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FEATURED TOPICDigital Transition -The term "Digital Transition" describes the process all organizations must go through in the 21st Century, as they leverage new technologies that provide new options for Applications, Equipment, Processes, and Networks that make them more effective. In contrast, the term "Municipal Wireless" is limiting. It puts the network technology ahead of the application and process changes that drive the business case. ORIENTATION |
Putting the Cart in Front of the Horse
Not many city officials will understand why they need a broadband network, especially these days, after they read two or three of the ever prominent emails circulating about the debacles in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Portland ... "those didn't work, why the hell do I want my city to be the next one in the next series of emails? No Thanks." But those same officials do know about the continuing need they have to get their tasks done, and they're interested in new and better ways to "get 'er done" and always, always, they want to save money while doing it. They better. It's high time we quit talking about networks and network technology, and start talking about Digital Applications and Digital Transformation: Getting work done faster, more effectively, more efficiently, by using newly available tools and doing things differently than the way they've always been done. That is the nature of Digital Transition: we all have to go through it, and those who go through it sooner will reap rewards sooner and be more competitive than the laggards. Big words, simple concept. Through the use of new digital technologies, city workers can be far more effective, doing more work in less time. In time, the city manager can shrink the size of city government, or meet the demands of growth with a flat hiring strategy. Rather than throw bodies at their problems, the city manager can add technology and keep staff levels the same. The result is better services at less cost, with more options for the city down the road. Good Government Management is a Balancing Act The key to sound city government management is balancing costs with revenue ... but city budgets are under growing pressure from increasing costs and decreasing revenues. The traditional solution is belt-tightening, cutting jobs or services, or both. But there's another way to bring back balance, a better way: using new tools and new processes to work smarter. A Perfect Storm of Bad News A perfect storm of negative economic trends threatens city budget managers in cities both large and small with direct and indirect consequences. Rising Fuel Costs. As the price of gasoline soars, unbudgeted city fuel expenses must be accommodated. Sinking Home Values. Real estate values have dropped at unprecedented rates. Declining Sales Tax Revenues. As people quit spending, the revenue from transactions contracts. Declining Property Tax Revenues. With sinking property values come lower revenues for city coffers. In the face of such bad news, city management staff have few options under traditional business practices. Typically, departmental budgets are scrutinized, salaries and wages are frozen, reductions are implemented across the board. There will be pain, and it must be shared. Because when governments fail at their job of keeping the books balanced, they can't just shut down and start over, like individuals or businesses. They must continue to work through their problems until they find a solution. We're stuck with the problem and the only way out is to work out a solution. Pinned Down by Old Assumptions People and Processes. Governments are bureaucracies that use labor inputs to deliver services to citizens. Taxes and Fees. Governments raise money by taxing and charging fees. The classic argument in government is between those who believe in keeping a tight lid on costs, no matter what, and those who believe in delivering services to those in society most in need. A rising economy eases pressures, while a sinking economy sees tensions mount as factions argue over how to adjust to increasing pressures. Sticking with old assumptions limits the range of solutions to variations of painful belt-tightening. Thinking about old problems in new ways unlocks new win/win solutions that improve on belt-tightening and ease tensions. Under the twin shocks of uncontrollable added costs and reduced revenues, the standard response is to cut labor costs and reduce services, but that leaves the city weaker and provides citizens less. The urgency of added budget pressures provides an opportunity for a better way of looking at government operations, which introduces new digital processes, applications, and equipment to make the city stronger and more productive. Digital Processes. New technology lets us look at old problems in new ways. Sending staffers out into the field in cars and trucks to gather information, returning to the office when necessary, is inefficient, when alternatives exist. Digital Applications. From Voice over IP (VOIP) to Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR), a variety of digital applications are enabled by new communication options that enable mobile workers to cut out inefficient steps and added costs, to do their jobs more effectively. Digital Equipment. Converged dual-use cell phones (iPhone, RIM Blackberry), wireless "netbooks" (Asus EEE), and wireless video surveillance cameras are only the first wave of new digital equipment that leverages new communication options to transform traditional business processes. Step One: Analysis. Transformation starts with a departmental review of select business processes and costs. Step Two: Strategy. Departmental managers strategize to transform operations with new digital technology. Step Three: Focus. Key benefits will accrue in three distinct areas. Folks, the smart city management will be reading the tea leaves and already be thinking outside the box, along the lines of the argument presented above. The rest, well, the rest will realize at some point that it's all gone to shit, but it will be too late for them. They will be stuck digging out and enduring the pain of slashed budgets, spread across the board to all departments, as they suck it up to bull their way through the bad times and hope for good times ahead. Yechhh. There's a better way, and that is using technology to do things differently. First, you invest in a network, either city-owned or privately-owned, that will depend on the particular circumstance of the city. Then you pay yourself instead of others - you quit buying services from outsiders. Second, you change the way you do what you have to do - quit driving around and wasting gas and time - start doing the work out in the field and recognize that each trip back to the office costs big bucks. We'll see how this goes, and who steps up to grab the brass ring. Times have changed - the first organizations to realize that fact and make changes will be the first ones to reap the rewards and thrive. Posted on June 01, 2008 at 10:11 PM | Comments (0) The State of Wireless On the GoIn this blog to the NY Times, Connecting to the Internet on the Go, published two weeks ago, you will find a very interesting and revealing discussion with about 90 comments, which shows the current attitude among early adopters who use broadband while traveling, with considerable variety evident in the discussion. Plenty of viewpoints and perspectives, multiple ideas on how things could be better, but not much challenging of the way things are, more attempts to find work-arounds. Consider the time you spend to browse this item an eye-opening stroll through the minds of travelers who adopt various work-arounds to make cellular wireless broadband work for them. The theme of the blog post is the utility of Sprint's new USB antenna, which includes storage and built-in features to provide more convenience. Of course, it's still a relatively high-priced service with various restrictions. And, considering that absent any movement to create the type of city-wide wireless broadband alternatives that we talk about on this site, we will all be left with these alternatives from the major carriers, with slowly ascending capabilities and slowly descending prices, all calculated to maximize shareholder gains for the carriers and maintain dominance in the marketplace, and not so much calculated to fully leverage technology to provide a boon to mankind. For better or worse, that's the way it is when corporations are in control. So it goes. Posted on May 29, 2008 at 10:40 AM | Comments (0) When a Committee is in the Driver's Seat
"Which is more important to driving, the accelerator or the brake?" Clever one that you are, you answer, "That's a stupid question, they're both equally important." No kidding - and don't forget the steering wheel as well. I remember my first snow skiing lesson, where I learned how to turn (steering wheel), and gravity and lack of friction provided the acceleration, but stopping (brakes) wasn't until Lesson 2. It was painful. My dad (6'2") used to get all over my mom (5'0") for her driving habit of resting her left foot on the brake as she drove. Not surprisingly, Dad spent more time and money than he would have liked out in the driveway, replacing worn out brake pads because of Mom's style and reliance on braking while accelerating. In our first attempts to promote metropolitan broadband infrastructure based on new technologies, with goals of wide dissemination, dramatic savings, and improved connectivity options, those of us driving this new industry (if you can even use either of the terms "driving" and "industry" these days) have struggled in a debate similar to that my mom and dad had so long ago over a more literal "driving" topic. It's a matter of style and perspective on which pedal you prefer to dominate as you drive, whether it's a car or an industry under discussion. At any given moment, both brake and accelerator are needed because they work in harmony as part of a system. But when it comes to metropolitan broadband, we currently have multiple drivers sharing one set of pedals, and braking tends to win out over accelerating, at least for now, because conservatism rules after a few well-publicized failures of accelerating into the future heedless of potholes. Until there is a greater sense of urgency, it will remain easier to brake in the face of uncertainty than it is to accelerate, certainly more politically safe. It just makes more sense to go slowly, steer around obstacles, and ride the brakes along the way, IF, that is, one is basically content with the way things are and feels they have time to burn to improve the odds and lower the risks and costs. It's more prudent, the argument goes, to move slowly, especially when the taxpayer's money is at stake. But for those dissatisfied with the Status Quo, moving so slowly leaves them mired in the problems of today, when the possibility of a solution is tantalizingly close. "Without some acceleration into the dark, how will we ever know what lies ahead?" they ask. Which leads us to ... Some Boring, But Essential Truths about Broadband & Infrastructure Can there really be gain without pain? I think not. Growth is about change, and that inevitably means leaving some parts of the past behind when you grow, much like a snake shedding its skin. Growing muscles is all about breaking down muscle cell fibers during the day, damaging the muscle tissue so it can repair itself during the night and the following day, growing incrementally stronger, only to then repeat the process - of course, lactic acid build up from exercising leads to "Muscle Soreness." Taking such dramatic steps to grow is essentially painful, thus the phrase, "Growing Pains." The first of the hard truths we must all face: Growth is Painful. I don't know if there is so much debate out there as to whether the external environment is changing, as there is a continuum of perspectives on which individual civic leaders lie regarding the degrees of change, the need to respond, and the best method of response. On the one side are those progressives who focus on the future and the great possibilities inherent in technological change: "Finally, a chance to shed those old problems that bedevil us!' On the other end are those conservatives who focus on the past and the great threats inherent in technological change: "Not again, yet another call to change what's already working - if it ain't broke, don't fix it!" Either way, the debate is around the nature of the environment in which we operate, and whether and/or how to respond. At the end of the day, the debate must produce some form of consensus on how to react to the environmental change, or you're left with a political stalemate, paralysis, and stagnation. If you choose to move ahead, do it together. If you choose to do nothing, acknowledge it as an explicit strategy and accept the consequences. This leads us to the second of hard truths we must face: Dynamic Times call for an Explicit Response. Thus the battle lines are drawn by those with something to lose by change - the "pragmatists" and those invested in the status quo - and those with something to gain - the "idealists" and the have-nots. The first battle is the argument over whether there is really sufficient environmental pressure to necessitate change. The first gambit of the progressive is to trumpet the pressures that external changes bring on the status quo, and the opportunities to respond in different, more productive ways. Conversely, the conservatives' first gambit is to ignore such changes, then when the ever-more-loud-and-shrill cries of the progressives get to be too much, demanding a response, the conservative makes light of the environmental changes and claims, "Why, even if you are right that something needs to be done, we already have the solution at hand, so we really don't need to change all that much." "In the face of Change, Deny, Delay, Diminish," seems to be the strategy to maintain the status quo. The result is Incrementalism, where small changes are implemented around the edges, in an attempt to demonstrate action but incur as little pain as possible. Which leads to the third hard truth: "Small changes will only get you small results over the short-term." Big problems will only be slightly altered by small solutions. Incrementalism accepts a bigger risk later in exchange for a smaller risk now. These, I believe, are the principal obstacles to dramatic changes that would reshuffle the deck and realize the potential that lies at the heart of new technological advances: Each of these tactics avoids a strategy to fix the problem and move ahead by substituting a strategy addressing the symptom while avoiding the pain of a fix. Pain avoidance is an attractive political concept, but there's a small fly in the ointment: together, these tactics have the impact of allowing small problems to grow larger, and large problems to grow immense. That is where we have gotten to these days when it comes to infrastructure of all kinds, whether it is bridges, roads, schools, or broadband. It is the same with societal problems of all kinds, whether it is energy policy, health care, or climate change. These problems do not in fact go away under this formula, they only disappear temporarily, to come roaring back at a later date (preferably on someone else's watch). Frum writes, "There are things only government can do, and if we conservatives wish to be entrusted with the management of government, we must prove that we care enough about government to manage it well." There's a debate about the validity of the current conservative approach to governing (less government, lower taxes, etc.), with popular feedback expected in November 2008. Of course, results will vary from location to location. Nothing will be settled, and the debate will continue. "The policy ideas in "Comeback" rely on the market more than on the state and are relatively small-bore, such as a government campaign to raise awareness about the dangers of obesity. As with most such books, the diagnosis is more convincing than the cure. The Fall of Conservatism, New Yorker When we accept the politician's message that we can have all that we want without paying for anything, we are allowing ourselves to be deluded with sweet talk, because we know in our heart of hearts that there is no Free Lunch in the real world, we have to pay for what we get. We're deluding ourselves, postponing real-world solutions, and accepting bigger problems down the road. The Bottom Line Infrastructure is an investment by a society in a better tomorrow. Investing to bring future benefits should be judged differently than spending to provide present benefits. Given the greater payback, spending on investments over expenses should be a priority, all things being equal. But at a minimum, investments should be considered equally with expenses. In the absence of funding investments, one is condemned to continually spend on an increasing basis and ultimately, to falling behind those who suck it up and make the investments when they are cheaper to make. A blog on Last Mile Online posted the recent news that the US is stuck at 15th in broadband penetration and asked for comments - mine are below. It's a fairly straightforward equation from where I sit. Currently, the overwhelming majority of broadband in the US is delivered by a cable broadband or DSL (telecom) provider. Who would get it that doesn't already have it? The poor, the ignorant, the isolated, and those who don't want it. Thus, we must see the cause of the plateau in penetration you describe as based on inadequacies in either pricing (costs too much), education (don't appreciate its value) or infrastructure (not available). Only increased competition or government policy mandates will bring access pricing down to stimulate more subscribers - which will come first? And unless things change, infrastructure growth will still come primarily from the large players, who lack any incentive to build out faster than they already are - we are a big country, and they're in no hurry to blanket it with broadband. Sure, at the edges we're likely to see some innovation by 1) the WiMAX consortium; or by niche wired and wireless providers in 2) rural markets, 3) exburban rings around growth cities, or 4) in the "swiss cheese" coverage holes of major providers in suburban and urban areas; or by 5) motivated municipalities, probably smaller towns who otherwise risk being left behind as broadband infrastructure gets built out. In summary, there's a good reason we're stuck where we are; 1) those who have the ability to change things (government and cable and telecom incumbents) lack sufficient motivation; and 2) most broadband users remain ignorant of what is possible, so they're content and satisfied with what they have. We'll move off this square only with 1) governmental leadership that challenges the status quo with a redefinition of broadband upwards of 256 Kbs and new policies to stimulate competition or infrastructure growth; or 2) a growth in availability and appreciation of high bandwidth content and applications, which will expose our current infrastructure and services paradigm as bankrupt, behind the times, and grossly inadequate. The needed pressure will be brought to bear from above (government) or below (market). As the article in the New Yorker commented: "But governing well, in conservative terms, doesn't mean spending more money. It means doing what neither Reagan nor Bush did: mastering details, knowing the options, using caution - that is, taking government seriously." Metropolitan broadband networks need this kind of attention if they are ever to achieve serious consideration as a tool of efficient government operations. Posted on May 28, 2008 at 02:33 PM | Comments (0) New Technologies Beware: Squashed Like a BugFor a stimulating read at no out-of-pocket cost - the book's free! - I recommend this downloadable e-book == Free Culture == by Dr. Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford law professor, founder of the Creative Commons idea that there should be shades of copyright protection, in between the black or white "either copyright protected or not.", as well as a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In it you'll find this gem of a story about the discovery of FM radio and its slow progression to replace or complement AM Radio, the standard of the day. The moral of the story is that technological superiority can, and often does fail when up against the power of a market leader striving to maintain its status quo interests. Sound familiar? Should, that's what happens pretty routinely to many new technologies... And that's what we're experiencing right now with Metropolitan Broadband. It's a long and winding road, but these days, it seems pretty much uphill. Sigh ...la plus ca change... Extended passage quoted after the jump ... On the day after Christmas, 1933, four patents were issued to Armstrong for his most significant invention - FM radio. Until then, consumer radio had been amplitude-modulated (AM) radio. The theorists of the day had said that frequency-modulated (FM) radio could never work. They were right about FM radio in a narrow band of spectrum. But Armstrong discovered that frequency-modulated radio in a wide band of spectrum would deliver an astonishing fidelity of sound, with much less transmitter power and static. On November 5, 1935, he demonstrated the technology at a meeting of the Institute of Radio Engineers at the Empire State Building in New York City. He tuned his radio dial across a range of AM stations, until the radio locked on a broadcast that he had arranged from seventeen miles away. The radio fell totally silent, as if dead, and then with a clarity no one else in that room had ever heard from an electrical device, it produced the sound of an announcer's voice: "This is amateur station W2AG at Yonkers, New York, operating on frequency modulation at two and a half meters." The audience was hearing something no one had thought possible: A glass of water was poured before the microphone in Yonkers; it sounded like a glass of water being poured. . . . A paper was crumpled and torn; it sounded like paper and not like a crackling forest fire. . . . Sousa marches were played from records and a piano solo and guitar number were performed. . . . The music was projected with a liveness rarely if ever heard before from a radio "music box." As our own common sense tells us, Armstrong had discovered a vastly superior radio technology. But at the time of his invention, Armstrong was working for RCA. RCA was the dominant player in the then dominant AM radio market. By 1935, there were a thousand radio stations across the United States, but the stations in large cities were all owned by a handful of networks. RCA's president, David Sarnoff, a friend of Armstrong's, was eager that Armstrong discover a way to remove static from AM radio. So Sarnoff was quite excited when Armstrong told him he had a device that removed static from "radio." But when Armstrong demonstrated his invention, Sarnoff was not pleased. "I thought Armstrong would invent some kind of a filter to remove static from our AM radio. I didn't think he'd start a revolution - start up a whole damn new industry to compete with RCA." Armstrong's invention threatened RCA's AM empire, so the company launched a campaign to smother FM radio. While FM may have been a superior technology, Sarnoff was a superior tactician. As one author described, "The forces for FM, largely engineering, could not overcome the weight of strategy devised by the sales, patent, and legal offices to subdue this threat to corporate position. For FM, if allowed to develop unrestrained, posed . . . a complete reordering of radio power . . . and the eventual overthrow of the carefully restricted AM system on which RCA had grown to power." RCA at first kept the technology in house, insisting that further tests were needed. When, after two years of testing, Armstrong grew impatient, RCA began to use its power with the government to stall FM radio's deployment generally. In 1936, RCA hired the former head of the FCC and assigned him the task of assuring that the FCC assign spectrum in a way that would castrate FM - principally by moving FM radio to a different band of spectrum. At first, these efforts failed. But when Armstrong and the nation were distracted by World War II, RCA's work began to be more successful. Soon after the war ended, the FCC announced a set of policies that would have one clear effect: FM radio would be crippled. As Lawrence Lessing described it, "The series of body blows that FM radio received right after the war, in a series of rulings manipulated through the FCC by the big radio interests, were almost incredible in their force and deviousness." To make room in the spectrum for RCA's latest gamble, television, FM radio users were to be moved to a totally new spectrum band. The power of FM radio stations was also cut, meaning FM could no longer be used to beam programs from one part of the country to another. (This change was strongly supported by AT&T, because the loss of FM relaying stations would mean radio stations would have to buy wired links from AT&T.) The spread of FM radio was thus choked, at least temporarily. Armstrong resisted RCA's efforts. In response, RCA resisted Armstrong's patents. After incorporating FM technology into the emerging standard for television, RCA declared the patents invalid - baselessly, and almost fifteen years after they were issued. It thus refused to pay him royalties. For six years, Armstrong fought an expensive war of litigation to defend the patents. Finally, just as the patents expired, RCA offered a settlement so low that it would not even cover Armstrong's lawyers' fees. Defeated, broken, and now broke, in 1954 Armstrong wrote a short note to his wife and then stepped out of a thirteenth story window to his death. This is how the law sometimes works. Not often this tragically, and rarely with heroic drama, but sometimes, this is how it works. From the beginning, government and government agencies have been subject to capture. They are more likely captured when a powerful interest is threatened by either a legal or technical change. That powerful interest too often exerts its influence within the government to get the government to protect it. The rhetoric of this protection is of course always public spirited; the reality is something different. Ideas that were as solid as rock in one age, but that, left to themselves, would crumble in another, are sustained through this subtle corruption of our political process. RCA had what the Causbys did not: the power to stifle the effect of technological change. The corporation squashed the little guy who threatened their empire with new technology - squashed him like a bug. It's not paranoia or hyperbole when it happens in real life. The moral of this story: "When introducing a new technology, use a strategy for acceptance that is as non-threatening as it can be to the interests of the status quo. Sometimes it's better to come in through the basement window or side door, than it is ringing the bell and walking in through the front door...think like a bug (and hope there is not a can of Raid nearby)." Posted on May 26, 2008 at 07:01 PM | Comments (0) Ctrl-Alt-Del: Time for a Reality Reset
We all know the routine, the crushing feeling when your computer locks up, the "Blue Screen of Death", those automatic messages ... You give it the "Three-Finger Salute," hold your breathe, and hope for the best..."did I hit Save any time recently?" You rapidly go through all Kubler-Ross's Five Stages of Grief...Denial ("this is nothing"); Anger ("F%^&ing Microsoft"); Bargaining ("Oh, just let my documents come back...oh, forget the documents, save my PC"); Depression ("I can't believe this is happening again...we are so screwed ... I don't know what else I could have done"); Acceptance (" You know, I could use a new laptop ... I didn't like this one so much anymore.") Most of the time, you get back on track after a minor hick up, maybe you have to go through the System Restore routine, maybe you hurriedly do the back-up that was three weeks overdue, breathe a sigh of relief, and move on. Some of the time, you take your lumps, pull up a previous version of the document, and try to remember what you had typed over the last thirty minutes - "quick, before I forget it." You may even tell yourself that what you typed a second time is actually better! That's where we are with wireless broadband - I can't actually bring myself to use the term Muni Wi Fi or Muni Wireless anymore, it catches in my throat, my fingers hurt to type it. There's no use denying it, this has been painful to watch the slow collapse of the dream fostered by early companies like Kite Networks, EarthLink, and MetroFi. Now, it's all over but the crying, basically. The sooner we all move through the Five Stages and get on with it, the better. Acceptance means a Reality Reset, where we shake our heads, splash cold water in our faces, and accept that we will not be able to have the fantasy that was the vision of Municipal Wireless - a private company will come in and build a network and everyone will get "Free Wi Fi," including the city government. I'm afraid that we will have city governments stuck in various stages of grief for a while, until Reality starts to look more attractive than the Righteous Indignation of the Victimized Public Official. Reality Reset 1. There is no such thing as a Free Lunch. This is one of the hardest things for adults to accept. Indeed, it is childish to hold on to the belief that you can get things for free. We learn through dating that there are expectations set when a very, very nice "gift" is accepted. We learn through buying and selling, gaining experience in the marketplace, learning that giving time to a vendor at the door or a salesperson on the phone is an actual commercial exchange - it rarely results in the promises that first come across the threshold, but it's worth the time if you learn something. We learn that the free pens we accept have about a gram of ink in them and are so cheap they're likely to explode and drip ink on our pants, shirt, or hands. "Free" is always subsidized by someone, somewhere, so there is someone picking up the tab out there, carrying an expectation of a payoff. There's an implied debt when a gift is accepted - I learned that when I told my parents "No Thanks" to their offer of tuition money and went out on my own at the age of 19 - their gift came with strings attached: I had to listen to them and take their "advice." It was a painful transition, but we got along much better when I became independent. There is always a sacrifice of quality when free is accepted. Paying for something should always be acceptable, IF there is a fair exchange of value - that is the definition of commerce. "You can't get something for nothing" is a primary lesson of adulthood that we all must accept and keep in mind, because we're constantly told the opposite by people who want something from us. Growing up means accepting reality, and one of the toughest lessons to learn and relearn is that "free" is not, in fact, "free." 2. Low Bid is Not Always Best Bid. If we can't have it for free, we often shouldn't even want it for cheap! Sorry folks. The Project Triangle, known by many other names, provides a basic pearl of wisdom, a lesson of reality that can be gained only through experience, because most of us don't want to believe it. But it is indeed a pearl. The Project Triangle says that there are three elements to any project: Time, Quality, and Price - you can focus on two out of three, but there is always a sacrifice involved to get those two. I wrote a good blog post about this on November 22, 2006. The Business Golden Triangle Maxim says, "Only two of these three are available to any consumer." To recognize its truth, just try to imagine getting just what you want that is very high quality, immediately, for very little money - that's a fantasy world. Or the polar opposite, getting something of very low quality over a long period, with project delays, while spending a lot - that's getting taken to the cleaners. So, the rational choices in a procurement or business decision are to pick two factors that are most important and relax the third constraint: 1) Fast and less expensive, but lower quality. Strategy: 1) Lower your standards (accept less quality or fewer options, usually achieved through extensive planning and negotiation between stakeholders to determine the must-have items and the nice-to-have items and then setting priorities). 2) High quality and less expensive, but takes more time. Strategy: Start the project earlier (to be a responsible steward of time as a resource, a city would start a low-grade project immediately to get a jump on things and move at their own pace, to allow adequate time to find savings and develop creative approaches that leverage existing assets or competitive advantages). 3) Fast and high quality, but costs more. Strategy: Pay more (budget more to accommodate a higher expense, create a strong business case to justify a financial strategy, identify alternate grant or funding sources, etc.). MetroNetIQ Archives: Learning to Live within Boundaries The Triangle is the essence of Project Management, because it's firmly based in the world of Reality, ruled by the Facts of Life. Accepting these rules up front is a key to happiness on the back end. 3. A changing environment demands adaptation; doing nothing is a choice too. The essence of denial is that if I don't recognize something, if I avoid facing it, then it doesn't exist. Living in denial is alternately seen as childish, immature, or unhealthy behavior. It's often called various things in shorthand: "Burying your head in the sand." "Running away from your problems." "Delaying the inevitable." Mature, healthy people recognize that living life with your eyes wide open is always preferable to the alternative. But often the truth can be so painful that we construct elaborate denial mechanisms that rationalize our courses of action as appropriate. One of the key things we hold on to is the fantasy that time is not in fact moving forward, that somehow things can stay the same. I have three coffee mugs that remind me of this fact every morning, after I have the coffee started, when I select a mug. There amid my wife's flower mugs and the souvenir mugs and the gimme mugs from the Blood Bank, are my three favorites, with pictures of my kids, my wife and kids, and me and the kids. The mugs in question are about 10 years old, 5 years old, and 2 years old, so the kid pictures are at various stages of cute (my son and daughter are 12 and 13 years old now). I cherish the memories of each stage, but am reminded each morning as well that they're rapidly moving through time, and there is not a damn thing I can do about it, but accept it and enjoy it. Similarly, the environment we live in is dynamic, and you cannot freeze things or keep at bay the forces of change. People move in and out of a community. Traffic increases or economic activity dwindles. Without a clear strategy to monitor a changing world and adapt a city or organization's strategy to manage it's position in that world, it become inevitable that one's position will decline. Any system faces decline without new energy being fed into it. The concept of Entropy is a physical reality, not readily understood, and even less readily accepted by the psyche - it says that left alone, all things will decay over time, from a state of order to a state of disorder. Quit investing in the future, and watch the world around you slip into decay. If the world is constantly changing, then one must constantly spend energy (time, money, etc.) to adapt in order to stay even, and spend even more energy (time, money, etc.) in order to move ahead and do better than the rest. Doing nothing is a choice, but in a highly dynamic environment, it becomes a choice to fall behind. 4. The world is now digital, demanding a strategy to coexist, to balance the ancient human elements of life with the efficiencies of a newly digital world. My last blog post was about a wireless toy that played around with an analog radio modulator tool - Mr. Microphone. It is a relic of our past, when High Tech was not digital. Gone too are the days when digital High Tech was a novelty, or even an option. Digital Integration is now an essential element of life. No longer is it the case where you could pretend that high tech did not matter - to pretend otherwise, to cling to old analog tools and processes, is to accept less efficiency and more cost. Not all things digital are good, necessary or even effective; to discern the mix between old and new requires an investment of time and attention, to gain the understanding and experience to tell the difference. The silicon chip is now pervasive, and increasingly, connectivity over an IP network is becoming just as pervasive. To deny the need for broadband is to deny reality. To deny the need for mobile broadband is equally evasive, because as new tools become available, they offer an adaptability challenge that we either accept or deny. Going through a digital transition is a matter of When, not If. 5. Life is a Series of Choices and Consequences. Individually and collectively, we each choose to be In the Game or On the Sidelines. There are costs and benefits to either choice, but the reality is that we do not get a third choice. The Reality of Freedom means that there are Choices and there are Consequences. Having to choose is indeed a burden, just as not having an ability to choose is a burden. Life is a burden, that's reality. Freedom of choice places a premium on education and learning to make good choices, profitable choices, beneficial choices, healthy choices, just choices. Refusing to make a choice is in itself a different kind of choice, with its own set of consequences, including the lack of experience that comes with being engaged in a project. Delaying a choice opportunity is a strategy that can be appropriate or inappropriate, given the circumstances at hand. Denying a choice opportunity, at least as an adult in a free society, is an aversion to accepting reality. Sometimes reality can present a series of "bad" choices, that can seem like the same as no choice at all. But in that case, we are forced to weigh the outcomes and choose the least bad option - that is reality - to say that there is no choice is to play the victim, to deny that you are in control. On this topic, I'm obliged to share a statement actually made by the CEO of a major corporation where I worked - I was only a week or two into the new job, when I took my first trip to corporate headquarters to attend an annual all-hands conference. The CEO gave a headliner speech, where he described the bleak business environment in our industry at the time and shared this pearl. "Folks, when you have to eat a shit sandwich, you're better off to take big bites." That was in 1995 - five years later, the 70 year old company was acquired. The CEO was right, but he also steered the company into a safe harbor as his final duty. At the time, I was shocked to hear those words in a public speech, but they stuck with me, 15 years later. The essence of good leadership in bad times is to make hard decisions that offer the best outcome over the long run, with the least pain in the short term. Reality in life is about accepting life as it comes at you and doing the best you can with what you have to work with at the time. The Bottom Line: God Bless Reality 1. There's No Such Thing as a Free Lunch It's not all that hard to analyze what went wrong and what we now face in regards to metropolitan broadband when you accept reality and review the recent past through the lens of reality. The reality we face is that all cities, all organizations, all communities will have to go through a Digital Transition sooner or later. I'd suggest a Digital Transformation, making the most of a necessary evil, along the lines of the Shit Sandwich analogy. The sooner we all adopt this mindset that Reality is just fine and put our energies into understanding what Reality means, letting go of the Fantasy that masqueraded for Reality a few years ago, the better off we all will be. It's up to the leaders among us to be the first to proclaim out loud the following Truths: 1. The Emperor Has No Clothes. Having accepted Reality as what it is, we can start having the adult conversation about what a future based on digital tools connected with ubiquitous broadband would look like, and how we can get from here to there. I'm ready to start talking about Digital Transformation if you are.
Posted on May 18, 2008 at 05:59 AM | Comments (0) A Good Strong Wind
I just heard the news about MetroFi selling its existing networks, and perhaps, the company itself (amply covered here, here, and here). I urge you to check out that good analysis - I guess the pain finally got too great, and the money ran out. I have to say, the image of a strong wind blowing away all the dead wood came to mind, no offense intended at all to MetroFi (or to EarthLink, or to Kite/Gobility). It's just that when the bloom goes off the rose, it really starts to stink pretty fast, doesn't it? This slow motion dying is driving me crazy!! I admire what these companies did, regret their lack of success, but can we move on already?? More after the jump. If I haven't mentioned it before, the project that keeps me sane these days is building a small (200 sq. ft.) outbuilding at my ranch(ette) in Dripping Springs. Since 1992 I've owned 20 acres of beautiful Texas Hill Country, what some would call "raw land," though I choose to call it a "ranch," being in Texas and all. The area is rapidly moving from rural to exurban, located about 25 miles/35 minutes from my house, and I've finally started on building something out there this spring. I'm using reclaimed cedar deck timber for the frame, and reclaimed cedar fencing for the exterior, and building a covered front porch and a narrow back deck hanging out over the gently downward-sloping hill. It will have a small loft and a gambrel (barn) roof when I'm finished - I'm going to need some help at some point. Because of the weathered fencing for siding, the cedar plank doors and shutters, and the tin roof, it'll look like it's been sitting out there about 100 years when I'm done. That's the plan anyway. I'm calling it my "eco-barn." It will have a wood shop down below and a small sleeping loft above. I've finished with a lot of the fun work, and I'm now facing an ugly task - clearing out all the dead wood that hangs around the construction site, because I've had to chain saw away dense cedar undergrowth and some pretty tall old cedar to make way for the barn and clear out the view of the scenic hills to the West. If you've never dealt with clearing mountain juniper, what we call cedar-chopping here in Texas, it's an ugly affair, with stickers everywhere and sharp sticks waiting to poke you in the eye. But until the dead wood is cleared away, it's hard to work on the new building - and therein lies the analogy for what I just read about MetroFi. I'm dreaming of a good strong wind to come along and blow all this dead wood away, so we can finally take stock, start afresh with new business models, and get on with it! But I'm afraid it will have to be more of a manual clearing effort, with painful labor that will take some time. At least that's what it looks like so far. But the sooner we can put Muni Wireless 1.0 behind us, and that means picking through the pieces and gleaning lessons, the sooner we can move on to Muni Wireless 2.0, no? Check out my previous post for more discussion on where we can go in the future, as soon as we're able to let go of this past. Posted on May 16, 2008 at 12:38 PM | Comments (0) Time for Free(mium) Wi Fi?Recently, too many people have been too quick to point out the misfires of early experiments with new wireless technologies as failures, challenging what went wrong and finding moral shortcomings among those who took risks to push out the envelope on how we all might get connected to the internet. For every article that documents lessons learned, it seems, there have been twenty or thirty that describe the failures and criticize the players as naive, deluded, hyped, ignorant, willfully blind, or corrupt. Civitium and other early industry promoters have taken a healthy dose of this criticism on the chin. As the consulting firm that advised many of the cities that sought to challenge the status quo with a new business model that gave city governments a seat at the table, Civitium is in for its fair share of critique. To be fair, they benefited from all the activity over the past few years, so maybe there's some balance there. But I don't think it's fair to place too much blame at the feet of pioneers like Greg Richardson and his partners - as consultants, in my view, they have their sleeves rolled up and they're trying out new things to see what will work on behalf of their clients. Consultants are change agents, but they work within heavy constraints - they take what they're given, by their clients and the market, and make the best of it. Civitium didn't tell EarthLink what to do, after all, but they did coach cities on how best to take advantage of what EarthLink and other motivated private sector providers offered. Greg and I have enjoyed comparing notes over the past four years as we've rambled along in this new industry, so I enjoyed our conversation when we spoke two days ago. Greg urged me to look at his blog post (see On the Issue of Free) from last weekend, where he mulled over recent events and what went wrong, how things could be looked at differently, and pondered the nature of the Free v. Pay arguments. I urge you to take some time and read it, because there are few who have seen what these guys have, so their insights have value. I've been doing my own fair share of pondering lately. Publicly, the metropolitan broadband story over the past week has been about the marriage of Clearwire and Sprint, about Cablevision getting Wi Fi religion, and about the sad final parting of the ways between EarthLink and the City of Philadelphia. And I've written a lot about all of this over the past week. It's inevitable that I see these latest public events through the lens of my own private experience. How can we do anything but that, after all? I've been consulting with city governments for two years. Like Greg, I'm privy to the human element of the struggles inside an organization that pains itself to work through these issues, and I understand better than most the constraints and dilemmas that must be worked around and balanced in order for progress to emerge as the finished product of a network project. Compare that perspective to the very public experience of journalists and commentators who merely skim the waves from the outside looking in, who pronounce judgment on innovative experiments conducted by highly dedicated individuals and groups, often based on regurgitated conventional wisdom about the way things should be - Monday morning quarterbacking, in many cases. "Where would we be if these same rigorous, unforgiving standards had been applied to some of the big breakthroughs that were achieved in our past?" I wondered this morning over my coffee. "In fact," I realized on further reflection, "all early pioneers were challenged by the same mindsets, that's just the nature of Progress, the eternal struggle between Change and the Status Quo. But those pioneers soldiered on, driven by some internal source, motivated to prove the doubters wrong, or to make a buck, it doesn't matter; in the end, the pioneers succeeded where everyone before them had failed, made a name for themselves, and we're all better off for their efforts." Human beings are a strange lot, no doubt. Despite the abundance of experience and wealth and good things we've created to progress out of the muck and sheer desperation that life has been about for most of our existence, most of us continue to look into the dark void that is the future and come away frightened of what awaits us - even those of us, especially those of us who have so much going for us already. Maybe we're afraid because we feel we have so much to lose? I'm afraid that too often we overestimate the downside, and underestimate the upside. Sure, we all have doubts about the future, but too many allow fear to rule their lives, taking the "safe" (conventional) course when presented with alternatives. "Better the Devil I know, than the one I don't," they too often say. The key problem with that course is that one gets stuck with the Devil...that mindset presupposes that any alternative will be equal to or worse than the status quo (perhaps because the status quo is already so damned good?). But why devalue the chance of success and dramatic improvement so readily? Such is the power of fear: "Better Not to Have Loved and thereby Avoid the Loss," they seem to say. Greg's blog reflected long on the experience that Netscape ran into when they sought to be paid for their efforts to develop the first internet browser software - imagine that, productizing their successful research in order to recover costs and make a buck! The nerve! But what Netscape discovered as the new market unfolded was that their potential customers didn't yet fully value what they had brought to the table. So they learned by experience that they were better off giving it away. Such is life as an Internet pioneer, I guess. While Netscape ultimately faded away, their impact didn't. To the contrary, I'm using their browser to post this blog - Mozilla Firefox is the descendant of their early work. That new form of economics has been one of the most astounding things about the bizarre world of the internet. And it sounds to me, like it did to Greg, a lot like access to outdoor Wi Fi in public spaces. But when innovators in wireless access sought to apply these new internet market rules to Wi Fi access, they were criticized as idealists, because conventional wisdom says that internet access is a service that should be paid for - that's what the cable and telecom ISPs do, after all. And capital and operating costs must be recovered for a model to be sustained - not arguing at all with that, I just don't think we were creative enough the first time around. Of course there are multiple nuances to consider as we analyze what happened - and EarthLink's own corporate motivations clouded these experiments in municipal wireless, after all - but one key take away is that you can't sell something to a market that is not yet ready to buy and that has ready substitutes at an affordable price. To get people to try something new, sometimes you have to give it away, removing that barrier to experimentation. Think of the sample tables at grocery stores...Sometimes, you even have to pay them to take it. It's just not easy breaking in a new product in a new market. Most internet users don't yet understand why they would even need to access broadband when they're not sitting down in front of a computer. Mobile broadband is still too new, but then, not too long ago, cellular phones were for rich businesspeople, I had a pager that worked just fine, thank you very much. Consider these points then, as an adjunct to Greg's thoughts on the nature of Free in regards to Wi Fi. 1. Not Free, Subsidized. I grew up in the 1960s, watching Free TV - sure, it was only 2-3 channels of content, depending on the market, and we usually got a Native American "Big Chief" test pattern at midnight when TV programming went off for the night, but it was still a relatively new medium - we forget how new Wi Fi still is, much newer than even TV was in 1965. The business model back then was broadcasting advertising-subsidized content to end devices that the consumer bought and owned. The network operator ran the national network, with local franchisees running local operations and buying content from national networks who procured the content from creative talent in NY and LA. Big advertisers paid for the privilege of gaining access to the viewing public through the network. Local advertisers dealt directly with local franchisees. The network operator and the local franchisee made buckets of cash by selling advertising, not unlike the business model for commercial broadcast radio, on which the TV model was based. We still enjoy "Free" radio broadcasts, in fact, still available in your car or on a nightstand near you. But now you have an option to avoid the commercials by subscribing to satellite radio for a nominal monthly fee, which is gaining traction and growing subscribers, in part by avoiding the commercials, but also by providing more value than you can get with free radio. For that matter, newspapers and magazine publishers played a variation of this game as well, receiving similar support from advertising revenue, although readers paid a nominal fee for the content, thereby subsidizing the cost of production and distribution. The key point: Free was never really ever Free, so much as it was Subsidized - we paid for the right to see entertainment content not with dollars and cents, but with our time and attention to commercial content - we had to watch commercials! But it was perceived and marketed as Free, and that's the same way it could be with Wi Fi - subsidized, but perceived as Free. 2. Freemium. The Freemium model on the internet is a Web 2.0 phenomenon where a start up first gives away its product / software / service in order to generate interest and create a user base, then offers a premium version with more features, better quality, etc. for a small fee. From Wikipedia: "Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base." This is a modern variation on the Free (ad-subsidized) broadcast TV model above, in so much as its intent is to generate interest and attract a broad user base. It's correlated with the Long Tail analysis by Chris Anderson of Wired magazine. Accepting that search costs on the Internet are near zero and that users can and will find you if you have what they need, it suggests that the logical thing to do is to encourage people to find you by putting out bait. The nature of the new economics is that one can make decent money with a relatively small user base and at a relatively low price, if the payments are repeated monthly, and costs are kept ridiculously low - in essence, that's the Web 2.0 storyline. 3. Commodity Services. Based on costs, IP has turned internet access and VOIP telephony service into a commodity business, but service fees have been kept artificially high for the time being by keeping the number of providers artificially low. This artificial scarcity is consciously engineered by the incumbent service providers with the intent of preserving a very lucrative revenue source - and I frankly can't blame them, I'd no doubt do the same if I were them. When you're on top of the mountain, your job is to kick off others who try to displace you. That's called rational corporate self-interest (which is not, by the way, always the same thing as good public policy). But Municipal Wi Fi came along and offered an alternative that challenged that old "captive customer" business model, which depends on a limited number of options for consumers. The challenge Wi Fi Mesh-based service faced was that consumers were not yet used to getting mobile broadband anywhere they went, and didn't yet value it enough to pay for it - they didn't and still don't know why they should pay for it, so few of them actually do - I'm not surprised, are you? And marketing Wi Fi as a substitute for fixed wire line access was a BIG mistake, because quality of service is not what they said it would be, certainly not comparable to cable or DSL broadband in many cases, and the inevitably strong market competition that early entrants went up against was deadly. A key lesson of early experiments (Google in Mountain View, etc.) was that far more users would come try the service if it were free than if there was a fee attached, and many would grow used to the service over time - and free service had the added benefit of having much lower operating costs by avoiding the billing and high levels of customer service that for-fee service would require. Hmmm. that looks a lot like the Freemium model above to me. Give it away at first, then once consumers value it, start charging a small fee, or series of small fees, or make money off the network traffic it generates. If one understands that one has to create a user base with a new product before charging for it - no value, no revenue - then that's where early models went wrong (among other things!) - they were compelled by investors to monetize private sector investment with aggressive subscriber acquisition models whose subscriber revenues would pay off the network capital AND operating costs in an acceptably short time period. Not. Gonna. Happen. 4. Public Subsidization. And if one accepts that the Freemium model makes sense, then, "How the hell," one may ask, "are you going to pay for the damn network? With Pixie Dust?" So goes the frustration of those who pride themselves on having their feet placed firmly on the ground. The problem is that this Freemium model is an operating model, it still requires some cash to launch a network, and it leaves nobody there to pay for the initial capital costs - after all, it arose as a Web 2.0 model, where a Network exists to start with, and that's not the case when it comes to outdoor Wi Fi. That's where municipalities come in as a natural fit, because they have an opportunity to save budget spending by implementing mobile IP applications, but they need a network on which to run those budget saving applications. With sufficient business planning, they will see that they can either own these networks themselves or act as anchor tenants for a private provider, with acceptable risk. Either model will work, but the city has to do the heavy lifting in order to see the light. No avoiding the sit-ups, I'm afraid. When a city acts as a catalyst to bring a network in, they make a Freemium business model possible as well. 5. Private Subsidization. There's yet another alternative. A smart cable (Cablevision) has caught on to all of this and has realized that they can add a 4th leg to their triple play with mobile broadband via Wi Fi Mesh, giving it away to their own customer base as a means of locking in customers. That move changes the customers' value perception on cable service ("now you can take it with you when you leave the house!") and hopefully lowers or mitigates churn, the bane of network subscriber operations. Going on the offensive this way by changing the value proposition for their service is smart. What else is a small cable to do to stay competitive? Here then is an open door, if companies will just walk through it. It will be hard to do at first, I admit. But if the telecom and cable incumbents in any of these markets where there is a municipal wireless network would just seek to buy access and then give it away as a reward for their customers, as Cablevision plans to do, they'd find that it's a relatively low marketing cost. It's especially low when compared to some other ways that providers currently spend their money (lobbying for protection from market forces, for instance?). When compared to the cost of losing an existing customer, the real threat that incumbent providers face, giving away Wi Fi access is pretty cheap insurance. There are legs with this strategy, we'll see more of it, but it requires a motivated ISP to go there. This would put incumbents in the position of stimulating more broadband usage in a local area, which is commensurate with their grand strategy, after all. The Bottom Line We are all to some extent still trapped in conventional paradigms of internet access as a service that we buy, just like telephone or cable service. We have a ways to go to reach the point where the market accepts that internet access can be a gateway service that opens up the consumer to an array of other services that they can buy over the internet. It's a two-tier problem, in fact: 1) we need a last mile wireless broadband infrastructure and a way to pay for it; and 2) we need a new user paradigm and business model that is more expansive than our current way of using the internet and doing business. When all that happens, Free(mium) Wi Fi should gain traction. And, the aggressive provider that chooses to be bold, to give away both Internet Access and VOIP in exchange for long-term lock in on some other type service? My bet is that they will kill the competition over time. But I think we still have a long way to go before we see that, as there are too many players right now who see free access or free VOIP as anathema, a non-starter, like preaching "socialist" health care to a conservative. They won't listen. If the choice is between cannibalizing their existing revenues and staying with the status quo, after all, they have a point. The elephant in the room is that current providers haven't figured out a new way of providing value, competing, and making money - their current model is still way too lucrative, after all, for them to be all that creative. And cities are not yet truly pressed to be really innovative, not that many of them. They are waiting on a few to go forward and succeed, then the rest will follow. "The line forms at the right - the timid need not apply....Next!" I wish there were better news, but it looks to me like this will all just take time to sort out...Sigh...
Posted on May 16, 2008 at 10:16 AM | Comments (0) Rumors of Death Greatly ExaggeratedIt seems appropriate to publish this good study that looks at what comes after we say prayers over the dead husk of Municipal Wi Fi 1.0 - aka the Big City Free model... I urge you to check out this report from a few weeks back, for one of the most comprehensive reviews of the current state of municipal wireless in the US. (See Municipal Wi-Fi 2.0: As large-scale, for-profit projects falter, innovative new models emerge. The bottom line conclusion - Municipal Wi Fi 2.0 is seen in projects based on municipal applications and other areas of innovation ... but no more Free Wi Fi, or Field of Dreams build-it-and-they-will-come ... they did (build it), and they didn't (come) Posted on May 15, 2008 at 08:01 PM | Comments (0) D-I-V-O-R-C-EWell, that's it, they're splitting the sheets, the clothes are flying out the apartment window as we speak. Earthlink has called it quits and is pulling its equipment down off the streetlights of Philadelphia. Like me, you no doubt have friends who have gone through a divorce. Or perhaps you have yourself. It's a terribly awkward and painful time. Many outside the relationship see the split coming way before the actual event itself. So gut-wrenching is the process itself that there's a long sigh and a painful denouement when the divorce is actually final. Then, there comes a long period of adjustment to a new paradigm, where the parties recover. But, it's not just the parties themselves to the divorce who must adjust - the need to realign falls on all of us who count ourselves within the sphere of the divorced parties. I've lost good friends to divorce, despite my best efforts - even though I vowed to stay friends with both the man and woman in the divorce - we were close friends as couples, after all - but it most often has proven to be well nigh on impossible and one or both friendships fade slowly away. There's a new dynamic at work in the social fabric. We've lost several families from our church membership in the same manner. But life goes on.
So, with the news yesterday that the split between Earthlink and the City of Philadelphia has been finalized - finally - it feels like a divorce to me. What does it mean for all of us in the sphere of this highly-watched marriage? This first big municipal wireless deal was held up as a model of things to come, after all. We scrutinized this union as it unfolded .. analyzing it step by step. I'm reminded of the Fairytale Wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Di, back on July 29, 1981. It was so beautiful when they came together as Prince and Princess, but so ugly when they split... This feels to me like the second shoe finally hitting the floor. It's time to move beyond this crash and burn of Muni Wi Fi 1.0. The business model failed, but the potential of the technology lives on. It's important that we don't throw out the baby with the bathwater, which many have already done, so eager are they to put the final nails in the coffin. (Let's see how many metaphors I can string together)... Personally, I've already moved on, having processed Earthlink's withdrawal from the industry in a series of posts last year, in August and these two posts in September (see Reader's Digest Condensed Version and Big City MuniFi and Sand Castles - Fun While They Lasted). I urge you to check those posts out for a thorough discussion on what happened and what's in store. What's more appealing to me is to focus on what comes next, because the problems that the Earthlink model sought to address sure haven't gone away, just because this first solution proved itself to be a turkey. I think there are three trends to watch... 1. Public Ownership of a Wireless Network based on Municipal Cost Savings - see my recent white paper, Lowest Risk, Publicly-Owned Networks and the upcoming announcement on San Marcos, TX's plans for wireless broadband (MetroNetIQ is completing an engagement with San Marcos). There's lots and lots more to come on mobile broadband - short and sweet, Earthlink was an experiment that failed, with high visibility and emotion (NOT the end of an era, as many will make it out to be). In the meantime, sit back and enjoy the show, because it will be one hell of a ride.
Posted on May 13, 2008 at 06:58 PM | Comments (0) Big News Week!We can go on for months and, seemingly, years, with relative balance in the environment, then along comes a week with some major disruptions. First, on Wednesday May 7, there was Clearwire's deal with Sprint, which brings renewed promise to WiMAX, no doubt just in time to help the shareholders at Clearwire and Sprint to sleep a little better at night, at least for the short-term. The details of that deal remain to develop, but nobody can discount the disruptive effect. See Forbes and WiMAX.com coverage. Second, on Thursday May 8, we saw another development. It looks like some movement among incumbent cables and telcos regarding the usefulness of unlicensed wireless broadband - see the coverage of Cablevision's decision in Long Island at Daily Wireless, Muniwireless, and Wi Fi Networking News (May 8). Third, the continued bad news on the municipal wireless front, as early business plans unravel. See the Earthlink / Philadelphia squabble here, and for broader coverage on Earthlink's withdrawals, see Dailywireless coverage. These trends all come together when we look at the environment as a whole. Mobility is accepted as a necessary element of broadband communication, and we are seeing the worlds of mobility (wireless) and capacity (wireline) starting to come together. A lot of the argument about what is "right" and what "should" happen often boils down to competing perspectives on the world and the natural world order coming into conflict as this convergence happens. Check out the debate thread over on MuniWireless about a retrenchment in Sydney, Australia from one week ago, which I was clued into (Thanks Jason at Strix Systems!) and couldn't help but join after reading (see my comments reprinted below). This is a fascinating thread, so against my better judgment, I'm jumping in (moth to the flame). First, just because city-wide Wi Fi Mesh hasn't worked yet doesn't mean it won't ever, or that it shouldn't. We're still early in the game, so failures of experiments to date may just be learning moments leading to ultimate success (think Edison and the light bulb and Marconi and wireless - lots of widely criticized failures before ultimate game-changing success). Second, just because Earthlink led a marching band down a dead-end alley doesn't mean that all parades are bad, just that particular one. We should all be more discerning in the future. Third, just because incumbents have been against this trend because it threatened their comfortable status quo doesn't mean they're evil or corrupt (though some certainly are) - it may also be that they've been insufficiently motivated. Things change: witness the news this week that cables are starting to drop wireless zones into their territory, and the jury's still way out on the stimulus effect of the Clearwire/Sprint WiMAX announcement. Fourth, free was never "free," rather it was "subsidized." The right subsidy model may well still be waiting out there to be discovered, and we may well still find a home for free access in the right markets. As long as wireless access provides value, it will find a market, and free will be less and less relevant. There's a lot of confusion in this argument, but there are rational positions still to be taken on all sides. What we need to be mindful of is throwing out the baby with the bathwater...unlicensed wireless technology has a future, we're just trying to figure out what exactly it is. There are more mistakes yet to be made, but they too will bring lessons and we'll all get smarter (let's hope!). Posted on May 09, 2008 at 02:49 PM | Comments (0) From Irving to Irvine in Ten Days, By Way of San MarcosI haven't posted a significant article on this site for 2-3 weeks, and I'm having withdrawals. I'm sitting now in a hotel room in Irvine, CA, after attending a remarkable exercise in regional coordination yesterday, where I helped to present results of a study I've been involved in for the past six months. Orange County is leading an effort to investigate its options for regional collaboration of a wireless broadband infrastructure, and they hosted a Business Summit yesterday attended by about 50 local and regional government leaders. I'll post more on that meeting in the next few days. Last week, I spent three days in Irving, TX, where Broadband Properties magazine hosted a Summit, with the focus of the discussion mostly on FTTH, although a smattering of discussion on wireless options was thrown in. I'll post more on that meeting as well in the near term. Finally, in between these two road trips, I've been wrapping up work on a consulting contract I've had with the university town of San Marcos, which sits just south of my hometown of Austin, TX. I've been engaged with San Marcos in some capacity or another for nearly two years, since June 2006, when I first made a presentation to a staff group. City leaders are now preparing to make a decision on buying a wireless mesh network, with a vote expected at the May 20 city council meeting. I feel like I've earned my PhD in Metropolitan Broadband through my in-depth work with San Marcos, and I'll be sharing what I've learned over the coming months. For starters, I've put together two documents that I'd like to share with the readers of this site (you'll need to register to download these, but I assure you that it's a painless process, well worth the time!). First is a paper titled Lowest Risk Publicly Owned Networks, which is a short (3 page) argument on why public ownership offers particular advantages to a city considering its broadband connectivity strategy. Second is a paper titled Wi Fi Mesh Economics - Costs, which describes the cost elements of a 10-sq. mile mesh network, which can easily be divided by 10 to come up with a cost/sq mi, for help in estimating about what it might cost your city to build its own network. Taken together, these documents offer interested city leaders a strong business rationale to start a metropolitan broadband project. While starting is only a first step, with multiple steps to follow, one must start by taking a first step if one is ever to finish and achieve a worthwhile objective...I've discovered that in 2008, there remains no reason for a city to put off starting a metropolitan broadband project. Do not fall into the common trap of using the cacophony of bad news about municipal wireless and the EarthLink withdrawal from the market as an excuse to put off a project - that's just what it is, an EXCUSE for inaction. In fact, we've now moved beyond prudence when it comes to metropolitan broadband. I believe that it is now imprudent NOT to start a wireless broadband project, given what we know, so strong are the benefits of broadband to a community. In short, the opportunity costs of not starting a project now exceed the costs of starting a project. The prudent city leader must now move beyond study to taking action. Posted on May 09, 2008 at 11:20 AM | Comments (0) Net Neutrality for Non-Science Majors(Nearly 33 million downloads of this video - how does that translate into Gold and Platinum status??) [Note: it's been a busy month for me, as I work to bring the San Marcos network from concept into reality. We're close to a solution and a vote, hopefully by the end of April. I filed this post away last Saturday, and only now got around to writing it up...patience, patience. ] For the casual reader, I think even the term "Net Neutrality" is enough to make the eyes roll and hasten them to turn the page. That topic combines the best of Public Policy, Technology, and Politics. Yeaaaaaaa! So I was intrigued when I read an article in the popular press the other day that actually put an interesting spin on the topic, made it readable for a change...In Beware the New New Thing, NY Times guest columnist Damian Kulash (lead singer for the group OK Go, an Internet music sensation - be sure to watch the video above), lays it out for the time-pressed technophobe in us all. If you haven't been following the debate on net neutrality, you're not alone. The details of the issue can lead into realms where only tech geeks and policy wonks dare to tread, but at root there's a pretty simple question: How much control should network operators be allowed to have over the information on their lines? Let me repeat that key phrase, because he nails the issue in paragraph 3: How much control should network operators be allowed to have over the information on their lines? He goes on to carry the discussion into "Common Carriage" laws - brave soul - and actually states the case pretty plainly that the continued success of the Internet depends upon its continued openness. Most people assume that the Internet is a democratic free-for-all by nature - that it could be no other way. But the openness of the Internet as we know it is a byproduct of the fact that the network was started on phone lines. The phone system is subject to "common carriage" laws, which require phone companies to treat all calls and customers equally. They can't offer tiered service in which higher-paying customers get their calls through faster or clearer, or calls originating on a competitor's network are blocked or slowed. These laws have been on the books for about as long as telephones have been ringing, and were meant to keep Bell from using its elephantine market share to squash everyone else. And because of common carriage, digital data running over the phone lines has essentially been off limits to the people who laid the lines. But in the last decade, the network providers have argued that since the Internet is no longer primarily run on phone lines, the laws of data equality no longer apply. They reason that they own the fiber optic and coaxial lines, so they should be able to do whatever they want with the information crossing them. Just as an aside, I spent nearly two years of my life nearly 15 years ago as a regulatory lobbyist for an electric company, forcing me to sit through interminable hearings at the Texas Public Utility Commission. I cannot forget the detailed discussions in rate cases around electric and telephone companies rights to recover the costs of their infrastructure through regulated rates...so it sticks in my craw when they talk about their "ownership" of these assets - no doubt, as the telephone companies transition to private status, they build more and more of their infrastructure on their own dime. But a considerable amount of the copper wires they currently leverage today to provide DSL were built under the auspices and protections of their status as regulated monopolies, where in a sense, we the public all owned the infrastructure - it was a common good. They managed over the ensuing years through a series of legislative and regulatory victories and deals they struck where they did not live up to their end, to transfer those assets over to the private side where they could use them to produce unregulated income ... So file that one away in the back of your mind as you keep reading. Under current law, they're right. They can block certain files or Web sites for their subscribers, or slow or obstruct certain applications. And they do, albeit pretty rarely. Network providers have censored anti-Bush comments from an online Pearl Jam concert, refused to allow a text-messaging program from the pro-choice group Naral (saying it was "unsavory"), blocked access to the Internet phone service (and direct competitor) Vonage and selectively throttled online traffic that was using the BitTorrent protocol. When the network operators pull these stunts, there is generally widespread outrage. But outright censorship and obstruction of access are only one part of the issue, and they represent the lesser threat, in the long run. What we should worry about more is not what's kept from us today, but what will be built (or not built) in the years to come. The essence of the argument to block traffic is that a privately-held resource is constrained and the owners "have to" block traffic in order to maintain service for all. They "have to" block traffic of a few abusers in order to protect the service levels of the rest of their customers. But this argument presupposes that they are managers of a scarce commodity, victims of fate, in a sense. They create the very conditions that constrain them, then argue for remedies that would further limit competition. Orwellian. In point of fact, the arguments made against Net Neutrality are ultimately based on the availability of a critical infrastructure. The current owners of the infrastructure are banking on maintaining their hegemony over the new network - the bigger, faster one, yet to be built, which will be even more profitable. And they need protection in the laws - they need their leveraged position to be set into concrete - for their plans to come to fruition. We hate when things are taken from us (so we rage at censorship), but we also love to get new things. And the providers are chomping at the bit to offer them to us: new high-bandwidth treats like super fast high-definition video and quick movie downloads. They can make it sound great: newer, bigger, faster, better! But the new fast lanes they propose will be theirs to control and exploit and sell access to, without the level playing field that common carriage built into today's network. They won't be blocking anything per se - we'll never know what we're not getting - they'll just be leapfrogging today's technology with a new, higher-bandwidth network where they get to be the gatekeepers and toll collectors. The superlative new video on offer will be available from (surprise, surprise) them, or companies who've paid them for the privilege of access to their customers. If this model sounds familiar, that's because it is. It's how cable TV operates. We can't allow a system of gatekeepers to get built into the network. The Internet shouldn't be harnessed for the profit of a few, rather than the good of the many; value should come from the quality of information, not the control of access to it. So, if you want the telecoms to be more like the cables, relax and let things happen. But it doesn't have to be that way. Other companies in other industries with a legacy of working in a competitive market readily see a similar situation in a dramatically different way. For some parallel examples: there are only two guitar companies who make most of the guitars sold in America, but they don't control what we play on those guitars. Whether we use a Mac or a PC doesn't govern what we can make with our computers. The telephone company doesn't get to decide what we discuss over our phone lines. It would be absurd to let the handful of companies who connect us to the Internet determine what we can do online. Congress needs to establish basic ground rules for an open Internet, just as common carriage laws did for the phone system. The Internet, for now, is the type of place where my band's homemade videos find a wider audience than the industry's million-dollar productions. A good idea is still more important than deep pockets. If network providers are allowed to build the next generation of the Net as a pay-to-play system, we will all pay the price. Kudos to Damian for making a complex issue plain. It's not an easy thing to do. Takes a creative mind, I guess, to cut through the bull to get to the heart of the matter. I guess last Saturday was a big day for the Internet at the NY Times (the mainstream guys were off for the weekend?), because there was yet another article on the Op Ed pages, this one about the potential to use the Internet for an unsavory practice - digging into your private lives. The Already Big Thing on the Internet: Spying on Users. This article underscores the argument for a robust, well-regulated Internet industry. We need the Internet, but we also need protection from its abuse. Having a variety of providers to go to would provide a market-based protection against those who would abuse the trust of their customers and take advantage of their privileged positions as network owners by digging into our private files. (See Warrantless Wiretapping). And, needless to say, from my perspective, metropolitan broadband addresses both these issues, infrastructure and security, because it provides more robust competition and an alternative means to build out critical information infrastructure. Posted on April 12, 2008 at 09:47 AM | Comments (0) Back to the Drawing BoardIn an editorial this morning titled Broadening Broadband, the NY Times Editorial Board indicates that it reads its own paper (eventually) - see this article from March 22: Hopes for Wireless Cities Fade as Internet Providers Pull Out) and says, in effect, and incredibly, EarthLink should fulfill the commitments it made. To borrow a turn of phrase from my friend, John McCain, "That, my friends, is not likely." But I do give them credit for the last sentence, in which direction lies wisdom... The reality is that cities have to go back to the drawing board, broadband is an essential commodity, a necessity for modern society. They get that right. Let's give them credit. Posted on March 29, 2008 at 04:28 AM | Comments (0) A Dozen Roses, Kid Gloves or a Baseball Bat?
Hate me if you must for inflicting this clip of William Shatner "Singing" - if you can really call it that - on you. I just couldn't resist. It's so bad ... it's good! Somehow, this performance captures - a little - the way I feel about working with Incumbent ISPs. I have to admit, based on my experience so far, I feel somewhat helpless, not unlike the way I've felt with women most of my life, and with my wife these past 18 years...should I just love the incumbent ISPs, simply love them, merely love them, love them, love them? Naaaaaaaaah...don't think it's quite the same thing ... So, my question for all who read this is this - should a new market entrant or a city team try to win over the the incumbent ISP when engaging in a metropolitan broadband project (Dozen Roses)? work with them (Kid Gloves)? or just forgo the pain and move forward and accept the consequences, hoping they'll come around or be pounded into submission (Baseball Bat)? Believe it or not, I lean towards the middle alternative, and here's why...we need the incumbents to be successful...they have so much going for them, and they can do so much harm ... it's to the advantage of the entire community to have an established network operator or better yet, two or more, fall into line behind a community wireless project. Impossible? Maybe, but it's worth a try and here's why... This morning, after writing this two-part post about Sascha Meinrath's recent essay on Municipal Wireless and Best Practices (here and here), I went back to his web site and left the following comment: That said, sensitivity for negative impacts on beneficiaries of the status quo must be weighed and balanced with the needs of all citizens and the benefits to the community at large that come from a progressive project like metropolitan broadband infrastructure. All parties, including the incumbents, benefit when the community gains a new resource like ubiquitous broadband. One can make the strong argument that we have long erred on the side of the status quo, and that it's time we began to err a little on the side of progress, especially when it comes to broadband connectivity. So it is up to the leaders in a community, in both the public and private sector, to explain these purported community benefits in a well delineated vision. And it's up to those leaders to lead the broadband incumbents away from their narrow focus on self-interest to a more expanded assessment of holistic community benefit - I believe they can do that through public discussion and by shining a light on the complex facts of such social change. The sooner that incumbent service providers recognize that they're a part of a community as well as a profit-taking corporate entity, in deed as well as in word, the sooner the impediments to progress will be removed and the sooner the benefits of ubiquitous community broadband will be realized. My more detailed comments can be found on my website MetroNetIQ at www.metronetiq.com - keep up the good work, Sascha! I felt compelled to elaborate on this comment because, you see, policy perspectives and best practices are all well and good - in a vacuum - but get out into a local political environment and try to pursue an objective in opposition to the local cable and/or telecom incumbent - and come back and tell me how that worked out for you. I'm betting that you'll find that their senior management staff are registered lobbyists in Washington and the state capital, that their management staff sit on local boards and commissions, that they run the Chamber of Commerce, that they pay significant municipal franchise fees into the city coffers, that they routinely donate to local charities and sponsor local softball teams and kids' Little League. Let's face it folks, the incumbent ISPs are no dummies, and this is what they do for a living - they ARE the Status Quo, and the status quo is quite good now from where they sit, thank you very much. They make a pretty profit on broadband, and they have no conceivable idea why that should change. In fact, they make so much money from broadband now, just over the last decade, that they've grown to like it and it's become such an important part of their portfolio, that it's even perceived as a threat to them if anything about the current situation were to change. When you're on top of the pile, "change" is not a popular word. "Change" means going down, "stasis" means staying on top. So, they're here, they're an integral part of the community, and you ignore or offend them at your peril. Just ask the FCC...it's the same, from the federal level, to the state level, to the local level - really, when you think about it, managing political outcomes has perhaps become over time their key core competence ... forget managing networks. Though they are good at that, you have to admit. And so I come back to a new way to look at incumbent ISPs. They're important citizens of the community. They deserve respect for what they've accomplished, and for the vital services they offer day-in and day-out. But they also need to be prodded to move ahead, because they are comfortable where they are, and their comfort can become an impediment for the greater good of the community. They look at change with a jaundiced eye - they don't trust it. So I opt for the middle path: forget the Roses, don't even try, begging earns you no respect when approaching a powerful player - they will dismiss you and crush you...and forget the Baseball Bat - if you haven't noticed, they're richer than you, they're better connected than you, they have local market knowledge better than almost any, they have staff who can vote in a block to keep a politician in line ... and they're sitting on a pile of cash, so they can outspend you. So, forget the baseball bat folks. So, what about the Kid Gloves option. I've become a recent advocate of Kid Gloves. Because this is a path of respect, and not just for the incumbent ISP, but also for the metropolitan broadband project promoter. Moving down this path should also help in establishing a valuable link between the powers of the present- the power of the status quo - and the power of the future - the power of change and innovation. Whether they realize it or not, those who hold the status quo need the power of change, because they often face strong internal resistance to change and innovation. And the world they operate in is changing, whether they admit it or not. The smarter ones know that already and will be receptive to a Kid Glove treatment that offers them a way to profit from change, a way to turn lemons into lemonade, a way to get ahead of the competition. So, without further ado, here is something to make you and the incumbent ISP think twice about a metropolitan broadband project that may be coming to their area whether they like it or not. Reasons an Incumbent ISP Should Support a Community Broadband Project 1. Wireless broadband is a new mobile broadband service that incumbents can purchase from the city or provider on a pay-as-you-go wholesale basis (in account bundles) and then resell to current and new subscribers for a profit, but without having to invest capital in the infrastructure needed to provide that service. They may choose a "take-your-broadband-with-you-when-you-leave-the-house" add-on service that incumbents can add to their service bundle. If they were able to buy the service wholesale for app. $5/mo and resell it for $8 - $10/mo, they'd have a clean path to good margins. Let's face it, there could be more benefits to the smart incumbent than risks when a wireless broadband network comes to town. By seeing the glass as half full, by envisioning the opportunity to grow a larger pie, rather than losing slices to a competitor, an incumbent can turn a project in its territory into a major plus, if they so choose. This is, I hope, a glimpse into the future. I'm reminded of Green Eggs and Ham ... in fact, if they try it, incumbent ISPs may just find that there's lots to like about a community broadband project in "their" backyard. Posted on March 27, 2008 at 09:10 PM | Comments (0) Muni Schmuni, Part 2Yesterday I introduced a dialogue on "what's in a name?" and asked "is it appropriate to still call this industry 'Municipal Wireless?'" I highlighted especially a very well written essay by community wireless activist Sascha Meinrath, and we left off still needing to address the five Best Practices that Sascha listed at the end of his essay. The list and my comments below. First, Sascha highlighted the basic conflict in the municipal wireless debate as "liberation vs. lock-in," drawing a comparison to municipal franchising and grants of exclusivity by cities to private service providers. What cities want is an open platform to support public use and new applications. When The Economist reported in January that open networks are necessary to support next-generation networking and the global competitiveness of the United States, it opened up debate about the wisdom of our sole reliance on free-market solutions for broadband networking. What private corporations have implemented are closed systems using proprietary hardware, software and services. Such systems may seem good on paper, but as history is teaching us, their many points of failure makes them unreliable in practice. So Sascha set up a debate on whether a system should be open or closed. I would submit that we are still in the early stages and while we can discuss ideals, we should also be practical: any network is better than no network at all...but, the necessary requirement must be on a practical and sustainable business model. Sascha then went on to suggest his five best practices: Utilize open technology. The smart choice for municipalities is to require open standards that support interoperability and an easily upgradeable modular design. Too many wireless broadband networks in this country use proprietary technologies that are far more expensive and far less dynamic than other systems available today. Open technology alternatives like WiFiDog (Ile Sans Fil), Austin Wireless (LessNetworks), CUWiN (Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network), and FreiFunk/FunkFeuer (Berlin/Vienna) may not have the public relations or marketing budgets of proprietary solutions, but that should not excuse municipalities from seriously considering them. The success of the Internet itself is pred | ||||
