Let's slow down on broadband stimulus to consider ownership alternatives. Here is the "elevator ride" pitch:
The current strategy of privatization with hope for competition under independent regulation has failed in many developed and developing nations. In the US, regulators have been unable to create competition and our infrastructure has suffered.
The large broadband incumbents have benefited from public subsidy, have failed to live up to commitments, and have used their power to defeat attempts to create competition.
The US has little fiber in the access network today, but will have fiber to all urban and many rural homes and buildings in the long run. The question is not whether we are going to deploy new infrastructure; the question is who will own it?
We should take the time to evaluate decentralized alternatives to near-total ownership by the incumbents. Local governments, cooperatives, small ISPs, and home and building owners might own parts of our next generation infrastructure.
This evaluation can be fast and cheap. The work of the National Science Foundation in designing and creating NSFNet and connecting universities, colleges and foreign networks provides an excellent example of a small government staff calling on experts from academia and industry to design a network and a strategy for deploying it, followed by procurement via competitive bid.
We need immediate economic stimulus, but that can come from tax cuts and investment in many sectors as well as broadband.
Nobel economist Paul Krugman acknowledges the need for rapid stimulus, but says we should downplay the "jump start" metaphor and focus on job creation through infrastructure investment over the next four plus years (see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/12/opinion/12krugman.html).
We will be living with the fiber and high-speed wireless infrastructure we build today for many decades. We will also be living with its owners.
I am all for changes in policy or subsidy that would help small WISPs compete with the incumbents, but this map overstates the case.
My Los Angeles zip code, 90064, is well into a yellow area, but a database search shows no results. A broader search on "Calfornia" returns 5 WISPs. Only one is headquartered in Los Angeles county, but some may offer service here. Their offerings are geared toward small business -- "wireless t1" sort of service.
They are not competitive for anyone who is served by DSL or cable, both of which are widely available in Los Angeles. (I even hear a rumor that FIOS is in the city, but not in my neighborhood).
One might argue that this is a result of unfair regulation or anti-competitive acts by the incumbents, and there has been plenty of both, but it is hard to make the case for WISP in a wired city.
Shifting gears -- you provided a link to that goofy Verizon customer service call. I wonder if it is a fake.
Check out Dabbleboard, www.dabbleboard.com. It is a cool, lightweight vector graphic application with extensible image libraries and synchronous collaborative drawing.
The Kremlin tried to shut the nascent Russian Internet -- mostly UUCP at the time -- down during the 1991 coup attempt. You can read about that at http://bpastudio.csudh.edu/fac/lpress/articles/rel com.htm. It did not work then and it won't work now. As Mikhail Gorbachev said:
We are witnessing a revolution of international relations toward increasingly open and mass-scale communication. And this greatly increases the role of creative and positive policies. But equally, it raises the price of mistakes -- the price we must pay for adherence to outdated dogmas, routine and old thinking.
In a recent post, we noted that Apple had succeeded in negotiating some control over application and hardware design from Cingular wireless. Now Skype has petitioned the FCC to open cellular networks. If they prevail, we could see a wireless end-to-end network, with Internet like innovation. Wouldn't that be cool?
My guess is that the cellular companies will fight this vigorously, but that might be short sighted. If they provided competitively priced Internet access, they would take the wind out of the municipal network and hotspot movements. More important, an open wireless network would be an important piece of infrastructure, providing a much needed boost to the US economy and our sagging Internet.
There will be powerful companies on both sides of this important issue -- make your voice heard by signing an FCC petition.
For sure! Leaving out CP/M-based machines is a glaring ommission.
There were several floppy-based disk operating systems for the Altair and 8080 clones. In 1976 Digital Microsystems brought out a floppy disk subsystem bundled with CP/M, and that machine was capable of doing real work. Digital Microsystems folded, but CP/M went on to dominate the world of serious applications up till the IBM PC came out.
CP/M started life as a software product (you wrote your own keyboard and display drivers in assmbly language), but took off when Digital Microsystems, Compal, and many others began bundling it with their systems. It dominated "serious" computing until the IBM PC came out. IBM bundled DOS with the machine and charged $75 extra for CP/M. CP/M continued technical excellence -- multitasking and a LAN version followed -- but DOS swamped it in the marketplace.
> The original telegraphy and radiotelegraphy was created without government funding or mandate.
Not true. Morse got $30,000 from Congress to build the first link. You can see a copy of the Congressional Record granting it at http://bpastudio.csudh.edu/fac/lpress/471/hout/net History/.
Slashdot Mirror
100 Mbps for "under 100 SEK": https://www.afb.se/en/About-AFB/Tenant-at-AFB/Tenant-at-AF-Bosader/Broadband/
Click here for a paper with details on the above.
Click here for a PowerPoint presentation on the above.
Whoops -- the broader search was on "Los Angeles," not "California."
My Los Angeles zip code, 90064, is well into a yellow area, but a database search shows no results. A broader search on "Calfornia" returns 5 WISPs. Only one is headquartered in Los Angeles county, but some may offer service here. Their offerings are geared toward small business -- "wireless t1" sort of service.
They are not competitive for anyone who is served by DSL or cable, both of which are widely available in Los Angeles. (I even hear a rumor that FIOS is in the city, but not in my neighborhood).
One might argue that this is a result of unfair regulation or anti-competitive acts by the incumbents, and there has been plenty of both, but it is hard to make the case for WISP in a wired city.
Shifting gears -- you provided a link to that goofy Verizon customer service call. I wonder if it is a fake.
The Commodore Amiga had been using right button menus since 1986.
The right mouse button brought up menus on the Alto at Xerox PARC.
Check out Dabbleboard, www.dabbleboard.com. It is a cool, lightweight vector graphic application with extensible image libraries and synchronous collaborative drawing.
Is it news that a lot of things are organized hierarchically? For one more hypothesized example, see Jeff Hawkins heirarchical temporal memory.
The RAMAC was mostly used for business data processing -- alphanumeric data. A lot of the applications were ported from unit-record equipment.
My guess is that the cellular companies will fight this vigorously, but that might be short sighted. If they provided competitively priced Internet access, they would take the wind out of the municipal network and hotspot movements. More important, an open wireless network would be an important piece of infrastructure, providing a much needed boost to the US economy and our sagging Internet.
There will be powerful companies on both sides of this important issue -- make your voice heard by signing an FCC petition.
The Skype petition is not yet posted on the FCC Web site, but we will update this post with a link when it is: http://cis471.blogspot.com/2007/02/petition-to-ope n-cellular-networks.html.
There were several floppy-based disk operating systems for the Altair and 8080 clones. In 1976 Digital Microsystems brought out a floppy disk subsystem bundled with CP/M, and that machine was capable of doing real work. Digital Microsystems folded, but CP/M went on to dominate the world of serious applications up till the IBM PC came out.
CP/M started life as a software product (you wrote your own keyboard and display drivers in assmbly language), but took off when Digital Microsystems, Compal, and many others began bundling it with their systems. It dominated "serious" computing until the IBM PC came out. IBM bundled DOS with the machine and charged $75 extra for CP/M. CP/M continued technical excellence -- multitasking and a LAN version followed -- but DOS swamped it in the marketplace.
> The original telegraphy and radiotelegraphy was created without government funding or mandate. Not true. Morse got $30,000 from Congress to build the first link. You can see a copy of the Congressional Record granting it at http://bpastudio.csudh.edu/fac/lpress/471/hout/net History/.
Any suggestions for a quiet projector?