Submitted by acohill on Fri, 01/11/2013 - 14:44
The China Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has said that all new residences will be connected to fiber if an existing network is available, starting this spring, and the fiber will be operated on an open access basis, with residents able to choose from several providers.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 09/04/2012 - 13:16
Sometimes little things can have big impacts. The BioLite HomeStove has the ability to make a lot of lives better while reducing tree loss in many parts of the world. The innovative cooking device is a highly efficient "jet" or "rocket" stove that burns small amounts of wood while generating a lot of heat. There are many similar jet stoves, and because they are so good at creating lots of heat quickly, in many impoverished areas, the stoves can dramatically reduce the amount of wood needed to cook food, and make it possible to sterilize water much more easily. The stoves also reduce the amount of work needed to collect wood, which, if you are cooking for a family over an open fire, can be very significant.
But the real innovation of this device is the integrated thermocouple that powers a small fan (to make the stove more efficient) and powers a USB port that can charge small portable devices like LED flashlights and cell phones. It is an amazing innovation that has the potential make millions of lives better.
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 07/20/2012 - 08:56
The Intelligent Community Foundation has just opened its 2013 Intelligent Community Awards for nominations. This is the first step toward the Intelligent Community of the Year award, to be presented on June 7, 2013.
The awards program salutes the accomplishments of communities in developing inclusive prosperity on a foundation of information and communications technology. Nominations are encouraged from communities large and small, urban and rural, in developing and industrialized nations. The evaluation system compensates for population-related factors and lets the ICF compare large, midsize and small communities worldwide on a level playing field.
The 2013 theme is "Innovation and Employment." A special section of the questionnaire will examine how Intelligent Communities balance the positive and negative impacts of innovation, which both creates new employment and destroys jobs as it makes old processes obsolete. Look for the announcement later this month on the publication of an ICF white paper on Innovation and Employment.
The deadline for nominations is September 21, 2012. The award criteria and nomination form (consisting of just 6 questions) are available here. The ICF also invites communities to take our online self-test to get a feel for how they will be evaluated.
The ICF will announce the next Smart21 Communities of the Year in October at a ceremony in Riverside, California, USA, the 2012 Intelligent Community of the Year.
Disclaimer: I serve as a juror for the awards evaluation.
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 07/20/2012 - 07:27
British Telecom climbed aboard the clue train and has rolled out open access (they call it OpenReach) on their fiber network, inviting service providers to sell to BT-connected homes and businesses.
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 06/01/2012 - 07:28
The FBI says that you might want to leave your laptop home when traveling overseas. The latest scam is from criminals who set up bogus WiFi networks that look just like the real hotel network. When you fire up your laptop, you get what looks like the real hotel login page, but it is a fake one that immediately loads zombie malware onto your computer. Another trick they use is to have a fake "software update needed" window pop up. Everyone is now so used to getting these automatic software update notices that criminals are taking advantage of the fact that everyone automatically clicks "OK" for these upgrades. The same thing happens: instead of an upgrade, your laptop gets loaded with malware that starts capturing credit card numbers and login information.
Be careful out there.
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 07/15/2011 - 10:47
Long time readers of this blog know that I have a running joke about comparing the state of U.S. broadband infrastructure to other countries. The latest insult is Northern Balochistan (part of Pakistan), which is getting a 1,100 kilometre fiber build. Meanwhile, our rather measly national goal is 4 meg down, 1 meg up, which won't support work and business from home applications and is barely adequate for Netflix.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 05/17/2011 - 11:14
Via Stop the Cap!, some Lithuanian broadband customers are getting bandwidth increases that can range has high as 300 megabits, up from the current 100/40 bandwidth for the Premium plan. There is no price increase for the improved performance.
Since the U.S. Broadband Plan targets 4 meg as entirely adequate, we can imagine a catchy slogan: American broadband! 1/75 as good as Lithuania!
Submitted by acohill on Sun, 02/06/2011 - 11:45
SandMonkey, a prominent Egyptian blogger who was briefly detained by Egyptian security forces, advocates that opponents of repressive regimes should store all their documents, writing, and information (e.g. email addresses and data on compatriots) on a cloud-based service located in a different country. That way, if a laptop is confiscated, there are no incriminating documents on it.
It's a fascinating view of an emerging technology, and of course, terrorists can do the same thing. As always, technology is politically neutral. But there is no doubt that bloggers and the technology of the Internet is changing politics, mostly for the good, by making it harder to hide graft, corruption, nepotism, and incompetence.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 12/27/2010 - 11:23
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.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 09/20/2010 - 07:16
Many parts of rural England, like many rural areas of the U.S., have "little" broadband speeds of just a few hundred kilobits, as opposed to "big" broadband delivered via fiber with a capacity of a hundred megabits or more. A speed test was recently conducted in Yorkshire, England. The goal was to download a 300 megabtye file by a "little" broadband connection and see if that was faster than sending it 120 kilometers by pigeon.
The pigeon won. They strapped a USB thumb drive to the pigeon and it flew the 120 kilometers in one quarter of the time needed to download the file. Silly? Sure, sort of. But it really shows why little broadband is not enough for rural America.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 08/03/2010 - 09:58
Via an Akamai report (registration is required to get the report), Latvia has moved up to fifth place in the average bandwidth rankings worldwide. The U.S. is down at number 22, with a net negative drop of about 1% in bandwidth over the last quarter and 2.5% drop in bandwidth over the past year. According to Akamai, the average broadband connection in the U.S. is about 3.8 megabits/second, which would reflect the fact that the cable companies dominate the broadband marketplace in the U.S.
It is worth noting that the FCC just set a new standard for the definition of "broadband," which is 4 megabits down and 1 megabit up. This reflects the continuing focus on broadband as an "entertainment" service (that's what some cable companies call it) rather than a business service. With more people and businesses trying to work out of the home, symmetric bandwidth has become essential to economic development. The continuing acceptance of a bigger pipe into homes and businesses and a much smaller pipe upstream reflects a lack of understanding about business and job needs for broadband services, which need the symmetric bandwidth.
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 07/23/2010 - 12:28
India has announced a $35 computer for students. The Linux-based machine is intended to give Indian students at all levels, starting in grade school, access to an affordable computer. I proposed a $100 computer twelve years ago--at that time, no one took it seriously, but I'm glad India thinks it's a good idea.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 06/08/2010 - 14:53
Fiber everywhere is the simple goal the national government of New Zealand has set. In ten years, the government intends to have a minimum of 100 megabit fiber connections to 75% of homes and businesses in the entire country. They are doing this by going open access. It's a very simple model. The government will help underwrite the cost of privately owned fiber, but only if the network owner/operator agrees to provide unrestricted dark fiber and/or Layer 2 transport to any service provider. It's a time--tested model already being used in places in the U.S. like Utah and the City of Palm Coast, Florida.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 05/24/2010 - 13:48
The Australian, a major paper in Australia, has sold out the ad space on its iPad version of the newspaper. At least one paper intends to stay ahead of the news game and make the new medium work for its business. Good for them.
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 05/07/2010 - 13:19
Design Nine has been an advocate for open access for many years--long before it became fashionable. So it is nice to see that some places are finally figuring out that open access is the right way to do telecom. Via Ars Technica, the Australian government has announced a $38 billion (in U.S. dollars) plan to take fiber to most Australian homes and businesses. The government intends to operate it as a open access network, with private sector providers offering all the services. The article notes that the country has decided it will not impede economic development by allowing a single incumbent to make long term decision about how much broadband is enough.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 02/25/2010 - 09:39
There's a slogan for you: U.S. Broadband--We're almost as good as Latvia! Kind of rolls right off the tongue. Here is a link to a list of the "top 10" broadband countries, and the U.S. is nowhere to be found. Grim news indeed for the country.
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 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 Wed, 11/18/2009 - 09:30
Spain has decided that broadband is a "right," and is going to beginning legislating price and speed for bandwidth services. In the short term, this may get more affordable broadband to some rural areas of Spain, but in the long term, this kind of legislation tends to discourage innovation and competition.
In the U.S., it is tempting to look at rural areas the lack of broadband alternatives and think that legislation is needed, but there are options, like having local and regional governments make investments in broadband infrastructure and make it available to the private sector, which creates true competition. And this is already working and creating jobs in places like Danville, Virginia and Galax, Virginia. In both communities, open access fiber networks are creating private sector jobs and attracting new businesses to the downtown areas where fiber is available.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 09/14/2009 - 08:21
The BBC has an article asking what happened to public WiFi. The big WiFi projects that attracted so much attention in the U.S. five and six years ago (e.g. Philadelphia, San Francisco) failed miserably and were shut down or dramatically restructured. Some smaller municipal WiFi projects, like the one in St. Cloud, Florida, had some early rough spots but are still active. But local governments, by and large, found that free WiFi was expensive to support and often very lightly used.
The BBC wonders if the new smartphones (e.g. the iPhone, Google's Android) will create a new surge of communitywide wireless demand. The answer is, "Probably." But looking five to seven years down the road, wireless Internet access will probably have shifted by then to WiMax or the recently opened 700 Mhz spectrum. And if I had to bet, the 700 Mhz could be the winner because it has sufficient bandwidth, the signal travels farther (fewer access points and less cost), and it penetrates trees and buildings better. WiMax, for all the hype, still has many of the shortcomings of WiFi because it operates in the same general frequency ranges.
While rural areas will rely heavily on wireless for primary Internet access until fiber reaches most rural homes, fiber will replace wireless over the long term for fixed point access. But we all want mobile access, and so wireless services are here to stay. But it is an expensive technology, and communities would be served best by investing in open access basic wireless infrastructure (tower sites, towers, rooftop access on public buildings and water towers) and simply leasing out that basic infrastructure to private sector wireless firms. On the fiber sides, communities should build open access fiber networks and lease out the capacity to the private sector--for both wireless and fiber, these are public/private partnership solutions that keep government out of the business of selling telecom services but ensure that communities have some control over their economic future.
Design Nine was selected as a Broadband Properties top 100 company in 2008, 2009, and 2010.
Designed by Design Nine, the nDanville fiber network has won the Intelligent Community Forum's Smart 21 award for 2010.
Design Nine provides visionary broadband architecture and engineering services to our clients. We have over seventy years of staff experience with telecom and community broadband-more than any other company in the United States.
We have a full range of broadband and telecom planning, design, and project management services.
Eldo Telecom
Muni Networks
Free Fiber to the Home
Save NC Broadband
Broadband 2.0
Free Utopia!
Blandin on Broadband
Intelligent Community Forum
Cybertelecom
FCC Broadband Blog
KGP Broadband Stimulus
Daily Yonder
AppRising
Benton Foundation
Ars Technica Tech Policy
Broadband Policy
Bill St. Arnaud
Stop the Cap
Broadband Policy Watch
Lafayette Pro Fiber