Sad impact of over-powered monopolies September 14, 2006
Posted by innov8ordie in Communications.add a comment
There is not much to say here but the US is really falling behind broadband wise. And to me its clear that the big telecom players have effectively re-consolidated all their power so its unlikely to change dramatically. The last thing I want is Verizon WiMax or 802. They already own many of the pipes and much of my wireless access.
The only opponent is the excessively leveraged cable companies.
Some competition is better than nothing but they are still dragging the US further and further behind other parts of the world
From www.FreePress.net we get the following facts:
– The US is 16th overall in broadband penetration
- U.S. consumers pay nearly twice as much as the Japanese for connections that are 20 times as slow
Think about that again, 20 times as slow. That actually the speed bothers me way more than the fact that it is so darn expensive.
That is lost competitive edge.
That is a signficant leap in what can be done in terms of applications and services.
That is the lost opportunity to be on the cutting edge innovation that could come out of fast, cheap pipes.
Way over my head on what spectrum really means… March 25, 2006
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On my way back from some time down in Dallas this week I had a thought I wish I knew how to verify. How controlled is the spectrum used for AM,FM and broadcast TV? Could a station partition off part of the spectrum it controls (leaving the rest for the primary use) and use it for something else? Say something similar to a modified WiFi type or WiMax type connection from all its broacast towers?
This is probably controlled for by our good old FCC (nothing like a government agency to stifle creativity) but it would be a fascinating world if some of the broadcasters all of a sudden were in the connectivity game in a whole new way. Might help some of the WiMax/WiFi players out there. A cozy deal between Earthlink and Disney going around last mile operators sure sounds fun!
Connectivity… March 25, 2006
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A really good analysis by Om Malik on WiMax:
http://gigaom.com/2006/03/12/the-truth-about-wimax/
Bascially I have been wondering for some time what the total per site capacity is because clearly the range for WiMax is huge. This entry and the PDF it links to is pretty clear. In the short term the capacity is relatively low as a total figure. ” one cell could theoretically allow hundreds of business
connections at 1.5 Mbit/s and thousands of residential connections at
256 kbit/s.” That is simply not a huge amount of total bandwidth.
That is why WiMax is about backhaul for the Wimax mesh, not a replacement for it. Capacity and a bit of cost.
So WiFi Mesh (N will do nicely once they stop their infernal standards bickering!) with generally WiMax backhaul. Its where a heck of lot of its going, particluarly where there is not already an infestation of pesky infrastructure getting in the way…
The big merger March 9, 2006
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So its been a few days since the big announcement AT&T/SBC is buying BellSouth.
I am fairly directly affected by this as my day job involves managing folks writing lots of software for both these companies and it is sort of scary on that front. As the RBOC re-com-bobulate (seems like it needs a new word) into one big Ma Bell shadow the IT departments get bigger and my leverage gets lower. In some sense I am a little tiny fragment of their old IT department, Bell Labs, spun off to the side and forgotten. I say shadow becuase frankly the RBOCs are a shadow of the old behemouth. The level of people and understanding and innovation at those companies does not come close to the hey-dey of Bell Labs when nearly everything in the world was invented in Murray Hill, even if they did not know how to market and serve it up to the market.
But I digress. The big issue here is really about network nuetrality. These children of Ma Bell are mean spirited and desperately want to take control of the internet and the new age of communications. They can’t do it worldwide but they are powerful enough, and cunning enough, to really retard innovation in the US. They will do this by choking the backbone in the US. The good old super highway will be a toll road if they and their pets at the FCC have their way. The toll will up the ante forcing table stakes for the future of the webback to the millions or even tens of millions. Today I can start a web service and offer it to the world for nearly nothing. Tomorrow if I need to pay for good performance that will simply retard innovation anywhere the RBOCs hold sway. So my innovative Korean competition will not just be able to compete with me but will have a head start. Not good for the US in the long term.
Some part of my idealistic nature wants to think some of the newer emerging players like Google and Yahoo will remember their roots and try and stop this from happening. I still hope they do. But they already have the table stakes. Does it help them or hurt them to retard real innovative competition? Is it good business for them to fight this battle? I really don’t like my brains answer to those questions.
Bit Torrenting the world February 13, 2006
Posted by innov8ordie in Communications, Distribution, Marketing, Uncategorized.3 comments
So 60% of all bandwidth is attributed to bit torrent. Wow…. seriously wow.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1083
I use it to download lots of shows I have no other way of getting (international stuff not broadcast here generally). I even occasionally use it to supplement my Replays time-shifting when something gets missed or when something is in HD and I would really like to see in HD. (Although HBOs current lack of new stuff has stopped that from happening lately).
But I don’t know anyone else other than my brother that does this. So where the heck is all that traffic coming from? Is it shows? Pireated software? Music? Sure that is alot of it but 60%? How many people does that 60% represent?
Another obvious answer that now jumps into my head as I type is that it could be the porn community has somehow adopted bittorrent. You always hear about them being involved in pushing the technological envelope. It makes perfect sense actually. Cheap mass distribution. No censoring or monitoring of any significance. I dont think there is a lot of time sensativity to exactly when most of that content shows up. So in many ways its a better fit than regular broadcast TV. Theres tons of it and a seemingly endless appetite for it. That’s got to be it. Anyone have anything better to explain it?
What the FON? January 31, 2006
Posted by innov8ordie in Communications, Distribution.2 comments
Not to become overly obessed with wireless data access (although I am, major emerging platform) but I realized I have never mentioned FON before the last entry.
FON is a fascinating company coming out of Europe delivering software to run on your linksys router to create a wireless network out of existing connections. A good overview can be found at:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/12/01/HNhotspotsunite_1.html
I am really not sure how feasible is but if it caught on it sure would be interesting. Maybe they even could be knit in some fashion to the emerging muni networks. Sort of an open internet model but for all semi-public wireless access types…
Enmeshed in the future. January 27, 2006
Posted by innov8ordie in Communications.add a comment
I still have not nearly absorbed all of the information on this yet but what I have absorbed has further convinced me that meshed wireless with wired (fiber most likely) backhaul ~will~ rule in time for many if not all applicaitons.
The information presented is somewhat acedemic and filled with (to me) fascinating questions but still approachable.
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jac22/future.html
Items like http://telcotrash.typepad.com/telcotrash/2006/01/700_mhz_spectru.html confirm that more spectrum will be made available (sadly to the highest bidder not for the greater good, but still) and the previous link points out ways it can be more effectively used.
Improving in two dimensions (amount and effectiveness) is an incredibly powerful combination.
