Communications Insights: Trends and Cool Stuff

In a previous Cool Stuff, I wrote about the study which I completed demonstrating the social value from reallocating some of the Digital Dividend spectrum for broadband mission critical public safety communications. The European Parliament seems to agree.

Yesterday, the European Parliament’s Industry Committee adopted a report urging that the EU should ensure a set of harmonized, EU-wide rules on how to allocate radio frequencies that will be freed up when analog terrestrial television broadcasting ends in 2012. The report was an own-initiative report authored by Italian liberal MEP, Patrizia Toia and was adopted in Committee with 41 votes in favor, 1 against, and 1 abstention. A plenary vote is scheduled for September. Further, the amendments to the report argue that approximately 100 MHz of the Digital Dividend could be reallocated to mobile broadband and other services such as public safety services, radio frequency identification (RFID), and road safety applications, without preventing broadcasting services from flourishing.

Insight:  While the transition from analog to digital terrestrial television should be complete in Europe by the end of 2012 (nearly 4 years after the U.S. is scheduled to complete its transition), decisions on how to reallocate the approximately 75% of the highest quality spectrum which will be released cannot come fast enough. Mission critical broadband communications networks require long lead-times to plan and deploy, and the services they enable are nothing short of lifesaving.  Public safety and security users urgently need an additional allocation of a approximately 30 MHz for these purposes.  The Industry Committee correctly urges Member States to release their Digital Dividend spectrum as quickly as possible, follow a common methodology, and develop national Digital Dividend strategies by the end of 2009.

I have been listening to a bunch of excellent presentations for the first two days of Supernova2008. Rather than rehashing what each speaker has said, I have been trying to formulate a theme. Not an easy task. I have noticed a few reoccurring themes: social activity, intellectual property, management of information, and marketing; all good network-related themes. I spent most of the second day at the Open Flow Track. Much of what was discussed was is integrating systems: Connecting the connections. That is to say that the internet has provided connectivity and access to persons and applications. The essence of Web 3.0 is making sure that your Flickr works with your Dopplr, with your, dare I say, Napstr.

Insight: The rich and lively discussion in the Open Flow Track seemed to focus more on engineering and business practice questions in terms of getting APIs to work together and making sure that privacy, security, and trust are respected according to applicable law and good business practices. I still found myself searching for more a fundamental concept. A more fundamental question which was present but perhaps not fully articulated was how to describe this continuum of “openness” vs. “closedness” (not a real word). So, here I get to like to wax poetic for a second. Eric Raymond, a pioneer of Linux and the open source movement, gives us a particularly literary book title and syllogism, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”. Raymond sees the cathedral as representing a system of architecture which is, “carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation - no beta version.” It is a centralized, coordinated approach. Open source architecture he likens to “a babbling bazaar of different agendas and approaches.” It is decentralized with varying standards and rules, but is not anarchy. Both approaches seem to work in creating stable systems, though they may be suit to different types of applications.

It was widely agreed that there should be a general preference for openness. I agree, but to my mind that there is a choice between openness and closedness. This choice implies a tradeoff. And, if there is a tradeoff, there is by necessity some optimization. What the optimum is will depend largely on your point of view and social optimum does not necessarily equate one-to-one with a private optimum. At the very least we can have a rational discussion as to what the relative merits of the tradeoff are and where the different optima may lie. In sum, do we want a world that looks more like the Cathedra or the Bazaar, or is there an entirely new form of architecture that we should consider?

No matter what the outcome in November’s presidential election, about a year from now, the FCC will be anticipating the arrival of a new Chairman.  I present the following challenge to the next Chairman, whoever he/she may be: make the US last in the world rankings of per capita broadband adoption.  What?!  Stay with me for a sec.

The FCC defines “broadband” as any access technology providing at least 200kbps in one direction.  This standard was appauling when it was introduced nearly a decade ago;FN1 it is simply laughable now.   Shouldn’t this standard evolve at least a little bit over time?  Consider for a second Moore’s Law on computing per unit cost, which stipulates that preformance roughly doubles every two years.FN2    So, between January 1999 and January 2009, the price preformance of the electronics which enable a broadband connection should have increased by a factor of 32.  Thus, a resonable standard for broadband today would be 6.4 Mbps (200kbps X 2 X 2 X 2 X 2 X 2 = 6,400kbps).  Let’s say I missed my guess by a bit and an appropriate standard is 5 megs.  (Neither a particularly high threshold and about what I get at my home in a small suburb outside of Bonn, Germany.) In that same decade, the US rank in the world in terms of broadband adpotion has fallen from 3rd to 15th to 20th, by some counts.

Insight:  According to the FCC’s most recent data, in December 2006 there were 82.5 million broadband lines in the US.FN3  Using the 5 meg standard this number would drop to roughtly 11.5 million lines.FN4  The effect of reporting this as the number of broadband lines in the US would be to be to drop the US to a per capita broadband adoption rate of Slovakia or Mexico.  Only then would it be undeniable that the US is falling behind in the adoption of next generation networks.  And, only then would the FCC have the imperative necessary to take the steps which other nations are taking and “encourage the deployment on a reasonable and timely basis of advanced telecommunications capability to all Americans,” per the FCC’s mandate. 

FN4: This is a bit of a fudge factor, but good enough for the back of the envelope.  Since the FCC only reports lines with speeds between 2.5 megs and 10 megs, I assumed that only 1/4 of the 34.7 million lines in this category were greater than 5 megs - I eyeballed this from the skew of distribution.

I am very please to announce that I have been appointed to an International Advisory Forum on Next Generation Broadband Networks.  Minister Eamon Ryan of the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources established this Advisory Forum of senior telecoms experts and CEOs from around the world in order to advise him on the optimum role for Government in the development of Next Generation Broadband in the Republic of Ireland. 

Insight:  As side for being a fantastic opportunity for me, I think this is right approach to policy formation, broadband or otherwise.  Policy makers should always pursue the “optimum role for Government.”

Classical conservative political though holds that “government is the problem,” and that a laissez faire approach is best.  Conversely, liberal politics hold that the profit motive is a sufficiently corrupting influence that in the absence of rules constraining the market place, the private sector will steal everything that is not nailed down. I am a lawyer, so I see these two statements as not mutually exclusive and both possible true.  I am also an MBA, so I can also see that there is some tradeoff between the two approaches.  And, if there is a tradeoff, it follows that there must me some optimization: one rule too many and government throws up barriers to entry to the market place; one government employee too few and the Invisible Hand can get into the Invisible Cookie Jar.  Thus, the policymaker should always be managing regulation to this efficiency frontier.