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.  (continue reading…)

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…)

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…)