Part I
Internet prime mover Vint Cerf echoes what I’ve been hearing from other architects of the TCP/IP network: we should focus on building much fatter pipes, and get away from the enforced/legacy scarcity and build gigabit broadband networks. Nothing here about the cost of providing gigabit access, nothing here about the fact that much of the (rural) U.S. has no access to broadband at any speed. What policies do we need to have pervasive gigabit broadband, urban and rural, in the U.S.? Who will pay for the buildout? [Link]
Part II
My friend Robert Steele emailed me in response to my last post, saying there’s more to consider, and I agree. He mentions Open Spectrum.
I’m feeling cynical. Here’s how I responded:
I’m aware of open spectrum… I’m in other conversations with various wonks & engineers who’re discussing bandwidth, spectrum, etc. Of course we could have a much different scene if we weren’t constrained by markets and politics. People how can see one sense of the obvious often miss another, which is that the world we’re in is not an ideal world, and the ideals we can conceive are not necessarily easy or even possible to implement. I pay less attention to the “next net” list we’re both on because so much of it is fantasy and masturbation.
I own a nice home in rural Texas but I can’t live there because I can’t even get 500kbps. I thought it was amusing that Vint is arguing for gigabit bandwidth when most of the U.S. is dark and there’s too little monetary incentive to bring light to the darkness. Of course I think we need a public initiative to make it happen, but in this era “public” is a dirty word. I halfway expect to see all roads become toll roads; a world where only the elite can travel, and only the elite will have broadband access. Though aging, I’m struggling to remain part of the elite… *8^)
Robert Steele Comments:
Open Spectrum was part of my comment to Jon, but much more pointedly, I observed that Vint went to the dark side with Google, and has completely neglected both the Dutch model that Gordon Cook has documented so ably, and the desktop analytics as well as the back office M4IS2 processing that is required to create the World Brain and Global Game. I do not wish to publish the Operation Cloudburst memorandum that is before Microsoft, but now that Office 365 is out the way is open for some SERIOUS human-centric, data-centric, intelligence-capable M4IS2 innovation (Microsoft BI, Access, and MySQL are baby steps). Google, IBM, and Oracle are all great in their respective niches, but no organization–including Microsoft–is trained, equipped, and organized to create a global grid that is Open Everything. This is my specific calling in my last 25 years of productive work.
