except, as Levy points out, even if you paid $500 for your dandy new Nexus One phone, you are not likely to a) find a provider willing to sell you service, and b), if you do find a provider (T-Mobile is the only one so far), you won't get a discount on the service contract.
The only glimmer of hope is that with all the new iPhone imitations coming to market, the increased competition for smartphone customers, who tend to spend more because they buy both voice and data service, has lowered prices a bit. But the lower prices is so far limited to the unlimited contracts, which were already very expensive. The cost of these contracts is coming down by $20 to $30, but are probably still very profitable. When there is real competition, prices can and often do come down. But the cellular business looks a lot like a cartel, with cartel-like pricing.
This is an illustration of why open access networks, with community ownership, are so important. Only by making investments in owning some of the infrastructure do users (local governments, schools, businesses, residents) get some control over the market space. When telecom infrastructure is owned entirely by one company (e.g. phone/DSL, cable TV/cable Internet), the company that owns the infrastructure gets to set the pricing--and rightly so. I don't subscribe to the notion that incumbents are bad. They are making intelligent pricing decisions based on their asset and business models. Communities that want better and more affordable telecom services have to introduce different asset ownership models and different business models. It's not hard or complicated, and many communities are already doing this with excellent results. Call Design Nine (540-951-4400) if you want more information on how to get started.
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 01/15/2010 - 08:25
I have added the Benton Foundation to the blogroll on the right. Benton has been posting some very useful items on community broadband and municipal broadband projects.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 01/12/2010 - 07:40
Hong Kong Broadband Network Ltd. is offering 100 megabit symmetric connections to its customers for $13/month. Costs are going to be lower for them because most of the customer base is living in high rise apartment buildings, which are less expensive to cable. I don't know about Hong Kong, but in Japan, the building codes require telecom duct to every apartment from the ground floor, meaning it takes under an hour to run fiber to a new customer in a Tokyo apartment. Meanwhile, in the United States, many of us are still getting our broadband via copper cable technology invented in the late 1800s.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 01/07/2010 - 10:06
Chris Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance has an excellent article on municipal and community broadband at Ars Technica. Mitchell discusses some of the positive outcomes from the Lafayette, Louisiana municipal network, where you can get a 50 megabit symmetrical Internet access connection for just $58/month--which would qualify it for the lowest prices in the country. A ten megabit symmetric connection is just $29/month, which is also probably the lowest price in the country for that level of service.
It is the symmetric service that is so important. Many incumbent providers will tout services "up to 50 megabits" without noting that the service is asymmetric, meaning you may have 50 megabits downstream but as little as 2-5 megabits upstream, and that both the upstream and downstream bandwidth gets shared with a bunch of your neighbors (often 25 to 50 of your neighbors).
Why is symmetric bandwidth important? It enables work from home job opportunities and enables running a business from home. The availability of symmetric bandwidth is an economic development and jobs issue. A community that does not have symmetric broadband services is cutting off jobs and business growth.
Finally, while the article highlights the positive impact in Lafayette from the municipal network, it is important to note that there are other business models for muni networks that do not involve getting local government to sell services in direct competition with private providers. The open access, open services model being pursued by local governments in Virginia and Utah are doing extremely well, although you don't hear much about them because there is tremendous pressure from incumbents and lobbyists to not talk about them--they don't want to have to tell legislators there is a "third way" that provides an appropriate role for government but keeps local governments out of direct competition. nDanville, The Wired Road, and Utopia are all doing extremely well.
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Submitted by acohill on Wed, 01/06/2010 - 09:11
This article from MacWorld does a nice job of highlighting the emerging class of the titans. Apple and Google are ramping up for an epic fight, and we all win when two big companies compete for marketshare.
Google has announced the Nexus One smartphone, just the latest of several Android-based smartphones. Android is the open source operating system developed by Google which powers not only the Google phone, but the Droid phone from Motorola (distributed by Verizon). And alongside Android, Google has also announced the Chrome operating system, which wont' see the light of day for another year. Meanwhile, Apple has purchased an online advertising firm. So Google is aiming at Apple, and Apple is aiming at Google. The next couple of years will be interesting, and both companies will be forced to work harder and be more customer-focused--especially Google, which has little experience actually selling anything except ads.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 01/06/2010 - 09:02
New rumors about the Apple iTablet (or iSlate, or iSomething) suggest that it may come with 3G wireless network access built in. Big deal, since all smartphones already have this, right? No, the rumormongers are suggesting that iTablet owners will be able to pick and choose from several different cellular providers--but only for data, not voice.
It is likely that current cellular roaming agreements that make it possible to use your cellphone on any network would be modified to allow data roaming independent of voice contracts.
If this happens, it will be good news/bad news for the cellular industry. Good news in the sense that it will bring an entirely new stream of revenue to them--every iTablet owner who already has a cellphone contract will likely purchase a second contract for data roaming, and the cost will probably run $40 to $50 per month. The bad news is that the tablet will put even more pressure on cellular networks, as high bandwidth uses like watching TV shows, movies, YouTube videos, and video chat will explode. Want to bet that the iSlate will have Apple's iSight video webcam built in, just the way current Apple laptops have the tiny camera built in? Bet on it, and expect an explosion in video-enabled Skype use among iTablet owners.
There is potentially good news for rural communities suffering from lack of broadband and poor or nonexistent cellphone service. The new revenue streams that are likely to emerge may help improve the business case to expand wireless voice and data services into rural areas previously difficult to justify from a revenue perspective. But community broadband networks, powered by fiber, will still be needed to support commerce, jobs, and economic development.
Here's the funny thing about the iTablet--Apple had has this vision for at least 22 years--it has just taken this long for the technolgy to catch up with the Knowledge Navigator.
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