Navel Gazing: LPF Stats

Something’s changing and I don’t know what it means or why its happening….

Long-time readers will be aware that I don’t often indulge in talking about server-reader stats. First, they’re not all that accurate, secondly, they’re near impossible to interpret reasonably, and third even keeping track of these things distracts the writers from the point of the blog. (Which is not circulation but the local dissemination of information.)

By far the best use of my ISP’s minimal stats is to enforce a little humility. The website as a whole (including the moribund static portion) had a long-term stable “unique” visitor readership (uniques only get counted once a day no matter how often they drop by or how many pages they view) that has varied around 230 a day. Nothing to brag on by any means but enough to do the job of circulating good information on this topic to enough different local folks that the pro-fiber, pro-development, pro-technology, pro-equity, and pro-community position that I fear would otherwise go underreported has a chance to be heard and become a visible reference point in the local conversation. LPF is pretty content to be a small voice heard fairly well locally. That’s all the point has ever been.

A count of the total number of page hits –an even more dubious statistic– are more impressive with a long-term average of 1100 hits a day. That has added up to more than 600,000 page hits over the last year. Knock off the 7-8% that look like spiders crawling the web and that’s still fun to look at (and hard to make sense of ).

All of which brings us to the curious changes that prompt this post: LafayetteProFiber has experienced an approximately 37% jump in the six weeks since the first of the year. That’s a lot, and it’s sustained and continues upward. Daily unique visits this year are in excess of 300 a day and 350 in the last week. We’ve had over 100,000 hits in 2006. Previous jumps have been clearly spikes — they have been easily explicable by “big events,” and less sustained. They were clearly tied to local events that sent occasional readers over to check out what our take might be.

Now, I’m not complaining–but I am confused. Two “big picture” explanations occur to me. 1) the site has become well enough know in area circles to have reached some sort of tipping point–so the jump represents a “more of the same” readership. Or 2) This change argues and augers a shift in readership. Different people have found the site and have decided for reasons of their own to hang around.

I’m inclined to think that number 2, a new group has started hanging around,–but if that is so I’d love to be clued in as to what the story is.

Ideas? Thoughts?

Back to our regularly schedule show…..

Counterattack: The Bells as Network Hogs

There’s been a huge outcry about the regional phone companies’ ongoing demands to be allowed to change things so that they can “manage” the internet in order to charge specialized “services” a fee for prioritizing their product, or the product of corporations who pay a special fee, over the rest. That’s a big change over the current system. Today we get what is called “best effort” services. Carriers toss all the information into the pipe and do the best they can.

The idea is to change the payment plan from one in which both consumers and providers pay for the amount of bandwidth they think they need to one in which they do that AND pay a special fee to actually get usable service. Inevitably this means that premium priority service will occupy bandwidth formerly used to provide “best effort” for all. Non-premium services will suffer; the incumbents will have to rob from the common pool to create fancy services they can charge for.

As noted here recently, the better way to deal with bandwidth constraints on video and internet telephony is to provide more bandwidth. (Shock: Federal Representative Talks Sense)

Which, finally, brings us to the the inspiration for this post: a BusinessWeek article, “Is Verizon a Network Hog?” While the Bell companies, including our less-than-beloved BellSouth, are screaming like stuck pigs about how unfair it is is that they’ve not getting paid enough and trying to make firms like Google and Vonage sound like bandwidth hogs for using bandwidth they’ve paid for to provide customers with services over bandwidth they’ve also paid for some folks are beginning to notice what is really happening and who’s really snatched up all the available bandwidth on the Bell’s part of the network: the Bells.

According to Marvin Sirbu, an engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University who examined the documents, more than 80% of Verizon’s current capacity is earmarked for carrying its service, while all other traffic jostles in the remainder…

As consumers try to search Google, buy books on Amazon.com (AMZN), or watch videos on Yahoo! (YHOO), they’ll all be trying to squeeze into the leftover lanes on Verizon’s network. … ‘The Bells have designed a broadband system that squeezes out the public Internet in favor of services or content they want to provide,’ says Paul Misener, vice-president for global policy at Amazon.com.

The service referred to is Verizon’s new cable TV service–a service which closely echoes the traditional cable model. As I understand it, it is simply true that these systems use a single framework to provide both TV and Internet. At some point you have to trade channels for internet bandwidth. –This constraint is the chief immediate reason that Verizon is limits the bandwidth it sells consumers. (Of course the basic reason is that they built the system to provide video and much prefer to sell you an expensive specialty service rather that cheap commodified bits. A point also discussed in the “Shock” post linked to earlier.)

An interesting — and smart–feature of Lafayette’s planned network is that it will separate cable and internet functions. Channels and Bandwidth will be functionally independent and the time will no doubt come when that be a major competitive advantage. BellSouth’s IPTV plan for offering cable-like services is a joke in terms of bandwidth. From the day they launch they’ll have to make hard decisions to make about how to dedicate the roughly 20 megs they’ll have available. Two HDTV channels per household and not much internet or 1 HDTV channel and healthy bandwidth. Neither choice will appeal to the wealthy consumers they really want. Cox has a lot more headroom. By killing a few channels they could pump up the bandwidth. But they’d have to kill channels. By contrast LUS would not have to do any such thing. Frankly, I doubt that being able to offer more channels to upper end packages wouldn’t be that much of a draw and won’t afford LUS a big advantage by itself. But suppose LUS were to offer a smorgasbord of channels to choose from as one or two freebie add-ons to every tier? Channels that only a few folks want but that those folks want passionately. I’d not be surprised to find that a LOT of people, given otherwise similar packages, would choose an LUS offering that allowed them to add the soccer channel or a Chicago station or a fine arts channel or the fisherman’s channel to their package. These oddball channels are cheap. Cox can’t do it because they don’t have the space. But offering that level of “customization” could turn into a huge differentiator for LUS. (This is what’s becoming known as a “long-tail” marketing strategy. See the seminal article in Wired.) Something like that could turn LUS’ huge bandwidth advantage into a real competitive advantage.

Bandwidth is good. The guy with the most wins.

“Cable TV Model Broken”

The bell is tolling for the broadcast/cable model of video. Watching a TV channel is dying. Watching video advertising is dying. Watching half hour or hour shows is dying. The idea that shows are “TV shows” –that they are to be viewed on a TV–is about to end.

The death rattle is starting to get loud enough that even consultants are beginning to notice. Red Herring quotes a Jonathan Hurd as saying:

“The whole notion of channels, bundles of channels, and programming being available only at a fixed time and only in a fixed place is evolving,” said Mr. Hurd. “With TiVo, PVR technology, and SlingBox, people are going to be able to consume video where they want and when they want. The trend is toward flexibility.”

Mr. Hurd points to the surprising popularity of video iPods as proof that America’s voracious appetite for TV is indeed evolving.

“The video iPod is the ultimate in a la carte programming. I can download an individual episode…”

There’s been a lot of enthusiasm and hopeful comment recently about a la carte programming and IPTV. They are both supposed to give the consumer more choice. A la carte would let you choose whatever channel you wanted and only pay for that channel. IPTV would let you use internet streaming technologies to emulate cable TV and provide a type of competition for cable TV’s channels.

It’s all a lot of half-measures and hooeey and if consultants are starting to recognize it you know the end must be near. You want REAL choice. You don’t want to “tune into” channels whether cable or IPTV; that’s just the awkward interface you currently have to use to get to your shows. Shows are all you really watch. You don’t really want the poor imitation of cable that you’ll get from IPTV. You’d be happier with using the bandwidth they want to dedicate to that to download the shows you actually want to watch. It would serve you better if the telephone companies would just give you the bandwidth they’re using trying to compete with the dying broadcast/cable model and let you use it to download what you actually want quickly.

See the old post Die TV. Die, Die, Die! for why you’re gonna be happy when the old cable model finally croaks.

State Legislation: When Doing Nothing is a Good Idea

Bulletin: The latest from the lege on a statewide emergency communications system: Study it.

Considering the history of the bills in the current session it’s not a bad idea to back off it for awhile.

It looks like the role of the wireless telecom emergency bill anticipated by Governor Blanco’s call is about to handed to a concurrent resolution introduced, and under suspended rules, passed yesterday in the house. This is the sort of “fast tracking” thing that happens when the fix is in. I expect it to pass the Senate shortly and be signed into law quickly. It asks the military department to study it. (Who knew we had a military department? Not me. Who knew that was the proper place to study communications? Not me.)

The resolution presents a progressive watering down of earlier bills introduced to accomplish this purpose. Like the levee consolidation mess and a lot that is going on in Louisiana’s legislature right now the final represents what’s left over after well-intentioned attempts to “do the right thing” gets gored by a combination of petty politics, naivete, and special interest pleading. Better, frankly to let it go for now and wait for better days.

That was the executive summary. The rest is a grumpy look at why I think it’s just as well that the legislature has decided to wait for a more appropriate time to examine this question.

Read on at your own risk.

Ok, don’t say you weren’t warned.

A short history of wireless emergency bills in first 2006 Louisiana Special Session:
The intent (if not the practical effect) of one early bill was to free local communities to build their own wireless networks for emergency purposes and to allow citizens to use the excess capacity. (This bill was discussed extensively in the last post and elsewhere on this site.) The bill was blocked for not fitting into the Governor’s call but not before being neutered in committee. Backers of the bill are more than a little distressed since they had understood that the emergency wireless part of the call was added to accommodate the bill that it was later found to exclude. At any rate New Orleans will get no relief. And there will be no exclusion for wireless from the onerous conditions of the Local Government (un)Fair Competition Act.

A second bill (also discussed in an earlier post) charged the state’s military dept. (didn’t know we had one? Me neither.) with developing a state-wide wireless emergency system and included no provision allowing local people an exception from the provisions of the (un)fair competition act to accommodate emergency services. This is the bill that did advance; apparently someone didn’t think it politic to let local governments take care of their own needs.

That bill, in its first drafts, included an interesting provision that would have allowed the system to be constructed so that it could be used, during an emergency, to communicate with mere citizens–a sort of emergency broadcasting system for the digital age. Even with the bill inappropriately limited to wireless communications that was an interesting and potentially ground-breaking idea. But that got taken out too. BellSouth? I think so.

What we were left with as a result of the crazy-quilt of cross cutting purposes and interests was a bill that mandated a system that used only one modern communications modality, ignored established and useful systems already in place, and ignored the considerable advantages of modern buried wireline connectivity for emergency services. At the end of all that they were happy to ignore providing for the ability to communicate directly with citizens…much less the value of allowing citizens to communicate with their government and with each other during a crisis.

We can do better than that. And we have to.

State Legislation: Stopping Short of Repeal No Solution

What follows is an essay I wrote outlining my concerns with a bill (discussed earlier on these pages by both Mike and I) that attempted to carve out an exception to the Local Government Fair Competition Act for wireless networks. New Orlean’s wireless networks proved invaluable in the first days after the storm and opening it to the city’s citizens was enormously popular and useful. The idea was to allow New Orleans–and other cities–to deploy such systems quickly and to let citizens use them without intereference from the state.

That bill has apparently been abandoned due to a concern that its provisions didn’t match the call. (Letting mere citizens use the network apparently can’t be considered.)

I’ve decided to post it here because I think it serves as a practical case study of why simple repeal of the Local Government Fair Competition Act is to be preferred over trying to “fix” the bad law or carve out strategic exceptions to it. You can’t fix a mess by messing with it a little more. This is a whole lot like trying to fix a gumbo with a burned roux by “improving” the spices–it isn’t going to work and will only make things worse; the solution, as we all know, is to dump the pot.

No problem discussed below would appear if the law were just repealed.

We simply need the state legislature to restore to local communities the right to take care of themselves in their own ways and according to their own lights.

——

No one can do anything but applaud the intent of the recently introduced “Municipal Wireless Internet Act.” It intends to protect New Orleans’ new publicly-available, free, wireless network from being all but turned off when the current state of emergency ends and the provisions of the 2004 “Municipal Fair Competition Act” are re-asserted. That’s right and fair. No one should be trying keep any city, but especially not New Orleans, from doing everything possible to serve its citizens with whatever resources it has at hand. This bill intends, as well, to extend the benefits of New Orleans’ successful experience in getting its wireless network going after the storm to all of Louisiana — and that intent is noble as well.

Unfortunately, the bill as it has come to stand does not serve those purposes as well as it should. There is a simpler and more effective way to serve those goals: all of South Louisiana should band together and demand the repeal of a law which has had the surely unintended consequence of outlawing an obvious, affordable, and demonstrably effective way of building a hurricane-resistant emergency communications system. Repeal — and only repeal — would also preserve the communities’ rights, as they struggle with an economy devastated by hurricanes and storm surge, to build infrastructure that could bring new commerce to town or help persuade those that have fled that there is something exciting and vital to which to return.

The law currently proposed has no advantages over repeal and carries more than a few disadvantages in relation to it.

The first and most disturbing issue is the apparent legally-imposed limit on speed to 1024 KB — less than 1/50th of what current, cheap, consumer-grade equipment is capable of today. That speed is an acceptable, even healthy speed today, but it won’t be for long . . . and it won’t be the sort of exciting service that will pull communities back together again, nor will it allow them a hand in determining their own future. For real broadband they will remain dependent on the same corporate providers who proved uninterested in supplying advanced services to South Louisiana even before two massive hurricanes hurt the economy and scattered the region’s people. The 1024 limit is designed to serve the economic interests of large corporations, not the interests of local communities. Those interests are not now, and will not in the future, be the same. The state should not enter this fight on the side of corporate profits and against the reasonable desires of towns and cities across South Louisiana to do for themselves what needs to be done. The 1024 limit is a fatal flaw in the current version of the law.

The governance provisions of the proposed “Municipal Wireless” act are also worrisome and serve to minimize rather than maximize the number of systems that are likely to be deployed. The title of the bill is something of a misnomer, since only parishes and no municipalities as such are authorized to build wireless networks. ONLY the “parish administrative head” may decide to deploy a wireless network. While this may not be a hardship for New Orleans — where the parish and the city are the same — it makes a mess of the politics of the state’s other large, hurricane-devastated city: Lake Charles. There, the “parish administrative head” is an appointive position under the police jury. The mayor of Lake Charles, who’d have the resources and control of the city property necessary to make such a program possible, would have no say in whether or not the city would be allowed to build a wireless network and neither, apparently, would any other elected official or body. Clearly that isn’t or at least shouldn’t be acceptable. Just as clearly, any hope that vesting all power in an executive to make this decision would have the effect of making it easier to go forward with building much-needed emergency infrastructure is a miscalculation. This provision will have the effect of forcing cities to go hat in hand to the police jurors of Louisiana. The historic tension between parish and city governments would surely reduce the number of towns which would try to build their own systems. The cities will have the resources and desire; the rural parishes will have only control. This is not a design which will encourage quick, widespread adoption.

Lake Charles and most other cities and towns are likely to have a problem with the governance portions of this bill, but Lafayette, the third major city below I-10 and the second most populous, has a separate set of issues. The same law that prevents New Orleans from keeping its wireless network up and running usefully has been the target for some months of a repeal campaign spearheaded by Lafayette. Self-determination should not be a privilege only of those cities that have decided on wireless technologies — especially not wireless technologies that are capped at speeds so low that they cannot be the basis for credible attempts to develop or redevelop local economies. This would leave communities forced to wait for actions by corporations that failed to find them profitable enough to serve adequately even before disaster struck.

If more cause for concern should be needed, it should also be noted that the law sunsets in five years. I presume that, since there is no state prohibition on owning a wireless network, parishes that built such networks would get to keep them for use by the government. The chief thing that would be lost, then, would be the right to let the public use what they’ve paid for. A sunset provision on public use dramatically reduces the incentive for communities to invest in this technology. Right now it seems wise to invest in a public communications infrastructure; our travails after the last set of storms demonstrated that. But the five year sunset provision, coupled with a cap on speeds that makes it clear that the system will not be allowed to grow in ways that directly benefit the public, will make it much more likely that cash-strapped “administrators” and those responsible for funding such projects will decide, at best, to buy “good enough,” cheap but dead-end systems or, at worst, some other pressing need the state hasn’t decided to should die in five years.

There really is a better, simpler way: repeal the “Municipal Fair Competition Act.” Then New Orleans could build any system it wanted to and could do anything it wanted to with it. So could Lake Charles and Lafayette . . . and Abbeville and Rayne, and Golden Meadow, and Erath and Cameron and every other city, town, or parish that wished to do so. They could build using whatever technology they thought wisest and keep it as long as they wanted to. They could partner with incumbents (who would know that they could go their own way if they wanted) or they could build local utilities whose only concern was local needs. Any city, town, or parish could invest in itself and its own future using the latest technology without any interference or “guidance” from the state . . . or from corporations whose core interests differ from their own.

“Bell South doesn’t care about geek people”

OK, so I missed this one initially. Mea culpa. I may not be fast but my net eventually catches most all . . . .
Lafayette hit the front page of Digg last week. (They’re the first site to give Slashdot a run for their money as the geek news website leader. A huge number of tech types visit there daily.) The story was highly dug . . . meaning folks found it interesting and recommended it. Then, the next day, Gizmodo — the place to graze the latest gadgets — picked up the story. Those two sites are huge, and between them it means that an awful lot of tech types saw the tale of Lafayette’s struggle.

The Digg article, Bell South doesn’t care about geek people, is short, but the most interesting part is the comments — which go on forever. What’s caught my attention is the vitriol expressed in regard to BellSouth and Cox and the sympathy expressed for Lafayette.

Locals showed some healthy participation on the site, so for extra entertainment you can try to puzzle out who the commenters are.

A Sunday Read: “The End of the Internet?”

If you’re one of those who like to spend part of your Sunday drinking coffee and reading an interesting piece that you might be too busy to consider during the work week, I’ve got a pretty good read to offer up.

Jeff Chester, writing in The Nation, has published an article that ties together pieces from different issues of the day. It starts with net neutrality–and gives a good overview of the movement to rob us all of the open internet–but ranges from there into the 1996 telecom act, astroturf research-for-hire, internet porn, warrantless wiretaps, media convergence, political advertising, and deep packet inspection. He makes a good case that these are all parts of the same story and he’s got me, at least, agreeing.

Worth chewing over: The End of the Internet?

Lagniappe: You know those newly available “directors cuts” and the commentary and “additional scenes” on more interesting DVDs? If you are one of the sorts who likes to see and try to understand the difference between the “edited for mass distribution” and the “artist’s vision,” you might want to compare the Nation’s version of this essay with the version the author posted on his own work website at the Center For Digital Democracy,Hijacking the Internet: How Big Cable and Phone Companies’ Plans for Broadband Threaten Democracy.” If it’s too cold to get yard work done you could easily fritter away another 45 minutes making that comparison.

New Orleans: Cox reply worsens cable conflict

If you open up a Louisiana paper today and read about the special session and all the utter BS coming down from the federal level, it’s hard to get too excited about mere disrespect coming from a company that’s never shown the least hesitation to put their business needs above serving the local community. But sometimes it’s the little things that make you crazy. From the Times-Picayune:

Public affairs manager Arthurine Payton repeatedly told the council that the TV Guide Channel, which provided on-screen TV listings, was no longer in business.

‘That channel is gone away . . . they are no longer in that business. It just doesn’t exist anymore,’ she said.

But after discovering that the TV Guide Channel still is very much in business, with 70 million subscribers, including some Cox cable systems elsewhere in the country, the council and Parish President Albert Laque sent a letter blasting the company for the statements.

The dispute grew out of Cox’s decision to remove the TV Guide Channel from the cheapest, analog “basic” tier. When the feds deregulated cable, one of the few things they left in place was a requirement that a basic, analog, cheaper tier be offered that includes local channels, local access channels (like AOC in Lafayette) and a few basic cable channels. It is supposed to be analog so that consumers can avoid the rental fee for the digital set top box.

Grundmeyer said the company removed the TV Guide Channel to make room for digital channels that broadcasters are required to adopt by 2009, but beefed up its digital offerings to replace them…

Grundmeyer said the bandwidth occupied by one analog channel can hold four digital channels.

This is one of those things that if not actually a lie was intended to be one. Let me explain. What’s happening in 2009 is that analog broadcasts over the airways will be replaced by digital ones. Cable companies will have to follow suit. They will have to carry the new digital channels. And they will be able to carry four digital channels for every one analog one that they have now.

Whoooooops…. did you catch that?

They’ll have four times the space. Going digital benefits Cox and lets them offer four times as many channels in the same space. So just exactly how is that an excuse for cutting out a channel from the least expensive tier?

It’s not. It’s all a song and dance. A little sleight of hand. Some flash. A bit of misdirection.

What they’d rather you not think about is that the cableco’s, including Cox, are eager to get as many folks off the basic tiers as they can. Those cheapest tiers are loosely regulated by standards set by the feds. (It’s complicated and inexact, but they can’t arbitrarily jack up the price like they can–and have–with every other tier.)

So it’s really a lot simpler than they make it out to be: they’re taking away the TV Guide Channel precisely because it’s popular. Because, they hope, that people will want that function so much that they’ll upgrade to a more expensive digital tier to get it. Even if they don’t want all those extra channels. And don’t want to pay for them.

Its all pretty insulting. Do they really think we can’t figure this out? My best guess after watching them for a while is that they do think we’re that stupid. And, in all honesty, the reporter didn’t flinch; he just reported it as if Cox was making sense.

All that’s upsetting enough. But then Cox has the gall to blame us for not wanting to buy their high-priced product. How? Well shucks, and gee golly, we’re all Southerners down here and in addition to not being able to figure out their shell game, we’re all kinda backward and stuck in our ways:

At the January meeting, Payton blamed regional influences for some customers’ unwillingness to upgrade to the digital service.

“As Southerners do, we tend to resist change and progress,” she said.

Nice guys, the cable guys. Your Friend in the Digital Age.

Shock: Federal Representative Talks Sense

In a shocking display of actual competence Representative Boucher of Virginia talks good sense about the saving the internet and Net Neutrality. Saith the Rep:

Internet2, a nonprofit partnership of universities, companies and affiliate organizations, including federal agencies and laboratories, has been studying this matter and has demonstrated that a multitrack Internet model is unnecessary to assure quality of service. Internet2 has for the past seven years deployed an advanced broadband network to more than 5 million users and has learned that in a network with enough bandwidth there is no congestion and no bits need preferential treatment because all of them arrive quickly enough to assure excellent quality, even if intermingled…

In countries such as Japan and Korea, network speeds over the last mile of 100 megabits per second (mbps) are common. In the United States, our typical speed is less than 1 mbps. If broadband providers would increase their network speeds to approximate those in other countries, all content would reach consumers with assured quality. No prioritization of bits would be needed.

So where’s the competence? Well, first off Boucher notices that the US problem is in the last mile–where our incumbent providers have failed us. We have excess backbone capacity. So he first locates the problem correctly. Then he goes on to notice that other countries with real last mile broadband don’t need fancy Quality of Service or other bandwidth sapping prioritization schemes because they’ve got plenty of bandwidth. And he backs that up by qouting our own smart guys and noticing that where we have enough bandwidth the problems the incumbents are whining about go away. The man’s thinking. Hell, he’s competent.

The problem the folks at the telco’s want to solve (choppy VOIP, blocky video) with “tiers” and “prioritization” is a problem of their own making. Rewarding them for their own failure is exactly the wrong way to go. (The right response? Fund your own big broadband utility. Lafayette is right.)

I worked at the university of Delaware when Internet2 came in and we got hooked up to it. Very damned nice, I assure you. The limiting factor was our ethernet switches which actually got used at something near to capacity on occasion. I had nice service from Comcast at home but I’d trek up to my office to watch net video…full screen, no stuttering at all.

Boucher is right: the solution to the consumer issues Verizon, ATT, & our own BellSouth try to mislead us with is simply more bandwidth. Good VOIP. Bandwidth. Streaming HDTV. More bandwidth. I have no doubt that the Internet 2 eggheads are right that there are ways to get big bandwidth over that last mile that are cheaper than squeezing your entire network through elaborate filters. Control is always expensive. All that prioritization really does is take the limited bandwidth the Bell’s failing business plan gives us and allocates enough of it to, say, BellSouth’s VOIP product so that it works. (Oh, and Vonage or Google’s version doesn’t. But hey, that’s the telco’s “best effort.”) What Boucher is too much the politician to say is that minimizing your expense is not the point. Maximizing the profit the Bells get out of “their” network is.

The Bells want to avoid “commodification” of their bits. You, dear reader, desire nothing less. Technology, and history, is on your side and the Bells know it. Unless forcibily prevented the natural flow is from specialization to commodification. The transformation from commodity service to high priced specialization won’t happen unless the telco’s can enlist the aid of the federal government. Unless they gain control, and soon, you are going to get used to paying less and less for a faster and faster flow of what is really nothing more than a bunch of undifferentiated series of ones an zeros. The telcos rather you paid for “services” that they can make “premium” or degrade to “best effort.” They’d like to conceal the fact that all they really have to offer is control of the last mile of the bit pipe. If you understand this you’ll never be convinced to give them anything like the income you’re giving the cablecos.

(And yes, its not just greed that’s got its hooks into the telcos, its also envy–a second of the deadly sins. And yes, what we really should want is to move cable toward the commodification model as well. But that’s a much harder row to hoe. And an even longer post.)

Here’s how commodification works if that term is proving unfamiliar: Most products start out as specialty, hand-crafted items. The parts that go into them are rare and and expensive. The skills needed to construct them are pricey. But our entire economy is built to take such items and make the progressively more and more common, more similar, and less expensive. We really are the wealthiest generation the world has ever known and this process is at the basis of a lot of that. If you’re willing to give up a little uniqueness you can get almost anything absurdly cheaply. If you’re reading this you’re almost certainly using a recently commodified object: the computer. I recall (don’t laugh) when 512 K machines with a 9 inch black and white screen sold for 3,000 uninflated dollars and a LaserWriter printer with a staggering 3 megs of memory and a 10 meg (that’s meg) hard drive was in the 5000 dollar range. I helped my wife’s graphic business buy them and while they were called personal computers the only people we knew who owned one were either typesetters or architects. A machine with those specs would not be considered adequate to describe the laptops MIT hopes to provide 3rd world grade schoolers these days. At a projected price of 100 dollars per. Graphic designers and Architects are using machines that in that not-so-far gone era would have been so powerful that they would have been called supercomputers and have been illegal to export to many nations.

That, my friend is commodification. Computers have gone from being expensive, finely crafted machines to standardized, knock-off, el cheapo stuff that you can’t charge much for. (Much better machines than our 3000 dollar one are on sale now at WalMart.com for 300.) A commodity is defined by the production of mass quantities of the product that are, for practical purposes indistinguishable. All commodity markets are cutthroat by definition. The producers make pennies on the dollar and have to make money by selling many units cheaply.

You, as a consumer, like commodities. But companies hate it.

The telcos hate it.

They aren’t interested in the commodity sale of bits. They are interested in transforming their commodity transport of undifferentiated bits into an elaborate series of “specialized services.” Right now you are buying by the bit–so many bits per second regardless of what is represented by those bits, be it video, web pages, google searches, email, whatever. All you care about when making your purchase now is how fast and how cheap. The telco’s want to change that so that they sell souped up products such as “video gold” or “google search premium.” It’s a huge con. Here’s the dirty secret: Packet prioritization always less efficient for the network as a whole than not prioritizing anything. The process of prioritzing bits in one place always eats up more capacity overall than it saves locally. Sort of an “entropy” principle for the information age. The consumer will always be better served by solving service problems by throwing more bandwidth at it.

The public, the people Boucher and all our representatives serve, will be better served by increasing their bandwidth than by allowing the telco’s to transform our current, increasingly commodified, system into a series of “products” by carving up an internet they serve with inadequate bandwidth into specialized pipes which work ok–if you pay extra for it.

The battle cry should be “One Big Pipe.” (I’ve no hope we’ll rush to the barricades under the banner of “Increased Commodification.” :-))

That is what Representative Boucher of Virginia understands. Boucher gets it. We need to demand that our representatives get a clue too.

New Orleans’ Wireless Bill

The New Orleans-sponsored wireless bill that Mike covered recently made it to the Senate Wednesday.

It exempts New Orleans’ current wireless system from the Municipal (un)Fair Competition Act that you’ve seen objected to here. It would allow New Orleans to continue to offer its current wireless system to the public even after the state of emergency that currently exempts it from the law is ended. It seems obvious that the city of New Orleans could allow its citizens to use their own property (its existing wireless emergency and security network). And that’s the way it was before the passage of M(u)FCA. Such decisions shouldn’t involve the state, much less the pack of corporate lobbyists working for BellSouth and Cox.

But the best way out of that situation is not to try and cobble together a law to exempt one set of technologies from another, bad law.

The best solution is repeal.

The real problem with M(u)FCA is that it writes the interests of the current, corporate telecom providers into state law and makes the state their agent for enforcing those corporate interests. This allows BellSouth to wheel the whole apparatus of the state from the legislative auditor, to the Public Service Commission, to the courts into play to delay, make more expensive, or block municipalities from offering services that neither BellSouth nor Cox intend, by their own admission, to offer. More laws simply exacerbate the problem. It gives the incumbent providers more tools with which to frustrate local communities.

The proposed law will surely serve the incumbents in the same way. Already the process of bending the law to incumbent purposes has begun.

One noticeable change from earlier drafts is that, regardless of the bill’s title, “The Municipal Wireless Internet Act,” the latest version doesn’t apply to municipalities at all. Instead, sole decision-making power is vested in the parish executive. That means that in Lake Charles the elected mayor will have to go hat in hand to a fellow appointed by the Calcasieu Police Jury to serve as “Parish Administrator” who will be vested, by state law, with the sole power to make the decision for Lake Charles about how Lake Charles (and Sulphur and Iowa) uses its rights of way and resources. How palatable will that be for Lake Charles’ popular mayor? It leaves a relatively minor appointed official in a position to dictate to Lake Charles whether it will have a public wireless network and just exactly how it will be built and run. (If he doesn’t get his way, he can simply rescind his solitary decision to allow it at all.) Madness, pure and simple. And it reeks of the sort of “compromise” that Lafayette has had such trouble with. Since Orleans Parish is the City of New Orleans, this doesn’t have much effect there. But for a bill which represents itself as being all about preparations for the next hurricane to have so misunderstand the situation of the “other” Louisiana city devastated by Katrina leaves one with real questions about how seriously this bill is intended to serve the whole state.

Additionally, I have serious questions about another paragraph in this bill that wasn’t in a draft version I saw and commented on earlier. That paragraph reads:

The Parish may provide wireless Internet services for free to subscribers at a minimum rate of 1024 KB per second or may charge for the whole or a component of the services. During an emergency declared by the governor or the parish president or the duly elected administrative head of the parish, the parish president or parish administrative head may increase the wireless Internet speed.

That reads very ambiguously to me. Can the “administrative head of the parish” decide to “increase” speed to 2048 KB only during an emergency (even if he declares it)? Is 1024 the most or the least that parishes will be allowed to offer under normal circumstances? Normally I’d read minimum to mean “the least,” but the context seems to mean that it is a normal limit…and I can think of no reason to declare a lower limit on this service. Why?

My confusion and concern are reinforced by an interview with the person who drafted his bill, Steve Sabludowsky, held with the CTO of New Orleans, Greg Meffert, covering the issue of this wireless law for New Orleans. Here’s Sabludowsky asking the question and Meffert answering:

Why is 1028 Kilobits important as a minimum speed?

It is the minimum usable speed for use for very basic web applications and communications. It is also not a threat to true broadband, and other valued-added providers.

That really makes me uncomfortable. Meffert is clearly interpreting the “1028” (surely a misprint of 1024) as the least that is both usable and not a threat to the incumbent providers. He understands it as the most that will normally be available. And Sabludowsky does NOT correct him.

I’ve written Sabludowsky for clarification and have yet to receive a reply. He’s been a reliable correspondent and I expect to hear from him. When I do I will post here.

But if my concerns are correct, this would be “a really bad thing.” They and everyone else in the state would get crippled municipal wireless that was deliberately made marginally useful in order to avoid threatening the current corporate interests. They could invest real money in themselves to serve serious emergency needs that the current providers are not in the least interested in serving themselves. That would be okay with BellSouth and its agents in state government. But the citizens would be limited by state law to using 1/50 or less of the rated capacity of the system for their own, free, nongovernmental use. Why?

What really confuses me is the political naivete of this proposal. A bill like this needs allies in other communities. The need for emergency communications is absolutely real and your natural allies are all the cities and communities below 1-10. How does this bill serve those potential allies? Not all that well, frankly. It flagrantly ignores the situation of the “other” major Louisiana city extensively damaged this last hurricane season by excluding the city from deciding its fate altogether and handing over control to an appointee of a police jury. If you think this makes any sense, you don’t understand Louisana politics. If you think Lake Charles doesn’t already resent its interests being ignored while it methodically goes about taking care of itself while the state and New Orleans thrash, you don’t understand human nature. The governance provisions of this law are a huge mistake…and that mistake seems unlikely to be accidental to me. I, for one, pointed out that an earlier, milder version of this mistake would be politically divisive. Lake Charles is merely the most glaring example. Hammond, Morgan City, Abbeville, Erath, Delcambre, Cameron and every other town below I-10 has to be asking itself why the police jury should dictate when the city is the natural entity to actually deploy the system. Many, many more systems would be deployed if every city were free to go its own way. And maybe that is why they aren’t being allowed to do so.

Lafayette, the hub city of the Acadian region least damaged by this year’s storms, has chosen after a pitched battle with the incumbent corporations to build its own fiber optic network to secure its telecom future and in the course of the battle has developed a huge resentment for the M(u)FCA. Local representatives have been beating the drums of repeal for months. Watching New Orleans try to carve out an exemption for its choice instead of allying with an ongoing repeal effort that would leave it with unlimited capacity to serve its beleagured citizenry has got to raise questions.

I wish New Orleans would have taken a different path.

The right way is repeal of a bad law. Not the imposition of another layer of bad legislation.

This is not the way forward for South Louisiana.

Update: In correspondence with Steve Sabludowsky he’s confirmed that the 1024 KB is an upper limit–that speeds above that would indeed require an emergency.