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California City Converts Its Street Lights Into A High-Speed IoT Backbone (backchannel.com)
Harvard Law professor Susan Crawford describes how the city of Santa Monica installed its own high-speed IoT backbone on its street lights and traffic signals -- and why it's important.
Neutral "micro" cell sites can make very high-capacity wireless transmissions available, competitively, to everyone (and every sensor) nearby. This can and should cause an explosion of options and new opportunities for economic growth, innovation, and human flourishing in general... Very few American cities have carried out this transmogrification, but every single one will need to. Santa Monica...is a city that will be able to control its future digital destiny, because it is taking a comprehensive, competition-forcing approach to the transmission of data...
Cities that get control of their streetlights and connect them to municipally overseen, reasonably priced dark fiber can chart their own Internet of Things futures, rather than leave their destinies in the hands of vendors whose priorities are driven (rationally) by the desire to control whole markets and keep share prices and dividends high rather than provide public benefits.
Santa Monica's CIO warns that now telecoms "are looking for exclusive rights to poles and saying they can't co-locate [with their competitors]. They're all hiring firms to lock up their permits and rights to as many poles as possible, as quickly as possible, before governments can organize."
Cities that get control of their streetlights and connect them to municipally overseen, reasonably priced dark fiber can chart their own Internet of Things futures, rather than leave their destinies in the hands of vendors whose priorities are driven (rationally) by the desire to control whole markets and keep share prices and dividends high rather than provide public benefits.
Santa Monica's CIO warns that now telecoms "are looking for exclusive rights to poles and saying they can't co-locate [with their competitors]. They're all hiring firms to lock up their permits and rights to as many poles as possible, as quickly as possible, before governments can organize."
Can we stop saying that maximizing profits at all costs is the only rational approach to business?
It's a rather new idea that's been pushed by the financial and legal worlds for the last 40 years (because, surprise surprise, it lets them maximize profits on their advisory services), but is by no means the only valid metric for measuring business success. Focusing solely on profits oversimplifies the role of business in complex markets. This single minded focus ultimately leads to monopolies providing expensive, crappy products (which is exactly what Santa Monica is trying to avoid here).
IoT...hacker's choice!
This can and should cause an explosion of options and new opportunities for economic growth, innovation, and human flourishing in general.
Really?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
> It's the reason the business exists.
Speak for yourself. I've founded and owned several businesses over the last 30 years, and none have existed solely or primarily for the purpose of profit to the business. Maybe that's how YOU do business, but not the rest of us.
My last business was *started* in order to solve a specific pair of problems for customers and the industry as a whole, because existing solutions weren't working and it was a pain in the butt for day job. Actually, it turned my day job into a night job - having to be up in the middle of the night dealing with servers overloaded by attacks. So basically it was started to prevent problems that made my day-to-day work painful. It was then spun off as a separate corporation for the purpose of providing continued employment to existing employees when the main business was sold. That is, to provide employment for a couple of years until another company could be launched around another product. Because it's first purpose as a corporation was to provide a steady paycheck for loyal employees, when one employee got depressed and stopped showing up to work we continued to pay her for six months - making sure people had a steady income was the purpose of that company existing, after all. Later I gave that company to another employee, most of it anyway.
> Are you suggesting it would somehow be in the interests of the business to minimize profits, or operate at a loss and go out of business?
Yes, companies such as State Farm and Nationwide insurance minimize profits. Any profit not required for new investment is refunded to customers. Their purpose is to provide the best possible insurance value to customers.
Most, though not all, businesses have a continuing purpose, so indeed they try not to go out of business. Some have a limited-time purpose, but not most. So they try to avoid net long-term losses that would put them out of businesses. That's very different from maximizing profit. A great many strive for profit near zero other than paying off debt and a capital expenditures fund. I've been on the board of directors of such.