Spectrum of Greed

It's tough to buck the system - Ask Cool Hand Luke

“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate,” the Cap’n tells the prison population about the recently recaptured Cool Hand Luke.  Dressed in his southern white suit, he pronounces sentence on the rebellious inmate that threatens the orderly status quo of his prison.  I would say we can repeat that phrase to the FCC today.  According to a recent news article from Arstechnica.com, we have a very confused former FCC Chair that is defending the orderly but hopelessly antiquated status quo of our wireless (and wired) network management framework, while courts reviewing a decision on predatory customer retention practices calls foul.

At the heart of the confusion is the definition of what the FCC is in control of.  They think in boxes labeled, phone, internet, wired, wireless, broadcast, media, etc…  What has evaded their recognition so far is the massive convergence of these separately born technologies.  What we citizens of the world today refer to as the ‘Net’.  We can do anything over the net today - watch media, listen to media, make calls, move data - you name it.  So all of these little boxes that the FCC is trying to manage have become a terrible set of stumbling blocks that they can’t get themselves out of.  They are like a hopelessly out of shape middle aged man caught in the middle of a torturous obstacle course.  (continue reading…)

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…)

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…)

As recently as a few months ago, CDMA was being touted as a “CDMA ecosystem”, to a group of developers for their BREW software at a product conference in San Diego.  That CDMA has been one of the underlying technologies responsible for Sprint and Verizon’s mobile networks is beyond dispute.  That those networks are incredible revenue creation machines and that those companies provide thousands of jobs is also indisputable.  The future of the technology is where I beg to differ with Paul Jacobs, CEO of Qualcom.  The vast majority of the world is on GSM, with WiMax being a second rapidly growing networking technology that will rapidly dwarf CDMA in all but those markets in which massive investments in the technology have already been made.  There, a return on investment must be wrung out of the technology before a replacement can even be considered.

Which brings me to the inbreeding point.  (continue reading…)