Municipal networks and federal apathy in the US

We have seen that access networks in the United States have fallen behind those of many European and Asian nations. There is no federal government effort or planning, and the ISP industry is dominated by telephone and cable companies which were able to defeat Congress' attempt to generate competition in the 1996 Telecommunication Act.

William Kennard, who, as chairman of the United States Federal Communication from 1997-2001 was charged with implementing the Telecommunications Act, stated near the end of his term that “all too often companies work to change the regulations, instead of working to change the market,” and spoke of “regulatory capitalism” in which “companies invest in lawyers, lobbyists and politicians, instead of plant, people and customer service." He went on to remark that regulation is “too often used as a shield, to protect the status quo from new competition - often in the form of smaller, hungrier competitors -- and too infrequently as a sword -- to cut a pathway for new competitors to compete by creating new networks and services.”

In many cases, municpal governments have tried to close the access gap by developing and contracting for Internet access networks. They have a mix of motivations -- use by city employees, narrowing the digital divide, economic stimulation, providing a service to citizens, etc. and a mix of public-private funding and business models.

W2i organizes conferences on municipal networks, and they have compiled a database with 91 case studies. The case studies include an overview, contact information, and presentations on the projects as delivered at W2i conferences.

Muni-Wireless is another excellent source of information on these networks. They also organize conferences, have an excellent blog, and a Web site with sections on technology, applications, initiatives, and other topics.

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What are the implications of the US falling behind in access networks?

New design ... content unchanged

I made a minor design and color change in order to take advantage of Blogger's new layout tools. Note that the content has not changed at all -- the Blogger developers have kept content and presentation independent.

One of the trends we highlight is the falling cost of creating and publishing content. The new Blogger layout tools provide an example. With them, creating and modifying a blog like this is quicker and requires less skill than before.

A closer look at HTTP

We have talked about HTTP being a client-server protocol in which clients retrieve Web pages from servers. A page may contain many objects -- text, images, scripts, flash movies, etc. and therefore require many requests. Three simple tools:

• Pingdom (has the nicest user interface)
  
• Web page analyzer
  
• Site timer
  

break down a page request, showing the retrieval time of each object on the page. These programs can help us understand the HTTP protocol and tune our Web pages for fast download.

Here we see the analysis of the retrieval of our class home page:



It requires three requests:

1. retrieval of the page
   
2. a call on Google Analytics to record the access
   
3. a call on Creative Commons to retrieve the small image at the bottom of the page
   

The entire page takes around 430 milliseconds to load. The yellow bar shows the time to establish a connection to the server, the green shows the time to request the object, and the blue the time to download it.

Note that these programs treat a script file as a single object without analyzing its content. Therefore, it does not give an accurate picture of a site like www.yahoo.com which uses an extensive Javascript.

Small, quick investments in network-based applications -- venture capital 2.0?

Using the Internet as your development platform drastically reduces the cost, time and risk of building an application and starting a company. For an example, check out Techcrunch's discussion of venture firm Bay Partners' investment fund for people building applications on top of the Facebook platform.

Bay Partners is targeting tens of investments from $25,000 to $250,000 using a flexible, fast-track approval process. There will be many folks applying for this funding -- Facebook says 40,000 developers have requested keys to create applications, and over 1,600 have already launched. Many of those 40,000 are just playing around with the platform, but Bay Partners is hoping to find around ten investment-worthy applications.

Is this venture capital 2.0? What are some of the drawbacks to using Facebook as your development platform?

Using Zoho's cool form-creation service

We illustrated a three-tier application using a simple class roster file. It took me a day to develop, debug and document that application using Active Server Pages (ASP). It consists of six ASP pages, and I needed some knowledge of ASP, Visual Basic, and SQL to develop it.

I implemented the class roster application using the form-creation service at Zoho.com. It took me less than an hour to learn to use the service and implement the application. I needed no knowledge of programming -- it was similar to building the application using a simple database management system like Microsoft Access. Note also that the service-based application has powerful features like data export, access control and report sorting that are missing in the bare-bones ASP version.

The advantages of using a service to create this application are abundantly clear, but there are still questions. Will it scale -- how would it perform if we had an application with thousands of records and dozens of forms and views? Will Zoho continue offering this service -- can I count on it as part of my course curriculum? What will they charge for large databases? Would they be better off implementing their service using a file service like Amazon S3?

Micropayment for storage service

I just received a bill for the very small amount of storage I had used on Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) during the month of July. The charge for my storage and data transfer was 4 cents!

We have talked about micropayments for years, but, until now, I had never made one.

This is a terrific example of Web services. S3 is the base service -- offering reliable, infinitely scalable storage in Amazon's data centers. But, I do not deal directly with Amazon. Jungledisk has virtual disk software that makes my S3 store look like a standard disk drive on my computer. They insulate me from S3, pay Amazon, and bill me. My payment is automatic through another service, Paypal.

Organizational uses of wiki technology

Conference panel discussion are usually pretty lame, but this panel on the use of wikis inside organizations is an exception. The panel has both academic and experienced industrial members who give plenty of practical advice and examples. They note that engaging users can be difficult, and find that additive applications like compiling a list of resources are easier than compiling a knowledge base -- a collection of coauthored documents.

The conference audio is here. The panel was at the the 2006 Wikimania Conference. The other conference session recordings are here

The university is an organization -- how might we use wiki technology in our class? For example, might we coauthor a summary of this panel discussion using a wiki?

Imagining the future

Futuristic videos are a way of imagining the future. Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator, which showed how a professor might one day use a networked computer, was one of the earliest and most influential. A more recent one is Prometeus - The Media Revolution, which depicts the Google-owned virtual world of the year 2050.

We have collected links to some works that "imagine the future" at the bottom of our class home page. They include other videos, an excerpt from the talk given by Lyndon Johnson when the US Public Broadcast System was announced, and early visions by important computer scientists.

Can you find other examples of visions of the future?

Audio editing at National Public Radio

This segment of the NPR radio show On The Media illustrates the behind the scenes editing that NPR uses to make their shows sound so smooth and articulate. Listen to the segment (just over ten minutes long) or read a transcript -- it may help with your editing skills.

Web services at Arizona State and Northwestern

Universities are growing rapidly and per-student budgets are falling. Arizona State University is using Gmail and other Google services to cope with this dilemma. In doing so, they hope to exploit Google's accelerating IT technology improvement trajectory and the increasing efficiency of the Internet as an application platform.

For more on the Arizona State project see:

• Economist article
• Launch and rationale
• Core vs. context.
  
• Strategic technology alliance.
  

Northwestern has also gone with Gmail and Google Apps for students.

Should our university be utilizing Google services? For what applications? What other services might we use to advantage?

Picnik, an excellent Internet-based photo editor

We talk about the increasing viability of applications that are hosted on the Internet as connectivity spreads and improves. The Picnik photo editor provides a good example. Once loaded, it is a fast photo editor with a very simple user interface. It cannot do everything a high-end editor like Photoshop can do, but it can do most of what an amateur photographer wants. Your photos are online and sharable, and they can easily be imported from other online photo-sharing sites. The basic program is free, and there will be a subscription-based professional version.

What are some of the key features of Photoshop or your favorite desktop editing program that are missing from Picnik? Yahoo allows Picnik users to import photos from their online photo service Flickr. If you were a Yahoo executive, would you allow users to export their photos?

Will business customers force cell network neutrality?

A recent Information Week article criticizes the US cell phone industry for disabling phone features, restricting phones to one network, restricting Internet access, using incompatible communication technologies, and poor quality of service and coverage. For example, the article says that "by some estimates, nine out of ten cell phones in the US are sold by carriers, nearly reverse the ratio in other countries." Compared to the cell companies, wired Internet service providers are good guys and network neutrality advocates.

That is all bad news, but the article maintains that since mobile access is becoming very important in business, the cell companies might be pressured into reform. Consumers take whatever the operators offer, but business will not.

We spoke of this topic in an earlier post on Tim Wu and efforts to obtain wireless net neutrality.

In some nations, cell phones and cell service must be sold separately -- can you find which ones?

Will rising gasoline prices lead to more telecommuning?

Rising gasoline prices have led to reduced driving in the US, and may also lead to increased telecommuting.

We have looked at the case of an hypothetical teleworker. Would you like to telecommute? What are some of the pros and cons from the standpoint of the society, the organization and the worker?

PRAM -- future memory and electronic storage technology

Our class notes cover progress in electronic, storage and communication technology. Russell Kay has written a short introduction to an emerging technology, phase change random access memory (PRAM). PRAM records ones and zeros by changing the electrical resistance of a microscopic spot. High resistance = 0, low resistance = 1. Intel expects to ship product in 2008, and PRAM may one day replace flash storage and RAM memory.

Hosted versus in-house CRM

As networking technology improves, the alternative of using a software service improves relative to the alternative of running software in house. Still, there are pros and cons for both alternatives, some of which are covered in our class note on software as a service. Network World asked the question "is on-demand CRM better than an on-premises solution?" and published a short debate. You can read the Yes and No arguments online.

How Internet search works

Consultant Mike Moran tells how search works in this four minute audio clip. He describes both organic search, based on page content and link frequency, and paid advertising search. This is an excerpt from a longer interview on his "how to" book on search engine marketing.

Using the Web for customer feedback

Dell solicits product requests from customers on their Ideastorm site. That is fairly common, but they have added a voting mechanism. If a user likes a posted suggestion, he or she can endorse it with a single click. Dell decsion makers (and customers) can query the site to see which requests are most popular and take appropriate action.

37 Signals also makes excellent use of Web forums for customer feedback using threaded discussion forums. Here is the forum for their Basecamp project management service. They accept and discuss feature requests, tips and tricks, how-to questions, bug reports, and examples of Basecamp use along with making announcements.

Home connectivity is lagging in the US

One measure of a nation's home connectivity is the rate of household broadband connections. A recent survey showed that 89% of South Korean homes have broadband connections while the United States has fallen to 25th in the world with 50% penetration. The situation is even worse than these statistics indicate, since US broadband speeds are lower than most nations and costs are higher.

With increasing demand for video content, homes, organizations and other fixed locations will eventually have fiber connections -- our DSL and cable modem connections will one day seem as slow as dial-up connections do today. South-east Asia, led by densely populated nations like China, Japan and South Korea, is deploying fiber faster than the rest of the world. As we see, 47 percent of the broadband connections use fiber:



Why is the US falling behind the rest of the world? What are the implications for a nation of falling behind on connectivity? Are there any advantages?

Mobile applications

We all use the Internet from our desktops, but few of us access the Net when we are on the move. Many people expect mobile access to boom. Cellular phone, search, and hardware companies are all developing mobile access products.

Search firms Yahoo, Google and Microsoft have focused on the cell phone. You can try their efforts at http://m.yahoo.com/, google.com/m, and Windows live search.

Text entry is difficult on a cell phone keyboard, so Google and Microsoft are working with voice-based search. You can try them at 800-GOOG411 and 800-555-TELL.

Microsoft, Intel, Apple, phone manufacturers and others are also experimenting with larger form factors than the cell phone. A good example is Intel's Mobile Internet Device. Its features include a four or six inch touch-screen display, stripped-down version of Linux, fast restart from suspended mode, retractable keyboard, GPS radio, and a camera.

Job loss in the long tail: from professional to amateur

The world's largest model train store, Allied Model Trains, has been sold and is downsizing because they cannot compete with low-overhead Internet discounters. Consumers are getting better prices, but many of the highly specialized, knowledgeable store staff will be laid off.

Some of these workers may be able to earn income offering advice and information on-line, for example from advertising or subscription-supported blogs, but they will be in competition with on-line hobbyist communities. In general, amateur train enthusiasts will replace the professionals.

Allied owner Allen Drucker discusses the effect of the Internet on his business in this excerpt (1 min 40 sec) from a recent interview. (The entire interview is here).

This is reminiscent of the time supermarkets replaced small grocery stores or a Walmart store coming to a town. Can you think of other on-line markets where specialized jobs are being lost? What is lost and what is gained when specialized retailers are driven out of business by Internet-based alternatives?

Internet control: Déjà vu

Several governments have recently tried to tighten control over the Internet:

• Turkey
  
• Thailand
  
• Russia
  

This is nothing new. The Kremlin tried to shut down the nascent Russian Internet -- mostly UUCP at the time -- during the 1991 coup attempt. (You can read about that here).

Nearly every government makes some attempt to control the Internet -- to preserve culture as well as political power. What are some other examples of government control over Internet content? Does the US government control Internet content?

Beginning of the end of music copy protection?

We cover the affect of copyright, which is used to protect music, video and other Internet data. Apple's Steve Jobs has called for dropping copy protection on music, stating that 97% of the songs on a typical iPod music player are already in the open mp3 and AAC formats. The EMI record label has agreed to let Apple sell songs in Apple's AAC format. Microsoft may soon have a similar agreement with EMI.

Presumably Microsoft will distribute the music in the .mp3 format, which, unlike AAC, works with any music player or program. Is this the beginning of the end for copy protection on music? What is the outlook for video?

Tim Wu on wireless network neutrality

Skype recently petitioned the FCC to open access to cellular networks in the United States. That petition was based on a study by Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University. Our class notes cover the Carterfone case which opened the wired telephone network, making the end-to-end Internet possible. Wu feels that a neutral-access cellular network would enable Internet-like innovation and competition on wireless networks.

You can read Wu's paper and see the Skype petition at the New America Foundation. Wu was also interviewed on wireless network neutrality by National Public Radio's On The Media. You can hear the interview (with a rebuttal by an industry representative) or read a transcript at the On The Media Website.

VOIP is used in 9% of US homes

In our coverage of voice over IP (VOIP), we saw that VOIP sales passed traditional business PBX sales in 2003. VOIP is making inroads into the home. A recent Instat report states that as of the fourth quarter 2006, more than 10.6 million US households (9%) have at least one active VoIP user. That is up from approximately 9 million households at the end of the third quarter. It seems inevitable that eventually, person-to-person voice will be just another Internet service. Do you use VOIP? If so, do you also have a traditional land-line or cellular phone?

An open book on open source software

MIT Press has released a free-download version of their book Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software. This is an excellent collection of articles by well known authors. All of them are not open source "cheerleaders." For example, one chapter examines an important Linux module, and is highly critical of the code quality.

With this book, MIT Press has followed the open publishing format of the University of Michigan Digital Culture imprint. Let's hope it works well and more publishers do the same.