The FCC and Google want faster Internet access

After a year of public hearings and input via the Internet, the FCC has released their national broadband plan.

The FCC wants to bring 100 Mb/s download and 50 Mb/s upload speed to homes and 1 Gb/s to schools, hospitals and government buildings. They also advocate converting wireless spectrum used for TV broadcast to Internet access, with the goal of giving the US the fastest and most extensive wireless access in the world. They hope competition will lead to relatively cheap Internet access.

To put this in context, relatively low cost 100/50 Mb/s access is available in a number of cities and nations already.

More context -- Google plans to roll out 1 Gb/s fiber to between 50 and 500,000 homes in a test network.

Google hopes their test network will pressure on the FCC and the ISP industry to be more ambitious. Faster speeds mean a better Internet experience, which means more users and more Google ads. One hundred megabits per second sounds pretty good today, but it won't seem so fast in ten years.

They also hope to spur innovation. We have seen that researchers often develop applications for technology they expect to be available in the future. For example, Ivan Sutherland, shown here, built prototype image processing software with a graphical user interface in the early 1960s, using a very expensive computer. It was over twenty years before similar programs like MacDraw and AutoCad became economically viable.

Google hopes that, like Sutherland's expensive computer, their gigabit per second network will be used for new applications. They also hope to develop advanced technology for building fast networks.

How does 100 megabits per second compare to your current home Internet connectivity?

What sorts of applications would a gigabit per second connection enable?

Congress hoped to bring about competition and low prices for Internet access with the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Did the act succeed in spurring competition and lowering prices?

Three reasons the iPad will succeed. Whoops, make that two.

The Apple iPad was announced January 27. After years of hype, people were generally disappointed. The trade press carried many articles like this one listing ten missing features. It can not play Flash movies, the aspect ratio is not 16:9, AT&T is the only carrier, the battery can not be changed, the operating system cannot multi-task, there is no camera or HDMI interface to a TV set, etc.

For me, the most important missing feature is a microphone with accompanying speech recognition software. I want to be able to input marginal notes, email addresses, etc. without typing on a glass keyboard.

In spite of all of this criticism, I expected the iPad to succeed for three reasons.

The original Macintosh had 128 KB of memory, only a floppy disk for storage, and a tiny, monochrome screen. Still, its operating system and simple applications for image and word processing had graphical user interfaces (GUIs). The earlier Apple Lisa and Xerox Star also had GUIs, but failed because they were too expensive. By the time the Mac was delivered, technology had improved, and they had engineered a minimal system that was just good enough to get people excited and succed in the market. The timing was right.

As technology advanced, Apple upgraded the Mac, adding memory and a hard drive, followed by a larger screen, color, etc.

The same will happen with the iPad. Features will be added as technology improves. I am confident that Apple has a multi-year plan for iPad improvements, and it has the potential to become a significant device for consuming content -- games, books, periodicals and video of all sorts.

I was optimistic for a second reason. Apple understands that the device is only one part of a system that includes the application store, content deals, and synchronization with the desktop and Internet. Apple learned this lesson with their ill-fated Newton, the first pocket computer. The Newton failed because the hardware was not powerful enough, and, more important, because it did not synchronize with desktop machines.

I am confident that Steve Jobs and his colleagues are negotiating with TV, movie, book, newspaper, and magazine publishers for content deals as I type this.

The third reason I was confident was that Apple had legions of software developers who, because they had developed iPhone applications, were ready to go on the iPad. Their iPhone applications would run with little or no modification on the iPad, and their programmers were up to speed on Apple's software development tools, their software development kit (SDK).

Apple might have learned the importance of the developer community by watching Microsoft. Microsoft wooed independent software vendors (ISVs) from day 1. Since the early days of MSDOS, they invited ISVs to conferences, provided them with excellent tools, set up a developer's organization, etc. Apple has taken this a step further with their application store -- they also provide a distribution channel at a reasonable cost. They removed the "V" from ISV. Independent developers were just developers, not vendors.

That is the good news (for the iPad). The bad news is that Apple seems to be blowing off the developer community. To use Apple's SDK, a developer has to agree to draconian terms. For example, they can only sell through Apple.

At some point, Microsoft could have afforded to ignore the ISV community -- Windows had a monopoly -- it was the only game in town.

Unfortunately for Apple, their developers have alternatives -- Google's Android, Microsoft's mobile version of Windows 7, and Palm's webOS. Google seems to be the biggest threat. They just released a new version of their SDK, which is provided to developers without restriction, and they offer prizes for outstanding applications.

I am still betting on the success of the iPad, but the odds have dropped. Apple's high handed attitude toward developers could be the chink in their armor.

The Pew Survey on the Future of the Internet

The Pew Internet in American Life Project conducts a biannual survey on the future of the Internet, and they published the
results of the 2010 survey last week.

Pew surveyed 895 Internet experts and stakeholders, asking questions in these areas:

• Will Google make us stupid?
• Will the Internet enhance or detract from reading, writing, and rendering of knowledge?
• Is the next wave of innovation in technology, gadgets, and applications pretty clear now, or will the most interesting developments between now and 2020 come “out of the blue”?
• Will the end-to-end principle of the Internet still prevail in 10 years, or will there be more control of access to information?
• Will it be possible to be anonymous online or not by the end of the decade?
  

Note that we discuss each of these topics in the "Internet implications" portion of our class.

The survey is formatted as a series of 5-level Likert Scale questions with open-ended explanations of one's answer. The report summarizes the respondent's consensus on each question, and includes many quotes selected from the open-ended explanations.

I recommend this report to anyone interested in the implications of the Internet for individuals, organizations or society.

The survey is part of Imagining the Internet, a larger Elon University/Pew project on the history and future of the Internet. Highly recommended.

Disclaimer: I took part in the survey.

Who came up with top-level domain names like "com" and "edu," and what was the early Internet culture like?

The Internet was developed by a group of people at various universities and companies with contracts to work on the project. Decisions, policies and technical specifications were worked out informally in conversations, email, and documents called "requests for comment" (RFCs).

Many of the original developers and users of the Internet still contribute to discussions on the Internet History email list. You can gain insight into the history and also the culture of the early Internet by subscribing to the list.

For example, there was a recent discussion of the choice of the original top level domain names like "com" and "net" on the list. I have selected a few messages from that discussion to give you a sense of the way decisions were made. (The messages refer to "Jon" -- Jon Postel, one of the key Internet developers and policy makers).

This question was posted January 20, 2010:

Does anyone know why .com; .edu and .gov were chosen? I know it seems
simple, but why .com instead of something like .biz?

There were many replies, and I selected a few which help capture the process and culture:

I recall seeing those TLD names on Jon's white board at the time. I feel
quite certain that they came out of Jon's head, but were ratified by
discussions with Paul.

Bob Braden

---

Some years ago, Jake Feinler said that there was a persistent, non-converging
debate in the community about the TLD choices.

She asserted that there was finally some small face-to-face discussion where she
ran out of patience and declared that the choices would be com, net and org.

I have a somewhat more vague recollection of her acknowledging that the
question, then, was whetehr Jon would concur, and that he did.

Dave Crocker

---

perhaps the point has been made but the motivation for these TLDs was
to parse the responsibility for registration into very distinct
categories so that the work could be delegated without too much
dispute over jurisdiction but still covered the range of then-foreseen
participants in the use of the Internet system.

Vint Cerf

---

I don't know but it happened between April 1984 and October 1984.

In April 1984 Postel and Reynolds distributed a draft of what became RFC 920.
In that draft they used Grapevine-like naming, so ERNIE.CS.CAL.UC for a
site in the University of California system.

In October 1984, when RFC 920 came out it specified GOV, EDU, COM, MIL and
ORG.  NET came later (Dick Edmiston's and my doing).

I wish I had copies of the email discussions between April '84 and October '84
but I don't.  My guess is that the discussion was in NAMEDROPPERS but I
only have a very limited archive of old NAMEDROPPERS email.

Craig Partridge

---

Hi Bob!

I also have the feeling that Jon put the list together, since as I
recall he was the only one of us organized enough to deal with such
things...

As to why that initial list was chosen, my recollection is that it
simply reflected the demographics of the emerging "Internet community"
at the time.  There were lots of governmental entities and lots of
schools.  The "rest of world" were commercial, or companies.

Plus it was likely that someone from each TLD subgroup would step up and
volunteer to be the coordinator/arbitrator of name etiquette within that
subgroup.  You couldn't have a TLD unless there was someone willing to
manage it.

The nascent Internet was very US-centric, again reflecting the
demographics.  Gov meant US government.  Com was US companies, weighted
toward government contractors such as BBN or Linkabit - I can't recall
any non-US companies being involved until later in the game.

I think .com originally was derived from "company" rather than
"commercial".  The .com's weren't thought of as "businesses" in the
sense of places that consumers go to buy things.  They were companies
doing government contract work.  The Internet was not chartered to
interconnect businesses - it was a military command-and-control
prototype network, being built by educational, governmental, and
contractors.  If anybody had suggested that businesses were to be
included, it would have raised flotillas of red flags in the
administrative ranks of government and PTTs.  Hence .com -- not .biz.

I don't recall anybody ever thinking we were creating an organizational
structure to encompass hundreds of millions of entities covering the
entire planet in support of all human activities.  And it certainly
wasn't supposed to last for 30+ years, even as an experiment.  It just
happened to turn out that way.

IIRC, there weren't any major debates or counterproposals or such about
TLDs.  The TLD list just wasn't that big a deal (at the time).  The
Internet was an experiment which, like all experiments, was supposed
to end.  CCITT, ISO, and such organizations were inventing the official
technologies for the future of data communications.  We know now how
that turned out   Whatever TLD list and such was used in the Internet
wasn't supposed to last long.  So a specific logistical decision like
the TLD list wasn't all that important - at the time.

I agree that whatever discussion happened was almost certainly carried
out mostly on the email lists which served as the primary way for
everybody to interact between quarterly meetings, and then Jon and crew
most likely put the initial list together, and there wasn't any real
opposition so it became real.

It's very difficult to identify who "invented" anything in those days.
There was lots of discussions, ideas, and strawmen passed around in
emails and then eventually somebody wrote the document or wrote the code
to capture the "rough consensus" of the discussion.

Jack Haverty

You can find these messages and the others on the thread here. I've also included snapshots of the people participating in this discussion -- they may also help give you a feel for the culture. (Which one is Jon Postel)?

Concept videos guide new products like the Apple tablet

The long rumored Apple tablet computer is expected to be announced tomorrow.

People have high hopes for the Apple tablet, speculating about its features and applications like watching video, reading full color books with dynamic illustrations, and playing multi-player games.

We will know the details tomorrow (if it is announced), but we might get insight into the hardware, applications, and design goals from concept videos like this clip showing how one might one day read a magazine on a tablet.

Concept videos are similar to the futuristic concept cars displayed at auto shows. They offer a concrete, long run vision and provide general goals and direction.

Perhaps the most famous concept video was Apple's Knowledge Navigator, which was created in 1987, and foreshadowed networked communications in support of collaborative work. The future developments shown in these 1993 AT&T ads have pretty well been realized. Here's one on a possible future of the cell phone.

How much would you be willing to pay for content like movies, TV programs, books, periodicals and games downloaded to a tablet computer like the one shown above?

Which of today's applications and capabilities were predicted in the Knowledge Navigator video? Which are not in today's products?

Should you be buying and selling textbooks at Amazon?

I have long predicted the demise of conventional textbooks, but they are hanging on. For now, the textbook is king.

Faculty like textbooks because they save them time. There are only a few candidate books to choose among for a course, they come with teaching material like PowerPoint slides, review questions and test banks, the publisher maintains a Web site for the book, and the table of contents determines the course syllabus.

As teaching loads increase, faculty are driven to rely more heavily on textbook publishers. (I stopped using textbooks years ago, saving my students a lot of money, but costing me a lot of time).

I still think textbooks will fade away, but while you wait for the demise of the $100 textbook, you can use Amazon's beta-test textbook buyback service to ease the pain. A student with books in good condition can ship them for free to Amazon, and receive Amazon gift card credit as payment. That credit can be used to purchase new or used textbooks for other classes or anything else. Textbook ordering is also simple -- enter the ISBN numbers of the textbooks you need, and a one-click search returns links to all of them.

Amazon also offers many textbooks in electronic form for distribution on their Kindle e-book reader. The current Kindle has significant limitations as a textbook reader, but it also has some advantages, and many companies are working on other devices. (Maybe textbooks will be a killer application for the much rumored Apple tablet or whatever Hewlett Packard is cooking up).

The average US student spends $702 annualy on required course materials, and, as shown below, about 23% of that goes to the bookstore and distribution. Amazon hopes to get a piece of that.


(Click on the picture to enlarge it).

Let us know if you have been buying or selling textbooks online or using an e-book reader like the Kindle.

The Open Government Directive -- maybe some things can change

President Obama appointed Vivek Kundra Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO) earlier this year. Kundra had been Chief Technology Officer for Washington DC, and espoused a strong "Web 2.0" vision for citizen participation, government transparency and cloud services, but he was surprisingly inexperienced. John Dvorak, a respected technical journalist, looked into Kundra's education and background and questioned his qualification to manage 71,000 IT workers and 10,000 IT systems -- asking whether Kundra is a phony.

InformationWeek, a trade publication for IT managers, just named Kundra CIO of the year, emphasizing his vision more than listing his achievements.

On December 8, we saw what may be a major step toward implementing Kundra's transparent government vision -- issuing the Open Government Directive. (You can see Kundra in the announcement video). The directive orders Federal agencies to:

• publish government information online
• improve the quality of government information
• create and institutionalize a culture of open government

And they are to start immediately -- each agency is required to

• identify and publish online in an open format at least three high-value databases within 45 days
• create an open government Web page within 60 days
• develop and publish an open government plan stating how it will improve transparency and integrate public participation and collaboration into its activities within 120 days

This activity will be tracked in an open government "dashboard" with statistics and visualizations showing how each agency is doing with respect to openness. The dashboard is to be on the Web within 60 days.

It is noteworthy that they are not talking about PDF copies of reports, but publishing data in machine readable form so it can be analyzed and summarized by others -- journalists, scholars, business people, politicians, etc.

This sounds real. The Sunlight Foundation, which has led the movement to use the Internet for government transparency, is optimistic. (You can hear more in this interview of their policy director, John Wonderlich, who sees this as "a real commitment to systemic change within the government").

It will be interesting to see how things look after those 45-120 day deadlines have passed -- we can check the Open Government Dashboard.

Perhaps Kundra's inexperience has an upside -- he may be too naive to understand that getting government bureaucracies to publish data and listen to the public is "impossible."

LTE version 1.0. TeleSonora begins 4G cellular service in Scandinavia using Chinese equipment

We cover cellular networks and generations in discussing mobile and portable connectivity.

Today might be considered the first day of the fourth generation -- TeleSonera began offering commercial LTE (Long Term Evolution) service in central Stockholm and Oslo. This is LTE 1.0. It is not built into phones; it is not offered outside of Oslo and Stockholm; there is no competition; it does not fall back to 3G or WiFi; there are no tethering applications for creating portable WiFi hot spots, but it is here.

The service delivers download speeds in the 20-80 Mbps range and will cost 599 Swedish Kronor ($85) per month. There will be no data cap while the service ramps up, but after July 1 2010, they will impose a 30 GB-per-month cap. It also requires a Samsung plug in modem. The current version of the modem is LTE only, but they will soon have one that can fall back to the 3G network where LTE is unavailable.

When TeleSonera began testing in Oslo last June, they said rollout would begin in 2010, but demand for high speed mobile connectivity convinced them to push the start date up.

The equipment is manufactured by Huawei, a Chinese company. You may think of China as a manufacturer of cheap toys and other consumer goods, but they are becoming world leaders in high tech areas like telecommunication. Huawei European equipment sales were $3 billion in 2008, compared to just $160 million in 2003. Forty of the world's fifty largest telephone companies are now Huawei customers and 75% of their 2008 sales were outside of China. Globally, Huawei is the second largest mobile connectivity manufacturer.

Check this short video tour of the Stockholm base station, which has both 3G and the new LTE 4G equipment.

Verizon's FIOS Internet connectivity is $70 per month for up to 25 mbps download and 15 mbps upload. Would you rather have that or TeleSonera portable service in Stockholm?

What new applications and devices might this service enable?

Too cheap to virtualize? Intel's data center on a chip and the Carnegie-Mellon FAWN project

We discuss the evolution of server hardware configurations, and we may be witnessing the start of the next chapter.

Just as virtual servers -- which share processors -- are becoming popular, we see the cost of processors shrinking to the point where they may not be worth sharing. Intel has demonstrated a 48-processor chip which includes shared memory and an on-chip network connecting the processors. The power/speed trade off can also be adjusted under program control. As Intel says, they are working toward a "data center on a chip."



The FAWN project (fast array of wimpy nodes) at Carnegie Mellon University is prototyping this approach, and they say the results are promising. Preliminary results with FAWNs indicate that they are cost competitive with conventional architectures, but consume 3-10 times less power. Power consumption is a large and growing portion of data center cost.

Swedish report calls for openness and competition at all network levels

The Swedish Telecoms Regulator has issued a 150 page report (in Swedish) on open networks and services with a two page abstract in English.

The report focuses on the importance of open, competitive markets and networks at five levels:

1. Natural resources (use of and access to land, ducts and spectrum)
2. Infrastructure (passive cables and masts)
3. Transmission (equipment for transportation of bit-streams)
4. IP/Internet (equipment for traffic direction and IP addressing)
5. Content and services (content, services and end user equipment)

This multi-level approach sounds like that presented by Brough Turner, and it has worked well in Stockholm and throughout Sweden, as shown by their high rank on Internet-related indices:

Index	Rater	Rank
Broadband Performance Index	European Community Commission	1
E-readiness rankings	Economist Intelligence Unit	2
Networked Readiness Index	World Economic Forum	2
Broadband Quality Score	Said Business School	4

An FCC workshop on Future Fiber Architectures and Local Deployment Choices. It looks like the FCC gets it.

The FCC just held a Workshop on Future Fiber Architectures and Local Deployment Choices.

The workshop was comprised of two panel sessions featuring a mix of academic, industry, market research and community networking people. Video of the panels and the panelist's presentation slides are available at the workshop Web site.

The range of speakers and their presentations leaves me optimistic that the FCC “gets it” – they are listening to good people with diverse views and no longer define "broadband" as 250 kbps.

I have summarized the workshop by selecting one slide from each presentation and adding a short comment to each. I have not listened to the presentations – the comments are what occurred to me when I selected the slide.

Selecting the slides to include was difficult – I left out some good ones, and would recommend your looking at the rest and listening to the presentations if you are interested in broadband policy.

This is an experiment in how to cover and summarize a conference.

For another excellent summary see this post by Goeff Daily in which he extracts noteworthy quotes from the presentations.

Can you hear the difference when audio is compressed?

We have seen that images can often be compressed significantly without noticeable degradation.

A recent review asks whether one can distinguish between a file that is ripped from a CD with no loss and a compressed MP3 version of the same file.

There were only seven subjects in this small test. They were given two recordings of two rock songs and asked to tell which sounded best. One was a lossless recording ripped from a CD, the other the same file compressed. Some compared the lossless files to 192 kbps MP3s, others compared them to 320 kbps MP3s. (Apple iTunes music is 128 kbps).

Only one person could accurately pinpoint which tracks were MP3 in every case. Of the rest, three subjects picked the lossless track twice and the other three only made one correct choice.

This is obviously a limited test -- there were few subjects and few controls. The results might be affected by things like

• the quality of the playback equipment
• the hearing acuity of the subjects
• the familiarity of the music to the subjects
• the nature of the particular song or other audio

Still, a test like this makes one wonder whether bandwidth is wasted by a lossless file.

You could easily create a similar test and try it on your friends (and yourself).

It would also be interesting to do a test of recorded voice. Podcasts are typically delivered as 64 or 128 kbps MP3 files -- can listeners tell the difference? Would a higher data rate matter?

As storage cost falls and bandwidth increases, how is the audio compression tradeoff of file size versus quality affected?

An example of bad image processing on the Web

We discuss the importance of processing, resizing and compressing an image before uploading it to a Web site.

This image, found on the WiFi Alliance Web site, provides an excellent example of what not to do:



As we see in the property sheet, the image is 980 by 664 pixels and the file size is 1.28 megabytes:



Resizing and compressing the image before putting it on the Web site would have reduced it to about 5 kilobytes -- 1/250th the size of the original -- with no noticeable loss of quality. (Quality is not even important in this case since the image is just a button linked to a video).

Furthermore, the image is resized to 177 by 99 pixels, which distorts it by changing its aspect ratio. (It appears that the image was also distorted when it was captured).

We can learn from our and other's mistakes -- can you find other poorly processed images on the Web?

A standard battery charger will benefit individuals, organizations and society

We discuss the importance of standards whether they are developed by a dominant company, an industry trade association, a professional society, a government or international organization, or they begin as an Internet Request for Comments.

The International Telecommunication Union has released a recommended standard design for chargers for cell phones and other portable devices, and a number of large manufacturers have committed to supporting it in the near future.

This standard takes on added importance with recent innovation in and rapid growth of the market for smart phones and other mobile Internet access devices.

Of course, we are still stuck with a variety of sockets to plug our chargers into:



It's too bad someone did not standardize sockets before nations deployed electrical
networks (click the image to enlarge):



How will this new charger standard effect manufacturers of phones and other portable devices? How will it effect the consumer? How will it effect the environment? Will any individuals or organizations be harmed if this new standard catches on?

Software refinement -- from research to products -- an image processing example

We have discussed the birth of image processing with Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad program in the 1960s. As we see in this video, Sketchpad could draw, rotate, resize, copy and combine images.

Since Sutherland's research, there has been tremendous improvement in hardware technology and innumerable engineering refinements to image processing software.

Software refinements require research and the development of prototypes before they become product features. Consider, for example, the PatchMatch algorithm developed in collaboration between Princeton University and Adobe Systems. Here we see a paper describing the algorithm and some demonstration videos. The paper was presented and the videos shown at an academic engineering conference.

Successful research like the PatchMatch algorithm is subsequently incorporated into commercial products. Here you see a demonstration of tools that use PatchMatch for image retargeting, completion and reshuffling integrated into Adobe Photoshop. The tools are being demonstrated at a trade show, and it is probably safe to say they will be in the next version of Photoshop.

This is typical of engineering refinements to software. A prototype is developed in a research lab and it later becomes a product.

Researchers typically work on things that are too demanding for the technology of the day. Some of the Princeton videos are shown at 5 times actual speed because it takes time to compute the new images. By the time these features are released in Photoshop, hardware will have improved and they will execute rapidly.

Note that Sutherland's work was a pure university effort, but PatchMatch was a joint effort between a university and a company. Many significant advances have come from industrial research labs. Can you find some interesting prototypes and projects at Microsoft Research?

Microsoft's answer to Google Apps for education

We have seen that universities like Northwestern, Arizona State and Abilene Christian have adopted Google Apps and Mail.

Microsoft's answer to Google is their Live@Edu program, and they have just entered into a long term agreement with the University System of Ohio for "cloud" services.

Wireless data coverage is uneven

We discuss evolving cellular data generations. Today's third generation equipment provides for speeds of up to 2 mbps, but, as shown in this figure, download speed varies considerably from one city or neighborhood to another. The download speed to your iPhone 3G might be as low as 400 kbps or as high as 1,600 kbps.



The plot was generated by ARCchart, a wireless market research firm, and described by Brough Turner in a blog post. ARCchart monitored over two million performance tests using iPhone, Blackberry and Android phones, then filtered them to focus on major cities. This graph is based on 648,374 downloads from major cities in 103 nations between August 2008 and June 2009.

(Gizmodo performed a more limited test of Sprint, AT&T and Verizon 3G networks in eight US cities and also found considerable variance in download speed).

Of course, in some places there is no GSM coverage. Consider the coverage by AT&T, the GSM provider supporting the Apple iPhone in the US -- there is no coverage in the light-colored regions:



This map was taken from AT&T's coverage viewer in early September 2009, and coverage has continued expanding since then.

However, AT&T states that the maps are only an approximation, not a guarantee, of their coverage, which may be effected by terrain, weather, foliage, buildings and other construction, signal strength, customer equipment and other factors. There are many anecdotal reports of inability to use an iPhone in parts of San Francisco and the bay area.

Network neutrality is a global issue

We talk about the Internet being designed as an end-to-end network in which network operators only make fast connections between computers -- the network does not provide services or differentiate between one person's packets and another's. This approach is generally favored by companies like Google and Skype, which offer Internet application services, and opposed by Internet service providers like Verizon and AT&T, which must deliver those services, and, in some cases, compete with them.

The US FCC recently endorsed the vision of an open, neutral Internet, and The Washington Post has published a story about Skype's lobbyists in Washington, who were quite happy with the FCC action. Skype is lobbying for neutral networks in every nation, not only the US. They feel the example set by the US FCC will have an impact on regulators in many other nations.

The US is among the world leaders in this policy, a nice place to be for a change.

FCC Chairman calls for network neutrality

One of President Obama's campaign promises was to support network neutrality. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski has now called for new rules guaranteeing network neutrality.

Mr. Genachowski outlined his proposal in a talk at the Brookings Institute. After discussing the importance of the Internet to our economy and society, he reiterated four current FCC Internet governance rules:

• Consumers should not be limited in the content they choose to view online, as long as it's legal.
• Users should be able to run any application they want as long as they don't exceed service plan limitations or harm the provider's network.
• Consumers should be permitted to connect products they buy to their Internet connection, as long as the devices operate within the service plan and do not harm the network or enable theft of service.
• Customers should be able to easily review their options when buying Internet service plans and learn how those plans protect against spyware and other invasions of privacy

and he added two new network neutrality rules he would like to enact:

• Internet service providers (ISPs) would be prohibited from selectively blocking or slowing Web content or applications.
• ISPs would be required to make their network management practices clear and available to consumers.

The network neutrality provisions are opposed by many ISPs like the telephone and cable TV companies and supported by content providers like Google. You can read an argument against network neutrality here.

You can watch a video or read a transcript of Mr. Genachowski's talk and a panel discussion following it here. If you are in a hurry, you can check out this short coverage from National Public Radio. Last, but not least, you can see announcements and give feedback to the FCC here.

Do you support the call for network neutrality? Do you think it should apply to mobile ISPs?

Is technological progress slowing?

We have seen exponential progress in electronic, communication and storage technology during the last 60 years. As a result, computers and networks are now used by billions of people for a great number of applications. This "information revolution" has had an impact on our individual lives, organizations and society.

No doubt, computers and the Internet are a big deal, but Alfred Normann argues that they have not changed our lives as much as earlier inventions -- that he has not seen as much technological innovation as his parents and grandparents did. As we see in his illustration, shown below, a host of important inventions occurred during the 50 years between the Civil War and World War I and many others occurred during his grandmother's life. He feels that technological progress measured in terms of impact on our lives has slowed, not accelerated.

Ray kurzweil would disagree with Normann. He argues that accelerating improvement in information technology facilitates an accelerating accumulation of knowledge, which is leading rapidly toward an understanding of our own biology and intelligence. Kurzweil foresees radical medical breakthroughs, leading to the possibility of immortality, and machines that surpass human intelligence and continue to improve without us.

How does the impact of the Internet on individuals, organizations and society compare to the impact of inventions like the automobile, radio, television, antibiotics, electric lights, telephones, and nuclear weapons?

Will today's exploding knowledge of genetics and biology lead to a longer life for you and your children? Can you think of examples of things computers do today that would have been considered "intelligent" 50 years ago?

The general public is unaware of Internet policy issues and their impact

Geoff Daily just wrote a blog post explaining most people do not understand broadband or bandwidth. As an example, he told about a friend who did not know how his apartment was connected to the Internet and was

pretty much totally oblivious to this language of bandwidth, bits, and bytes. And he certainly doesn't know anything about bandwidth caps or traffic shaping

His friend had invited a dozen people with laptops to his apartment for an online fantasy football draft -- would there be sufficient bandwidth? Would the extra usage exceed a cap and cause an unexpected jump in his Internet bill?

More important, most of the general public is unaware that US broadband connectivity is slow, asymmetric and falling behind that of other developed nations. As shown below, by last year the US had fallen to 11 th among OECD nations in broadband connectivity per capita, and we had very little fiber installed.



What are the implications of lagging connectivity in the US for our quality of life and economy? If all of the freeways in the US were two lane streets, would that effect the quality of your life? Would it effect the economy?

How fast is your Internet connection at home? To your cell phone? Do you have unlimited usage or does your bill increase when you exceed a cap? Does your connection bog down when more than one person in your home is online? Could two people watch a low-resolution TV show without pauses and glitches? Could you watch an HD movie?

For more on Daily's views on bandwidth and bandwidth requirements, click here.

Excellent lectures from The Stanford Technology Ventures Program

The Stanford Technology Ventures Program Entrepreneurship Corner is a free archive of entrepreneurship resources for teaching and learning, including videos and podcasts of talks by successful entrepreneurs.

Many of the talks are by IT people. For example, Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer and Siebel Systems founder Tom Sieble spoke recently. Balmer spoke about the early days at Microsoft, the patience and hard work required of an entrepreneur, and the great opportunities open to Internet entrepreneurs today. That was in contrast to Siebel who spoke about opportunities in health care and energy, and asserted that the time for opportunities in IT is past. In a third lecture, neuroscientist and IT entrepreneur Jeff Hawkins reviewed his career, including the creation of the Palm Pilot and other portable computing devices and the founding of several companies and a research institute.

They have over a thousand two or three minute video snippets from the talks. You can search through them by key word or speaker. For example, there are 24 by Google's founding CEO Larry Page. You can watch one or two, or stream all 24 together.

Balmer is optimistic about the future of the IT business, but Siebel is not -- what do you think? What personal lessons can you learn from these entrepreneurs?

Senators call for investigation of cellular company practices

Several US Senators, including John Kerry and Herb Kohl, are calling for investigation of anti-competitive practices by cell phone companies. The Senators are bothered by restrictions like limiting the Apple iPhone to one carrier, AT&T, and the lockstep price increases we noted earlier.

It is encouraging to see these issues raised, but anti-competitive behavior by the telephone and cable companies goes far beyond cell phone restrictions.

We need to question fundamental assumptions about the role of the Internet as basic economic and social infrastructure, the appropriate role for government ownership of infrastructure, and the service-oriented business model of the incumbent ISPs .

This call for investigation is limited in scope and far from action and results -- let's hope it is just the first step.

Open networks benefit both ISPs and the public

We have spoken of the economic inefficiency of the service-oriented business model of the US telephone and cable companies. They see themselves as selling video, telephone, and Internet service -- the so-called "triple play."

We see the social cost of this business model when we compare the US with other nations, where access network operators open their networks to competing service providers. We pay a lot for inferior broadband connectivity.

It is not surprising that the telephone and cable companies are trying to increase their profit at public expense, but there is ironic evidence that this service-oriented business model may also be hurting them. In a nutshell, the argument is that the owner of an access network can make more money by opening it up to all service providers. True, they would forsake the monopoly profits of being the sole supplier of telephony, movies or television on their network, but they would make it up in wholesale and retail sales volume as many companies compete to sell these and other services.

If this is the case, open networks are a win-win proposition. Both the public and the cable and telephone companies win.

Yankee Group analyst Benoit Felten will present a one-hour webinar on this topic on June 30. The presentation will be archived, so you can listen later if you miss it.

For further discussion of this "dumb pipe paradox" see Brough Turner's blog.

Proprietary research firms are an excellent source of information

Proprietary market research firms like The Yankee Group, Infonetics, and Forrester Research study various industries and technologies. They typically make money by holding specialized conferences and selling reports and consulting services to companies that are in or depend upon those industries and technologies. For example, a report on the future of WiFi would be of interest to both WiFi chip manufacturers and to computer companies that will be using those chips in their products.

Market research firms hire highly qualified analysts and sell the results of their research to many interested companies, enabling them to share the cost of the research. That is good news -- it makes business more efficient. The bad news is that the research reports are too expensive to be used in education.

But, since the market research firms want publicity, they provide some very useful information for free. They publish press releases and executive summaries of their reports as well as blogs and webinars.

Take The Yankee Group for example. They bill themselves as "The Global Connectivity Experts," making their research relevant to our class. Twenty six Yankee Group analysts write blogs with posts in 30 categories. You can read press releases on and summaries of their research here. Yankee Group analysts also present webinars on their research. One can register to watch these online presentations as they occur or download them afterward.

Which of the Yankee Group bloggers or topic categories is most relevant to our class? Which of the previous webinars seems most relevant?