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Saturday, June 10, 2006
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 Saturday, June 10, 2006
started 6/10/2006; 3:30:44 PM - last post 6/11/2006; 12:34:59 PM
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Doc Searls - Saturday, June 10, 2006 
6/10/2006; 7:30:44 PM (reads: 5711, responses: 3)
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What kind of Net do we want? 
| | As we move forward, we'll either bring the Internet along or we'll drop it in favor of some other approach. The backward-looking habit of so many bloggers and Internet lovers is an impediment to progress that tilts the deck in favor of leaving the Internet. |
| | We can either wake up and fix the net, or we can stand back and watch it decay and ultimately die because it's no longer good enough. I'd prefer to fix it, but not many big blogging dudes are with me. I can't help but think that's a shame. |
| | Even though I don't share all of Richard's opinions, I think he's making some good points here. |
| | I also believe we need to define progress in ways that far exceed the scope of the carriers' ambitions. Richard may be right that end-to-end is a limited way to characterize the Net, and an impediment to progress. But it's a good way to characterize the wide-open nature of participation in the marketplace that the Net made possible. That's what many of us on the pro-Neutrality bus have been afraid we'll lose if the carriers build the Net (or whatever succeeds it) mostly to optimize a one-way railroad system for shipping pretty but crippled "content" from a few producers to a zillion consumers. |
| | Now that the NN bus has crashed, maybe we can get together and think of better strategies — and not just political ones — to build the Net we want, while preserving the best of what we already have. |
| | I'm not that worried. At the consumer side, there's already a set of tiers, depending on what you are willing to pay for. In my area, there's everything from dialup to 30mbps down, 5 mbps up FIOS. prices range from $15/month on the low end, up to $180/month on the high end. This is far more choice than I had just a few years ago, btw, and it's all coming via the dreaded carriers. |
| | And I'm paying $63/month for 10Mb down and 1Mb up, even though Cox has only deployed 5Mb down and about 750Kb up on that plan. According to the Cox service guy I spoke to on the phone, Santa Barbara is among the last (if not the last) of Cox's towns to get it. At some point, they'll provision that service and I'll get what I'm paying for. (I could save $10/month and get 5Mb down and 500Kb up, but it's worth it to me to pay the difference, because I want all the upstream I can get.) Oh, the guy also told me Santa Barbara is nowhere in Cox's fiber deployment plans. Nor is fiber in the works for Verizon. |
| | I'm one of the locals who (unlike our carrier duopoly) want Santa Barbara to be one of the most connected counties in the country. (Why not? Ambitions like that are good for business.) So we'll need to find other carriers. Or start one ourselves. According to the Telecommunications Industry Association, which commends the passage of the COPE act (without Net Neutrality), "the legislation allows municipalities to deploy broadband and provide video services on a transparent and nondiscriminatory basis, thereby removing barriers for another competitor¹s entry intro the marketplace." If true, that's a good thing. |
The road to hell is paved with newsprint
| | Jeff Jarvis: This is, of course, why it¹s such rubbish to say that newspapers have always been conversational because they took letters. |
| | Here in Santa Barbara, Nick Welch's Dog of another Color actually understates the depressing state of matters with our local paper. |
Hard lessons
| | I would like to point out that it is entirely Apple¹s choice that their operating system does not run on my new Lenovo ThinkCentre. I¹m not saying it was a bad business decision — they are a hardware company, after all — but it is particularly galling to realize that if I bought a new Mac, I would be subsidizing the development of an operating system that contains code whose sole purpose is to lock me into a specific hardware platform. I realize that most people don¹t look at it that way, but there it is. |
| | I¹m creating things now that I want to be able to read, hear, watch, search, and filter 50 years from now. Despite all their emphasis on content creators, Apple has made it clear that they do not share this goal. Openness is not a cargo cult. Some get it, some don¹t. Apple doesn¹t. |
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Andrew Leyden - Walmart strategy
6/11/2006; 2:37:06 AM (reads: 899, responses: 2)
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So far in the telco deployment war, we've seen several companies come in and try to 'cherry pick' the big customers in big cities with lower priced bandwidth than the major telcomms. A few opened their own 'central officies' in major cities and tried to pump T1s and above to business consumers (i.e. people who pay too much for what they buy). They ripped up the roads (and X $100 per foot) and wired through pre-built offices (at $X per foot of cable) and generally, haven't really taken over from the major players.
But wouldn't it be neater to have the revolution in bandwidth start at the grassroots level? To start at the almost 'village' level and then work its way up.
For example, I live in a small town of about 6,000 people. A big fat pipe hooked up to a mesh network or something could easily cover the needs of this town for broadband access. It could be high speed up and down, and would require a more limited investment to install (in an area where you can rent an office for about $400 a month no matter what the size). It would be everywhere--wifi mesh everywhere. The price could be almost cooperative in nature, say a few bucks a month ($9 maybe) and it could be run in an almost non-profit way to pay for expenses and then move to other things like hosting and email etc.
I call this the WalMart strategy. Walmarts moved into small towns and became the dominant player in large part because of a) pricing and b) offerings better than the competition. In a small town like mine, where the phone company or cable company is an 'all or nothing' type arrangement, a better way, a cheaper way could come to dominate the tiny market and prosper.
And then do it again, and again, and again. Wash, rinse, repeat, all over the country.
This would be kind of fun....
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Doc Searls - Re: Walmart strategy
6/11/2006; 10:24:11 AM (reads: 959, responses: 1)
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Exactly. And that's what is happening: in Burlington, VT; in Lafayette, LA; in Loma Linda, CA...
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Andrew Leyden - Re: Walmart strategy
6/11/2006; 4:34:59 PM (reads: 1102, responses: 0)
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Walmart never made a dime in New York City, Los Angeles, or Chicago until they had first conquered places like Burlington, Lafayette...etc.
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