Google Needs Lafayette

“Give me a place to stand and a lever long enough and I will move the world”

…Archimedes, 220 BC

Google needs Lafayette, and Amsterdam and Vasteras and….any of the fibered-up cities you might care to name. And, of course, Lafayette needs Google. That’s been true for some time. But it recently became much clearer. The big news on the internets these last few days has been Google’s newly announced Google Chrome OS. Most of the coverage has been predictable and mediocre but more thoughtfully analytical stories have finally begun to appear. (cf. the NYTimes) Even in the better articles the focus is inevitably on Google vs. Microsoft. While that might be understandable given that a battle between the two has become a journalistic stock-in-trade that is used to “explain” every move that either makes it really doesn’t seem like the best analytic starting point for understanding what is going on. The fact that Google’s OS isn’t good for Microsoft is incidental to what Google—and a few other web players—are trying to do aid an ongoing process. Exactly what that process is requires a little explaining:

What’s Going On Anyway? The backstory

The world is shifting yet again; this time onto the web from the computer. Not so long ago we moved much of our activity onto the computer —be they mainframes, PDAs, desktops, or laptops. The world shifted from only having physical objects that were unique or functionally identical copies of the unique object (think newspapers) to having perfect digital copies that paradoxically almost infinitely changeable, copyable, and decomposable (think email). The myriad internets focused on finding other computers and on transferring files between them. Mostly you worked on files locally in your own complete environment—even when you were actually a client “your” computer desktop had a separate copy of the document that you worked on. No more: while we struggle to come to grips with the social changes accompanying digitalization we find ourselves undergoing yet another shift off computers and onto the web. This shift widens the scope; it is easy to have a single unique copy that many people alter in addition to single, stable copies and many transforms of the original. That shift promises to make it possible to do our work with less duplication—of files, of storage, and of processing power and promises to pass the savings on to the final user.

Really, it’s all about leverage
The world is shifting and Google, with one of the longest levers, is trying to increase its leverage by moving the fulcrum ever closer to the weight it wants to move. The whole point of levers is to move a huge weight with a small force and the closer your fulcrum is to the weight you want to shift the greater you mechanical advantage. [image] The huge weight that Google wants to move is the “dead weight” of the existing paradigm of single, local, users that periodically transfer files. The emerging model is one which shifts toward multiple, distributed users that remain connected to files that are, themselves located in multiple, distributed “places.”

The new Google OS is all about building an OS that is optimized for that new environment. Right now we have an operating environment in which we are using a computer/local-user-centric OS to access the web. From the standpoint of web-centric use such OSs are bloated, slathered over with useless “features” and surprisingly anemic when it comes to operating quickly and securely within in the new “always-connected” world.

Note that moving us in this direction is what Google has been from the beginning: making it easy and cheap to move to a web-centric mode of interaction. Google’s innovation in web search is all about using web links and web stats to make good guesses about what is sought. That made finding things much easier—and then they made if free…It displaced a hierachical organization (cf. Yahoo’s (still extant!) example) arranged by respected experts that more closely resembled the library’s Dewey Decimal System or Linneaus’ taxonomy than anything that we’d now call search. You can perform pretty much the same analysis for Google Apps, Google Chrome, Android, and, now, the Google OS. Those are all fulcrum points that give Google (and Google’s user) additional leverage as we shift the weight of the past. With Google OS that point is very near the center of gravity of the opposing paradigm…. The point here is not that Google does NOT have want to “beat” Microsoft (or Apple or Linux) at any of these tasks. It will be sufficient for the purpose if the new browser or operationg system forces a shift on the rest of the field. It will be quite alright with Google, I suspect, if MS beats them in the browser war as long as the winners all support HTML 5-Ajax-multiple threading and the like. Google will have won if its Apps—and similar web applications that rely solely on nonproprietary foundations—run beautifully on all browsers. It is investing in winning the war; not the battles.

If Microsoft, or Apple, or Linux responds to a Google OS with popular instant-on, secure, web-centric OSs and Google’s dies a slow and embarrassing death the larger battle will have been won. And, for my money, that is the most likely outcome. Google to date has done an amazing job of creating the ecology in which it can thrive. Google Search made an impossible-to-navigate complexity suddenly usable—and that encouraged the myriad of small, eccentric, impossible-to-classify sources to find an audience and thrive. That in turn made search ever more dominant and gave Google search the page views it needed to thrive through even the lightest-weight advertising. The old hierarchical web was designed by and for graduate students. The new searchable web is usable by almost anyone who has a vague idea of how a topic is discussed.

Now, back to the topic

Google is leveraging the brutal fact of efficiency, its method is so much more cheaper per person than the oldr way that it can afford to give us significant services for free. We do waste enormous amounts of processor cycles and memory storage. The current system is inefficient by design: We buy memory to store our copy of a file stored (but not easily accessible) in a myriad of other places. How much space do you devote to browser cache alone? We purchase computers with several times the processor power necessary to do what used to be called supercomputing (and was illegal to export only a decade ago). Indeed, much current supercomputer design is consists basically of hooking up many personal computers or even game consoles together through a very fast network. We only very occasionally need the enormous power that is at our fingertips in the current personal computer. Web-based apps and systems do not need to waste anything like that amount of firepower. The difficult, processor-intensive tasks can be done on the web. The big storage can be on the web.

The web is, or can be conceived of as, a big, oddly configured computer. It’s got great memory and a great, if wildly distributed, CPU. And it can be radically cheaper to use because of those facts.

But…

The Catch
But, the catch is that the web is great computer that has lousy and expensive I/O by comparison. It is only the beginning of a great computer. You have to be a touch geeky to recognize all three parts of a computer…memory, cpu, and I/O. We are sold computers and parts on the basis of memory and CPU speed; not I/O. I/O is code for input/output. It defines what sort of and, crucially, at what speed, information can flow in and out of the computer. On your personal computer I/O is seldom a bottleneck and its expense trivial. Not so for the web where the I/O is the network itself. On the web I/O IS the bottleneck, always.

Most of Google’s initiatives can be conceived of as trying to find ways to minimize the effect of the webs’ I/O bottleneck. When we hear talk about running faster or yielding a better user experience that is what is typically where the real bottleneck is. Google Apps, Google Gears, Google Chrome, the Google OS and more are all shaped by getting more out of a slow and expensive connection. They’ve bee surprisingly successful. (The idea that you can do good word processing over the web is really pretty shocking.) The Google OS is merely the latest and potentially most powerful way to evade that constraint and keep that huge weight moving.

But, really, it’s all a sad hack.

Google needs Lafayette, and Amsterdam and Vasteras and….
What Google really needs is for everyone to have better, much better, bandwidth. And damn near no latency too, while you’re at it. Google needs Lafayette, and Amsterdam, and Vasteras and every other local fibered-up high-bandwidth network in the world as testbeds to showcase what is really possible. It (and others) need a place with no I/O constraint, with a network that has the quality to take advantage of the infrastructure that it is building and surely wants to extend. It needs to build an on-network cache and server system to explore how it can use a decent I/O network to compliment its current products and develop new ones. It needs real communities to really test those new ideas. (Like Google Wave, which could be launched today in a place with real bandwidth.) Google is creating the conditions for the next big shift. It’d be a pity if like xxx it moved the world only to find that the effort had left in a place where others benefited first and most.

If Google’s attempts to move the system can be understood as trying to shift the fulcrum to give them more leverage, promoting big-bandwidth communities might well be likened to making the lever longer…that is what most needs to be changed to really shift the old world to a new place. And Lafayette just might provide that crucial place to stand and use that longer lever.

Lafayette is a special case…
because Lafayette is a campus—it provides 100 mbps of speed, with amazingly low latency, between every household it connects. It’s hard to overstate the value of that. What make most great networks less great is, ironically in this context, network effects. In most cases network effects are good [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Network_effect.png] things…the value of your phone connection only increases when your neighbors also get one. But if your network is great and other networks that contain the people you want to contact are not then the added value of what you get from a great network is seriously diminished. So Google, with its large suite of apps that emphasize interaction finds it difficult to find a population that has a large enough population to use its products who all have the same fortunate circumstance. Even networks, like Verizon’s here in the United States, which have some higher bandwidth tiers sell mostly lower bandwidth tiers. And they do NOT give their customers large bandwidth between themselves. These networks do not form a cohesive pool of high-bandwidth users.

Lafayette’s will.

And, wait, there’s more! What Vasteras teaches us is that a high-bandwidth community can flip from having most of its traffic connect to places outside of the local community to making most of its connections inside its own network. Various reporters say that 70% to 80% of Vasteras’ traffic is internal. That really shouldn’t surprise us; it has happened before. When the first phone networks were built they were conceived of as substitutes for the long-distance telegraph and few thought their use would extend beyond the business world. In short order, of course, it became apparent that the people we actually want to talk to are right down the street; those are the people we know. Phone traffic is, and has been for a long time, mostly local and the widespread adoption much less expensive long distance calling has not changed that.

There is no reason to think that a more robust network, one that is rich in ways to communicate will not follow a similar pattern. People want to communicate and trade information with each other, not someone far away.

Lafayette et al. needs Google
Google can make the local network truly valuable, it can significantly erase the negative weight of the old network by locating caches and services on the local network. Local networks like Lafayette’s need that support to make their own business case. Such networks would be wise to court Google (and many others, Google here stands for the new web aborning) and to suport the company in its efforts. A partnership would be of enormous value to both sides. And would help in shifting that weight.

So…..
There’s a major shift underway; it’s hard not to feel everything straining toward that change. But a single constraint keeps the current edifice from falling: Bandwidth. Kick out that constraint and the new web comes into its own. Quickly. There are a few places where that bandwidth constraint is not in place. Those are the places where, with a little judicious midwifery, the new web could be born. And Lafayette shows how the initial densely interconnected communities that would kick-start the process could be developed.

It is a dream. But it is just barely beyond our grasp.

NADs, the Digital Divide, the iPhone and Lafayette

Food For Thought Dept.

Mike helpfully emailed a link to a Wall Street Journal article that thoughtfully rewrites a press release from Comscore, a marketing research firm which recently released a study on the influence of the iPhone on the smartphone market.

Long story short: the iPhone is a big deal and is driving some pretty basic shifts in usage patterns. This isn’t all that surprising when you realize that the iPhone is pretty much a full computer with an always-on 3G internet connection—usably fast mobile ubiquity. I recently got one to take on an extended vacation and camping trip out west and it was fantastically useful to be able to access mapping, directions, restaurant reviews—and even GPS locations while hiking far from cellular connections. I am not surprised that others find its extended all-in-one capacity both helpful and worth affording. (That trip explains the 2 week LPF hiatus for both of you that wondered.) You can do a search on the terms and find bits and pieces of Comscore’s broader analysis. (The full report is a for-pay item.)

Our Focus
But the big picture is not particularly what interests us here today. Instead we focus on the implications of these usage shifts for digital divide issues here in Lafayette.

Part of what Comscore’s data shows is that lower-income householders are 1) adopting smartphones and especially the iPhone at a rate that is growing faster than those that are more wealthy and 2) that their use of network functions like email and search are also growing faster than the wealthy as is their usage of music/mp3 functions. (As an interesting sidelight: the overall usage is actually shrinking for non-network centric uses like music listening. hmmn….)

The conclusion that the analysts reach is that folks who need to stretch the dollar are dropping telephone landlines and internet connections in favor of cellular connections when they are pressed—iPhone-like devices make it possible to gain enough of the benefits of these capacities over your cellular connection to make turning off the other services seem cost-effective. You also don’t have to pay for a separate mp3 player or computer.

The smartphone/iPhone is emerging as an all-in-one network device that is particularly attractive to those whose need to pinch pennies. It may well become the preferred NAD (network attached device) of the working stiff.

The NAD and the Digital Divide in Lafayette
Just how people attach to Lafayette’s shiny new network has been a big issue dating back to the Digital Divide Committee and the Fiber Fight. Both LUS and the city-parish council have made a strong (and specific) commitment to making sure that the benefits of the community’s network extend to all. The first and most valuable commitment to equity was to make the the network as cheap as possible and to make the cheapest levels of service much more powerful than is available from for-profit providers. LUS is clearly keeping that commitment with very low-priced, extremely high bandwidth connectivity products. But there was also a commitment to find some way to get computers into poorer people’s homes.

Closing the digital divide, digital inclusion, was never just a matter of do-gooder sensibility or even simple justice (as powerful as both are); the impulse always included a healthy dose of selfish realism: We will all advance further and faster if we advance together. A truly advanced digital community must be pervasively sophisticated. To the extent that Lafayette (and any vigorous local community) has decided to invest in a technological future for its children it cannot afford to leave any part of the community behind. No local community has the human resources to waste. No real community would tolerate it.

That was the basis for our commitment to digital inclusion. At the time it was assumed that the NAD would be a desktop computer or maybe a laptop. But the winds have shifted.

The New NADs
It now appears that the NADs used to bridge the digital divide in Lafayette will consist of some mix of 1) newer, radically inexpensive low-powered laptops (aka “net tops”, 2) wireless smartphones, and 3) the cable settop box’s rudimentary browsing and email capacities. I’ve discussed 1 and 3 pretty extensively earlier.

What’s most interesting about these 3 paths toward accessible network connectivity is not how they differ and the hard choices those differences might suggest but how they are similar and the opportunities that they offer that Lafayette is uniquely situated to grasp.

Net tops laptops, smartphones, and set top boxes are all unabashedly network-dependent devices. Without a good, fast, reliable connection to the internet they are really not very useful or valuable. With an advanced connection, however, they are transformed into powerful, amazingly cheap devices that challenge the functionality of a powerful conventional computer for most folk’s purposes. That defines the double-edged sword that inexpensive network devices represent for most people in most places: they are only as good–and as cheap–as the networks to which they connect.

The smartphone/iPhone presents a new set of challenges and opportunities for providing fair access to Lafayette’s networked future.

Smartphone Opportunities
The opportunities are pretty breath-taking: hand-held, always-on network devices like the iPhone or newer advanced Blackberries offer the possibility of leapfrogging into a future that must remain a vision in most places.

That vision is of an ubiquitous, always-accessible network that puts rich comunications—ranging from video to voice to text—and huge computational and information resources at the fingertips of users at a price point so low as to make universal use almost inevitable.

If we can line up all these elements we can be both a national and even a world leader in popular access to advanced technologies. Lafayette can be the place to explore today the consequences of sort putting massive bandwidth, new devices, network storage, and online computational resources into the hands of most people in a community. It’s a chance for our comunity to help define the future—and to make a place in that future for communities like our own.

Smartphone Challenges
The new, cheap NADs Lafayette is considering as tools to close the digital divide are all not only network-centric but network-dependent. These inexpensive devices all require two things to make them function as adequate substitutes for traditional computers: 1) an always-on, large-bandwidth connection and 2) —and this is less well understood—on line storage and computational resources dedicated to each NAD user.

We have the dense fiber backbone. And the crucial public ownership. But we need more.

1) We need, first, to make sure that we beef up the wireless network that is currently being deployed along with the fiber and offer it as an adjunct to a citizen’s network connection. We can provide wifi within our own homes by attaching it to the fiber, but on the streets and and in public places our network connectivity needs to follow us. Wifi (for other practical reasons as well as the current considerations) shouldn’t be a seperate network.

2) We need to provide substantial online storage for individuals. NAD’s are noticeably short of storage space. That’s part of what makes them light and inexpensive and hence good digital divide devices. There is no reason to have massive storage located on an always-connected device. But beyond compensating for NAD shortcomings, a central online repository will soon become a practical necessity as people move toward using multiple, differently capable devices online. It is easy to see a time in the near future when the typical user might login daily from 1) a home computer, 2) a work or school computer, 3) their personal NAD, 4) their settop box to view some net content communally or on the large screen, and 5) from a friend’s house or public space. A single, online “home” would allow everyone to use their personal “stuff” (from docs to passwords to bookmarks to online applications and beyond) from any device at any location.

3) We need to provide real network-based computational power. NADs onboard computational resources are weak. But with a robust local network there is no need for a supercomputer in your hand…just access the computational power of the supercomputers on the network. The settop box solution would be greatly enhanced by locating a linux desktop on the network. A small server farm (or a nice virtual server like the one that Abacus has) could serve out the capacity of a full computer with a full suite of powerful applications to any screen—from the settop’s TV to a NAD’s small one. The technology is currently being called “cloud computing” but it could be arrayed cheaply by any community with the will to do so.

With fiber, fiber-driven wireless, online storage, and network-based computation Lafayette could cheaply and easily meet the commitment made during the fiber fight to closing the digital divide. And it could do it in a way that would benefit every citizen no matter what their income, neighborhood, race, or level of tech savvy. Meeting above challenges would help shape Lafayette into a community with an unrivaled capacity to meet future challenges. Since everyone would benefit it would be easier to sell politically. In these hard economic times it would be a huge boon to the whole community and mark Lafayette as a progressive, self-reliant locale in which to do business.

Really this should be a no-brainer…. don’t you think?

Lagniappe:

Should you be tempted to think that this is ahead of its time or that Louisiana is behind those times:

About 25 percent of Louisiana’s 4.2 million people have a Blackberry, iPhone or similar device, which May said “is really a computer.”

That’s from an Advertiser story on the community college system reformatting online coursework to make it accessible via smart phones….since it is “really a computer” qualified students can get aid in buying a smartphone since it can be regarded as educational.

The future is just around the corner. This stuff is all in sight.

And We’re Not Amazed

Food For Thought


That’s Kevin Kelly sitting in the red chair on a darkened stage. He’s talking to an assembly of some of the world’s finest minds at a recent TED conference. He’s earned their attention by being, over the last 40+ plus years one of the most prescient thinkers on the globe. He not only sees real patterns — which is rare enough — but he has an ability to see the direction in which those patterns are moving. That’s a forbiddingly abstract talent and it’s always been hard for Kelly to make himself sound sensible when he first points to a pattern. It’s only later that his positions come to be taken-for-granted wisdom.

As you might surmise, Kevin Kelly has been a hero of mine for a long time; since the old Whole Earth Review through his work on chaos theory. His sort of integrative, obsessive, reportorial focus on what’s truly important is always worth listening to….and even if you are tempted to think that this time it might be a little over the top you should remember that he has pretty much always been right….

This time he’s on about the web. How amazing it really is. How amazing it is that we’re not just poleaxed by what we’ve got. How that’s only the beginning How the web is turning into an ever-more all-inclusive machine. And how that machine is evolving.

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Like the web you could just about take off anywhere in that talk and dip into some really fascinating and important stuff. For instance, Kelly mentions, in quick passing, photosynth. Long-term and retentive readers will vaguely recall that term; I posted on it back when I fell across the technology on the web. Take a look; I think you’ll see how it fits his thesis. Then consider: He considers that a throw-away line. There’s a lot of meat below that almost-glib surface.

Here in Lafayette we’ve got to start taking such stuff seriously. It’s now inevitable that we will be able to inhabit the leading edge of this brave new world when it appears. We’ll have bandwidth to burn in LUS’ 100 megs of intranet and the wireless network now abuilding and attached to that hard-wired backbone can provide ubiquity at speeds that will stun. (In my neighborhood mysterious black cylinders are being attached to LUS fiber on a pole on every block. As I walk past with my iPhone NAD a wifi network pops up….) But, frankly, having the hardware doesn’t give us the vision. We could use it to just give us “more” of the same—bigger bandwidth, better phones, more fun cable, all for less. And we should do that. But that is the LEAST we can do with our new network.

A network-centric future is upon us. The web will connect, for practical purposes, all points from hand-crafted links, to databases, to our relationships, to the bevy of things we make and use. What ties all that together; what makes it work; is how it is integrated. Right now we’re calling it “search” and Google is the god. But simple textural search and link-ranking (which is most of what Google does) is only the tip of the iceberg here.

What the world needs—and what Lafayette and a few other places are positioned to supply—is what will replace search. The new web needs big bandwidth and ubiquity—practically speaking a tightly integrated fiber-wireless network. The next web also needs the huge calculative power that Kelly mention but does not emphasize. Between LITE and ULL’s underutilized supercomputers we’ll have computational power to do the sorts of pattern recognition and integration that things like photosynth and other database integrative applications will need. Kelly notes that the new web will no be like the old web any more than our web is like television. The new way of making acessible all those things which the web will connect is the crux of the difference. I trust his insights there and can see the outlines of the patterns he points to.

What Lafayette, and other communities with the resources, should be doing is supporting and providing incentives for companies and individuals that want design for what only we can currently do: provide the next generation of integrative technologies—that which will replace search. Any x-prize, any portal, any support that does not take that into account will be missing the boat.

Kids prefer the Net to TV

The NYTimes publishes a brief bit which says that new research shows that 10-14 year olds who have the internet spend more time there than watching TV.

While I look askance on the source (a marketing group) the finding does match my experience. With my six grandkids in Lafayette I think it is true that the grands spend more time on the net than watching the TV and I don’t doubt that this is widely true.

There are always caveats of course and here are several: 1) The household has to have internet. 2) The kids have to have as ready access to a computer as the do to the TV. —In our households that’s the parent’s (or grand-parent’s) cast-offs. 3) The distinction, for kids, between TV, and internet, and video gaming is not as clear as it is for their parents so saying that kids are “on the net” might be misleading.

That last point—that kids don’t make the same distinctions that we do is worth exploring a bit. Video game consoles are connected to TV’s. So the “TV” can be used to play games–including, in one household, networked games through the video game console. Or a very similar game can be played on the computer over the network. And the cartoon network is very popular on the computer screen where, once you are into the show, the experience is little different from watching the TV–you can pause it but then in these households the kids have grown up with the understanding that you can pause and record TV on the DVR.

So saying “For children ages 10 to 14 who use the Internet, the computer is a bigger draw than the TV set,” as the article notes, does not necessarily mean what it means to adults. Still, the article is basically correct: though kids might not think of all these activities as “internet” they are, in fact, only possible over a good networked connection.

But that probably should be the deeper point. The triple play package the LUS will soon be offering here in Lafayette will be strong on all counts—cable, phone, and internet. But it will be untouchable on the internet side. And all action is shifting to the internet side. Kids are simply the leading edge on this. As the distinctions blur between internet, phone, and TV all the power shifts to the internet and internet-enabled entertainment and interactions.

For LUSFiber that will be a key advantage. Their emphasis should be on shifting this community’s usage in that direction as fast as is possible for that is where the future competitive advantage of the network lies. Right now the cash cow is cable—and that will help pay of the network in the crucial first years—but those 14 year olds will exiting high school and setting up their own households shortly after the network build-out here is finished. Those customers will be all about the internet…as far as they will be concerned “the phone” will mean VOIP and wireless, “the TV” will be an adjunct to the video they download and will be used in roughly the same way (started and stopped on their command and watched on the most convenient screen). Gaming will a huge part of their entertainment life and a fast local network over which to play with friends will be something that young households will value at least as much as ESPN.

The future is not only coming but is here…take a look at your family’s pre-teens…and it is going to be dominant far faster than we thought 3 years ago. LUS is standing in the right place to enable that transition easily, cheaply, and smoothly for our community; let’s hope it sees the opportunity and gets ahead of the curve. Moving fast on this can be the way to realize the dream of making the network a real utility–ubiquitous and necessary for all.

Home Networking, Verizon, and Lafayette

Food For Thought Department
[What follows is lengthy and starts out with arcana but I think the implications are significant—perhaps especially for Lafayette. I ask that you stay with me…]

According to TelephonyOnline Verizon is radically upgrading the gateways it installs in homes served by the fiber-to-the home-based FIOS service. —FIOS customers can buy a triple play internet/cable/phone package from Verizon based on technology that is very similar to that being constructed in Lafayette by the community’s Lafayette Utility System.

The new in-home devices have a number of interesting characteristics; they will:

  1. bump “speeds over coaxial cable in the home from 75 Mb/s to 175 Mb/s”
  2. “have double the processing power” compared to the current gateways
  3. allow “users to create up to four separate wireless networks, each with different security settings”
  4. allow “remote Verizon technician management”

Understand that an upgrade like this is costly. Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) is costly. Putting a piece of relatively pricey equipment in every home (on top of the set-top boxes you’ve installed for video and any VOIP equipment) really adds up. CPE is where every company tries to pinch pennies and extend the life of its equipment. So upgrades are rare. And they are never done without a damn good reason.

So why would Verizon invest in new hardware with the hopes of using the new capacities in “the next three to four years?”

My best guess: to ride the wave of big bandwidth in the home…Big bandwidth inside the home has recently emerged as an issue. (I’ve just recently caught on. See my recent post, FTTD (Fiber To The Desk, for some background musing on how really big in-home transfer might be accomplished. What Verizon is doing validates the idea but is pretty small potatoes compared to what is coming. Don’t miss the comments–good stuff there.) Verizon clearly thinks that its current model which provides 75 mb/s will prove inadequate for in home use in the next 3-4 years. Pause to let that soak in please: the next 3-4 years. Tomorrow.

That is a near-future time frame. Nobody spends the amount of money that Verizon will spend even gradually moving over to new equipment without a very compelling plan to make back their investment. And Verizon knew what it wanted in these boxes. These are not off-the-shelf pieces; they’ve been designed to Verizon’s specs and the company has contracted two independent providers that meet those specs in order to assure itself of supply.

So the difference between the previous standard and the new equipment should strongly hint at what Verizon thinks folks will do that makes the upgrade pay out. Let’s unwrap those specs looking for clues:

The Analysis
—Faster speed, from 75 to 175 mb/s, means that Verizon is expecting a lot of internal traffic on home networks. That is lot-—especially since Verizon won’t offer you more than 50 megs of connectivity to the internet itself so it’s not video downloads they’re trying to accommodate (of course not 😉 ).

So for what do you need massive amounts of in-home networking speed? Take a gander at the processing power for a partial answer.

—”Doubling the processing power”–if you dig around a bit (1,2) you’ll see that that phrase refers to moving from a 32 bit chip architecture to a dual core 64 bit chip. That’s the way my fancy laptop is built. That’s real processing power even if the clock speed turns out be a bit lower. It allows the onboard computer to coordinate more in-home devices. Most obviously multiple set-top boxes for the cable video service are in the mix; it takes a lot of bandwidth to push HDTV around especially if one or more set top boxes is acting like a DVR/video server and pushing video out to secondary screens. In fact the “doubling” phrase clearly understates the added computational capacity. On top of chip architecture the gateways can serve out eight (8!) Quality of Service (QOS) controlled channels. At a minimum that means that Verizon can push 8 separate protected streams to multiple TVs. But eight seems like more than homes really need. Of course there are Xboxes, and Wiis, and Apple TVs and the like in addition to a raft of reasons that users or companies selling to users might want a protected stream…So eight makes sense. . . If (and only if) you are planning to do something beyond video.

Ok, its faster and more powerful…

—What’s with that feature: allow “users to create up to four separate wireless networks, each with different security settings?” Well, that allows you to set up a buncha different networks, some with QOS, some without, some that are slow, some that are public…..hmmn, whats with that? Again, it seems like overkill for current services. Wireless is hard to maintain for the QOS that video requries. They are probably wisely sticking with wires (coax) for that function given the eight protected streams on the wired side. By any measure the capacity for 12 separated streams is pretty astonishing.

Faster, more powerful, many separate streams, eh?…

—Finally: allow “remote Verizon technician management.” That means that Verizon can modify the thing from their headquarters. That alone isn’t too new—most “modems” can be upgraded by the company or at least reset to clear glitches and given the clearences it needs to access the ISP’s network. But in this context “remote management” surely means the ability for Verizon to enable and assign all those streams and to install some management software or special access codes on unit. And, sell that capacity to third parties who would like to use the in-home network that Verizon’s fancy new gateway creates.

Faster, more powerful, many separate streams, that can be controlled by the network owner…extending its control of the last mile into your rooms.

Chew on that for awhile. I did.

The Conclusion
Some folks might think all these bells and whistles are just over engineering. I can’t believe that a traditional telco like Verizon, one that is already straining its financial capacity to pay for a fiber build, is investing that kind of cash unless they really think this amount of capacity will be valuable to them within 4 years and pay for itself rapidly at that point.

My guess is that Verizon wants to control your home network and all the things that you are shortly going to want to run on it. Things which you might want today if only it weren’t so hard and costly to get the service up and running.

What Verizon wants to sell you directly is only the base. Video and video serving is likely only the beginning from Verizon’s point of view. The corporation has two profit centers currently: data and wireless. (Video shows promise but isn’t there today. Old style telephone lines are shrinking.) Convincing you to buy more data capacity and their wireless service is a proven cash cow. Wireless’s Achilles heel remains coverage and the most persistant irritation. In-house and in-building coverage is a big problem and one that is hard and expensive to solve by popping up more cell towers. The emerging solution is to use “femtocells” —to set up a small base station inside the building that is hooked up to a wired network and provides a mini “tower” that dramatically improves service. An in-home gateway like the ones described could help service and manage the bandwidth and protocols necessary to easily deploy this service to those that need it. And potentially radically reduce expensive customer turn over.

But, as popular as video and wireless retention has to be with the accountants who like old services and guaranteed returns, the real goal is likely broader: providing a platform for other, secure, protected services. Services which people can be sold but for which each provider currently has to figure out how to provison. A truly capable gateway like the ones that are described would let a lot of service providers play without installing their own in-home network and/or controller device.

All Verizon would want is, say, 20% off the top.

And providers would probably find that cheap compared to installing their own network.

Here’s an unordered list of things which would be much more commercially viable if the infrastructure/platform were already installed in the home and could be activated and managed remotely:

  • Gaming can eat local bandwidth too.
  • Virtual Private Networks (VPN).
  • Video telephony and intercomms.
  • A local high school sports “network’s” video stream and pay per view.
  • National professional and college sports “channel” versions of streaming video and downloads direct to your DVR.
  • Sophisticated security networks and security cameras.
  • “Telepresence” and other video conferencing/telephony.
  • Allowing all your electrical devices AC, refrigerator, hot water, etc to communicate and lower energy costs.
  • “Smart home” sensor and activity networks.
  • “Satellite radio” channels.
  • A myriad of music rental services could play directly through your connected sound system.
  • And many more…..add your own in the comments

Many of these “long-tail” sorts of uses will be “gotta have it” for some subset of users. The 2 dollar USL sports network will lock in users who will spend the next 200 monthly dollars on Verizon. Suppose only 1% of users has gotta have each of the above functions. That’s 11% of the market right there. Locked into your company from the start. I think Verizon could make a pretty penny by controlling the gateway device that made such home functions easy to buy, install and provide.

I think any network could.

The Take Home
Understand that the current incumbents know very well that the only thing that keeps them from becoming cheap, commodified transporters of other people’s expensive bits is their monopoly-based control of the last mile architecture. If we had six connections to the outside world all networks would be running cheaply and competing on how fast and reliably they could provide us with bits. (But that ain’t in the cards…which is why wise communities will follow Lafayette’s lead.) The incumbent’s stranglehold on the last mile is crucial to their profit profile. With it they are Gods of the network age. Without it they are the guys who sweep the roads and fill in potholes—and will be paid appropriately. They’d rather be Gods. That last mile control is the key to being invited in to control the network in your home too and the key that will give them huge new sources of revenue by controlling the toolbooth that they hope that new gateway will become.

It’s a pretty damn good plan.

Lafayette
No Lafayette Pro Fiber blog post would be complete with a comment on the local implications. IMHO this is another place where Lafayette could lead the way.

Verizon is poised to extend its fiber-based advantage into the home by controlling access to big bandwidth inside the home and by easing the entry of services that critically depend upon accessing a robust home network. In some places the cable company has already partnered with security firms to provide robust networking that rides on the coax installed for cable. Other incumbents surely will see the writing on the wall; they’ll have to follow suite or watch companies like Verizon generate the revenues that will enable them to become more and more dominant. Verizon has the big bandwidth advantage in fiber. But that advantage is purely theoretical until the public can see that the more capable network can provide not only “more of the same” but actually “different and better” services. The gateway can be the key that unlocks that potential.

A gateway or something similar can do the same for Lafayette’s network.

I’ve been hearing a lot of background buzz lately about trying to encourage tech development in and for Lafayette. Meetings in various places, varying level gurus flown in from various places to attend the meetings. Dinners in posh private homes. Talk about establishing an “x-prize” for Lafayette. An attempt to organize a meeting for developers. Desultory attempts at secrecy. (My list is surely incomplete.) The usual influentials’ names are bandied about. You know, the works. No one knows whether any of it will come to fruition. But the point is that Lafayette is beginning to wake up to the fact that it will be well served to actually do something to encourage development. A “build it and they will come” attitude only works in the movies. In the real world if you want something to happen you’ve got to do something special to encourage it. Building LITE and LUSFiber and ramping up LCG’s example are great starts but they won’t, alone, be enough to make Lafayette the mecca many of us would like to see it become.

So far most of the Lafayette discussion on this topic has been couched in terms of somehow convincing (or bribing) developers to make us something special. As much as I like the idea—and hope it succeeds—I think we’d have better chance at success if we instead tried to do something special ourselves.

Like Verizon is evidently doing.

The heart of Verizon’s apparent plan is to make it possible, even easy, for developers to do something great and different. They are poised to eliminate the barriers to “getting things done” by providing the platform over which these things can be accomplished. Verizon lays out all the tools on the table (albeit tools that lock you into their network) and will surely even handle billing for you. But they won’t pay you. Instead they’ll charge you…and your customers. Frankly, that’s a better way. Opening the door is always a better plan than subsidizing the battering ram!

The right box in the house could do for Lafayette what Verizon’s gateway is poised to do in the homes of it FIOS users. But Lafayette’s could be based on ethernet and open IP standards instead of the clunky cable-oriented and proprietary network hardware and protocols that serve Verizon but are unfamiliar to most developers. Lafayette could do a better job of facilitating access to the Local Area Network (LAN) that is the home than any of the competitors is willing to do.

But Lafayette could go further. It could do the same for its MAN (Metropolitan Area Network) by building in the resources that make access easy. Make available storage. Make available the kind of computational power represented by LITE and Abacus. Embed modern protocols. Pack up some servers to enable within network serving of various kinds of data (streaming video, for instance).

In short Lafayette could make its networks, both inside the home and inside the city, playgrounds for the easy, fluid kind of development that developers love.

And we might, eventually even make a few pennies off it. But quickly and surely we could make Lafayette a tech mecca, give LITE a clear purpose in the community, and make LUSFiber a roaring success.

You want to be that shining city on the hill? The path is open.

FTTD (Fiber To The Desk)

I’ve long thought that FTTH (Fiber To The Home) was the last step in high-speed networking. We’ve already got easy access to 1 gig ethernet for in-home use. After all when we get a 100 meg symmetrical intranet here in Lafayette we’ll be far, far ahead of any connection available to large numbers of people in the US. Most folks dream of a 2o meg connection—and even more dream of being able to afford it. So the 1 gig ethernet network in my home seem, by an order of magnitude, far more than adequate to handle my practical needs. Fretting about an in-house fiber network seemed plain silly.

But maybe FTTD (Fiber To The Desk) won’t seem silly for much longer. According to a recent NetworkWorld article Verizon is actively marketing and has already installed a few FTTD setups in larger commercial and institutional settings. According to the article FTTD has real, solid advantages right now:

  • cheaper materials (copper is costy),
  • cheaper to install,
  • faster installation,
  • fewer electronics,
  • cheaper to maintain,
  • space-saving (fewer maintenaince closets),
  • energy-saving.
  • and oh yeah: far faster now and future speed upgrades will be dead easy

Now that’s a pretty compelling list. The article is very straightforward, however, in saying that FTTD isn’t currently for everyone. You need to have a fairly large population of users and retrofitting a smaller building probably wouldn’t be cost-effective. And my own caveat: in reading between the lines of the story it is pretty clear that the cost savings are based, in part, on eliminating the need for a separate phone network. The user is assumed to be on a VOIP phone. Now that seems like a sensible long-term evolution but it may mean that you’d come up with different numbers if you did a straight ethernet to fiber comparison. Still…even being in the same ballpark is very surprising and since phone wiring is going the way of the dodo anyway it may make sense to disregard its cost.

So FTTD is not for everyone…Yet.

I (cough, cough) remember when ethernet was viewed as similarly impractical for home use. It was an enterprise or institutional networking infrastructure. Nobody would have troubled themselves to install it in a household or small business. —I, back in the dark ages, installed AppleTalk networks in a graphics firm and in the building where I did graduate study. Ethernet was thought to be overkill–useful in the backbone but too much and too technical for mere mortals or small groups.

As to those who can’t imagine that we’ll need that sort of bandwidth the same ethernet history applies: There was a time when a powerful local network seemed pointless. After all what household could afford more than one computer and if you had two, why would they talk to each other? But as of this morning I’ve got a total of 6 or 7 computers pulling power in my two person household: 2 main laptops, 2 TiVos (each of which is a linux computer) and 2 “extra” computers–one serving as a “kids or visitors” laptop with appropriate programs installed and one running as a server/workstation. If you wanted to count the Cox set top box that would make 7. And hey, I don’t have an AppleTV, iphone, videophone, xbox, PS2, or a Wii. (Poor pitiful me!) I do have a network storage device backing up the main computers regularly, so that eats some bandwidth when it kicks in. A household with a lot of gamers or heavy video watchers could generate a lot more internal traffic than I do.

So when the claim is made that a networking infrastructure is more capable and cheaper for larger installations—and with local network demand for are visibly growing—I strongly suspect that it will, in short order, be feasible and valuable for home use. My guess is that somewhere shortly after we see 10 gigs being pushed to the wall of our homes we’ll think our 1 gig of in-house ethernet is puny. We’ll then think it makes sense to disconnect our ethernet, lash fiber to the ethernet wire and pull the copper ethernet out as we run the fiber in behind it.

Digging Deeper….
For those who might be interested in a bit more technical background (as far as I understand it): FTTD as discussed above is really a form PON (Passive Optical Networking). Verizon who is featured in the story uses this form of networking in its FTTH network FIOS—LUS will use the same framework here in Lafayette. PON systems take a single fiber feed and split the bandwidth it carries between a number of users; in most metropolitan-level networks it is split between 32 users and it appears that the Verizon commercial product discussed is based on this model. So there would be one “cabinet” in a large building that would replace the central IT hub and various closets with electronics like routers that are typically found on every floor or every large segment of an ethernet network. Part of the savings is found there. From the hub fiber would run to every desktop and that would necessitate an ONT (Optical Network Terminal) at every desk to translate the fiber’s light to electrical signals for use in the computer, TV, phone, or other device (like a wireless node, network storage, or network printer). The cost of this ONT would be a major issue, I would think. I would expect that some day the ONT would be integrated into the device itself as has happened with ethernet and other networking technologies.

So there really does appear to be a path to FTTD @ home in the foreseeable future. All we need is enough bandwidth to our houses to make deploying the in-house sensible.

Making the Most of LUSFiber’s Advantages

(Warning: Long…but thoughtful, I hope.)

LUS Fiber is going to have a lot of advantages going into the fray with Cox and AT&T. Capacity, technical sophistication, home-town appeal, and the fact that we fought a winning battle against the incumbents to get our network up all work to the advantage of the local utility.

But, unfortunately, a “build it and they will come” strategy is mighty risky. A more solid strategy can be built by taking your advantages and making them essential to your customers. LUS will have to encourage its Lafayette citizens to value what it alone can offer. The utility will also need to acknowledge its weaknesses and take steps to minimize those weaknesses that are inescapable.

Technical and organizational advantages:
LUS’ indisputable technical advantage will be bandwidth, bandwidth, and consistency built on having bandwidth to spare. (No one will have to wonder if the network is too “slow” to handle a given use “right now.” — As I regularly do on Cox when the kids get in from school.) So how does LUS find a useful advantage in all that bandwidth; or rather: how does LUS make sure its users find that bandwidth too wonderful to pass up? And how does LUS do that in ways that its competitors simply cannot—or will not—match? That involves making good use of its massive bandwidth and symmetrical connections.

But the massive bandwidth of fiber on a modern system unburdened by legacy copper and commitments is not LUS’ only advantage. Arguably, that’s not the major advantage. LUS also has the advantage of being owned by its customers. Other businesses have to compromise between what is best for its customers and what is best for its owners. LUS doesn’t have that conflict and can rationally choose to benefit its citizen/customers in ways that are simply not open to other companies. This makes it easy to take smaller profits and offer more services—the stockholders of LUS will, I assure you, not object.

But the advantage of community ownership goes beyond doing a better job of the standard business plan; LUS can do do more than offer better service at cheaper prices. A community utility does not need to pretend to be a slightly more efficient company slaved to a standard business model based on profit maximization. The utility model is based on service maximization…and that is not the same thing. Cox has to be able to show the profit potential in everything it offers its customers or be legally liable for mishandling its owners’ resources. LUS, by contrast, can do things that creates value for its citizen/owners without creating direct value for itself along the way. A utility can pass value through. A utility can take a remarkably generous attitude towards its citizen/owners.

That, potentially, is a vast competitive advantage. It means that LUS can pursue business models that its competition simply cannot emulate. And “value pass through” is not theoretical or forbiddingly abstract in practice: Passing the value through is exactly what LUS is doing when it lets its citizen-owners use the full 100 megs of intranet bandwidth and offers symmetrical bandwidth. Private corporations are loath to follow suit because doing so would mean letting customers use resources they might eventually find some way from which to profit.

Value pass through need not be limited to bandwidth infrastructure issues like symmetry or full intranet usage. It can apply to infrastructure at higher levels. LUS can provide—or support—all manner of infrastructure. On the purely video side it could offer “channels” to anyone local at ridiculously low prices (as Burlington, Vt. is doing) it has bandwidth to spare. Why not? On the richer internet side it can host neutral servers that any citizen/customer can use. The utility can host cheap applications that are open to anyone who has an IP address on the network. It can host free or cheap online storage. LUS would be wise to host (or sponsor) servers providing all manner of higher-level infrastructure capacities. It would be a trivial expense to host a server that provided users with the ability to multicast streams of video (broadcast) or to reflect a video to a specified set of users (“unicast”). Application serving, online storage, and facilitating advanced technologies would all increase the value of the network for the community of users and that, not simple profit-taking, is the goal of a utility company. Happily, it would also raise the percentage of people who’d take the service and thereby add to the bottom line.

(An aside: Google acts like a utility; and is hugely successful as a consequence….the business model of offering your customers “free” value to make richer use of your network is the basis for the most successful new business model of our era.)

If value pass through, massive bandwidth, symmetry, and high-level infrastructure represent key advantages for LUS and Lafayette then those advantages should be used to offset any inescapable disadvantages the local network will face when dealing with Cox (and AT&T, should it get its act together).


LUS’ disadvantage: Size
And LUS does have a key disadvantage: size. We are tiny compared to Cox. And even smaller compared to AT&T. Nor do we have, yet, a clearly visible wireless strategy and a wireless strategy will be considerably enhanced by the size of LUS’s competitors.

Large size makes a few things potentially easier, among them: regional content, regional network effects, and technical prowess. People want to communicate with and about local things. (Most phone calls are local, for example. Regional content like high school football has a larger area to draw from than the city of Lafayette.) So Cox will be able to establish valuable products like local calling circles and regional sports networks that LUS simply will not be in a position to match.

Large size also means that Cox and AT&T can afford to spend big bucks putting together sophisticated interfaces to their content and building devices that allow them to integrate wireless and wired, phone and internet, and generally to try and lock people into unified world where they can offer easy integration. —For instance they could work on making it easy to program your DVR from a phone or see a telephone caller’s name and number on the TV when the phone rings.

Advantages and Disadvantages. Lemons into Lemonade.
So regional network effects and the ability to spend on integration and interface issues favor large corporations. But home town loyalty, massive bandwidth, symmetrical bandwidth and, most crucially, a willingness to pass value through to citizen-owners favor local, municipally-owned competitors. LUS can build higher-level infrastructure that drives participation and adoption.

Capitalizing on Advantages: Broadband and Symmetry

LUS can do what no private provider will: encourage bandwidth usage. And kill the old broadcast model while doing so. It will be to LUS’ advantage to do so since it will lead to a place where the competition will simply be unable to follow.

The most obvious driver of bandwidth usage is video and LUS needs to be thinking about how to drive levels of use so high that Cox and AT&T cannot match local demand. The way to accomplish that is make it possible and easy to use video phones, simple to use security cameras casually, to send video’s of T-boy’s birthday to grandmama, to watch a live stream of the Tuerlings game broadcast by a fan, to talk to salesfolk at a local store, to sign into a video “channel” organized by the Chamber of Commerce…or the Wetlands Coalition, to attend class, to, even, view locally produced full-length documentaries. Local video needs to become a casual, normal, accepted, unremarkable way to communicate, share, and promote products and ideas. If that level of usage can be reached LUS’ network will be wildly popular…and the intimate local content will make other networks look weak in comparison.

Making video communication unremarkable is quite possible. But it will require active promotion on the part of LUS and the Lafayette community. We will have to break our own path—fortunately that’s something we’ve done before.

LUS has already made an amazing start. We’ll have true bandwidth, true symmetrical bandwidth. It will be cheap. It will be ubiquitous. Those are the necessary if not sufficient conditions to move to a visually rich communications system. With the lowest tier, even in the first year, being 10 megs there will be no one on our network that will have too slow a connection to regularly use a video phone or watch full screen HD streaming video. Even when we are communicating with the outside world. When we are connecting to our fellow citizens we’ll have the full capacity of local network available to us, limited only by the electronics on the wall of our house…currently 100 megs. And everyone here will have the same 100 megs of intranet capacity. Regardless of what they pay for their connection to the outside world. That sort of uniformity and capacity will make it possible to build networks–human networks of people talking, playing and working–based on the expectation that you can communicate with huge resources.

We’ll have a dense population of uniformly high-bandwidth subscribers in a small city. Once a tipping point is reached everyone will want to be on such a network. First in Lafayette and then, when others see what is possible, elsewhere.

Reaching that tipping point though will have to be a goal that we work toward. Having the necessary conditions is not sufficient.

Getting There: Supporting Higher Level Usage

Bandwidth and Symmetry give this community a huge leg up on the future. The future will be possible in Lafayette come January. But they aren’t enough alone to ensure that we make the shift ahead of other communities. The community will need more to make the jump. Luckily LUS is a public utility and it has already show that it thinks in terms of giving the community the most it can. That is why we have big bandwidth and a 100 meg intranet.

Public utilities can and often do pursue such a “generous” policy—and LUS has shown every sign that it understands the value of this. (For details see “On Really Getting It“) A generous attitude turns the ROI attitude on its head: anything that benefits the user is good unless it does serious damage to the bottom line. The owners must be pleased first, just as in any business. But since the consumers actually are the owners in a public utility scenario pleasing them includes giving them what they want, mostly–which is lots of reliable services for as little as is possible. That is what public utilities do. They “pass value through” to their community.

We’ll still have two sets of needs that someone will need to generously provide; they will be both social and technical. Social needs are essentially educational. Technical needs are essentially infrastructure.

Social Support
On the social side we’ll have to teach people how to use new tools. Dialing the telephone was once a daunting technical challenge involving unfamiliar concepts like codes that stood for locations and an elaborate set of rules about when to release the rotary dial. (Really) Use needs to be taught. In our era we’ll need to teach folks the rudiments of lighting, (backlighting is rude) how to upload video, a bit about politely providing a compressed stream to the poor people who view our stuff outside the city, and something about how to usefully tag our products. If that seems crazy and forbidding go back and look at the phone video I linked to above. In 5 years it will all be second nature–but until that time we’ll need to provide basic education.

Beyond basic communication we’ll also be undertaking to create media…to broadcast our kid’s soccer games, to hold business meetings virtually, and to create advocacy films and websites. We’ll need to learn how to do this well. The schools should be involved and we’ll need a community center, or several, to foster a new layer of people who are the equivalent of today’s photographers and newsletter writers…again, we’ll know this has been a success when nobody really needs to be taught this any more; when it is absorbed from the culture and every small group has its “Uncle Bob” who knows how to get it done.

AOC –Acadiana Open Channel, the PEG channel— who already does a similar task for TV production and film needs to be retasked to include these functions or some new organization created to serve these educational functions.

An AOC-like organization will also be needed to host Uncle Bob’s videos, to run the server, to vet the new “channels” and playlists made available by groups and individuals, and to keep the technical backdrop going. Community access channels will remain, if renamed in any new big broadband future that takes local communities seriously. Someone has to do the work.

Technical Support
There’s a level of infrastructure above the physical connection that really should be attended to. If we can set up some reasonable standards and provide some resources that are easy and cheap for us to do collectively the whole process of “getting there” will take place much more rapidly and the Lafayette network that LUS runs will be much more useful.

LUS and LCG could provide most of this—and perhaps should—but they could also simply support it by sponsoring organizations that provide the functionality.

Most basically, community support organizations should be provided with bandwidth; they are serving the network and making them pay for bandwidth would be both prohibitive and unfair. The community media support, the local portal, organizations that support nonprofits…all need bandwidth to serve the community. If they don’t make a profit they shouldn’t be expected to pay to use resources that are, after all, not scarce.

Server and storage space are the 21st century equivalent of a the TV studio–the necessary infrastructure to make community media possible.

LUS can also establish basic technical capacities that anyone can use. For instance LUS should turn on multicast features in their routers, They should help make sure that a multicast server and a server that supports multicast are available for broad use. That is much like reserving channel capacity for public channels on today’s cable networks. The new networks will also be served by fostering public media.

There are also a wide range of things that the community, in the guise of LUS and LCG could do to keep the network up to date and able to dynamically adapt to changing conditions. Because Cox and AT&T will have much more money to drop in developing integrated applications (like the phone/TV ones mentioned above) than Lafayette ever will it would behoove the community to adopt the broadest standards available and encourage developers to treat a protected portion of the network like a “sandbox”–a safe place to play that encourages innovation. In one example: it is clear now that in the near future the standard set top box for cable television will be based on a standard called “Tru2Way.” This is a published standard and allows anyone to write applications that can be used on any compliant box. If history is any guide cable companies in general will try and strongly restrict what people can actually do with their signal and what applications are allowed to run on their boxes. The companies will want to control the experience (and dollars) of “their” users. Innovation will generally be restricted and nifty new services will not make it to market. (Want to know why your HDTV can’t surf the net? It’s not because such technology wasn’t developed a decade ago in rudimentary form.) If the Lafayette network adopts only boxes that run this standard and adopts an open attitude about allowing others to add value we’ll likely end up with advanced integration and a better user interface than any of the larger, slower, more constraining network providers.

Conclusion:

This has been a long piece but the take-away is relatively short: The success of the new LUSFiber network is dependent upon maximizing the advantages it gives its citizen/customers and finding ways to compensate for the networks inescapable weaknesses. Bandwidth, symmetry and the ability to pass-through value due to the network being community-owned are fundamental advantages. Size is any local network’s fundamental disadvantage. LUS needs to focus on making its advantages essential to the community; a process which will require both education and building another layer of infrastructure above the fiber itself.

Even if LUS has an advantage in a standard face-to-face commercial matchup (and it clearly does) it would be wise to play a deeper game; one that focuses on making the new network central to how we live and play in Lafayette. That means helping citizens find rich ways to use the network; especially help using the network to communicate locally. In that arena Lafayette’s network is free to adopt policies which will make it overwhelmingly more useful to community members—policies which its competition cannot match.

The Lafayette community has already demonstrated that it is up to the task and LUS has shown that they have right generous spirit to pursue their part of the effort.

What remains is to settle down to the hard work of making it happen.

WBS: The Path to Leadership

What’s Being Said Dept.

They’re talking about Lafayette’s network in New Zealand. Or at least David Isenberg is. David visited recently and I am embarrassed to admit I haven’t written about it. (Yet. I will.) I’ve written about Isenberg & the Internet and his F2C conference here before. For now let it suffice to say that he has the sort of stature in the field that people happily fly him across the globe in order to get his advice on what should come next in telecommunications policy. (For a well-written overview of the man, and a review of his speech hit the NZHerald.)

He went to New Zealand intending, apparently, to walk the Kiwis through a path toward internet leadership that included fare like “structural separation,” and “unbundling local loops.” But he ditched that complex policy message and decided that the real message should be:

let’s face it, fiber, the all-optical network, is the end game.”

His recommendation to New Zealand: Just go for it. And he thinks its pretty reasonable financially. He uses Vermont’s rural and Lafayette’s urban networks to run up an estimate for the cost of fibering up the whole nation. Here’s what he said about Lafayette:

“In town, it costs a lot less. I visited Lafayette LA two weeks ago. Lafayette is a city of 110,000, or about 40,000 households. They’re building a municipal fiber network to every house in the city, rich and poor, black and white, for about 300 million, or about $2000 a house at a 50% take-rate. If you factor in OPEX and everything else, their cost will be about $50 a month. They plan to charge $70, for TV, telephone and 100 Mbit/s Internet.”

I think several of those numbers are off but the basic point remains true: It’s not too costly for a determined community. And Isenberg’s advice to the nation of New Zealand is to follow Lafayette’s lead in building fiber to every home.

That’s what I call good press. And sensible advice.

“The Latest From Lafayette, LA”

What’s being said dept.

It’s nice to be noticed. Especially for the things you’re actually proud of. Lafayette got a bit of notice online today from Geoff Daily over at Apps Rising. Geoff has visited here in Lafayette a couple of times and has had an outsiders eye on the city and its unique fiber project for awhile. So its gratifying that in reporting on an interview with Terry Huval of LUS he focused on the really important stuff. Sure, he mentions that he found out about technical issues and things that are interesting to industry pundits. But he spends all his time talking about what Lafayette’s network means.

But there were two other nuggets of news that really caught my eye as they proved LUS’s desire to be progressive in deploying one of the most advanced communications networks in the world

100 meg intranet—He’s right to headline this; it’s the biggie:

First off, Terry shared with me their plans to offer high speed intranet or LAN services for free to enable consumers and small businesses to transfer data in-network at speeds much faster than the Internet connections they’re paying for.

So say you’ve signed up for LUS’s baseline broadband, which will likely be around 10Mbps. Because of these free LAN capabilities, you’ll be able to establish point-to-point connections to other users on LUS’s network that go beyond the speed of your broadband connection to support burstable speeds of up 100Mbps for in-network data transfer.

What might this enable? Imagine sharing an HD home movie with a neighbor in minutes instead of hours, or a small business being able to send large datasets across town exponentially faster than it would take over the open Internet. No longer will you be limited by your Internet connectivity but instead you’ll be able to take greater advantage of the capacity fiber provides.

It is one thing to see the objective implications of this innovation. Daily understands what it means. He Gets It:

It’s my fervent belief that leveraging the in-network capabilities of full fiber networks holds the potential to revolutionize our relationship with the Internet and how we use connectivity to establish stronger bonds within our community.

That’s as wordy as I might be…to simplify: communications is the foundation of community. Owning the communications network means we can choose to build a more robust community in ways that private corporations would never consider. To wit:

The Digital Divide: building on the power of a 100 meg intranet the issue becomes making sure that power is as evenly and fairly distributed as is practically possible. This concern motivates what we’ve called the digital divide. Daily has clearly heard about Durel’s presentation in Washington.

The second major tidbit I learned relates to one of LUS’s initiatives to bridge the so-called digital divide by offering low-cost Internet service to TV sets.

The idea is that many people may want TV and phone service but aren’t yet convinced they need broadband. So LUS is going to enable them to pay a low fee to rent a special set-top box and for very basic Internet access–slower than their base level broadband–so that they can surf the Web from their TV.

The downside is significant limitations:

Now Terry admits that this service will be limited as it likely won’t be able to do things like allow people to watch YouTube videos plus there are the limitations of the set-top box, which won’t have the storage and ability to support an endless array of peripherals as a full-fledged computer would.

But users will be able to visit webpages, use email, and other basic functions of being online. And because it’s LUS’s mission to deliver their services for 20% less than their local competitors, it’ll essentially work out so that you pay the same to get TV and this limited Internet product from LUS as you would to get TV alone from the cable company.

The overall idea behind this is to provide another way for people to get introduced to the advantages of being online so that they might find inspiration to upgrade to the true broadband connectivity LUS’s full fiber network can deliver.

Daily is on target about the limitations:

When I heard Terry describe a service where you couldn’t watch YouTube, where you didn’t have any storage, where you likely were extremely limited in the Internet applications you could use, I found myself cringing at the thought.

But he comes down here:

…in the end I think this is an innovative approach to tackling the digital divide from a different angle, and I couldn’t be more excited to see how it plays out, because if it works then we’ll gain another important arrow in our quiver as we all work together to convince America that broadband’s great and that everyone needs to be online.

Frankly, while I respect both Geoff and Terry’s judgment, I think we can do better than accepting the limits of Alcatel’s favored supplier. I do think that the set-top box solution is the best solution for those not yet on the web. (And I’ve long held this opinion.) But it isn’t at all clear to me that there is any reason that we couldn’t have a much more capable settop box setup than is suggested in Geoff’s post.

It really should be pretty easy.

Let’s think about this a little: a cable settop box these days is increasingly often a Digital Video Recorder (DVR) and is capable of two-way communication with the headend. It is, in reality, already a network connected computer with a fat hard drive for video storage. Often the guts of the software is a Linux OS already because that is what is cost-effective (and free) for the developer. The typical cable provider is desperate to get these boxes into every home because the company knows that once they get a digital box in the home they can 1) sell more services that require two-way communication (say Video on Demand which is a huge cash cow) and 2) upgrades do not require an expensive (hundred + dollars) truck roll and 3) many typical outage issues at a home can be dealt with from the hub without a roll or if a roll is necessary they know what the problem is going out.

These additional revenues and savings MORE than pay for the cost of the box. So cable companies do their best to push them on every customer and if the FCC did not require them sell a non-box, “analog” cheap tier they would not do so.

LUS would share these benefits, so getting sophisticated set top boxes into the hands of as many consumers as is humanly possible should be a high priority for the sake of video revenue alone.

Since the basic setup is already a hard-drive capable networked computer with very nice video circuitry spending the very few spare dollars to add a few things like a bit more RAM and maybe a usb port should be a tiny incremental cost.

Presto chango: a fully capable, if cheap, computer–if you open it to your customer.

It would be a stunningly cheap way to meet their social obligation to close the digital divide in our city. —Something I know they really want to address.

With such a device in hand the smart thing to do would be to offer it to every customer as part of the package. Even, especially, the low-cost tier. The FCC only forces you to allow the low cost tier to be box free. If you want, you can give the customer the box or allow them to refuse it. If that box carried with it a free low-level internet that was fully capable but slower than the city’s 10 meg basic tier I predict few people would turn it down. Instantly almost every LUS subscriber would be on the internet by default. Making that capacity available in every home would instantly turn the household TV into a household internet device—I’d bet families would cruise YouTube together. We already do that with our grandchildren on tiny 13 or 15 inch laptop screens with the kids crowded around and laughing. Imaging how much more fun it would be to do it comfortably on a big screen. Or gaming…..a lot of network things are potentially more fun or valuable on the multiple participant TV screen than on our seperated little ones.

It’d be a healthy switch from a passive social medium to an active social one. And Lafayette could pioneer it.

And LUS could sell more VOD and other product to those people than they would otherwise and save lots of money on maintaining them. (And pay off the network more quickly.)

It is a classic win-win.

a small variant:
Suppose LUS doesn’t want to provide a local hard drive because of cost (though drive costs are absurdly cheap). Hey, we’ve got fiber. With a 100 meg intranet connection at every house there is NO reason not to provide online storage to customers. Cheap, easy–and you’re already obligated to do email storage anyway, just to provide that basic service. What’s an additional gig or two for good citizen-customers?

All that is standing in our way is the capacity — or rather incapacity — of the set top boxes currently being considered. The only reason YouTube does not work, I’d venture to guess, is that the creaky old OS version that the Motorola or Cisco has installed can’t handle flash. So get ’em to upgrade it. Make sure to pick a box with a USB port. Let the user hang a disk off that if they want. (The ones they are considering already support wireless keyboards and mouse.) Find a box that does what we want it to do.

We can do this.

If we decide we want to.

That’s what makes owning the network so wonderful. We can do it for ourselves.

Wikipedia and Knowledge and Lafayette Commons

Food for Thought Dept.

Every once in an while I put up something that is more for chewing on in the context of Lafayette and Fiber than it is on those topics directly. Sunday Thoughts. Food for Thought. Those are the usual tags long-time readers will have noticed. Today the pointer is to a new bit from Kevin Kelly; an intellectual hero of sorts for me.

Kevin Kelly has changed his mind about Wikipedia. It works. Most folks that “knew anything” knew it wouldn’t work. Kelly knew it wouldn’t work. And knew why. He, and they, were wrong. I think a lot of folks have made that admission. But few are as rigorously self-critical as Kelly. He tries to understand which of the assumptions that he brought to the table mislead him—and asks what other judgments of his might be based on those now-disproven assumptions.

His conclusion about Wikipedia:

How wrong I was. The success of the Wikipedia keeps surpassing my expectations. Despite the flaws of human nature, it keeps getting better. Both the weakness and virtues of individuals are transformed into common wealth, with a minimum of rules and elites. It turns out that with the right tools it is easier to restore damage text (the revert function on Wikipedia) than to create damage text (vandalism) in the first place, and so the good enough article prospers and continues. With the right tools, it turns out the collaborative community can outpace the same number of ambitious individuals competing.

This makes Kelly—who calls himself an individualist with a deeper sense of what that means than most—rethink his individualism and ask if there is a new and desirable sort of community emerging:

The Wikipedia has changed my mind, a fairly steady individualist, and lead me toward this new social sphere. I am now much more interested in both the new power of the collective, and the new obligations stemming from individuals toward the collective. In addition to expanding civil rights, I want to expand civil duties. I am convinced that the full impact of the Wikipedia is still subterranean, and that its mind-changing power is working subconsciously on the global millennial generation, providing them with an existence proof of a beneficial hive mind, and an appreciation for believing in the impossible.

That’s what it’s done for me.

Read carefully this post points to the way that Wikipedia’s basic structure, its architecture, its rules, its algorithmic frame, encourage real, competent, participation and discourage and make inconsequential sabotage and ignorance. You just don’t need a controlling hierarchy if you get the architecture right. It turns out that the “undo” command might be a critical social invention, or at least that’s the way I read it. Maybe that(‘s why we should prefer a digital world. Wanna know what “undo” has to do with it? Read the article. It’s well worth it.)

That’s really interesting. And maybe it’s something that is not only interesting globally but locally—here in Lafayette. We here in this little place will have the monster bandwidth of our generous intranet connection (100 megs or more to all!—locally) and the absurdly cheap storage that comes with our era. What can we do with big storage and unthrottled bandwidth—more what can we do that is worth doing? We on LPF, and the Lafayette Digital Divide Committee, have floated the idea of a Lafayette Commons—a deliberately vague notion about a site that would aggregate information and provide on-network resources to our community. Now our community doesn’t need an encyclopedia…it needs something more focused on local needs, local events, and local, timely knowledge. We need to know what’s going on down the block, who is hot in the local bar scene, what the real skivvy is on the district four councilman’s connections, how to get funding for a new pocket park…and a lot of other things that I can’t but you can imagine. The knowledge and understanding is out there. It is only getting the architecture of making it accessible right that stands in the way of our turning an amazingly fast and cheap local infrastructure into a something really valuable.

And it might be that Wikipedia—and a new generation that thinks Wikipedia is normal—is worth learning from. Kelly remarks:

When you grow up knowing rather than admitting that such a thing as the Wikipedia works; when it is obvious to you that open source software is better; when you are certain that sharing your photos and other data yields more than safeguarding them — then these assumptions will become a platform for a yet more radical embrace of the commonwealth.

What sort of common wealth could we create? If we can just get the architecture right.

Interested?