Spectrum of Greed

What's wrong with this picture? Nothing! It is just what we asked for.

An amazing post on the history of South Korea’s internet has been all but unobserved by most of the internet community in the US.  This information should be part of the body of knowledge that is reviewed as a part of defining a strategic plan to get us where we need to be as a country for internet access.  Based on current projections, we are already 13 years behind South Korea, as their first generation plan to get their country online was originally conceived and execution begun back in 1995.  Fast forward to today, and they are already on Internet - generation II, while the US still sits on it’s thumbs, hoping that somehow if we keep doing what we have been doing that everything will be better.  The problem is a fundamental one:  Korea has a target of connecting their citizens to the world, and to be number one at it.  The US has a goal as well:  to provide support to existing companies that have built our internet infrastructure and hope that they do what is necessary to connect the citizens of the US.  The one complicating factor is that the companies in control of this roadmap in the US have a different motivation than getting the best connectivity for all citizens - it is called making a profit.

An excerpt from the article:

How and why did South Korea become an overlord in Internet speed? In short; the South Korean government introduced a number of policy instruments to stimulate technological learning, aimed to strengthen international competitiveness of the economy. The government launched a five-year plan to create a ubiquitous networked world in 1995, meaning that the country developed a stunning 1.5 billion dollar wireless network to stimulate the use of the Internet.

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Voice/data from 2008 to 2012

While I groused about the lousy percentage of mobile broadband customers that we have in the US, I didn’t offer any solutions - what a loser I am!  So I have determined to do some research on markets in the rest of the world and how they are coping with this rapidly changing technology called wireless.  From this information I will formulate some suggestions and pass them along to our new administration so that they can quickly implement them, save our economy and fix our wireless ills all in the first 4 years of our new president.  Great plan, eh? I determined from some initial research that the Asia / Pacific region, and specifically Hong Kong, would be an excellent starting point for my research.

I found a great source of information - turns out that IDC does scads of research papers on just this type of thing - Surveys - forecasts - my mind was doing cart wheels anticipating all the incredible information that could be used to fix our current wireless situation.  I clicked the link to get the first report and POW!  Got some major sticker shock - $5,000 and the report could be mine.  Turns out the others were identically priced.  Must be REALLY good information.  (continue reading…)

This is the REAL Economic Stimulus, right here baby!

If you haven’t been there yet, you need to stop by a website called Internet for Everyone.  My post headline is their theme.  This site was launched by several people, including an FCC member (Jonathan Adelstein).  Larry Lessig, shown in the YouTube video in my previous post, along with Vint Cerf of  Google mythology are supporters of this organization.

Why should you go there, you ask?  Let me count the ways…   we have less than 15% of our entire country using wireless internet, our current government thinks 200k is broadband, we have slipped past #16 in connected countries, most major parts of our country are lucky if they have 3 choices of internet providers, when you do get mobile internet it is going to be an add on to your phone rather than a service you can buy separately, you don’t have any choice of what phone you want to use with which carrier, (pause for breath). (continue reading…)

Managing Dark Fiber - an economic stimulus opportunity.

Does anyone remember the term ‘Dark Fiber‘?  No, it isn’t an action movie starring Christian Slater and Heath Ledger.  It was a term coined in the telecom industry describing the results of unchecked capitalism during the initial heady gold rush to the internet in 1999 & 2000.  Several telecom vendors went out and each built what they considered to be the one best fiber network in the country, connecting cities all over the country and providing the potential for exponentially more bandwidth for the rapidly expanding internet economy.  But when the bubble burst in 2000, in the vernacular of the industry, many of those fiber lines didn’t get ‘lit up’, because with several vendors all connecting the same places, they overbuilt.  To make it worse, because technology’s nature is to get better, faster and cheaper over time, before all the fiber was even buried, technology had been created to make each strand of fiber 100 times as productive as it had been just a few short years earlier.  The result?  Dark Fiber, or fiber that was never lit, because it was never needed.  Much of this unused capacity still exists today and is resold and marketed to private industry and telecoms, but vastly under utilized. (continue reading…)