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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 |
Broadband, Meet Energy: ecomergence website launchedHappy New Year to all who may come across these writings! 2009 is set to be the year where broadband and energy finally come together. From the electric utility perspective, 2009 will see tremendous focus on Clean Tech and Smart Grid, where broadband will be used as a transport network to bring back sensory data from out on the grid, most notably, automated meter data. From the broadband communications perspective, high speed connectivity will come to be seen as an indispensable piece of the solution to achieve greater efficiency in energy consumption, as businesses, organizations and residences drive to eliminate wasteful energy consumption at the urging of the federal government, state and local governments, and their local utilities. In light of the growing connection between energy and broadband, I've launched two new websites recently. First, there is Cake2Bread, the blog I started writing the day before Thanksgiving. The theme of this blog is to track the changes in behavior and culture as economic pressure and the inclination to Go Green pull us back from the extremes of an overheated consumer culture to a more fundamental appreciation for the simpler things in life. Second, there is ecomergence, the commercial website for my consulting practice. The word "ecomergence" signifies five fundamental concepts coming together, as is noted on the front page of the site: ecomergence - noun 1. an economic solution that emphasizes greater control of expenses through improved business processes and more effective purchasing: "Respect Limits" Check them out when you have time. Happy New Year to All, and keep your eyes peeled for these two threads, broadband and energy, to start winding together in the months ahead. Posted on January 01, 2009 at 03:20 PM | Comments (0) Time to Consider AlternativesI'm beginning to think that the profile of the city that opts to take matters into their own hands when it comes to metropolitan broadband infrastructure, given the bad press and emerging nature of realistic business models, will be a city that has a strong sense of motivation. Either positive motivation as in being early adopters and out on the cutting edge, or negative motivation as in being out of alternatives. It is not easy to buck conventional wisdom and take an independent stand on broadband infrastructure, that's for sure. Those who do are independent and motivated. As we enter a period of prolonged economic difficulty (I'd argue we're in a recession, but there's a general reluctance to use the R-word, it seems), there actually is a strong incentive for cities that are under stress to look again at metropolitan broadband infrastructure. At first this may seem counter-intuitive, but hear me out. This recent article, Vallejo, Calif. files for bankruptcy protection, describes a city in the Bay Area that got upside down in its finances. As it caved to municipal worker demands over time for increased salaries, its underlying tax base and municipal revenues caved in - whether you call it a perfect storm or a perfect mess, the result is the same -when a city gets upside down as Vallejo, CA, did, bankruptcy results, and then its that much harder to claw your way out. Better to avoid that hole in the first place by taking every measure to cut costs and enhance revenues. In contrast, consider the city that invests in a metropolitan broadband network in order to bring efficiencies to its government operations, ideally, before its in tight straits. The government that empowers its employees with the digital tools they need to be more effective with fewer human resources, will be in better shape over the long run than the city that hews to the traditional focus on worker rights and a growing workforce, with attendant conflicts between worker groups and human interest on the one hand, and taxpayers and conservative politics of fiscal restraint on the other. Labor costs are always inflationary - they go up over time. Cities traditionally have few options to raise revenues other than through tax increases, which is often politically infeasible. In tight economic times, revenues retract, but fixed costs can stay high. But technology costs trend down over time, just as capabilities trend upward. The essence of investing capital in technology is to bring more efficiency by enabling new business processes. By doing things differently through technological innovation, city managers bring the focus around to doing more with less. And the added bonus when it comes to Wi Fi Mesh networks in particular, is that a city network provides extra bandwidth after all the municipal application needs have been met. The city can use that surplus bandwidth as an asset to generate additional NON-TAX revenue. This is an equation that features both greater cost control and enhanced revenue opportunities. That is a message that all cities should embrace, but certainly cities under stress. But cities under stress tend to go the other way, don't they? Go figure. Indeed, the conventional approach for cities under stress is fiscal conservatism: clamp down on spending, seek to get more work out of existing staff, using hiring and salary freezes and reductions in force. Does that make sense? Fearful employees may produce more at first, but it seems that over the long haul you would actually get less when you treat employees that way. Its actually a good time to invest in metropolitan broadband, even as the economy would seem to indicate that most cities will pull back. The cost of equipment has come down, while performance levels and capabilities are up. Vendors are highly motivated, and new business models show the way to a low-risk project. And what applies to all cities goes double for a city that is struggling to get by under the conventional business model reliant upon outsourced services and in-house labor, in bad economic times. Adjust the equation with a city network and watch the potential grow. If you want different results, you have to do things differently. Look for interest to develop among cities out on the cutting edge, looking to make a name for themselves. Watch smaller towns and rural towns with few broadband options, who know they will be passed over in the first few rounds by private providers. Third World cities, especially cities and towns with large portions of disadvantaged populations will still be interested in metropolitan broadband. And cities hard-hit by real estate and other macro-economic downturns, like Vallejo, believe it or not, should be interested in a metropolitan broadband network project. For when these networks begin to be viewed tools for business efficiency, as they truly are, then this argument will make more and more sense to those who come to it with an open mind. Posted on May 26, 2008 at 11:30 AM | Comments (0) The Joke's on You and MeI actually made this one up! "What do a sagging fern
and a sad Senator from Nevada
have in common? THEY'RE BOTH LIMP REEDS!!!! Dan Froomkin at the Washington Post provides a good overview of the whole sordid tale of sellout and betrayal in this article, Fear Rules the Day. Reid (whose procedural calls as Senate leader made the passage of the bill nearly inevitable) responded with the following statement: "Today, President Bush continues his bullying. . . . "Due to months of White House foot-dragging, the relevant House committees have only just gotten important documents related to whether the Bush Administration followed the law and the Constitution. They need some time to review and analyze them. We must not let this critical issue be resolved by White House bullying. I'm crying in my beer tonight, not laughing, folks. My weak attempt at humor above is nothing when compared to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's weak attempt at leadership over this whole FISA and Telecom Immunity mess, to say nothing about our current presidential administration. How, how did we go so wrong as a country??? Back in sixth grade, I remember being terrorized by a bully, for what must have been a week or so, and 40 years later, I still remember the frustration and impotence I felt. But I'm an adult now, and I know how to react to bullies. Generally, they're weak and pathetic individuals who continue bullying when others give in, but who back down when challenged by strength. Bullies are into external power plays to make up for their own lack of internal strength. It's a behavior born of weakness and pathology. As a parent, I believe that this description of bullies and how to deal with them is more or less well understood now. It's something we all deal with at one point or another in our kids' lives. So why don't our elected representatives know how to treat those bullies George Bush and Dick Cheney and all their minions in the Senate? I intend no disrespect here for the office of the President or Vice President, certainly, but I do intend a full measure of disrespect for the two individuals whose small, fear-filled minds have dragged our country down so far. But kicking George Bush and Dick Cheney is pointless, they'll be gone in less than a year! (besides, go ahead and Google "worst president ever" and see for yourself - what could I possibly add here to the 500,000 or so search results?) No, I'm here tonight to kick Harry Reid, who should have done a much better job at managing this lame power grab supported by the same old tired game of fear-mongering we've grown so used to over the past seven years. What on earth are those guys afraid of??? How does this still work for Bush??? Froomkin continues ... "Congress is prepared to extend current law - the Protect America Act - by any length in order for Congress to complete the in-depth analysis and negotiations necessary for a long-term law broadly supported by the American people. If the President chooses to veto a short-term extension - as he said he would this morning - the responsibility for any ensuing intelligence collection gap lies on his shoulders and his alone." Weak, Weak, Weak ...Harry, Harry, Harry ... Scott Horton blogs for Harpers: "If things proceed on the course now set by the Bush Administration and its brainless collaborators, and the national surveillance state is achieved in short order, then future generations looking back and tracing the destruction of the grand design of our Constitution may settle on yesterday, February 12, 2008, as the date of the decisive breach. . . . "On the key vote, the Republicans in the Senate continued to function in lock-step, as they have on almost all significant issues for the last seven years, while the Democrats fragmented. Their vote summed up everything that's wrong with Washington politics today. Fear and hard campaign cash rule the roost, and the Constitution is regarded as a meaningless scrap of parchment, indeed, a nuisance. . . . "The Constitution was defeated yesterday, and it was defeated by a fateful coalition between brain-numbing fear tactics and money and the resources that money buys." On that last point, I concur that we lost a significant battle, but disagree that the war is lost, not yet - it's not too late for the House of Representatives to weigh in and stop this fool's rush to give away our civil liberties. Please check out this good article as well and then let your Representative know how you feel, if you support the Rule of Law and the Constitution, like I do. I hate writing about this stuff, but it's important... Posted on February 13, 2008 at 07:21 PM | Comments (0) PrescienceOpening scene from Brazil, 1985 The populace of Oceania, belonging to three classes - Inner Party members, Outer Party members and members of a lower-class proletariat ("the Proles") - is subordinate to ruthless government control. This is accomplished and regulated by a "Ministry of Truth" in which the protagonist, Winston Smith, works as an Outer Party member. Smith spends his days constantly rewriting and altering history to satisfy the government (which includes destroying all evidence of history not conducive to the government's agenda) - amending newspaper articles of the past so as to remove all reference to predictions that did not come true, and individuals whom the state has identified as "unpersons" (people who the state declares as having never existed). Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell Written in 1948 and published in 1949, 59 years ago, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a great example of prescience. Orwell really hit the nail on the head, he just was a little off on the date. How did he know? And what about Terry Gilliam, the mind behind the brilliant 1985 film Brazil, whose original working title was "1984 1/2" ... just a keen observer with a great sense of humor, or another example of prescience? He loosely based his film on Orwell's opus, but drew heavily from his own experience with mind-numbing bureaucracy. The pursuit of terrorists by the Information Retrieval Department in the film make this film very relevant for what we see in today's fear-oriented American society, I'm afraid to say (pun intended). I rented the DVD and watched it again last weekend...didn't realize we'd be looking at a dystopia like Gilliam envisioned, here today in 2008, 23 years later, yet here we are, looking today at a Senate that has dropped the ball when it comes to lawmaking and lawbreaking, privacy, the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, etc. Retroactive Immunity got a boost today as a new form of lawmaking, where lawmakers don't legislate with the future in mind (that's so Yesterday), but rather they go back to change laws that have already been broken, in order to protect the law-breakers, under the guise of keeping us all safe from terrorists - that's the new way of Presto, our government and those who cooperated with it may have broken the law, see, but that's only if you think of the law in old-fashioned terms, as in rules written by our legislature, passed and signed by presidents, conforming to and upholding the U.S. Constitution, and which apply to all citizens of the United States, regardless of rank or privilege. No, with the new way of thinking, it's all better. In this case, they only had to do a little clean up work in order to get the law to conform with their actions, see, because they needed to do what needed to be done to keep the people safe, see, whether or not it was against the law, and besides they never would be at this point discussing retroactive immunity if it hadn't been for that pesky New York Times which dragged this issue out into the public eye (see Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts)..don't you know, they were doing just fine operating in secret, keeping us all safe...the Constitution? That's no longer relevant, because we're at war.......what's important is that we be forever vigilant against threats to our society and way of life. Out the window go those old concepts of truth, justice, laws, due process, etc. So 20th Century, dude. Much cleaner to let the President and his guys keep us safe. I believe that spying on Americans without a warrant as required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is illegal, whether you call it "operating outside the law" or "breaking the law." When I break a law, it's certainly called "breaking the law," and I face serious consequences, like getting arrested and being thrown in jail..But now it seems we have a society divided into two parts...those, like you and me, who must follow the law or face serious consequences, and those like AT&T, Verizon, and Pres. Bush, and VP Cheney, the CIA, the Department of Justice (don't forget Scooter LIbbey either!), etc. who are free to operate outside the law, for whom the laws will be changed if needed, ex post facto, by a compliant law-making body, aka the Senate. The ministries' names are an example of doublethink - "The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation." (Part II, Chapter IX - Chapter I of Goldstein's book)Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell Thankfully though, as bleak as it seems this afternoon, the jury, so to speak, is still out on this dark chapter in our history....please check out this website, read about today's FISA votes in the Senate, and encourage the members of the House of Representatives - who represent you and me in this democratic republic - to draw a line in the sand and stop this extra-Constitutional behavior in its tracks. We can look forward to this ... or, we can choose to be safe and still enjoy the civil liberties bequeathed to us by our forefathers. We don't have to trade one for the other. It's a false choice. We can have both safety AND liberty. Dare I say it, "Yes, We Can." Posted on February 12, 2008 at 12:55 PM | Comments (0) Willful Ignorance Serves Its PurposesIn the Age of the Internet, how come good ideas don't circulate faster? Why do societies continue on for years with what they know are substandard practices, when measured against a global standard? As complex as problems seem, why don't we more readily adapt solutions from outside our traditional spheres? A creative solution to a thorny problem arises in one country, yet even today, it remains infrequent that it gets copied and applied in another country. An article at the bottom of this post from 30 years ago blames the lack of comparative journalism - it's a failure of the press to do their jobs, in other words. I think it's that, but also, I think it's the nature of those in power in societies to preserve the status quo when it serves them, despite the loss to society. It's no secret that we talk here on this site and countless others about the stellar status of broadband in other countries, for example, as we ponder the declining state of broadband infrastructure here in the US. Why then is there so little interest among our leaders in adopting winning approaches from abroad here at home? Were we so motivated, we could send a high level delegation around the world and gather information in a Best Practices Tour. But we're not so motivated. The FCC has handed off the reins of power to those it regulates, and they are quite content with things the way they are. But why do we tolerate this, as a society? Don't we deserve the best of the best? Isn't that something of a tradition here in the States? The fact is, many in the US are parochial and xenophobic, content in the delusion that we have it better than those poor saps abroad. This is a myth that gets maintained in the media, as part of our culture. Societally, it's America Uber Alles. It's true in many areas, but not at all the case in many others. But if you haven't traveled much, it's not hard to remain content in that delusion that we lead the world in all things. It's what you want to believe, so you do. Health Care is another good example, as is Energy Independence, and Climate Control. So, why do we lament that our system declines and yet we wring our hands and stand back and watch it get worse and worse? It's because parts of our society (not just Telecom & Cable, but also Insurance, Pharmaceutical, Oil & Gas, Coal, Big Business) benefit from the Status Quo and they see these problems differently than does society at large. It's quite rational, I think. They look at things and see them going just about as planned. This type of asocial behavior by the largest corporations should at least give us pause to consider, but it's gone on so long that we often feel disempowered to effect change at the grassroots. But that is the promise of the upcoming political season. We can cross our fingers and hope, at least. From the outside looking in, you'd think we prefer our substandard solutions, proud as we are that they're home-grown. That's part of it, but that's not all. Our feelings of being unique may lead us to say "They may be shitty solutions, but they're our shitty solutions, made right here in America!" But that doesn't answer the question sufficiently. That's too simple, too easy, and too snarky. Not altogether helpful, actually. But I think we know the answers to these questions, we just don't talk often about it out loud, I guess because it just gets so frustrating, and we're all a little intimidated by such raw use of power. I don't know, I'm nursing this hypothesis that we have a mass public that is willfully ignorant because it serves the purposes of those in charge. We don't change our current business practices here in the US even when we have good solutions at hand elsewhere around the globe that offer improvement because powerful interests benefit from the Status Quo. They actively work to prevent not only any full airing of issues that could accelerate change and threaten their leadership status, but also any threatening legislative or regulatory changes. It's just good business to manage change and doing so becomes what we now call "good politics." That's where the media come in, if they cared, where their muckraking role is to highlight such situations, shining a light on other spots on the globe where people have more effectively dealt with problems. But the press has become part of the same problem. The mainstream media has grown too large, and it too has bought into the status quo concept, and reporters have become too unimaginative to dig around. It's sad to see such decline in the mainstream media, who have more tools than ever at their disposal to effect change and shine a light on such disparities. I know that sounds paranoid, and honest, I don't regularly see conspiracies behind every bush and rock. But, this time, it's true. The media has become much more like large commercial interests, moving slowly so as not to disrupt the good thing they have. The very corporations they would expose are the ones who have ready cash to spend on advertising in their arenas, so it would not be in their self interest to dig too deeply to expose issues. So at the bottom of this long post I've put a clip I found from over 30 years ago, decrying the poor state of media, where reporters let good solutions abroad go undiscovered here at home. I agree, it's a head scratcher...See this great site where I found this clip, for muckraking and trouble-causing, Neiman Watchdog: Questions the press should ask - it's the site of the Neiman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. If we were to use this article as a guide, we'd have to conclude that the media has not improved a lot over the past several decades, Comparative Journalism remains in the toilet. But bashing the main stream media these days is about as sporting as shooting fish in a barrel, so let's save that for another column. The bottom line is that clearly, with the Internet in place, a lack of reporting these days is not for lack of knowing, but lack of caring. Just look what I turned up in a couple of hours of digging using The Google. Put yourselves in the shoes of the CEO and you tell me what you would choose to do when faced with a better situation elsewhere. If you were CEO, would you: a) 'keep on keepin' on..." or b) embrace change with due haste! So, let's say you're the executive at this company (results from Feb 2007) - We'll call this first one Company A. Market Value $229.6 Billion I'm saying from where I'm sitting reporting to my Board of Directors - "It Ain't Broke, so Why Fix It." Here's Company B. Market Value $108.9 Billion Here's Company C. Market Value $70.78 Billion And Company D. Market Value $74.21 Billion These corporations are doing what they were formed to do - make money for their stockholders. I bet these companies are just dying to monkey with the Status Quo and bring in more competition. (note Heavy Dripping Irony here). Fact is, they're at the top of the heap, these days are the Good Times, and these four companies already control more than half of one industry that is just a part of their much broader communication and entertainment industries. Companies A-D above are the leaders in the ISP business in the United States (see below).
ISP-Planet.com - Top 21 U.S. ISPs by Subscriber: Q2 2007 Company A is AT&T, B is Verizon, C is Time Warner (owns AOL and Road Runner), and D is ComCast. Together, these four companies alone control 56.5% of the ISP business in the US and they are largely unregulated these days, especially when it comes to broadband services. Now I admit, this is a very unscientific, off-the-cuff analysis - this is no well-researched report by some professional journalist. But consider the pull of the Status Quo as a Strategy. For every day that things stay the same, according to current data above, here's how much each company pockets - EACH DAY! AT&T - $20,273,973 Going a little further, let's figure out Net Income Per Minute. For every minute that things stay the same, these companies make this much... AT&T - $14,079.15 I may have misquoted some of these financial statistics, but they paint a pretty clear picture. (Please do correct me if I'm wrong on anything here.) Don't get me wrong, I don't begrudge these folks their hard earned profits, neither these great companies, their management, their staffs, nor their shareholders. I have nothing against big companies, and certainly nothing against making money. But if our system is to maintain its integrity, I think we should all insist more loudly on a level playing field, where competitors compete fairly and earn their money by making good products and providing good services, not by lobbying state and federal legislators and regulators to continue in place rules that give them an unfair advantage. The system has gone out of balance, tilted as it is towards incumbents. It's a stretch to say that these particular companies are operating in anything remotely resembling a competitive environment. And each minute, each day that continues with this Status Quo is another Great Day for these companies. They have it good - quite good - they are cash engines, and the formula for success when you're on top is fairly simple - "Maintain the Status Quo at all Costs." These parties have little incentive to change the rules of the game, and every incentive to maintain them. If you're CEO, you're obliged to keep the gravy train running as long as you can. It's up to the press to raise this issue when it starts to hurt society and it's up to the government to push it back to the center when it gets so far out of balance. But what a story! Imagine the declining graph of broadband penetration, the complaints from users, in contrast to the financial results of these few companies that have it so well these days. A little more digging could make the story even more interesting. Man, I wish some intrepid reporter would pick this one up...sighhhh. What are the odds? There are so many worthy topics to go cover, but we have: But first, a word from our sponsors. Triple Play. Viagra. Blaring Truck Ad. Beer and Babes. Honestly. Individually, we're very smart, but get us together as a society and we revert to children. We can be such saps, and it's all relatively transparent. Here's the note on the poor state of media from over 30 years ago, from Needed: better reporting on how problems are dealt with elsewhere Way to go, Morton Mintz! ... Amazing, it's as if he had a crystal ball and foresaw the rise of the Internet and the role of Blogs, way back then ... At the Third A. J. Liebling CounterConvention, held in May of 1974, I gave the first reading before my peers of Mintz's Mass Media Proposition. I was careful to say that it is not an axiom, not a law; that it is full of loopholes, and should not be carried to extremes. I would like to repeat it here because, despite the qualifiers, it has, I believe, an essential validity. Here it is: If it's really important, it doesn't get the attention it deserves, or gets it late, or gets it only because some oddball pushes it. One little-noted manifestation of this situation is the lack of what Dan Morgan, a Washington Post colleague and friend, terms comparative journalism. I am talking, first of all, about the kind of problems that cut close to the lives, health, and pocketbooks of our readers, such as the safety of the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food and drugs we ingest, the vehicles in which we travel, the places where we work, and the power plants which supply us with electricity. I am also talking about the prices we pay and the taxes we pay, and what we get for our money. We - our city, our state, our country - deal unsatisfactorily with many of the problems that fall under my general descriptions, as we all know. Other cities, other states, and other countries have found better, or at least innovative, answers to some of these sample problems, as we too often don't know. Which is my point: news media, albeit with certain qualifications, do not give reliable, sustained, prominent, and priority attention to telling us who's ahead in dealing with these problems, although they consistently give such attention to who's ahead in the National League. Responding to criticism of their foreign coverage, some news media commendably have spent substantial sums to report wars, revolutions, disasters, diplomatic developments, persecutions, and the like, but they have yet to be seriously criticized for neglecting foreign coverage of problem-solving. To cite a homely example, I have yet to meet a person who, in buying a house, didn't feel he was taken in charges for title search and title insurance. But how many people know that in England the government keeps the records, certifies titles, and charges small fees which go into a public insurance fund that pays off for any mistakes that occur? I didn't know that until recently, when I came on the news in a book - David Hapgood's "The Screwing of the Average Man." Again, we all know that men and women throughout the country find their jobs deadly dull and dehumanizing and their work environment authoritarian. How many of us know anything at all of the fascinating story of the experiments in industrial democracy - the possession of real decision-making power, over substantial matters, by an enterprise's employees - which have transformed workplaces in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Israel, Britain, West Germany, and, if you please, the United States? I found that story, once again, in a book - David Jenkins's "Job Power: Blue and White Collar Democracy." We don't always have to go abroad to find a case in point. In the 1950s, when I was an assistant city editor at the Globe Democrat in St. Louis, I had the pleasure - and it really was that - of persuading the management that we should investigate the cozy relationship between the State of Missouri and favored banks. Essentially, it was a classic relationship in which the state, whether the governor was a Democrat or a Republican, deposited tens of millions of dollars in favored banks for long periods at no interest. The banks then invested the funds, sometimes in small loans on which the interest rate ran as high as 28 percent. Appropriately grateful, the banks made the necessary but relatively trivial campaign contributions, always, of course, without evidencing narrow partisanship. As a result of a superb three-month investigation by Carl E. Major and Ray J. Noonan, the bank lobby not only collapsed, but was so deeply embarrassed that it ended up actually supporting a constitutional amendment requiring investment of idle funds. The amendment was adopted and, in the first year in which it was in effect, yielded the taxpayers about $1 million which, for all practical purposes, would otherwise have been stolen from them. But where was the comparative journalism to carry Missouri's example effectively to media in other states, some of which still collect little or no interest on public funds? With happy result, The Washington Post exposed Maryland's wasteful handling of its idle state funds - but that was not until 1973. I suspect that the lack or insufficiency of comparative journalism internationally may have graver consequences. For starters, George Orwell, in his autobiographical "The Road to Wigan Pier," warned in 1937 against sterile public housing; we here paid no heed. Again, although Scandinavia has been a pacesetter in dealing with numerous areas of common concern, this aspect has generally been as remote in our news media as the dark side of the moon; Scandinavia has tended, instead, to become synonymous with pornography, alcoholism, suicide, and deserters. We have heard little about a system devised in Sweden for rating automobiles for insurance purposes in terms of relative collision-repair costs, about a system which pipes apartment house garbage underground, about the good housing, about delivery of health care services, about the protection of miners. (A couple of recent, noteworthy exceptions were in The New York Times: Lawrence K. Altman's pieces on hospitals in Sweden, and Agis Salpukas's articles on efforts in Scandinavia to humanize mass production.) Not long ago I learned that the Scandinavian countries had concluded a unique treaty under which a citizen of one of them who had suffered damages from pollution originating in another of the countries acquires, for purposes of litigation, citizenship in the country which was the pollution source. But how did I learn this? From a letter - not a story - in The New York Times sent in by a man who noted that U.S. media had given the treaty no attention… The message, I believe, is this: many countries facing problems similar to our own have pioneered new approaches and, sometimes, come up with solutions; yet our news media remain insufficiently concerned to give this kind of foreign news the coverage it obviously deserves. Posted on October 12, 2007 at 10:58 PM | Comments (0) Big and Small Can CoexistThere's no doubt that this is an exciting time to be involved with wireless. With news of massive projects in Houston and Portland moving forward, and now this article in the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal that describes an RFP for the huge Silicon Valley network, leading with the compelling title It's time to see if bidders share valley's free wireless vision, there is much to be excited about. Yet as exciting as this is, there are some troubling signs on the horizon. For starters, every one of these projects is trying to get the same or better deal from the vendors that the previous city got. And I know most of these vendors - the pot is not that big. How many vendors do cities think are standing out there ready to build networks on behalf of cities and take all the risk? I've long thought that this was a temporary situation, based on new venodr's eagerness to get networks deployed. Great if you can get in on the ground floor, but not meant to last. A business strategy based on the greater fool theory is not sustainable. And now this huge project hangs out there, which I'm afraid to say makes me think of that ambitious movie, A Bridge Too Far, the WWII movie about a tragic overly ambitious battle plan by Allied Gen. Montgomery that in some ways became a symbol of overly ambitious big budget Hollywood projects. More recently, the metaphor was used to describe our current tragedy in Iraq. The risk is certainly great for project planners that no vaild bidders will come - so it begs the question: with new technologies that do not require great scale to be effective, why do we still plan such huge telecom projects? If regional collaboration makes sense to get economies of scale, to pool purchasing power, to ensure that your neighbors' networks work with yours, and to share lessons learned - all reasons I've used on these pages to sing the praises of regional togetherness - if that makes sense, at what scale does it make sense to break the project up into more digestible bits? In other words, can a big project and smaller implementations go together? I would make the argument that its the only thing that makes sense. First, in an unknown, it makes sense to sort through an uncertain territory with several dozen of your friends. When many regional leaders get together, you get better answers - the Wisdom of the Crowds that I talk about now and then here. Large groups make better decisions than small groups. But having decided that a wireless network is good for the region, why not break the project up into as many small bites as possible, with common guidelines and requriements, so that the many smaller companies in this industry can all get a slice of the pie and the project can serve to develop the industry further. This is the set up for NANOnet, the business I'm lanching this week. The nature of metropolitan broadband with wireless mesh is that it can be deployed economically and rationally in chunks as small as 4-10 nodes, exactly where its most wanted and needed, and that such a phased deployment gives the public time to adjust and digest this dramatic change in the way we look at wireless and broadband. Otherwise, I'm with the authors of this article. One risk of a huge project like this is a huge case of indigestion, as those involved wait on the public to catch on and the revenues to start flowing from the new project. Posted on April 24, 2006 at 08:25 AM | Comments (0) Silicon Valley Metropolitan NetworkWi-Fi Networking News: Unwired Bay Area, Part 2: This Time with Details If you haven't seen this clip from Glenn Fleishmann's site, I recommend it to you. What these groups have done in the Bay Area, under wraps from us all for quite some time, is to put together a regional plan that makes sense. Take a look and see if you recognize any principles for regional collaboration. I hope these guys are successful. God Bless Silicon Valley and the Bay Area. They're awesome. Posted on February 12, 2006 at 09:29 PM | Comments (0) The Boston Model for Regional Collaboration - NOTIn December Bostonites were complaining that for a high-tech city, they certainly didn't feel like one when it came to wireless. Amid some political sniping this week, a task force was created that will explore the viability of citywide Wi-Fi. This week the Boston Foundation also released a report stating the city should partner with private companies like Earthlink to create a citywide network in the mold of those in Philadelphia and San Francisco. Broadband Reports I started out to write a blog about a Boston cooperation-and-due-diligence model, based on what looked like a good deal at first glance. But wait, there's more to the story. Silly me. While that model may still emerge at some point, the water is murkier than it first appeared to be. Let's watch this as it takes shape and use it as a case study in regional collaboration. Who knows, maybe it'll end up as a negative model for us not to follow. This city has all the potential in the world, lots of resources, loaded with universities, tons of character, dense urban development, but they will have to find a way to work together politically. Ah, there's the rub, politics and working together. The juries still out on that one. The article in the Boston Globe, Study Details WiFi Options, describes action that's brewing on metropolitan broadband after a lot of talk -- but not a lot of agreement, apparently. The Boston Foundation and Boston's Museum of Science, at the request of a city councilman, John Tobin, put together a study entitled "Boston Unplugged: Mapping a Wireless Future." So far, so good. This link takes you to the study, but apparently it has not yet been released, because the site has a Coming Soon message. Oh well. Apparently Councilman Tobin worked hard on this wireless initiative and is ready to launch with a Request for Information. The RFI would look at: - An examination of needed technical facilities for a WiFi network OK, now its really looking good - progress. This is starting to sound like the Regional Collaboration I go on about on this website. But, STOP RIGHT THERE... Enter the Mayor from Stage Right..."Step aside, Councilman, I'll take it from here ... I'm the MAYOR!" In what must seem to the councilman as a No-Good-Deed-Goes-Unpunished move, the Mayor stepped in and took control, suggesting that what was needed was a Mayor's Task Force. According to the Boston Herald, this is if you will pardon the expression, politics as usual in Boston. But, they did a lot of things right. And, it will probably still work out. An innovative leader in the city government did some consensus building, sought out allies, conducted preliminary research, and leveraged his position as an early adopter with motivated private sector partners. The missing link for now is political cohesion. This is why I recommend smaller projects to get going - more action, less talk. See this link to learn more about how a metropolitan network on a less grand scale is being pursued at the university level in a smaller version of Boston, Cambridge, home of MIT. Finally, to learn more about university / community collaboration, explore this report from the Boston Foundation, A New Era of Higher Education - Community Partnerships. This is kind of fun to watch, when you think about it. Makes Austin look good. Posted on February 11, 2006 at 06:16 PM | Comments (0) Planning and Engagement: A MetroNet in Ten Easy Steps
In contrast to the "one-winner-takes-all" municipal RFPs that are the norm today, I believe it's important that cities slow things down and involve more third-parties, their neighbors and private sector partners, specfically. In planning a metropolitan broadband network, it's best to keep things simple and develop a plan that manages risk as you go. So I recommend that you proceed step-by-step according to the list below, and contact MetroNetIQ Consulting for more advice on any of these steps. Our team of consulting associates is prepared to help you at any or all of the steps below. Prudent Progress Project Plan Outline 1. Get informed on metropolitan broadband technology options. Looking beyond some of the misinformation still circulating these days, we see that technological progress is further along than we might think. Being on MetroNetIQ.com is just the right place for Step One. For a good start, the resources on this website have considerable information on the metropolitan broadband industry and the changing picture for municipal and regional leaders. Share this information with other community leaders. Start with the Orientation categories on the left and work your way through the resources to get up to speed quickly. 2. Evaluate your community needs regarding broadband services. Before getting going, you need to evaluate your options, and this is the point where it makes sense to spend a little money for a custom initial evaluation. Contact MetroNetIQ Consulting today to learn more about a custom initial evaluation. You may also browse the Vendor Directory on the right side of this website for other resources. At this early stage, be sure not to spend too much, or take too much time - the key at this point is to set a direction and get moving. 3. Produce and file a preliminary plan to make government policymakers aware of your actions and intentions. In some states, such notice is required and delay could have consequences. In any case, filing a short preliminary plan has minimal downside and may result in help being offered your way. You can file the preliminary plan with your state's Public Utility Commission and copy your state legislators and US Congressman and Senator (use these links to locate your state's regulatory and legislative contact info). As you move along, help out long-term public policy by filing a more detailed plan with your state's Public Utility Commission and copy your state and federal legislative representatives. Be sure to state the benefits you expect to accrue and why you are proceeding in the manner you have selected. 5. Launch a Pilot Program. At some point, all the studying, talking, and listening will make you ready to dip your toe in the water. By installing a pilot network, ideally in partnership with a private sector partner, you will demonstrate to your community the real aspects of a MetroNet. For those less-informed than you active network planners, a Pilot is necessary to generate the awareness and understanding that will be necessary to continue, benefiting both the insider community and the greater community at large. Stay tuned to the blogs on this website, which will describe my work on the Pilot networks in Austin and Round Rock. 6. Broaden your community base of support. Having informed your planning team on the subject at hand, and evaluated your need and solution options, and the regional perspective, it's time to seek community input and determine a plan of attack. By making sure that you have as many community leaders on board for any plan you undertake, you will face less opposition than you might otherwise, and your network will meet more of the needs of your community. I recommend you review this short How To article on settng up a community blog as a great way of interacting with your community as you go through the planning process. 7. Determine your business model. First and foremost, I recommend you check in with your local electric utility for partnering possiblities. See the example of Go Moorhead. Align with technology partners, or better yet, with a system integrator, to ensure project success (See the Vendor Directory). Factors that will drive your decision include the risk profile of your city management, available funds, existing network assets, difficulty of potential network installation, in-house assets and skills for ongoing maintenance and operations, and partnering options with electric utilities and private sector providers. 8. Prioritize the implementation of broadband applications that will become available from your new MetroNet. Initiate those services that accelerate your return on investment (ROI) first. See the Application Vendors in the Vendor Directory for ideas and to stimulate dialogue. 9. Determine a funding strategy. While there will be a capital expense associated with the deployment, it is likely that a Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP) or Network Operator is willing to share the burden or bear all of the burden, in exchange for having an anchor client and customer for municipal services. Assess your capital budget possibilities. What is the temperature in your community for this network? See the Funding Options in the Vendor Directory. 10. Spread the word in your community. Begin to educate interest groups within your community on the coming changes and future service availability. Discuss the impact with your community and answer questions. Reference www.MetroNetIQ.com and other websites to spread the word and raise the level of awareness in your community. 11. Launch your plan, use someone else's network, build your network. It's time to go, finally. Whether you take advantage of a motivated private provider who has already built a network, or you initiate network construction in partnership with a private provider (acting as an anchor tenant with a long-term services contract), join with other cities for a regional network, or build your own network, you've engaged in a prudent decision-making process and you can relax knowing that you've done the best a city leader can do. 12. Enjoy the benefits and brag on your success. Controlling your own destiny and taking advantage of the new network becomes a virtuous circle. Establish a standing committee to take input from the community on new and innovative ways of providing city services. Broad, intentional community planning will enable greater value to be reaped from this new network sooner. This is a great time to further leverage your communiity blog, as well as the MetroNetIQ on-line community. As more cities and towns implement MetroNets, the cost of equipment will be driven down, the technology will advance more rapidly, and new applications will be developed; all of these factors will increase the value of your new network. Posted on February 05, 2006 at 11:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack Let's Get This Party Started! It's Time to Begin Regional CollaborationTo My Readers, I just told a fellow consultant in an email this morning: it's rare that business comes to find me, I usually have to go out and get it! It's time to get going! So my opening message to you, my readers, in my first blog, on my new website, is just this: I'm a metropolitan broadband consultant, I know what I'm doing, and I'm action-oriented. I'm ready to go make things happen. I've laid out my perspectives and views on this site, and I believe that this is the right way to go. I'm available today (although my calendar is getting busier by the day, I'll find the time to help cities get going.) Contact me and let's make plans to get going in your region. Here's the gist of my email to my friend. I like this analogy of you all reading over my shoulder. "This week, I've been focused on finishing the website, I landed one significant contract, and I'll get two more contracts today for networks in Austin and Round Rock, just to our north. It's been an exciting week. I could launch the website today, for sure by Monday. That will be a reference point that you can refer your people to. I've been thinking a lot about regional collaboration and how to capture the market interest in Metropolitan Broadband. Let's get busy and do some work together. Let's go help put Texas on the map. No need to sit around and wait to hear back from city officials as they exchange phone messages - yechhh. Let's find those who are ready to go. Why don't you jump on this and set up some meetings? Message points for regional leaders 1. Metropolitan broadband is available now, there are many options, and they're increasingly affordable. It's not as risky as it looks at first glance. I. Individual city consulting. MetroNetIQ will meet with local city officials and assess their situation and offer an opinion on how to proceed. This is a quick hit approach to save those who are ready to go now the time of weeks/months spent wading through the learning process. Price ranges from $5,000 to $9,995 for an intense two-day session - under the $10,000 threshold of most cities' procurement guidelines. For those cities that really want to do this, and are ready to get started, this will be money well spent. II. Regional collaboration consulting - vendor independent. Regional meetings, starting with an initial breakfast collaboration meeting - interested participants can pool their money to pay for an initial event, at app. $10,000/session plus travel, based on individual scoping. With 10 regional city participants, that would be $1,000/ea plus 1/10 of travel, and we would come to them - convenient. Follwing initial orientation and facilitated discussion, we would chart a course of action, answer questions, and preferably, identify and launch a series of pilot projects that would let neighboring cities come to see first hand what the technology does and how it works. In other words, this is a way to begin to get active, to move quickly but prudently out of the studying mode and into the doing mode. While I'll be busy here in Austin with my new contracts, with my website, and with my efforts to promote Metropolitan Broadband globally, getting out into commnities is my bread and butter. That's what energizes me. I would love to advise you, support you, and when you have it lined up, travel out into the field to deliver this consulting. By working together, we can help each other - no more talk, let's get busy! As always, let me know how it goes, and what you think. Best Regards, John Cooper Well, cities, the ball is in your court. What I said to my friend applies to you as well. I urge you to be deliberate, but not to a fault. Often, the real learning only begins when you take action. Sometimes you just have to go out and get it, because if you wait, it won't come to you quickly, if ever. There's safety in numbers. The journey of a thousand miles starts with one step. The hardest thing about exercising is lacing up your shoes and getting out there. OK, I'll stop. Posted on February 04, 2006 at 06:46 AM | Comments (0) |
METRONET VENDOR DIRECTORYMY OTHER BLOGSMetroNetIQ E-Store - Be sure to visit the MetroNetIQ E-Store and pick up a copy of The ABCs of Community Broadband: How Digital Transitions Will Transform America's Communities, One at a Time. The E-Store will offer special discounts on this valuable guide for community leaders, discounts that won't be available to the general public on Amazon! |
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