Spectrum of Greed

This could happen, but not till the FCC gets out of the way!

Sitting on the porch of a community center swimming pool on a sunny 80 degree day in February is a good thing.  This is where I am able to get a wireless signal while visiting my wife’s relatives in Florida.  I heard they got 4 inches of snow at home yesterday, so my timing was good.  What does this have to do with wireless internet?  My wife’s grandmother doesn’t have internet of any kind in her social security funded home in this nice retirement community.  She does have both a cell phone and a traditional land line phone though.  For her, a woman approaching 90 years of age (but still driving and fully functional), the learning curve of the internet is enough to keep her away, much less the cost involved with getting internet to begin with when she has limited choices and limited funds.  But there are tons of benefits to granny getting on the ‘net - both to granny and to the economy.  Now I or others like me that are comfortable with technology could take the time to show her the benefits of having a high speed internet connection and using VoIP for a house phone that doesn’t get all that much use anyway.  Having this tool instead of a traditional phone line would also give her more options when she wants to connect with her great grandson, who is active duty with the Army and is in Iraq through July of this year.  Why don’t I get her into the 21st century and get grandma onto the internet?

It gets back to the management of our national network, and what problems we decide we want to solve.  Right now, existing telco’s have enormous revenue streams that come from traditional phone line traffic.  In order to not lose this revenue overnight, several defensive tactics have been engaged, some of which are targeted squarely at grandma.  If you want to keep someone where they are, the biggest factor in your favor is fear of the unknown.  As long as the path to your competitors door looks like it could cause problems, or isn’t as easy to understand as what they are doing now, you are golden.  So imagine my persuasive conversation to tell grandma how much she could save if she dropped her current land line and got high speed internet, coupled with VoIP.  First question that has been raised by many is ‘What happens in an emergency?  What if I have to dial 9-1-1?’  Good question.  One that the FCC should have been trying to solve for some years now if they wanted new technologies to be able to more rapidly replace existing technologies.  Today, there has been very little progress to solve this - after all, it isn’t a priority for any of the existing providers.  Strike one against internet for Grandma.  Some small concessions, such as number portability, provide the illusion of a flexible marketplace, so you can tell grandma that she can keep her current number, just move it over to the internet.  That sounds easy enough, but then comes the step of the actual transition.  For a long time, you could not get internet from some phone providers unless you were a phone subscriber first.  That has recently changed, but still there is a lot of pain and insecurity involved if you want to move from a traditional number to something more contemporary.  So let’s say that granny is willing to take the chance that she could have a heart attack and the ambulance could not find her after a partial panic call.  Let’s pretend she is willing to shell out an extra monthly charge to get internet installed while keeping her phone line subscription going until she can figure out how to port her number over.  Now, how does an internet provider get selected, and how does the new hardware get installed?  This isn’t a speed bump on the way to the internet for the elderly, this is a Berlin wall.

Besides the downside for Granny, there is a downside for the rest of our economy.  Granny can’t do any shopping at Amazon for books (she is a voracious reader, going through 5 books a week), in fact, she can’t use the internet for shopping of any kind.  Since she lives in Florida and 2/3rds of her family are in different parts of the country, having Christmas presents drop shipped from an online merchant would be good for everyone involved.  So while we are calculating the value of an economic stimulus package, perhaps some math should be applied in this direction.

Perhaps the FCC, or better yet a replacement for the FCC like Lessig’s iEPA, should be doing some independent research on the various groups that are not using the internet today, and why they are not.  Once they have an accurate picture of internet use in this country, they would be able to create a strategic plan to help this country to realize the potential that the internet offers it’s citizens and it’s economy.  In a time of economic crisis like this one, we can not afford to ignore potential for all of this magnitude.