Using Dialup October 16, 2007
Posted by Tim Schneider in Digital Divide.add a comment
I was in Litchfield, Maine (population 3110), last week, staying with friends on the way to our annual trip to the Common Ground Country Fair, “a celebration of rural living.” We weren’t entirely sure the best way to get there, so by default we borrowed our friend’s computer to look at Google Maps.
This is a web service I’ve come to take for granted by now, not so much for directions but for basic, lay of the land stuff, but it was flat-out unusable over dialup, even at a relatively low-traffic time (7:30 AM on a Saturday morning). I wonder how many of the people who talk about the need for broadband have done this recently. The experience, after two plus years of living in cities and taking broadband access for granted, got me thinking again.
For my undergraduate thesis, I did a case study of an early FM radio network in upstate New York called the Rural Radio Network, as part of a larger examination on the impact of early radio regulation on rural peoples’ voices in contemporary mass media. My underlying thesis was that the decision to fund broadcasting through advertising revenue dictated an urban focus. More specifically, early FCC decisions to essentially force non-commercial stations off the air, including many pioneer stations at land grant colleges, cut a lot of innovative, agriculture and rural-focused programming off at the knees. The network I studied was an attempt, two decades later to remedy the absence of rural-focused programming through the new, and at the time neglected, medium of FM broadcasting.
I ended up caring about telecommunications regulation because I felt that the next decade ( and the previous) is an inflection point much like 1922-1934, a period where the rules will be set that govern the next 80-100 years of how people talk to one another. I thought it was important to make sure that rural people–my people–didn’t get shafted again.
The underlying principle is that a great deal of power is bound up in the answer to the question who is speaking, who is listening. The promise of the Internet is to give the power of speech to everyone, by disconnecting the ability to speak from concentration of capital, and yes, urbanity. So I’ll start from there.
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Tags: ruralbroadband dialup radio Internet regulation FRC FCC
All Cities Are Not Created Equal: the Question of Backhaul September 9, 2007
Posted by Tim Schneider in Peer Production of Infrastructure.add a comment
Yeah, I know, you think New York is way better than Boston.
Boston’s got a better football team.
Try answering this question about your favorite municipal wireless deployment: Who provides the backhaul?
All these wireless access points are sexy and all, but they are only ever part of the solution. Eventually they’ve got to carry their traffic back to the big bad Internet, and in general that’s not being done on your neighbor’s DSL line, with a couple of notable exceptions. You need a way to carry the aggregated bandwidth from your access points, which can add up. If you’re building a municipal network, this is a really big deal: even the most expensive access radios are way cheaper than laying fiber or even installing high bandwidth point to point fixed wireless links. St. Cloud, Florida uses Motorola’s Canopy system for backhaul, and supposedly it works great in a town where the land is flat and there aren’t a lot of tall buildings to block lines of sight. But what about Corpus Christi and Chaska, two other muni darlings? As it turns out, both cities own their own fiber optic rings, Corpus Christi on its own, and Chaska through the city-owned utility. Toronto’s much touted wifi network uses the fiber optic network of Toronto Hydro’s telecommunications subsidiary. A city’s ownership of their own fiber optic network radically changes the economics of constructing and operating a municipal network.
There’s a regulatory side of this too. Some cities with their own fiber networks negotiated them as part of franchise agreements with cable operators, but others only have the right to use the cable companies’ own lines for free or at a discount, and then only for government purposes. You can imagine how successful efforts to get the local cable company to allow use of those lines for a muni deployment have been. One of the likely downsides of efforts to streamline the franchising process is that cities will no longer have the leverage to negotiate for perks like these. A second angle involves the Federal governfiber access points for a municipal network.
I’m only just remembering how to blog, so if you expect this narrative to go anywhere you’ll likely be disappointed. It’s frustrating to find so little written in the muni wifi press on these basic facts that have such a huge impact on the success or failure of muni networks.
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Tags: muniwifimuniwireless chaska stcloud fon meraki backhaul
Death of MuniWireless Part 2: San Francisco! September 6, 2007
Posted by Tim Schneider in Broadband.add a comment
Continuing the bad news, Earthlink backed out of its much touted collaboration with Google to build a wifi network with San Francisco. After Philadelphia, San Francisco’s network was easily the highest profile muniwifi effort in the nation, and its apparent failure is a huge blow to the muniwfi movement. Certainly Earthlink’s financial woes (which as I wrote earlier, are only partially related to the unproven muni business model) are part of the problem, but the peculiar disfunction of San Francisco’s city government is just as responsible.
From a San Francisco Chronicle Editorial yesterday:
IT’S TIME for Wi-Fi 2.0. if San Francisco is serious about overcoming the financial and leadership problems that killed the first version. For over two years, City Hall pored over – and mostly bickered over – a plan to blanket San Francisco with free wireless Internet service. Mayor Gavin Newsom, to his credit, put forward a system to be built by Earthlink and backed by Google at no city expense. But free Wi-Fi comes with few guideposts or standards, and the idea came loaded with heavy expectations that it would level the digital divide between the wired and unwired sides of town. The terms called for a 16-year contract and Internet speeds criticized as too slow. These conditions were among several that stalled the idea at the Board of Supervisors, which had its own ideas.
“Had its own ideas” doesn’t begin to cover it. Some of the concerns, particularly over Google’s proposal for location-based advertising, were worth debating. But the Chronicle’s right, it was a good deal, better even than a city councilor’s proposal that the city could easily be wired by running fiber along the sewer lines, which prompted Google’s April fools joke this past year.
Maybe one of the reasons for high profile failures of municipal wireless is that the projects invariably require the participation of, um, municipalities.
The Death of Municipal Wireless? An examination (part 1) September 6, 2007
Posted by Tim Schneider in Broadband.add a comment
The past two weeks have been pretty brutal for fans of municipal wireless. Over the course of a few short days came news of Chicago and Rhode Island shelving their ambitious wif plans, followed by sharp cuts at Earthlink, the company behind many of the other wifi projects that people have been talking about (San Francisco, Houston, Philadelphia).
Muni wifi seems terminal, much to the joy of some. But a proper diagnosis of the symptoms is in order, since it might shed some light on the future viability of similar projects.
Sign of MuniWifi meltdown #1: Earthlink’s in Trouble
Of course it is. Seriously, could muniwifi find a more disfunctional standard bearer? Earthlink’s three core businesses in addition to municipal wireless include:
- Helio, one of the few (only?) remaining US MVNOs, which has slick adds, slicker phones and no subscribers.
- A dialup (!) Internet access division, as the country transitions to broadband.
- A broadband division, which like the few remaining CLECs, re-sells DSL run on the incumbents lines.
None of these is a growth proposition. Seriously. And starting out in a new and untested field is going to require milking your other core businesses for cash and capital while things get up and running (see Sprint’s WiMax plans). Earthlink’s got nothing. Earthlink’s cuts reflect deeper problems with its core businesses, and frankly, lousy management, not necessarily the underlying viability of muniwifi.
FON and Time Warner Go Steady April 23, 2007
Posted by Tim Schneider in Peer Production of Infrastructure.add a comment
According to Om, the Associated Press has confirmed that Time Warner and Fon have entered into a nebulous agreement. There are absolutely no specifics out yet, but the obvious deal is to bundle FON routers with a cable modem, and then grant Time Warner users access to the FON network, such as it is.
Spanish ISPs have been doing this for a while, and it makes a lot of sense if you believe that FON is a viable alternative to T-mobile hotspots, 3G data plans, or municipal/community wifi networks. Or open networks, for that matter. I’m skeptical of this, except in rather extraordinary circumstances (mixed commercial/residential districts), or FONeros who live above a Starbucks. As we see more dual 3G/wifi devices, maybe this’ll save people a few pennies a month on cell phone minutes. I like my FON router. I like the idea. I don’t think it’s a viable replacement for any of the things I listed above.
What’ll be fun to watch is how Time Warner modifies their TOS to allow sharing of wifi using a FON router, but not anything else. It will also be fun to watch law enforcement follow the chain, first to the ISP to get the user’s IP address, and then to FON to find out who was using the hotspot at what time.
technorati tags:fon, timewarner, wifi, starbucks, ommalik
Communications as Currency April 14, 2007
Posted by Tim Schneider in Uncategorized.1 comment so far
I heard this last week, and have spent the last week or so trying to find some confirmation/outbound links. Not finding any, I’m just going to post it like a thought experiment.
I was at a meeting last Wednesday and someone there was telling me about a company in Haiti that he claimed is “revolutionizing” telecom. This company is in Haiti, and they sell pre-paid phones that allow users to exchange minutes between phones by holding them close together and beaming them from one to another. According to this guy, cell phone minutes are now used as a common form of currency to buy things on the street.
There were other stories, about traveling in motorcades and the guns carried by his bodyguards, but I was captivated by this idea, the very act of communicating commodified. This loaf of bread, this dress is worth this many minutes of “connection.” I’d love to do that ethnography.
Municipal Wireless Phase Deux April 10, 2007
Posted by Tim Schneider in Peer Production of Infrastructure.add a comment
I spent most of last night and this morning completing a symposium application that I expect will be denied, because I failed to comply with certain formalities in the application process (consulting certain faculty, submitting the forms as directed). Attention to detail is rarely my strong suit. Worst case scenario I’ll have to reapply in the spring, but it’s not a bad application.
The proposal is for a symposium on municipal wireless, and the starting presumption is that the initial debate over muni wifi is now over. I was going to post on the Wifi Waste report issued a couple of months ago (the thing was just a mess, and not even about wifi), but what’s the point. The report was at least six months too late: the debate has shifted from the hypotheticals proposed by telco lobbyists and libertarian think tanks, to the merits of the actual implementation. Do the networks work? Do they deliver what they’ve promised? It’s going to be a great show, and in the end they all may fail (and the critics will have been right) . . . though I bet not.
This transition will expose some questions that the initial debate mostly obscured or ignored by its incessant focus on market effects and the ability of government to effectively manage tasks traditionally performed by the private sector. What does it mean for a government to run a network?
So much of the Internet scholarship I’ve been hammering through this semester assumes private networks. Thus the first generation scholarship’s focus on private ordering through contract, code and norms, the tortured attempts to adapt free speech laws that assume public spaces to private networks, and conversely, attempts to control privacy when the data is in (other) private hands throughout its travels (and in a sense already public).
Municipal networks confound these initial assumptions by inverting them. What are a user’s reasonable expectations of privacy when their ISP’s boss is the same as their police department? When cities inevitably are called upon to filter content and applications traveling over municipal networks, the First Amendment will surely impose some limitations on how they may Constitutionally respond. The answers to these basic questions will yield only more questions (many of which I posed in stilted English in my application). All legal questions are fractal.
If my symposium gets approved y’all will hear about it.
technorati tags:muniwifi, muniwireless, firstamendment, symposium, nyu, law, privacy
Does commons-based peer production work for video games? March 30, 2007
Posted by anachreon in Gaming.add a comment
I’ve become interested lately in the question of whether the successes that have occurred within the open source software community can be replicated in the case of entertainment software. Simply put, will open source video games ever rival or exceed the importance of games produced by massive firms like Electronic Arts? This question is an outgrowth of Yochai Benkler’s work in “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” and the more comprehensive assertions in his recent book, “The Wealth of Networks : How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.”
Benkler’s basic claim is that in the case of informational goods, commons-based peer production leads to better identification and allocation of human creativity when compared to markets and firms. This phenomenon has led to, among other things, the success of GNU/Linux, Apache, Wikipedia, and so forth.
I’ll say right now that I’m not sure the success of Linux can be replicated in the case of video games. This is not to say that there hasn’t been a tremendous amount of peer-based video game development going on over the internet. Take, for example, the tremendous success of “mods” for commercial games. “Counter-Strike,” which has now become a commercialized product, was originally a free add-on to Valve Software’s Half Life. It was developed by volunteers over the internet for free, and for a number of years it was the most popular game played online.
There’s a lot more going on here, but for now I just want to say that I don’t think we should infer from the special case of mods that non-market, open-source peer production is going to rule the gaming roost a decade from now.
The first reason is that mods are not really open-source projects. They are a peer-produced veneer on an otherwise proprietary and commercial code base. Basically, they’re derivative works made under a non-exclusive license that prohibits their creators from selling their derivative content.
A second (closely related) reason is that mods often aren’t commons-based. Instead, they frequently replicate the traditional firm model but do business over a network rather than in physical space. Mod projects generally don’t release their source code regularly, nor do they accept submissions from people outside their “team.”
I’m going to make a third claim that there’s something different about expressive content that doesn’t quite fit Benkler’s mold. What works for creating tools – an open-source media player, VPN client, or video card driver – may not really work as a mode of production for films, novels and entertainment software.
Open source can do software, but can it do entertainment? That’s the question.
"An evolving level of telecommunications services” March 28, 2007
Posted by Tim Schneider in Universal Service.add a comment
As we’ll see, the FCC’s definition of Universal Service has been static for a decade now, but the 1996 Act contemplated some evolution of the services guaranteed by cross subsidies among telecommunications providers. From Section 254:
(c) DEFINITION- (1) IN GENERAL- Universal service is an evolving level of telecommunications services that the Commission shall establish periodically under this section, taking into account advances in telecommunications and information technologies and services. The Joint Board in recommending, and the Commission in establishing, the definition of the services that are supported by Federal universal service support mechanisms shall consider the extent to which such telecommunications services–
(A) are essential to education, public health, or public safety;
(B) have, through the operation of market choices by customers, been subscribed to by a substantial majority of residential customers;
(C) are being deployed in public telecommunications networks by telecommunications carriers; and
(D) are consistent with the public interest, convenience, and necessity.
(D) is Telecom law boilerplate, everything the FCC does is governed by this standard. (C) is similarly empty–the FCC is unlikely to mandate a service that carriers are not already deploying. According to this 2006 Pew report, 42% of Americans have high speed access at home, so (B) is not far off. And finally, (A) is an interesting standard. At what point does a service become essential to education, public health or public safety?
Again, the statutory language gives all the wiggle room in the world: after all, these are just factors for the Joint Board and the FCC to consider when recommending and establishing the services that the “universal service support mechanism” funds. We can divine a general sentiment here, though: universal service is not meant to be cutting edge, but merely keep pace with what’s happening elsewhere.
technorati tags:usf, universalservice, 96act
Out of Left Field: Schools, Libraries and Hospitals Get Wired March 27, 2007
Posted by Tim Schneider in Universal Service.add a comment
And finally, there’s this:
(6) ACCESS TO ADVANCED TELECOMMUNICATIONS SERVICES FOR SCHOOLS, HEALTH CARE, AND LIBRARIES- Elementary and secondary schools and classrooms, health care providers, and libraries should have access to advanced telecommunications services as described in subsection (h).
As I noted in an earlier post, it’s a tribute to brilliant legislative drafting that “advanced telecommunications services” in subsection (6) is not necessarily the same as “advanced telecommunications and information services” in subsection (2).
If portions of (3) were new, this is flat out unprecedented. I’m going to bracket health care providers for a second, though I’m pretty sure that was about telemedicine. Services for schools and libraries is based on a very specific vision of what the Internet/National Information Infrastructure/Information Superhighway would be, a vision familiar from the copyright concept: a big fat pipe full of content. And like much of the rest of the Internet, we can really thank Al Gore for this (if Reed Hundt is to be believed).
On a personal note, many years ago I had a conversation with then-Senator Al Gore about his wish to see a schoolgirl in Carthage, Tennessee be able to learn from the limitless resources of the Library of Congress, without being barred by time, distance, and lack of money from such opportunities.
Tradition universal service, insofar as there is any underlying ideology, is about one to one, point to point connections with people in the same general area. As I’ve noted earlier, I think universal service as a coherent American value is mostly made up, and that it’s really about avoiding the political fallout from rising local rates post-long distance competition and divestiture. But what Gore/Hunt/the 1996 Act did was to port concept of universal service to access to information, or to use the contemporary parlance, access to knowledge. This shift is sort of intuitive in an age of convergence since the same pipe now does both, but it’s not an obvious move in 1996.
Going forward “universal service,” or the concept of universal connectivity writ large, will beg the question, “What for?” Is it about communication, or access to information? And as subsequent implementation of this principle demonstrate, the answer to that has a real impact on what kind of service we actually end up getting.
technorati tags:algore, 96act, reedhunt, universalservice, hospital, school, library, att, erate
