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100 Years Ago, No Free Broadband Pneumatic Tubes
TheSync writes "The Division of Labour blog spotlights a report written 100 years ago by a commission appointed by the Postmaster General, that came to the conclusion: 'That it is not feasible and desirable at the present time for the Government to purchase, to install, or to operate pneumatic tubes.' Here is a scan of the original NYTimes article. If only we had gotten the free government Intertubes in 1908!"
Strictly speaking, using a monopoly to abuse stifle competition or innovation is bad, monopolies themselves are acceptable and common.
The US Mail service doesn't have a monopoly, just ask Fedex Ground, and nether would a publicly-owned infrastructure either. It just sets a minimum standard of service. You're free to start Theaveng's Letter Service tomorrow, but it has to be either as reliable and cheap as the USPS, or charge more and compete on features.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
then the last mile should belong to the homeowner.
From Wikipedia:
Technical analysis
Stevens's speech was analyzed by Princeton computer science professor Edward Felten, who said that he disagreed with Stevens's argument but felt that the language "series of tubes" was entirely reasonable as a non-technical explanation given off-the-cuff in a meeting.[12]
The term pipe is a commonly used idiom to refer to a data connection, with pipe diameter being analogous to bandwidth or throughput.[13] For instance, high-bandwidth connections are often referred to as "fat pipes."
Most routers use a data structure called a queue to buffer packets.[14] When packets arrive more quickly than can be forwarded, the router will hold the packets in a queue until they can be sent on to the next router or be dropped.[15] On links that become congested, packets typically spend more time in the queue than they do actually moving down wires or optical fiber...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes
I too disagree with Steven's argument. But people who jump on "tubes" often do not even know the concepts behind the analogy. In a lot of cases, the people that laugh at his comment are even less informed about the topic than Stevens.
I actually think that technology history is a very interesting topic.
For example, in 1684 Robert Hooke presented a scheme to the Royal Society for setting up lines of towers to relay semaphore signals over long distances. This was an eminently practical suggestion. In fact the Royal Navy in the following century developed the capability of coordinating complex land and sea operations using semaphore. Still it wasn't until over a hundred years later that an attempt was made to make a practical land based network. By that time, the first practical demonstrations of electrical telegraphy had already taken place. Electrical telegraphy was both cheaper and nearly 8x as fast. Once electrical telegraphy was possible, semaphore was doomed.
What's interesting about semaphore is that it is intrinsically low tech. It's most efficient with some kind of mechanical shutter system, but you can make do with a pair of flags. The Romans certainly had the engineering ability to connect their empire with a series of semaphore towers; the only thing wanting was the idea. You can imagine how history would have been different if it had occurred to them. At the very least, the slow and easily intercepted nature of semaphore might have lead to many computer science and cryptography ideas being discovered thousand of years earlier.
A pneumatic tube system, on the other hand, is only possible for a civilization that has at least stem engine technology. Such systems were unlikely to scale beyond local service in any case. It's an interesting concept, but not nearly as potentially revolutionary as semaphore might have been.
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Why? Because pneumatic infosystems are "obviously" a silly idea? If you think that, you need to crack a book now and then. If you did, you'd know that pneumatic mail delivery was widely used in Europe from the late 19th century well into the 20th. (The Paris system didn't shut down until 1984!)
They were also widely used in the U.S. for internal business mail and similar stuff. Many large department stores used pneumatic systems instead of cash registers. The clerk put your money and bill into a tube, where it got sent up to the bookkeeping department, which sent back a receipt and your change. That's more cost effective than totaling out dozens of registers at the end of the day, and also minimized the amount of cash in places where it could be ripped off. Back in the 70s, there were still a few stores that used this system; it took the rise of networked POS systems and credit cards to kill it completely.
So the folks that wanted to build a national pneumatic system had some solid technology and experience to build on. Sure, they failed — but their failure is worth studying now that we're busy arguing about the best way to install a telecom infrastructure that's half as good as the ones in Asia.
No, it isn't a natural monopoly. It only seems that way because of lack of planning on cities part. The last mile should be a PIPE. No, not an internet connection that is called a pipe, but an honest to goodness hole through the ground pipe. The system should look a lot like a storm drain or sewer system. If you want to buy a service from Joe's home movie cable company, you should be able to have Joe's just pull a wire through the existing pipe to the larger main pipe, and all the way to their office where the video source comes from. Heck, if the city had data tubes, I could literally be on a neighborhood by having a line run from my house to my neighbors across the street. Of course, this would create MASSIVE competition, as the barrier of entry for a new cable company, phone provider or ISP would plummet.
No, the last mile is definitely not a natural monopoly.