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May 29, 2005Reality Connectivity is 40 gigabitsIt is said that Reality Connectivity is 40 gigabits. Surely we do not want to settle for less than Reality? Thus, with 40 gigabits set as our goal, we should call anything less than 400 megabits “tinyband” or even "nanoband". After all, 400 megabits is only 1% of the goal. This raises the interesting question of what are today’s legacy connectivity providers so proud of when all they offer is a fraction of one percent of the goal? What is so exciting about a rounding error? This news story is a case in point:New ITU Standard Delivers 10x ADSL SpeedsThe ITU is raving about nanoband capacities! How long can they fool us into thinking this is a wonderful accomplishment? Why does this matter? Because it is easy to anticipate fact that the culture in which the greatest number of citizens has the highest capacity for transporting bits will have a lot of advantages. And not just economic advantages either: Security, health, education, environment, artistic, cultural etc. In a word, Globalization 4.0 Why an advantage? Because all human endeavors are rooted in communications, not solitary confinement. The country with the best communications for the most citizens will do better in todays interconnected and networked world. Today, communications is simply bits. The country with the greatest number of citizens who can share the greatest number of bits the fastest wins. Call it the law of bits. It is really that simple and this simplicity is the source of its unstoppable power. Simplicity has a habit of trumping complexity. As we are often told, the market abhors the inefficiencies of complexity. The implications of all of this are very simple: current US policy with regards to communications and spectrum management, Byzantine in its complexity, can only guarantee that the US will NOT be in a leadership position in terms of capacity for transporting bits. The hysteria with regards to file sharing is also only going to guarantee that the US has a second class, or worse, bit transportation capacity. Why did early Americans opt for a public highway infrastructure? They believed it was the best way to grow the economy. Why was the Eisenhower Interstate System expressly made to be an open source highway -- toll free? Our economic growth since the revolution suggests they were right. Your favorite catalogue store, for example, ships products, but is NOT in the highway business and does not want to be. See what I mean? We must clearly separate the carriage of bits from the content the bits distribute. Comcast, and the other monopoly incumbents, should be in the content business or the transport business, but not both. Transporting bits is a very low profit commodity business, perfect for government operation -- ala the interstate highways, national defense and the court system. Can you imagine the disaster that would be privatized courts? It is easy to anticipate that leaders who refuse to learn about and understand this new bit-based fitness landscape, such as the FCC, the MPAA, and the RIAA are doomed to turn to dust. The future belongs to the edges. The days of the hub and spoke world are numbered. Can the Democratic party figure this out? The bits of this story are in the ether for all to download, but will they? Here are two questions we need to ask: 1] What is the limit of the air waves to transport bits? 2] How can we maximize the number of bits that can be transported by the greatest number of users? [Hint: Some spectrum management models suggest that capacity increases with the number of users.] The first political party to figure this out will win. Else the current parties will become irrelevant fossils and new parties will arise with more effective ways to thrive in the new bit-based fitness landscape. Is anybody in Washington, or any other capital, willing to ask these questions? For more on the Open Spectrum model see: Why Open Spectrum Matters, the End of the Broadcast Nation. Posted by Jock Gill at May 29, 2005 11:47 AM | TrackBack Comments
Forty gigabits? Will that make us happy? Want to pay the price? If you want anything done in this country, it must have utility for the military. Our space program is a good example, as is the Interstate Highway System, mentined above. When Eisenhower and Congress authorized the system, it was justified as having the ability to move troops and goods in wartime, just as the German Autobahn. If you'll notice, there are regularly-spaced long, straight sections - to provide for the landing of aircraft of the period - by law. Our development of the costly and limited Space Shuttle was due to the demands of the Pentagon and its promoters. Most science requires high orbits and space access, provided only by powerful Expendable Launch Vehicles, but the military wanted low-Earth orbit. Guess which one we put most of our money into? Even the Hubble Space Telescope suffers unplanned temperature cycling because we had to use the Shuttle to establish it in a low-Earth configuration, taking it in and out of Earth’s shadow. And the ridiculously-expensive and limited Space Station has few practical uses, save military domination. If you have any doubts, look into the mission of the US Space Command sometime. Our own beloved medium for communication, be-bop, games, and porn (whether wanted or not), is a derivation of the cast-off ARPANET, as you are all aware. We have it now, because we’ve built something much better for the War Machine. But cheer up. Soon, Space Command will have us build another preposterously-expensive toy for their communications, and we’ll get that fast access deemed so important. I have to add a codicil to the above post. It was not to question the utility of very high-speed communications, which was the topic of the previous post by Jock, but to lament the state of our society and government, encumbered and dominated by our self-righteous fixation on brute force. As one who believed in our place in the world - the one in which we like to believe - I am beset by my own remembrances on holidays such as this one. And as I age (I am reaching 61), actions of the past rush up with occasional ferocity, bringing old lessons and deeper meaning to new events. We have apparently learned little from our bitter experiences in Asia in the 1960’s. The question is not whether we will, or should, get ultra-bandwidth, or better communications, or even the action-from-the-edges that might offer a way to get our country back in the hands of The People. The problem is how to do it without having it used against us. I have to add a codicil to my post above. It was not to question the utility of very high-speed communications, which was the topic of the previous post by Jock, but to lament the state of our society and government, encumbered and dominated by our self-righteous fixation on brute force. As one who believed in our place in the world - the one in which we like to believe - I am beset by my own remembrances on holidays such as this one. And as I age (I am reaching 61), actions of the past rush up with occasional ferocity, bringing old lessons and deeper meaning to new events. We have apparently learned little from our bitter experiences in Asia in the 1960’s. The question is not whether we will, or should, get ultra-bandwidth, or better communications, or even the action-from-the-edges that might offer a way to get our country back in the hands of The People. The problem is how to do it without having it used against us. The European Union's policy is to separate the infrastructure layer from the services layer. To achieve this, they have pushed the incumbent operators to lease out capacity on their networks to any ISP at very low wholesale prices in an open, non-discriminatory manner. Recently, the European Commission approved the expenditure of public funds to build out a broadband network in a rural area in France (the Limousin region) on the condition that access be wholesaled in an open and non-discriminatory fashion to all service providers. Can anyone guess why in the EU prices for broadband have dropped and bandwidth made available to customers has increased dramatically? Posted by: Esme Vos at May 29, 2005 3:23 PMPost a comment
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