NextGenCommunications

For many of us hard core users of the Internet it comes as no shock that having a reliable, high-speed Internet connection can improve the quality of life. Many of us use our connectivity to stream music, watch video content that is unavailable in the mainstream media, learn, research and communicate with people from all over the world – all things we probably could not afford to do (if they were even possible to accomplish) using “traditional” methods.

Finally, we have a report that clearly shows the interdependence of this service to an enriched lifestyle. Released yesterday (April 19, 2005) at Yahoo!’s “It’s a Broadband Life” summit held at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York this report highlights how consumers are using their connectivity to improve the quality of the lives. I thought this article did an excellent job of highlighting the topic and I highly recommend it for anyone looking for more information on this study.

From streaming music across the Internet (instead of using a radio) to reading their news online (Google news anyone?) right through the soon to be ubiquitous availability of IPTV, things are changing and changing quickly. We no longer wait for the top of the hour to catch the news or weather, the information is available anytime we want it. Instead of watching television news, waiting for the one story I am interested is seeing, I can zero in on exactly what I want, when I want it. I can see videos, still pictures or just read the text – my choice – no graphic imagery if I choose not to view it, unlike the TV news networks that seem to fight over how much gore they can slam down our throats in an attempt to grab ratings.

Even better, I don’t have to listen to the carefully scripted slant of the story. I can choose to read several sites, browse the pictures, and discuss the issues with my peers instead of having the content “spoonfed” to me – try that with FoxNews!

At any given moment I have a complete library of almost anything I could want to know, any subject is available to me at a moment’s notice, cataloged for me in any one of two dozen ways and probably available at the level I need – from beginner to expert – it’s all there, all the time just for the asking.

This holds true for shopping, all kinds of shopping lined up in order by price, availability and with a way of comparing consumer opinions if I want them. I can click, order and have any number of products shipped right to my door without ever having to drive anywhere. No crowds, no problems parking and never the issue of having to deal with the weather – something that in the middle of the winter, here in northern Vermont is a blessing.

If you’re reading this, you probably had already figured this all out by now for yourself but now there is a study that confirms what you already knew.

In a departure from what I usually talk about I thought I would spend some time and discuss one of the problems I see as neglected to a large extent by many of us. I would like to thank TechDirt for bringing up this subject in another of their very well written articles located here.

As a parent and someone who loves technology as well as our country, I am appalled at the apparent callous disregard for the failure of our country to continue to lead the way in connectivity – let alone fall to almost dead last in terms of education, affordable health care and overall quality of life. This is far more than a political issue or the mention of how one political party is better than the other – this decline has been happening steadily regardless of which party held office.

Speaking directly to the educations issue, I have heard all of the excuses, it’s the educator’s fault, it’s the parent’s fault, the children nowadays are different from kids when we were growing up (Man, that one never gets old. I think I remember reading about how the ancient Romans complained about that one!) and that it is the government’s fault for not throwing enough money at the problem.

We now have a similar situation with broadband as the excuses are coming out fast and furious. There is the ever-popular, “We’re too big of a country and all of those other countries are smaller.” argument, the “It would cost too much.” comeback and my all time favorite, “We have just a Good Enough network for our needs.”

When did our country change from a nation of “We make the best of everything!” to “We make the best excuses!” Did I miss another damn memo?

Here’s a little random reality check – this is an issue that society has created and only society is going to fix. In keeping with that above statement, here’s a clue, looking for someone to blame is largely a waste of time and effort. We can look in the mirror and see exactly who is to blame. Perhaps that isn’t fair to some people but I feel as though I can state with some certainty they are few and far between. Applying the old 85/15 rule that states that 85% of the work is done by 15% of the people and we can clearly see that the largest part of our nation is doing squat to fix this problem.

What do we need to do?

Techdirt has a few suggestions that I would like to pass on. How about if we start treating kids that work toward improving themselves through education with a higher level of respect than kids that throw a football? The was a spelling bee in Canada recently where the winner was given a $10K scholarship. No kidding! Damn, if the kid had been a hockey star she would have gotten a full scholarship to the university of her choice.

When we as a nation wake up and realize that encouraging out children to educate themselves is as important – no MORE IMPORTANT – than shooting hoops or sinking baskets we will then start the long and hard road to recovery.

Who do we hold up to our children as role models? How many kids can name the scientist who developed the test for HIV as opposed to which sports star hit the most home runs? How many of those same kids can understand the importance of mastering technology as opposed to faking their way to pop stardom as the next Brittany Spears?

When do we reallocate our priorities so that the kid that gets picked on for being a computer nerd now takes on the status of a NASCAR driver? When will it be cool to be interested in science as opposed to being able to rap?

The funny thing is, this is what I thought a leader was supposed to do. I guess I was raised in a different time. I remember John Kennedy inspiring an entire generation to bettering themselves. I don’t think I have seen anything like that since. That is a shame and I actually get sick to my stomach when I think of the example our leaders have set since that time.

They say an addict must sink into the depths of desperation before they can turn themselves around. I wonder if the same holds true for a nation.

As anyone who is even vaguely in touch with this field knows, Muni Broadband projects are a really inflammatory issue right now. This has created some pretty interesting dynamics that move past amusing. We have the ILECs squarely against any kind of project they see as a threat to “their” business in agreement with many WISPs (if that isn’t unusual, I don’t know what is!) in that the use of tax money to set up communications infrastructure is something the ILECs are squarely against. If this isn’t the definition of ironic, I can’t find a better one and if the ILECs wanted to convince more of us as to their sincerity in this matter they could certainly start refusing the acceptance of any tax credits themselves.

We have the Heartland Institute (a name that invokes a warm, American sound, doesn’t it?) taking one side of the issue as you can see here. We all want to hear all the sides of any issue but I also believe it is important to understand motivations as this can help us to understand the perspective of the opinion.

According to Glenn Fleishman of WiFiNetNews, the Heartland Institute has a rather interesting history and some unusual ties that make me want to question their perspective. In fact, Glenn did an excellent job “connecting the dots” to see where the financing for the Heartland Institute actually comes from.

Personally, I think I might have felt a little better about this perspective if right from the start Steven Titch (the author of these articles from the Heartland Institute) had mentioned his financing was courtesy of the ILECs. To give you a little more of an understanding of the important work the Heartland Institute has done, here’s an interesting article about how they feel cigarette smoking, something that simply has to be read. I don’t have any clue who financed this opinion but based on what I have read I could make an assumption.

The funny thing is, I tend to fall on the side of the ILECs and the Heartland Institute on the Municipal Broadband issue – under a set of very strict circumstances. What’s worse, if these concerns had looked at issues that are behind the situation and told the hard truth instead of slanting their presentation as best they could, they might have picked up some serious support. However, this is probably something that would be difficult to do unless you are well versed in the business and are willing to lay it all out in the open – something that organization are sometime reticent to do.

So, what I is my take on the debate?

Well first, let me provide you with the obligatory disclaimer – something the Heartland Institute apparently overlooked, as they probably didn’t think it was prudent.

I am a businessperson deeply involved in this industry both from the owner’s standpoint of a very small ISP/WISP and someone who has invested a lot of time and money in this field. If the concept of Municipal Broadband did take off and become commonplace I would stand to lose a significant amount of money but more importantly I believe I would lose the ability to have access in many of the places I would choose to live. This is exactly the point I wish to address. One more thing, just to be clear, I am not being paid by anyone, anywhere, including the ILEC, the cable companies or any other entity on the face of the earth for this opinion – go ahead and check in you have that kind of time!

What nobody seems to want to tell you is that this business is all about numbers – sorry, I would love to tell you it’s about bringing broadband to “our communities” or bridging the “Digital Divide” but the reality is, from just about everyone’s perspective from the giant ILEC right down to the single end user, it is all about the numbers.

I don’t care who you are or where you fit into the spectrum of the broadband world, you need to understand one thing there is a cost to bring broadband to the customer. With the possible exception of satellite (a technology that in its current state isn’t considered broadband by either the FCC or myself) every single delivery method of broadband I can think of depends on a certain level of population density. To put it another way, we need a certain number of people per mile in order to deliver service at a price you (the end customer) will be willing to pay.

From the perspective of the ILEC or the cable company, if there aren’t a set number of customers for every mile of wire or fiber they have to roll out, there is never going to be a return on the investment. The same holds true for a wireless deployment but we aren’t necessarily bound by the same restraints as in having to follow the roads. We still need to have a fixed number of customers inside the radius of our coverage area or the cost to deliver per subscriber climbs proportionally.

It stands to reason that densely populated areas serve as the best locations to deploy service – the more people that live in a square mile, the less wire that has to be installed to service them. Conversely, is a rural or sparsely populated area, the situation is exactly the reverse.

This is where the problem starts to become apparent. Where are the Municipal projects looking at rolling out? Why, the densely populated areas! Okay, so what? Well the problem starts to be that once you have deployed in the densely populated areas and then you deploy in the suburban areas there is no business model that will do the same thing for rural areas! A different way of saying this is to say if we have a huge project that gets built in the big city that is financed by the big city there is a very good chance if it is well designed, deployed correctly and managed efficiently, it will succeed. In fact, it should be able to be a profit producing revenue stream for the city.

Next down on the scale is the suburban areas that surround the city. They can form their own broadband projects which while will not have the scale of economics to draw from will also be successful providing the project is run well.

Now we need to look at the next ring of the population, the rural areas that fall outside of the suburban areas. This is where the problem appears, there aren’t enough people per mile to support a project like what has been built in the city or the surrounding suburbs. Since each of the projects are owned and financed by the location they are in, the rural areas cannot effectively “piggyback” on those projects because it would raise the average cost per user to the “host” municipality. People, being what they are, usually won’t go for that kind of a proposal, in effect, leaving the more rural areas in a position where they either cannot get broadband or they have to pay significantly more for the same level of service.

This also explains why the ILECs are concerned about these projects. Without the “cash cows” (the larger metropolitan areas) the suburban and rural areas simply are not worth servicing. This also holds true once the broadband network starts to replace the copper telephone network. If there isn’t a lot of people paying to support the copper network in the city, there isn’t enough money to bring dialtone to the very rural areas. Opps, their business model just started to crumble. In all fairness, it isn’t the ILEC’s business model, the deal is that they get a monopoly if they will provide service universally. Every single one of us pays for the customer in areas of the country that are not profitable. Now, if the profit making areas leave the ILEC’s network, who is going to pay for the areas that will never turn a profit? Carrying that to the logical conclusion, if every metropolitan area were to start a municipal broadband project and a fair amount of the customer base then switched to VoIP as their standard communications, where does that leave the ILEC?

The next issue that needs to be looked at is why would I care and more importantly to you, why would you care?

Like many WISPs I live in a rural part of the country, northern Vermont. As I explained above I need a certain amount of customers per mile for me to support my business. Just like any astute businessperson, I am going to set up my business to service the market that will bring me the highest return first. Once I have maximized my investment in this community (that would be the most densely populated area, as you recall above) I will then have to look for other markets to expand into if I want to expand.

Next up, suburban locations (such as they might be in my area) will probably get brought in and when they are connected to the maximum saturation rate I will then look to rural areas that have a sufficient population density to justify deploying in this area. This cycle will continue until I have exhausted the process where at that point I will either choose to repeat the process in another area or try to continue to filling in customers on my existing network.

At this point, you should clearly be able to understand that the process is interdependent, no big city, no suburban deployment and the rural area hasn’t got a prayer in hell of ever seeing service at a reasonable price. Yes, I realize that some of the rural areas are where the very wealthy choose to live and that these people would be willing to pay significantly more for service but I submit this is the exception – not the rule.

This isn’t rocket science here, it is an easily definable business model that is pretty easy to understand once you understand the dynamics. If the city chooses to build a municipal broadband project, there is not population base that will sufficiently support the rest of the area.

Our state (Vermont) has a different way of killing broadband, we give out grants! You would think this might be a good thing but the reality is, it kills the deployment of independent broadband faster than anything else I can think of. Would you want to deploy in the next town over from a company that just got $50K with next to no strings attached? No? Why, it’s not like this would be a threat to your business or anything right? What happens when this money is introduced into an industry? I submit that is kills the industry dead. Why? Would you invest in an industry that at any moment could create a competitor out of nowhere that has no cost of goods? I wouldn’t think you would put your money up against that kind of opponent. The funny thing is Investors are just like you and me, they won’t invest in a venture that could one day have to compete with a company that has no cost of money or goods.

What about these “state-financed” businesses? Won’t they use the money wisely to roll out broadband to other areas? I doubt it because in order to qualify for these grants you need to deploy in an area that has no other form of broadband – read sparsely populated. Wait a minute, sparsely populated areas, don’t they need to have sufficient population density to support such a project?

The reality is, this (in my opinion) is simply a way of the political establishment to tell their constituents that they are doing something. Does it need to be something effective? Apparently not, but remember, the people who award these grants don’t understand this business – not even the basics. They do appreciate a well written paper and a carefully crafted presentation.

What scares me in the realization that a lot of our tax dollars are being spent in very much the same way.

As quoted from this study,

“According to a report by Technology Futures Inc. (TFI), by 2006, one-half of U.S. households will subscribe to broadband access, and a shift to much higher data rates in the range of 24 Mb/s to 100 Mb/s will have begun. By 2010, U.S. broadband penetration of 75% is likely, and 10% to 20% of U.S. households will subscribe to very high-speed-broadband. In the process, most of the local exchange carriers current investment in copper cable will be made obsolete.”

In that one paragraph (above) there is a mountain of information critical to every single person that reads this blog. The first and probably most crucial point is that somewhere around the end of this year 50% of the US households will have adopted broadband. (as defined by 200Kbps or higher)

We also are informed that we will also see a dramatic shift towards “much higher data rates” as described as 6Mbps, then 24Mbps and later 100Mbps. In the study (linked above) there is an estimated timetable as to when this is projected to happen but the incredible thing is that within the next 4 1/2 years we will only have connected approximately 75% of US households to broadband while somewhere between 10% and 20% will be connected to speeds as high as 100Mbps!

This is truly the redefinition of the term Digital Divide!

The final sentence in this amazing paragraph states that in that same timeframe the current copper infrastructure will be made largely obsolete! Even the most optimistic estimates I have read seem to indicate that we will be nowhere close to a 100% fiber deployment by that time.

Of course, this forecast (like any other forecast) can be easily dismissed as a best guess estimate, only as good as the quality of information it is based on and the quality of the person reading the information through their crystal ball. We all need to filter what we can accept in our view of reality and disallow that which might cause us to have to re-examine how we look at the world around us. I look at it as my job to ferret out these articles, examine their credibility and bring them to you for your enrichment.

A rather interesting discussion has been taking place in a couple of the WISP/ISP professional forums I belong to. The issue has been brought to a head because of the charges recently leveled by Vonage claiming that their service is being blocked. Alternately there is also discussion about their service being prioritized last in the queue making it unusable for all intensive purposes.

I am puzzled by some of the comments that have surfaced, many along the lines of, “It’s my network and nobody should be able to tell me how to run it or what services I need to allow.”

This amuses me as I have to wonder if there is any minimum requirement for being an ISP. Would it be allowable for me to block all traffic that I felt isn’t suitable for my network like, web surfing, email, P2P, download videos, streaming video, on-line gaming, etc? Why not? All of these services (except email) require me to use a measurable amount of bandwidth.

There is also the idea that “nobody” has the right to tell us what to do. Last I checked, the FCC has every right to tell us what to do as this is exactly what they are their for – to protect the American public from inadequate communications infrastructure. I would have to think that if the FCC didn’t feel as though an ISP was providing true “Internet service” they would have a lot of options.

We seem to forget that we WISPs operate by the good grace of the FCC and should they deem we are not operating in the public’s best interest they can pull the plug on us any time they decide to.

It is readily apparent that the FCC is solidly behind VoIP. Many of their recent decisions and public speeches have made that clear. What kind of businessperson would risk the angst of the FCC blocking a service that the FCC has championed? What sense would it make to force the FCC to take measures ensuring that the American public will get the necessary access to use a service that they have paid for?

This leads to another set of questions. Why would a business knowingly make it impossible for one of their customers to use a service that the customer wanted enough to take some of their hard earned money and pay for it? This defies every law of business known to man.

One thing for certain, when the service doesn’t work the customer will call the tech support number at the VoIP company and be told that they need to switch Internet Service Providers. When the customer leaves their current ISP and signs up with the competition finding that the service works beautifully, what are they going to think about their previous ISP? What will happen to that initial ISP’s reputation when word gets out that you need to switch from Company A to Company B because Company A’s network can’t provide adequate service to use VoIP?

The same argument could be presented that VoIP is similar to P2P but even that comparison begs to ask why any business would deny a customer any service they might want to avail themselves of. To be successful we need to provide the customer with the very best service available. This is not something that is limited to answering the telephone or dealing with hardware issues, this means that the customer never experiences anything that would disappoint them.

To do anything less is to have already made the decision you are leaving the business but you don’t know exactly what day that will be.

In this world, the only thing we have to worry about is our incompetence being leveraged by the competition.

Try not to forget that!

This morning I decided to take a close look at the spam folder in my GMail account. I had purposely been letting it grow so as to gather inspiration for this piece. Incredibly, in a three-week period I have managed to collect 374 pieces of some of the funniest email solicitations I can imagine.

Three members of the Douglas family (mike34 douglas, mike02 douglas and mike08 douglas – I guess this is like the naming convention of the George Foreman family) emailed me to tell me that their father, Paul Douglas, had been murdered and that they would like to have me help them get the money into a different back account. He tells me he trusts me and that he is willing to give me 20% of the money (just over $2 million dollars) for my trouble. I guess he is anticipating I am going to have a lot of trouble.

Katie Cody emailed me (along with roughly a dozen other nice folks) to tell me about her picks for the stock market. I thought this was nice of all of those busy stock brokers because if they knew me they would know I don’t invest in the stock market, I own my own company and place all of my gambling money there effectively cutting out the middleman (or in this case the middlewoman)

Several people (actually, too many to quickly count) emailed me with fantastic deals on software. I am reliably told that I can buy software packages that retail for several hundred dollars for pennies on the dollar because these nice people apparently are not interested in making all that profit for themselves.

I was also nothing less than amazed that I could grow some appendages bigger, wider and firmer while at the same time losing weight! I would have thought this a scientific impossibility but I am amazed what I learn everyday on the Internet so why should this be any different?

The winner, hands down, had to be all of the nice people who want to lower my mortgage, something I find amazing because I don’t have a mortgage. Apparently, that isn’t a problem as these people can also perform what I though was scientifically impossible by lowering zero!

ENOUGH!

My GMail account is less than a year old and already the spammers have found me to the tune of 100 plus emails per week. The funny thing is I don’t blame them; I blame the idiots that click on these solicitation and BUY from them. Let’s face it, the spammers do this because there is a payback – and a large payback it is.

Congress decided to take some action on this problem by passing what is affectionately known as the “can spam” act. Has this really done anything worth mentioning? Well, if my inbox is any indication, I am going to have to say no. Why? Because Congress targeted the wrong end of the transaction, the spammer. If they wanted to really have some effect on this problem they would have made it illegal for anyone to buy from these jackasses. Of course, if you are stupid enough to believe that some pills are going to make your appendage longer, or someone you don’t know can prescribe medications for you, you probably deserve what you get. How many people have been taken for large sums of money (some even killed) by answering an ad to help some soul remove millions of dollars from their country? Are these idiots really so gullible as to believe there is someone they don’t know out there trying to give them several million dollars?

I guess this might actually be a Dawinism because if these people are willing to buy medicines from disreputable establishments and swallow them, this will certainly become a self-correcting problem.

Now, let’s assume that did pass just such a law in conjunction with the can spam act. It would now be easy to find out the financial information of every spammer out there and seize it. Let’s face it, spam is driven by greed and if there were no money in the business we would also see very little spam in short order.

However, this doesn’t really address the entire problem. The real culprit is that the email system we all are used to isn’t capable of handling many of the challenges we face today. In my collection of spam I had several phishing experiments, including a couple “from” Ebay, one from Paypal and several from banks that aren’t in my area not to mention that I don’t have accounts with. Once again, people click on these messages (because they instinctively trust email?) and provide their personal information to very realistic looking sites. I suppose if we want to discourage that we would allow these people to lose their money. After a few idiots have their story about losing their life’s savings in the media I would think the American public would take this seriously. We can give them their money back after the story gets out; I’m not that heartless.

What we really need is a new mechanism for delivering messaging. Many people now use Instant Messaging as their preferred method of choice for text but this medium is now seeing spam infiltrating it in a very pronounced way.

How can we effectively out this to an end, once and for all? I think we probably could do this quite easily if we wanted to. This is what I suggest, we offer a large reward (say $10 million) to any credible entity to develop and release the next generation of text messaging that is completely secure. Where does this money come from? I would guess that the ISP industry would be thrilled to put this money up considering the very real cost in both bandwidth and the expense involved in trying to filter out spam from their customer’s inboxes.

To make this interesting, we need to structure the contest in such a way that the new program get introduced and set up on a testing ground while another reward (like $1 million is offered to anyone that can crack into the applicant’s security) If after a reasonable time period the software resists all attempts at being cracked we release it to the public for free. The world will quickly adopt this if it is released as a free program.

Do I think this will happen? To be honest with you, I don’t. There is too much money being made here for anyone to really want to change this. We have the spammers along with the companies that are working to stop spam, we have the consumers who seem to want to receive these messages or they wouldn’t be buying this stuff and last of all we have the criminals who are making a living off of these scams – even though I am not sure how much of an influence they have on the entire process.

One thing we could do that I am sure would work quite well, let’s start hacking into spammer’s databases and publishing the names of everyone who buys enlargement medication. I would be willing to bet once that makes it to mainstream media nobody would want to risk being “outed” even if the claims did live up to their promise.

Let’s start off by clearing the slate and understanding that I am not bashing the WiMAX Forum in this discussion. I think the WiMAX Forum has done nothing short of an amazing job – not perfect by any stretch of the imagination – but any group that can manage to get most of the active players in an industry to work together deserves some applause in my book. I am not directly addressing the technology even though the concept is not what I would have done – but then I am not always right either. What I am concerned about is the vision – or lack thereof.

In my daily jog around the Internet (I have to keep in shape somehow) I ran across an article that projected the shift in population from rural to metropolitan as reaching a critical point in the next five years. I had heard about this some years ago so I decided to do a little more reading on the subject and become more familiar with these projections.

In study after study the realization is that people in droves are abandoning the rural areas to move to the urban areas in search of jobs, infrastructure, culture with probably each individual having their own reasons. This holds true everywhere I could find credible data.

The world is steadily becoming more urban, as people move to cities and towns in search of employment, educational opportunities and higher standards of living. Some are driven away from land that, for whatever reason, can no longer support them. By the year 2005, urban areas are expected to be home to more than half of the world’s people.

Already 74 per cent of Latin American and Caribbean populations live in urban areas, as do 73 per cent of people in Europe, and more than 75 per cent of people in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. In both Africa and Asia, urban dwellers represent about a third of the total populations. However, there are significant variations between individual countries. In Africa, for example, more than 50 per cent of the populations of Algeria, South Africa and Tunisia reside in urban areas.

The above quotation was taken from an article located here:

The challenges this will present are enormous. Leaving aside everything else, I thought this would impact how communications will be served to this steadily increasing group.

If we take any large city, New York, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, etc we find that the density per square mile mandates that an enormous amounts of connectivity needs to be provides to a relatively small area. We can also be assured that this demand will significantly increase for the foreseeable future. At the same time the demand seems to be rising at a faster rate than the necessary infrastructure can be built.

Take New York City as an example. It is my understanding that it is a minimum of three years from concept to finished deployment for a fiber project of any size to be completed there. From the initial proposal, through the planning, budgeting, engineering studies, permitting process and continuing right through the actual construction this is a very expensive and time consuming effort. During that same three-year period the demand for more communications infrastructure have increased and the local population is not being adequately serviced.

What does this have to do with WiMAX? The reality is that the WiMAX standard has been designed to provide relatively small amounts of data for reasonably long distances – exactly what we don’t need in the above areas. As metropolitan populations increase their demand for connectivity and should the trend toward urbanization continues who the heck is the WiMAX Forum targeting as their intended market, the rural areas? I would suggest that based on the migration patterns presented above that is a losing proposition.

Instead, what is needed is a MAN standard that allows for huge amounts of data to be transported across relatively short distances coupled with the ability to be put in place very quickly. In addition, this infrastructure needs to be able to support a nearly infinite amount of radios with next to no degradation from interference.

The reality is that this is the overwhelming portion of the market, the one segment that seems to be being ignored by the wireless manufacturers and the one that presents the biggest challenge along with the biggest rewards.

To put this in perspective, the city of Sao Paulo has an estimated population of 27 million people and growing. The needs of a population base this size for a reliable communication infrastructure is astronomical. The ability of any traditional telecommunications provider to keep up with this ever-increasing demand has reached a point where the copper/fiber deployments cannot be deployed in a time frame consistent with the level of population growth as I mentioned in my example citing New York City above.

There is one more factor that enters into this discussion, cost. If we look at the real cost, including labor, to deploy a fiber network we find that cost to range anywhere from a low of roughly $3K/mile for rural areas that have extremely low labors rates to a high of $400K/mile in Manhattan.

That’s one heck of a range.

At what point does it become economically feasible to deploy wireless technology instead of fiber? Certainly this number would depend on the location, labor rates, demand along with a number of other factors. However, we can easily see if these ultra high-speed radios had a retail sale price of $10/each the adoption would be astronomical.

So, what are the applicable technologies we might apply to this need? Certainly the millimeter wave bands could be employed and show some serious promise as does Ultra Wide Band. In locations where the weather conditions permit Free Space Optics could allow for even more capacity to be added as radio and FSO could coexist in the same environment without degrading each other’s performance.

Amazingly, these technologies are reasonably inexpensive to produce once a critical mass is reached.

If we take millimeter wave as an example we find that if the production demands exceeded 10,000 radios per month we would see a drop in prices that would bring these radios in line with the least expensive fiber deployments we can cite. If the number was then raised to 100,000 radios per month we would see prices that would near the cost of telephone cable per mile. Continuing forward at the production levels of 1,000,000 per month we would now see prices not quite as low as the current WiFi levels but close enough that nobody would care.

How about UWB as a comparison? The projections are that the first generation of UWB to be released to the public will initially be mass-produced in such quantities for use in PAN (Personal Area Networks) so as to make the introductory price in the sub-$20 range. These devices have extremely low power output (as mandated by the FCC) but with the use of relatively high gain external antennas we might expect to see their range increased to levels that would allow metropolitan deployments in a mesh style configuration without adding too much self interference into the area. Imagine, we could quite easily produce near 1GHz mesh nodes for a under $200/each!

Finally, we look at Free Space Optics as a potential technology. Some of the early attempts to harness this technology produced some rather awkward devices that were capable of gigabit speeds across reasonable distances. One of the drawbacks to this technology was the incredibly high cost coupled with restrictions mandated by weather patterns that prevented the large scale adoption of this technology. Airfiber was one of the companies that manufactured this equipment and had refined their designs to a point where the equipment was both reliable along with desirable. But from a personal perspective the design used by them were much too large and expensive to be of practical use.

Things have come a long way in the last few years. I am in regular contact with someone who is now ramping up a manufacturing base to produce modified 10Mbps full duplex Ronja FSO equipment inexpensively. There is also a design currently on the test bench that can deliver 100Mbps full duplex connectivity but this is still a long way from production.

I believe this will be one of the technology adopted especially in areas that make wireless (RF) illegal. If the invisible spectrum was employed as opposed to visible light this technology becomes almost impossible to trace making it nearly invulnerable to restriction. I can also see this as being used to cross international borders skirting the insane regulations that tend to crop up.

The question isn’t if this will happen but when. The realization is that one of these days a group of savvy investors are going to embrace the right group of engineers and realize that this vision is necessary to make the future of communications come together. I look forward to that day as being the day when the current telecommunications industry gets put out to pasture and becomes looked upon as the dinosaur that it is. That day is coming probably much faster than many of us expect but as sure as the demand is outstripping the supply innovation will answer the need.

As WISPs based in industrialize countries we tend to think in terms of what we are doing, the progress we are making and the applications we are employing our technologies for. There is certainly nothing wrong with that other than we can sometimes lose focus on the bigger picture – you know – what the rest of the world is doing and this is nothing short of an embarrassment.

The explosion in wireless technology has hit just about every corner of our planet. This is pretty spectacular considering that many countries have prohibited this modernization in an attempt to keep their telecommunications industry intact. This is, of course, providing they even have a functioning telecommunications industry.

Let’s take a look at some of these deployments, the changes they are making and what this might very well mean to us.

Bhutan – To be quite honest with you I didn’t even know where Bhutan was on the map. I had to look it up on Google. This little country decided they were going to put an infrastructure in place and leapfrog the telecommunications industry right into this millennium. If you take the time to read about what was accomplished in such a short time and for so little money I think you’ll agree that wireless isn’t just a way of delivering Internet content – it is an incredibly powerful technology that is slowly tipping over the giants of yesteryear.

Laos – As we all go through life I would like to think we try to leave this world a little better than we found it. Lee Thorne is doing just that. Lee set up the Jhai Foundation as a personal attempt to make right a wrong he didn’t create yet he felt responsible for. Whether or not this was something he needed to do really isn’t important – he did it and many people are benefiting from this project. You need to know that the benefit is not only felt in Laos but also right here at home where people like me sit in amazement and wonder how it might be possible to contribute in such a scale as Lee and his organization are doing.

Mali – Here’s another country I had to look up on Google. I felt relieved when I found out that Mali is located in Africa. I have always considered myself excused from learning the names of all the countries in Africa as they seem to change just as soon as you learn them. Once again we see people bringing useful technology to far away and pretty desolate places for next to nothing. This project has been nicknamed “BottleNet” because they build WiFi antennas out of empty plastic bottles that cost roughly about one dollar. This is a story you really need to read as aside from talking about all these projects and the good they are doing it also conveys exactly how big a potential market we could (and should) be working in.

All of this pales in comparison to the sleeping giant that just arose and will probably dwarf every other market we now play in. India has recently set a new policy that includes outdoor wireless. To put this in perspective India is a country that is poised to become the second largest economy in the world. Conversely, India’s telecommunications infrastructure are in a shambles. Currently, as I understand it, India has a telephone base of .02% of its total population. Estimates suggest that India will add 40 million subscribers to their Internet backbone in the next five years! While I am not going to predict how many of these subscribers will be connected wirelessly I can tell you that if even 10% buy WiMAX CPEs we are going to see a successful launch of the WiMAX standard – one that will make even the biggest critics eat their words.

I have had the pleasure of watching this field blossom from a very few people largely discussing a passing hobby to an international industry that could very realistically change the world. The best part is that we haven’t even begun to see the fruits of this labor. What benefits we will see when most (or all) of the world finally becomes connected? What new services will be offered? Will we be able to perfect real-time language translation? If we do will this help to ease international misunderstandings? Will we now be able to seamlessly do business all over the world, taking advantage of different skill sets and labor markets wherever they might be located? The even bigger question is will this be an entirely good thing?

I don’t pretend to have any of these answers but I do know that this revolution in the way we communicate is going to have massive ramifications in ways I don’t think we can even begin to anticipate.

One of the technologies I see radically changing our lives is Grid Computing. Many of us are familiar with SETI and some of the other applications that are now taking shape. What will happen when we can connect a million computers, ten million or even 100 million computers to tackle our most complex problems? While I won’t pretend to put forth a guess on that front I will acknowledge what Alvin Toffler said in his famous book over 30 years go. We are moving faster, much faster than we ever have before and the rate of acceleration is ever increasing. To those who are not keeping up this world will rapidly become a very complex and somewhat frightening place, I believe. It is time we all commit to working a little harder, a little longer and a little more diligently to understand what we are building. It probably wouldn’t hurt for us to take a page from Lee Thorne’s book and try to make an improvement whenever we can, God knows this world could sure use the help.

Let’s take a look at one of the predominant reasons broadband isn’t being deployed at a much faster rate and at far greater speeds. If you were to ask any ISP what the biggest single deterrent to deploying broadband is, I believe you would receive a near uniform reply – the cost of upstream connectivity.

This brings up an interesting point, why does the cost to connect to the Internet seem so expensive? The obvious reply would be that the cost to purchase, deploy and maintain the necessary infrastructure is astronomical. There is certainly something to be said for that. A quick look at pricing for a high-end router or 10 miles of fiber (let alone the labor involved in hanging it) shows the cost to be not for the faint of heart. Verizon plans to invest $800 million in 2005 alone just in deploying fiber for the Fios project. Verizon claims that this investment will deploy this service to 1 million homes. If we can believe these numbers, Verizon will connect these 1 million homes for $800/each. Not too bad considering that this will allow Verizon to supply not only telephone and high speed Internet but also TV along with a bunch of other services I am sure they are looking forward to billing us for.

Along these lines, we need to look at what Verizon provides us with and at what price. Verizon’s DSL offering provides a 1.5Mbps connection for $29.95/month plus a pile of additional fees. I also get my T1 from Verizon at a cost of well over $1K/month based on the longest term contract they offer. I have to admit my uptime has been exceptional (certainly as compared to what I am hearing about Verizon’s DSL in this area) but the cost has stayed the same for over a decade even though the cost of the equipment has dropped to a fraction of what it was even when I ordered my T1 over five years ago.

Now, we are being told that Fios will provide 30Mbps down with 5Mbps up for $199/month yet Verizon’s T1s will still remain at the same price.

I guess the real question is whether or not Verizon (and the rest of the remaining ILECs) are really acting in the “public good” as their charter mandates. The next question we need to ask ourselves is whether we consider Internet service to be an “essential service” as we do telecommunications.

If we consider Internet to be an essential service and we also mandate that the ILECs continue to act in the public good, how do we reconcile the ILECs charging such high prices for independent companies to connect to the Internet. Let’s face it, a fair portion of the independent ISPs are the only choice for most of the country – especially in rural areas. To allow the ILECs to create this level of pricing, in effect, stifling the deployment of new Internet infrastructure certainly cannot be construed as working in the public’s best interest.

As a comparison, I thought it might be interesting to look at the way the incumbents run their business model and apply it to another public utility, the water company. Would we allow the access to our drinking water to be “rationed” so as to create wealth for an entity that is supposed to be working for us? What kind of impact would this kind of management system have had on the independent farmer? Would this model have worked well for our country or the world as a whole?

I see the parallel as being quite apt in this case. The stranglehold the ILECs have on our connectivity is largely preventing the wholesale deployment of broadband from happening in this country. If T1 lines were to cost $100/month there would be no limit to the amount of independent companies, neighborhood organizations or informal groups sharing all levels of service. The explosion would happen so fast that I think it would be hard for the ILECs to handle all of the business – profitable business – I would submit.

So, why isn’t this happening?

In a word – control. What we are talking about here is a huge industry, a powerful force that isn’t really interested in public good. In fact, as anyone who remembers the Ma Bell era, public good was the last thing Ma Bell seemed to be concerned with. Many of us that are old enough to remember that time in history are now beginning to become deathly afraid that those days are rapidly returning. With the recent spate of mergers and buyouts we are now beginning to see the rebirth of Ma Bell in all her former glory – a frightful sight indeed.

Perhaps we should all be looking into whether or not the ILECs are serving the public good. This is the key point here. The ILECs are a regulated monopoly that is protected so they can serve the public. If we believe the ILECs are working for their own good (as a for profit company should be doing) we need to ask ourselves if we should continue giving the ILECs the protected status they currently enjoy. I have no problem with Ma Bell acting in her own best interest – in fact, I encourage it. However, if this is the way the monopoly wishes to go forward then they need to understand there is a very different set of laws they will need to conform to.

It is time we look at the ILECs monopoly status, their ability to manipulate numbers to show that they can sell DSL circuits wholesale for just about the same price the sell to the end user. The fact is that the ILECs have somehow managed to become the center of the net. This is a curious thing from my perspective as I don’t remember anyone appointing them the guardian of the net nor do I think they should be allowed to continue.

This bring up the question of where should the center of the net be located and who should have control? More to the point, should anyone have control? Alternately, should we create more than one “Internet” that allows for interconnection as people might want. This would allow for the segregation of many of the undesirable sites from those who would like a squeaky clean Internet while still allowing for a “wild west” style Internet that many of us are used to and enjoy.

If I had to speculate, we will slowly start to see a second “net” begin to form. I suspect this is already happening in places as people are forming small networks to enjoy network gaming, file sharing, etc. Personally, if this happened we would lose some of the potential that make the Internet great. The promise of entire world being able to communicate freely, to teach and to learn, to share experiences along with our emotions is the potential we could lose.

It’s time that we are a people demand the return of the Internet to us, the people who it was created for and by. We conceived it, we spent the money to build it and it is ours – not some evangelical who knows better than we do about how we should live our lives and certainly not some antiquated company that is having trouble finding relevance in today’s world. I look forward to a time when the sound of a dialtone evokes memories similar to the ones I get every time I here a modem connect.

And that day is coming, perhaps not fast enough for some people like me but all too fast for those who are having a difficult time adapting to this rapidly changing world.

I’m sure Charles Darwin would wish them all the luck in the world – they will most certainly need it.

What is the definition of broadband?

Technically, the FCC defines broadband as 200Kbps. I am not sure when this number was first introduced but I don’t think anyone at the FCC has considered revisiting the number or ever thought about revising it.

This brings up the question of whether the numbers the FCC are providing us concerning broadband penetration are realistic. Leaving aside the question of how the FCC decides if an area has broadband (Alex Goldman did an outstanding job of providing us with the details behind that in this article.) I have to wonder what the numbers would look like if we were to raise the bar to 1.5Mbps as the accepted definition of broadband.

Let’s step back a minute and take a look at what the different service levels actually provide. To illustrate this point I am going to use the Microsoft XP Service Pack 2 upgrade that was released recently. This upgrade was critical for any user of XP that is connected to the net to provide protection for serious security flaws and other bug fixes that the original version of XP contained. As you can see from this link, the total size of this Service Pack was 266 MB!

At the current definition of broadband (200Kbps) it would take just over three hours to complete this download. During this time the user would not be able to use the internet for anything else to speak of as the entire connection would be in use.

Imagine a small company that has 20 computers running XP. Assuming the IT manager decided to download and install every computer at one time from their 200Kbps broadband connection it would take well over 60 hours to update the entire office. I do understand that it is possible to obtain a CD from Microsoft and that there are a variety of ways that could also be employed to perform this task but I would counter that these methods were only created because we do not have adequate infrastructure in place to get this job done in a timely manner using the existing broadband infrastructure.

Let’s move forward a step to the 1.5Mbps connection. Based on the link provided above, it would take roughly 45 minutes at T1 speeds to download this Service Pack for each computer. So, to do our fictitious office of 20 computers we would be looking at 15 hours or so at T1 speeds. Don’t forget, this is utilizing 100% of the connection.

As many of you know, a fair percentage of WISPs use T1s as their upstream connection. Using a business model that I know is commonly used, let’s take the scenario I created above and move our fictitious company into a medium sized industrial park that is lit up by a WISP using a T1 for their upstream connection. In our fictitious industrial park we have a total of 60 companies of which according to national averages only half have subscribed to the high-speed Internet service provided by our WISP. These companies range in size from one to two computer offices, through our twenty computer company, all the way up to one company that has 40 computers all running Microsoft XP.

Again, since I made up this little industrial park I am going to claim the average amount of computers per company is 15 and just to keep things simple we are going to say that all 450 of these computers run Microsoft’s XP operating system. We are also going to simplify this example by having all of these computers set up to download updates from Microsoft automatically and we are going to further mandate that every computer attached to our network is left on 24 hours per day. I do fully understand that this list of suppositions will probably never happen in the real world but I am going to state that given the fact this is a relatively small industrial park it is very likely that in a large park 450 computers running XP could very well be attached to a WISP deployment that is backed by a T1.

What does the math look like when each one of these computers decides to connect to Microsoft and download Service Pack 2? Here’s the math and I will tell you right now it isn’t pretty.

We have 450 computers all trying to download Service Pack 2 (all 266 Megabytes of it) at a 1.5Mbps connection. As you remember from the discussion above, it takes roughly 45 minutes for each computer to download the Service Pack. That gives us 45 minutes times 450 computers or 20250 minutes (337.5 hours) to complete the download! Ouch! To put that in perspective, that’s just over 14 days of continuous downloading at full speed to complete the job.

Well, I guess we need to look at a better connection than a T1, don’t we?

At 5 Mbps this download would take a four days to fully accomplish this task.

At 10Mbps (and let’s face it, not many WISPs provide this level of service) we would still be looking at a full weekend of downloading to get this one job done.

If that is the case, what would be the next level of practical service?

Verizon is in the process of rolling out Fios, which is their fiber to the premise service. According to Verizon’s sales literature Fios will deliver different levels of service ranging from 5Mbps all the way up to 30Mbps, priced at $199/month.

Let’s return to our company in the industrial park and their 20 computers. For the sake of argument, we’ll assume that Fios has already been installed in their office. In this particular instance (XP Service Pack 2) this job would take approximately 2.5 hours to complete – not too shabby given the alternatives. If our little company had the premium service offered by Fios (the 30Mbps level of service) the entire task would only take a total of 40 minutes!

Pretty good, right? No, not actually. In some areas of the world GigE service is available very inexpensively. My twelve year old son chats with a teenager in Germany who has GigE service. For the equivalent of $139/month, they get telephone, TV and high speed Internet! Compare that to the US model where we get TV, 3Mbps connection and telephone for quite a bit more than the $139/month it costs my son’s friend. I understand there are people out there that don’t believe this will effect our competitiveness, economically speaking. I wonder what color the sky is in their world? Having seen pictures of lower GI examinations, I am going to assume it is always dark in their world.

What does GigE connectivity mean to our twenty computer company in this Service Pack 2 scenario? The math works out to be the entire job would take a little under 2 minutes for the entire job to be completed.

I wonder if the statement, “Where do you want to go from here?” was really asking if we wanted to go faster.