Category: Dreams

On Really Getting It

One of the most gratifying things about Thursday night’s fiber forum was watching Lafayette’s leaders (and a nice chunk of the community) exhibit all the signs that they really get it. They understand the potentials of the new technologies and have a good sense of how to milk the most out of them. This, my friends, is extraordinary–and vanishingly rare.

There is evidence that they clearly understand: 1) Great things are coming but what those great things are is unknown; 2) that the best thing to do encourage unknown great things is to be generous, and; 3) generosity needn’t cost much or anything.

On Great Things are unknown:
At one point in the night Huval broke into an historical analogy. He said that he felt like his predecessor in in 1897 must have felt when electricity was being introduced. All the questions were about lighting and light bulbs: “What do we do when the light bulb breaks” and much concern was shown about the dangers of sticking a finger in the socket. Nobody knew about radio, or TV, or microwave ovens. The idea, of course, is that the hopes and anxieties of the initial stages of a new technology are incomplete and even misleading when viewed in retrospect. The conclusion is that we don’t, can’t, know all the great things that will result from ubiquitous really huge bandwidth. That’s wise. To believe otherwise encourages folks to build elaborate edifices for a future that is never realized–and that has been the single greatest danger of “visionary” enterprises. But the danger in the wise recognition that you can’t know the future in detail is that it might lead to inaction: there is a temptation to believe that you can’t encourage that which you do not know. That’s not true and these guys are NOT making that mistake.

On designing for unknown Great Things:
There is a way to design a system to encourage unknown great things: Where possible choose networks that leave open the most possibilities for users to “do things” with the network. And once you have such a networks don’t put any limits on users that are not absolutely necessary. That can get technical pretty quickly. But the underlying attitude is not complicated: Be Generous. If you have a choice to make about network design: Choose the more generous network. If you have a choice to make about what a user is allowed to do with the network: Be Generous. That’s a pretty simple and easy to enact principle.

Such a “generous” attitude was exhibited when Huval illustrated how he thinks Lafayette’s network will be different from other networks. Verizon, which has a fiber to the home network with the attendant large capacity, is not offering much of that capacity to its public. It is choosing to merely compete with its cable opponents by offering a little more of the same for a little less. Verizon’s attitude is that if it can’t make a buck off it then it won’t offer it–it won’t give away anything, not even something which costs it nothing. Huval, pointing to Verizon said “our philosophy is going to be completely different” and that LUS will take the position of offering a much as possible as long as doing so doesn’t create an obvious problem with the business plan. Both the decision to offer symmetrical bandwidth and to allow full intranet bandwidth between customers show what decisions result when you take a generous position.

On the idea that generousity can be cheap:
Given generous upfront decisions about the intial design of the network features like symmetrical speeds and full intranet speeds will be very cheap to provide in light of the huge excess capacity the network will have. Making the decision to be generous need not be expensive. This point was made during the discussion Thursday. One man voiced concerns that all the nifty ideas that had been suggested would be expensive and that only some of them could be chosen. Huval seemed genuinely puzzled as he responded that, actually, very few would cost anything. In that he was right…but his point was that he was inclined to do as much of it as he could in that case.

So these guys get it: Generosity pays dividends. We’ve always known this, of course, but it is interesting to find the principle showing up so vividly in the esotoric world fiber-optic networks.

A National Broadband plan? Europe and Eisenhower Show the Way

Everybody from Lafayette’s Mayor Durel, to Jim Baller of Baller-Herbst, to Michael Dell of Dell Computer, to the president of the United States seem to think that we really, really ought to have a working National Broadband plan. We should. And friends, it’s not rocket science.

We’re not nearly as clueless as we think. Some developed Western countries have figured it out–their experiences should apply to ours. Filter that through the US’ own success in building a complex, expensive national infrastructure network and you’ve got a pretty detailed outline.

The European Experience:
VuNet reports on the Fiber To The Home market in Europe. While France, Scandinavia and The Netherlands are deploying significant fiber, the rest of Europe is not moving forward. The article notes that:

“In part, this is due to a lack of initiative from utilities and local authorities, but also because markets are dominated by incumbents and cable operators which have no incentive to make hefty investments in brand new infrastructure.”

…Generally speaking, there is less interest in building FTTH networks from conventional national telecoms operators, which argue that the approach is too expensive to carry out on a widespread basis.

…The majority of former state-owned monopolies, for example, have instead committed to fibre-to-the node.

Sound painfully familiar? It should. That could be AT&T they’re talking about. Incumbent duopolies have little incentive to build new systems which would provide abundant bandwidth when they can continue to sell an expensive, scarce resource over a paid for, if antiquated, network. The US is in exactly the same fix.

What’s the solution? Don’t worry about cajoling the incumbents. Find a infrastructure provider that is differently motivated. Sweden shows how that works:

FTTH is most advanced in Sweden, where the technology is used for 650,000 broadband subscriptions, or over 27 per cent of the country’s 2.3 million residents.

The study pointed out that the 150 municipal networks serving these customers tend not to be owned by conventional telecoms operators, but by utilities or local authorities.

So Sweden, with about 2% of the EU‘s population has more than half of its fiber-connected homes and a take rate (NOT homes passed, actual subscriptions) of 27% of the population. That is amazing.

You’d think any country that wanted to figure out how to encourage real broadband and extensive use in a modern Western economy would take a lesson from this. Here’s a proven national strategy: encourage local communities to take on the task. They know what their citizens need. They’re willing to take the longer view. They’ve got no baggage of old networks to protect. And they’re not interested in squeezing the maximum return out of their customers.

The American Experience:
The Eisenhower Interstate Highway System.

No one any longer argues that the Interstate Highway System wasn’t the best economic investment since the Louisiana Purchase. The return on investment has been astronomical and it hard to imagine the modern US economy without it.

That system is owned and operated by the states and the states provide 56% of the funds necessary to build and maintain them. There is an elaborate set of standards and inspections and a significant amount of federal “guidance” in contracting and costing.

An extensive, expensive, successful state-of-the-art national infrastructure has already been built in America. We know how to do it. Just apply the lessons learned:

So here’s a real national strategy in a nutshell: Adapt the Interstate Highway model to a municipal ownership model.

1) Offer a 60-40 local/federal split to communities everywhere for the expensive last mile builds on their locally-owned rights-of-way.
2) Offer the same for the states to build the interconnects within their own states and tie-ins to neighboring states using rights-of-way along state highways (and their interstates).
3) Every community decides how much it wants to spend and the nature of the network they want; if it accepts the Federal money it adheres to federal rules in its construction and maintenance.

Sure there are details. I, for one, would impose traditional common carriage rules on the communities that accept federal money or federally funded interconnects. And I’d want a “no speed limit” clause built into the law. (Yes, that’s a joke.)

But those sorts of things would be extras. They’d not be necessary to accomplishing our national goals. The above is all that is critical. In a decade we’d have an “Interstate High Broadband System” that would be the envy of the world.

WiFi, the Quintuple Play, and Lafayette: The Biggest Story Barely Told

As we approach year’s end I tend to get a little reflective. All the news media are starting to churn out year-in-review pieces that highlight the biggest stories of the year.

Being fairly contrarian, I tend to want to do an anti-big story. What story that should have been a big story but never got played that way? For my money the biggest not-a-story story of the year was the continued insistence by everyone from the Mayor, to the CIO, to the director of LUS that they really, really intend to build a wireless network in Lafayette.

As I look back over the months of blog posts I see that at least as far back as mid-October last year you see hints that people understood how inexpensive a wifi network would be as an addition to fiber. By January Joey Durel was telling the Independent in no uncertain terms that wireless was on his wish list for the next 12-18 months. The idea continues to surface every couple of months as officials drop little hints. Not long ago Durel complained that we’d have had a wireless network a year ago if it hadn’t been for the obstructionism of BellSouth and Cox.

But even with all the national heat over wireless networks and municipal wireless networks, we’ve not gotten very excited about it here. Part of that has to be our fiber-based blasé. Fiber is what generates excitement here. We’re right about that: fiber is more important and more interesting. But, hey, we’re from down here–we can get excited about CRAWFISH, for Pete’s sake. You’d think we could get excited about fiber and wireless.

Granted, fiber is what a community needs to control its own future. Local control of the last mile and having a viable competitor to the national monopolies is the first order of business for any community that wants to guide its own destiny. Granted, fiber’s bandwidth puts to shame the bandwidth of wireless and, granted, its rock-solid connection to your home will always be more reliable than wireless can hope to be.

But wireless does have its virtues…

It especially has its virtues inside a fiber-based information economy.

Now, the conventional wisdom is that wireless’ biggest virtue is that it is “mobile,” meaning that you can connect from anywhere and that you’re never out of touch. True, but more reflective thinkers recognize (and Jon Fitzgerald has been pounding this for years) that it is also location-based. In order to negotiate a signal, wireless systems have to know roughly where you are . . . and that knowledge can be used to make available local information. With a properly configured system, every wifi client could be its own little GPS locater, with the attendant potential for helping you find the nearest po-boy effortlessly . . . and of having sushi ads pushed at you (every silver cloud has its dark lining).

I’ve written a couple of times about the potential a wireless addition to fiber would open in making possible a “quintuple” play–adding wireless data and cell phone capacities to the current plans for fiber-based cable, phone, and big broadband. Back then it seemed a way to leapfrog the competition. Less than a year later, with BellSouth rumbling about cable “sometime soon” and Cox having developed a partnership with Sprint/Nextel, it is clear that adding wireless to the fiber play will be the competitive way to stay ahead of the pack.

Most folks don’t talk about the voice capacities of wifi networks because it is hard, very hard, to provide the nodes of a wireless mesh network with enough bandwidth to reliably serve voice to any sizeable number of users. Additionally, every “jump” between wireless nodes as packets are shuttled back to the backbone adds hesitations, “latency” to the mix and voice begins to stutter and pause very noticeably.

All of that brings us back to the idea that wireless is especially fantastic inside a fiber-based information economy. Most ways of provisioning a wireless network with bandwidth involve setting up some sort of radio/microwave hookup back to a big broadband backbone and then using that to parcel out bandwidth to wireless “access points” which then further subdivide the available bandwidth by meshing together and dividing the bandwidth again. The packets of information coming to you have to be routed through several step-downs in available bandwidth. For most communities it is a good way to go but, more pointedly, it is the ONLY way for the community to provide bandwidth for itself. Unfortunately the constraints on providers, municipal and private, mean that you just plain don’t have the bandwidth for much beyond email and light browsing.

Lafayette isn’t in that situation. There is no need to go back to some big backbone through wireless jumps. There will be a huge chunk of fiber-based backbone running right down your street.

That is where all the really exciting stuff comes in.

A fiber-based wireless network could conceivably have NO jumps back to the backbone. It could be hung right off the backbone itself. It would not have to share bandwidth but could run at the full rated speed of the wireless equipment. (Something you seldom see. No wifi network in Lafayette outside, possibly, of directly fiber funded ones at ULL or LITE sees anything like the 54 megs of bandwidth that is speced out on the side of the box. Cox and BellSouth can’t give you that much bandwidth, so your can’t, for most practical purposes us the equipment at nearly that speed. We had one for a little while at our setup in the dome following Katrina/Rita. It was sweet. I liked it.)

With big, low-latency, bandwidth coming wirelessly off a fiber network vast new ranges of possibility arise. The first and most obvious is voice…voice over Internet Protocol, (VOIP) is practical, even easy. Just download Skype and go to it. Internet protocols don’t care what the packets are. If you get ’em fast enough you can easily use ’em for voice–without special network equipment. That’s where wifi/wimax enabled cell phones become a possibility. Just add the VOIP chipset and the chipset/radio needed for the radio bandwidth and your new “tri-band” or “quad band” cell phone is good to go…and as long as you stay in the city you can bypass those expensive cellular guys but still be able to hook in to them when you leave town. Seamlessly.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Funding the Wireless VOIP (WVOIP) dream are two necessities: big bandwidth and those Internet Protocols. The bandwidth makes new things possible and IP makes it simple to implement. Use your phone to wirelessly suck info from your home computer if you need it. Download the music parked on your online backup to your IPod via a nifty IPod add–do it from Mello Joy downtown–or the park. Reprogram your DVR from your laptop during the lunch break. Don’t just send your friends camera snaps…stream the video of your son’s turns at bat back to the mom who had to stay at work. If all that wireless is hung directly from the LUS network huge new possibilities like these emerge. Our wireless network could be qualitatively different from any in the country–much, much more advanced.

There are plenty of benefits for the city of Lafayette of having this all hung off LUS fiber and run by LUS. A wireless play there would both increase the take rate–more people would buy their package o services from LUS–and it would meant that the average subscriber would pay a little more as well. That means a system that more easily and quickly pays off its bond debt. That’s certainly in the interests of every citizen. But beyond that…that “little” more that the citizen would pay really would be or at least could “little.” What LUS will have to burn is bandwidth. It will cost them little to provide the bandwidth in-system. (Doubt that? Think again. How does Cingular afford those free in-system plans?) Such a system could provide wireless to wireless voice or data links between subscribers for just a small increment of the total bill. The cost of adding a wireless element to the fiber network would be, I believe, no more than 5% of the total investment. What percentage of your combined phone, internet, cable, and cell is your cell bill? More than 5%? I thought so. As a business decision it should be dead-easy for LUS. And the citizens it serves.

Speaking of those citizens: They’ll be some that worry about the political hassles that might result from the city taking such a visionary step. They shouldn’t. That battle, friends, has been fought and won. On July 16th. The people have asked for a strong, municipally-owned telecom network and winning over the citizens was the hard and essential battle. Giving them a good deal on yet another service or two is not going to distress them in the least. The opposition to our building our own system is already doing everything it can to stop us…and is failing. I doubt that there is anything they could try that they haven’t already tried. LUS is CLEC. It is already licensed to provide phone service. The coast is clear. There’s nothing to stop LUS from taking the wireless step but the approval of the city. The people gave their approval this summer.

You can see why I might think this the biggest story barely told. Lafayette would not only be the largest city in the country with a state-of-the-art fiber optic-based telecom system serving out big bandwidth that most could only envy. It would be in a position to serve the whole community with 1) big broadband wireless that is 2) completely integrated into and makes full use of the fiber optic grid the city owns. The combo of ubiquitous fiber and universal, big broadband wireless would be unique. And truly difficult for anyone, city or corporation, to match. Lafayette would be able to legitimately lay claim to being the most technologically advanced city in the country–and, as far as I can tell, the world.

That would be worth doing. Don’t you think?

Maybe it will be next year’s USA Today cover story.

“Die TV. Die! Die! Die!” or “Why You Want Real Bandwidth”

Television is really aggravating. We are so used to it that we forget how irritating most of the time but occasionally something happens to remind us just how bad things are. And we go off on TV (and sometimes even go off it for awhile). But we almost never realize why it is so bad.

We hate our TV because of limited bandwidth.

A fella named Ernest Miller reminded me of this with a post of his called “Die Channel. Die! Die! Die!” Ernest is one of those brilliant men who sit down, locate a problem of real substance, and try to fix it. His area is the intersection of law and technology. He’s at Yale now and is noted for his work on modern copyright issues. But his complaints about having to watch TV on someone else’s scheduling and about the artificial lengths of TV shows is what led me to think once again about how irritating TV is.

And I think we hate our TVs because of long-standing bandwidth limits.

Things to be justly irritated by:

  • Your favorite show is scheduled at a fixed time every week. (But your schedule isn’t fixed to match!)
  • Somebody in New York thinks all the good stuff ought to come on while you want to sleep. (And you refuse to change your sleeping habits or job to accommodate that New Yorker!)
  • Apparently there is some “normal” person in Kansas who all these shows is supposed to please mildly without offending very often. (But this fare pleases you about as well as the food in Kansas . . . you want something with a little more life!)
  • Someone has made up a rule that TV shows can only be shown in increments of a half-hour. (But you are irritated by shows that are have 23 minutes of decent content and 7 minutes of utter fluff!)
  • Every time something dramatic or interesting is about to happen on a TV show, they go off on a commercial break. (Even worse, you suspect that the only reason anything interesting happened was so that you’d hang around till the commercials were over!)
  • 212 channels and they can’t find anything worth watching? (What’s that about? A rerun of the Mary Tyler Moore Show is my best choice? Why?)
  • Not only that–but all that junk is expensive. (I hate paying for stuff I not only don’t like but wouldn’t have in my house if I had a choice!)

All that can be attributed to limited bandwidth — to bandwidth that is rare and therefore expensive. Now nobody much thinks about it this way right now. But that is because you seldom can see what the problem is until it has been solved. And I suspect that the problem with TV is about to be solved.

The solution is Downloadable Video (DV instead of TV). You go to the internet and find the show you want to watch, (pay probably), download it, and watch it.

You can:

  • You can watch episode one at 7:12 one Wednesday night and episode two at 2:00 the next Thursday if it suits your schedule.
  • Watch your favorite show at 3:15 in the afternoon every day and sleep when you want, thank you very much.
  • You don’t have to watch anything that that guy in Kansas would watch. And you don’t have to eat his food, either.
  • Some episodes of a show are 52 minutes long and some are 68 minutes long and it is all good stuff, ’cause nobody bothers with fluff if it doesn’t have to fit the schedule of some advertising executive.
  • The rhythm of DV shows is not determined by advertising breaks the way that TV shows are. The plot actually drives the show. At first it seems weird but it’s easy to get used to.
  • You’re not limited to 212 channels. Like bass fishing? Download your favorite show from 1982. Have a strange sense of humor? Download 12 Andy of Mayberrys and have a party with an Aunt Bee theme.
  • You pay for what you download. But you only pay for what you want to watch. None of that awful schlock. (Unless you like awful schlock–then you can have as much as you want—there is plenty.)

But you can’t fix TV this way unless you have real, big, bandwidth—cheap. Fiber to the home is the way out of the wasteland. Nothing else will provide adequate bandwidth to do this and everything else you might want to do at the same time. It is the future. Even after we get big bandwidth it will take a while to mature. Only those companies that have capacity to burn will be able to compete. And only those communities that have really big bandwidth will get it early. It will be well worth having, don’t you think? Replace your TV with DV.

You can put in an order on July 16th by voting Yes!, For Fiber.

Closing the Digital Divide, Lafayette Style

The Cell Phone Model—A Lagniappe Plan

If the phrase “digital divide” is unfamiliar the idea is not: “Thems as has, gets.” Access to information technology divides the information haves from the have nots. Typically, as broadband technology comes to a community the higher speeds, while a good thing in itself, also has the effect of increasing the gap between the haves and the have nots. Those who have flock to empowering communication technologies, and those that have not fall behind in this new arena.

But Lafayette is not typical, and promises to be less typical yet. Joey Durel, speaking at Councilman Williams’ Real Talk meeting tonight, talked about the possibilities for narrowing instead of increasing the digital divide in Lafayette using some of the most concrete language we’ve seen to date. He’s started talking to citizens…and he’s confident enough to have also talked to ABC news about it, he announced tonight! While tentative plan, still needing to pass financial muster, the outline is visible: Lafayette is hoping to follow a cell phone model and give away a computer with long-term triple play contracts.

The cell phone model follows the simple and famous logic of razor blades. —Give away the razor and make all your money on follow-up sales of blades. LUS is hoping to be able to give away computers with long-term contracts and make up the cost with the expanded sale of its services. Add to that universal service—a utility will run service to anyone who wants it unlike private providers—and a cost that Durel says will be from 25 to 45 percent cheaper than current costs and you have a recipe nearly as good as your grandmother’s gumbo. High Tech and Broadband that really is available to all and that brings the community together instead of separating it.

Whether or not this version can be made to fly the more important point is the determination that is being shown to take on the problem in a direct way. If you can’t quite afford to give it away then sell the razor/computer at a serious discount pay out the difference as a few dollars each month on your telecom bill. Or embed it in the settop box. Regardless, all that is finally required is the heart to do it. And Durel, at least, seems to have it.

But the basic idea is neither strange—it’s a standard ploy to develop a market—nor financially irrational—with 278 dollar Linux-based WalMart computers and free open source apps the cost of developing a deep local market could even be a good business decision.

Do you remember Lagniappe? That’s Lafayette. Just a little something extra.

Go LUS!