Mobile Operators Want their Ethernet over Fiber

May 29, 2010 Leave a Comment

A new telecom paradigm is on the verge of becoming reality. Not a disruptive technology, not the right brain flash of a new radical idea – rather it is a logical development of existing infrastructure using better operational execution. It is an acknowledgement of fiber optic infrastructure as an inherent requirement in the development of the 4th utility – broadband Internet, compute capacity, and storage as a basic right for all Americans.

The “utility” label has merit. Just as we need roads, water, and electricity to function in the modern world, we need communications. Much like the roads, electrical distribution, and water distribution systems crossing North America, the communications infrastructure follows a similar matrix of hubs, spokes, loops, and major exchange points interconnecting every square mile of the continent. The matrix includes a well-interconnected mixture of fiber optic cable, wireless, cable TV, copper telephone lines, and even satellite connections.

However, the arteries of this telecom circulatory system remain fiber optic cable. Fiber optic cable allows tremendous densities of communication, information, and data to travel across the street, or across the continent. Fiber goes north and south, east and west, connecting everything from wireless towers, satellite earth stations, collocation and hosting centers, communication carriers, Internet Service Providers, and end users to each other on a global scale.

Geography of the 4th Utility

Let’s take a deeper look at this circulatory system in geographic terms. When looking at a US map, latitude lines run horizontally, parallel to each other based on degrees north or south of the equator. The northern 40th parallel runs from Northern California to New Jersey, hitting parts of 12 states along its path. If we look at the US Interstate Highway system you will see some of the longer “arteries” stretch from the West Coast to the East Coast, such as interstate highway 10, running 2460 miles, hitting 8 states from California to Florida, and 35 major cities.

In addition, I-10 intersects with 45 other interstate highway junctions, and has several thousand entry and exit points serving both major cities and rural locations along the route. If you dig into the electrical grid you will find a similar mesh of interconnections, nodes, and relationships originating at power plants, and ending at the utility outlet in a bedroom or office.

The fiber optic system follows a similar model. The east-west and north-south routes follow the interstate highway system, rail system, and electrical grid – taking advantage of rights-of-way and interconnect nodes all along the route. The routes are generally shared by several different fiber optic providers and carriers, further extending their reach by collocating fiber at major carrier hotels along the coast, such as 60 Hudson in New York, the Westin Building in Seattle, NAP (network access point) of the Americas in Miami, and One Wilshire in Los Angeles, where they splice their fiber with major intercontinental submarine fiber optic systems.

Within North America further domestic interconnections are provided at each major city junction point throughout the country reinforcing the mesh of fiber networks in cities such as Salt Lake City, Atlanta, Chicago, Las Vegas, Washington DC, Dallas, Omaha, and Minneapolis.

The Local Value of a Global Fiber Optic Circulatory System

All this fiber is of little value if its utility does not reach every potential end user in America, or around the world. Much like the interstate highway system sporting several thousand access points and exits, the new fiber optic backbone will support fiber optic connections to every end user in the country, or push wireless broadband to every other addressable mobile and rural user. In the new world, the utility does not end at a wall outlet, but ends wherever the user is located. And that mobility is a local challenge.

Hunter Newby, CEO of Allied Fiber, an emerging fiber utility provider in the United States, advises that “It’s all about fiber…to the tower. For that component the long haul (fiber routes) is just how we get out there and back.” So while we may be able to analogize fiber routes with cities and interconnection points with the idea of a system starting at the driveway in a house to the East Los Angeles interchange and I-10, the wireless towers provide an undefined end point to the telecom grid that is unique.

The main difference discriminating the road system and electrical grid from the fiber grid are that in the telecom industry each route has many competing commercial providers. By definition, competition is not neutral. And if not neutral, it is not a utility, and cannot be expected to provide service in a location (or market) that will not be of financial advantage to the service provider – resulting in locations potentially stranded from the infrastructure.

Is this Really Different than the Existing Telecom Infrastructure?

Newby continues “The truth is that it’s the fiber that binds. Our route and its design is unique to today’s needs, unlike the design and needs of the cables from 10+ years ago. There are no neutral colos on those cables every 60 miles. There are also no FTTT (fiber to the tower) ducts (supporting) a separate fiber cable with handholes every 3000 ft on those systems.”

Following telecom deregulation in the United States, companies such as AT&T are no longer monopolies, with infrastructure development based on economic factors. If Carp, Minnesota (population ~100) does not offer sufficient economic incentive for AT&T to build broadband infrastructure, then it is unlikely to happen. Unless broadband is available through wireless networks, connecting to a broadband fiber backbone, and the rest of the world.

With companies such as Allied Fiber entering the market, access to the east-west, north-south routes will include a truly neutral alternative to the private road system of the existing telecom carriers. The long haul fiber routes will connect to regional neutral fiber routes, such as provided by companies such as Fiberlight in the eastern United States, and even more importantly provide both access to towers and interconnections at least every 60 miles (or more often) along the route.

That is because the long haul utility cable system will need to regenerate their signals at 60 miles points, offering a location for towers and regional fiber providers additional local access to supplement the carrier hotels and collocation facilities located at major junction or interconnection points. And financial incentives are available to companies through programs such as the Rural Development Telecommunications Program (RDTA) supporting the US government’s 4th utility Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP).

Hunter Newby brings evangelism to his vision.   

“Add to that the neutral colos allow the rural wireline and wireless carriers to colocate locally – in their county, or closeby by using the short haul duct to get to the closest AF colo – and in those locations they can buy high capacity transport and transit at wholesale rates from the large US and international carriers coming through. Right there! Wholesale! The rural carriers don’t even have to lease dark from us to get to the big cities/carrier hotels if they don’t want to or can’t afford to yet.

The ability to gain access to the power of the major US carrier hotels, but not have to actually get to them is the next frontier in the US.”

The 4th Utility is an American Entitlement
Newby concludes “The fiber laterals will all be built to us (the long haul neutral fiber providers). The tower companies won’t build them, but there are several transport providers that will. The mobile operators want their Ethernet over fiber.” Fiber that connects them to the content and people available on a global network-connected community. Broadband access that allows Americans to function in a global community.

Those wireless companies, whether mobile operators offering LTE/4G services, or WiFi providers offering a local competitive service, will pay the same tariff to connect to the neutral towers and fiber systems without prejudice. Just like an electrical utility doesn’t care if the outlet is supporting a private individual’s television set, a small storefront business’s display case, or an aircraft assembly plant, the only discriminating issue is in volume and required capacity.

A utility. Broadband access is now an expected utility – not a value-added service, available to all, but rather as an entitlement to living in America.

Filed under International ICT, Internet and Telecom, Social Issues Tagged with , , , , ,

A Cloud Computing Epiphany

May 22, 2010 Leave a Comment

One of the greatest moments a cloud evangelist indulges in occurs at that point a listener experiences an intuitive leap of understanding following your explanation of cloud computing. No greater joy and intrinsic sense of accomplishment.

Government IT managers, particularly those in developing countries, view information and communications technology (ICT) as almost a “black” art. Unlike the US, Europe, Korea, Japan, or other countries where Internet and network-enabled everything has diffused itself into the core of Generation “Y-ers,” Millennials, and Gen “Z-ers.” The black art gives IT managers in some legacy organizations the power they need to control the efforts of people and groups needing support, as their limited understanding of ICT still sets them slightly above the abilities of their peers.

But, when the “users” suddenly have that right brain flash of comprehension in a complex topic such as cloud computing, the barrier of traditional IT control suddenly becomes a barrier which must be explained and justified. Suddenly everybody from the CFO down to supervisors can become “virtual” data center operators – at the touch of a keyboard. Suddenly cloud computing and ICT becomes a standard tool for work – a utility.

The Changing Role of IT Managers

IT managers normally make marginal business planners. While none of us like to admit it, we usually start an IT refresh project with thoughts like, “what kind of computers should we request budget to buy?” Or “that new “FuzzPort 2000″ is a fantastic switch, we need to buy some of those…” And then spend the next fiscal year making excuses why the IT division cannot meet the needs and requests of users.

The time is changing. The IT manager can no longer think about control, but rather must think about capacity and standards. Setting parameters and process, not limitations.

Think about topics such as cloud computing, and how they can build an infrastructure which meets the creativity, processing, management, scaling, and disaster recovery needs of the organization. Think of gaining greater business efficiencies and agility through data center consolidation, education, and breaking down ICT barriers.

The IT manager of the future is not only a person concerned about the basic ICT food groups of concrete, power, air conditioning, and communications, but also concerns himself with capacity planning and thought leadership.

The Changing Role of Users

There is an old story of the astronomer and the programmer. Both are pursuing graduate degrees at a prestigious university, but from different tracks. By the end of their studies (this is a very old story), the computer science major focusing on software development found his FORTRAN skills were actually below the FORTRAN skills of the astronomer.

“How can this be” cried the programmer? “I have been studying software development for years, and you studying the stars?”

The astronomer replied “you have been studying FORTRAN as a major for the past three years. I have needed to learn FORTRAN and apply it in real application to my major, studying the solar system, and needed to learn code better than you just to do my job.”

There will be a point when the Millenials, with their deep-rooted appreciation for all things network and computer, will be able to take our Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and use this as their tool for developing great applications driving their business into a globally wired economy and community. Loading a LINUX image and suite of standard applications will give the average person no more intellectual stress than a “Boomer” sending a fax.

Revisiting the “4th” Utility

Yes, it is possible IT managers may be the road construction and maintenance crews of the Internet age, but that is not a bad thing. We have given the Gen Y-ers the tools they need to be great, and we should be proud of our accomplishments. Now is the time to build better tools to make them even more capable. Tools like the 4th utility which marries broadband communications with on-demand compute and storage utility.

The cloud computing epiphany awakens both IT managers and users. It stimulates an intellectual and organizational freedom that lets creative people and productive people explore more possibilities, with more resources, with little risk of failure (keep in mind with cloud computing your are potentially just renting your space).

If we look at other utilities as a tool, such as a road, water, or electricity – there are far more possibilities to use those utilities than the original intent. As a road may be considered a place to drive a car from point “A” to point “B,” it can also be used for motorcycles, trucks, bicycles, walking, a temporary hard stand, a temporary runway for airplanes, a stick ball field, a street hockey rink – at the end of the day it is a slab of concrete or asphalt that serves an open-ended scope of use – with only structural limitations.

Cloud computing and the 4th utility are the same. Once we have reached that cloud computing epiphany, our next generations of tremendously smart people will find those creative uses for the utility, and we will continue to develop and grow closer as a global community.

Filed under Cloud Computing, International ICT, Internet and Telecom, Social Issues, Social Networking, Virtualization

Under Siege in Jakarta

May 15, 2010 2 Comments

Entering any major hotel in Jakarta is a multi-stage process. First you pass by security staff near the entrance to the hotel at the street. Security staff look over the car, the passengers, and make a screening decision prior to allowing the car or taxi entrance into the hotel driveway. Then you have swarm of security staff checking under the hood, the passenger compartment, the trunk, and an examination of the under carriage with mirrors. Next, at the hotel lobby entrance, another metal detector, bag check, and a friendly “thank you” as you enter the lobby. Try to go to dinner, and another bag check at the hotel restaurant entrance.

May 14th, 2010.

JAKARTA, May 14 (UPI) — Indonesian police have accused arrested terrorist suspects of planning to assassinate the president and foreigners. The alleged targets included Americans during an Independence Day ceremony set for August.

The head of the country’s police force said the planned attack against President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was supposed to happen at the State Palace on Aug. 17. The four suspects, one of them shot dead during the police raid, were then going to declare Indonesia under the Islamic religious Sharia law.

July 18th, 2009.

VOANews.com. Investigations continued Saturday into the Friday bombings at two hotels in Jakarta, Indonesia that left nine people dead and at least 50 injured. Little information about the bombings is being released to the public. On Saturday, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono visited the sites where two bombs exploded at the Marriott and Ritz Carlton hotels.  

On Friday the president said the bombings were acts of terrorism but he made no statement during the visits

May 12th, 2010.

JAKARTA, May 12 (Jakarta Post) — The police’s counterterrorism squad has captured 17 terrorist suspects alive and shot dead five others in a series of raids conducted since Thursday last week. Spokesman for the National Police Insp. Gen. Edward Aritonang said the five suspects were killed in the latest raids on two separate places in Cililitan, East Java and in Cikampek in West Java on Wednesday. The police also arrested a suspect in Cikampek..

“We arrested two yesterday [Tuesday] in Jakarta,” Edward said as quoted by kompas.com

Ritz Carlton Jakarta following terrorist bombingIn Jakarta you cannot walk into a major shopping mall – particularly one catering to foreigners, without going through a metal detector and passing by several security officers trained to identify suspect behavior. Drive through the city center, and you will pass dozens of trucks with army and police forces waiting on standby to respond quickly in the event an incident occurs.

All office buildings in the city center have similar security to the hotels, with multi-stage security checkpoints from the street to your office. Most are surrounded by barbed wire, high iron and concrete walls, and a density of security cameras that make London look weak.

Jakarta feels like a city under siege

In the United States a potential car bomber in Times Square results in hours of “expert” commentary on the cable news stations, most of it meaningless babble produced by experts who have no clue what is really happening, offering only their opinion based on the same information available to any normal citizen by reading accounts from UPI, Reuters, AP, or citizen journalists.

Americans are lead to believe we are the center of the war on terrorism, until you experience the level of security being delivered in a city like Jakarta.

“Muslims are not terrorists”

Indonesia, the fourth most populace nation in the world, is also the largest Muslim population in the world. Ordinary Muslims are not radicals, and my experience shows Indonesians treat each other with a level of respect and courtesy only dreamed about in a city like Los Angeles. Jakarta, as in any major city, has crime. However, having walked around most areas of Jakarta, and several other Indonesian cities, you do not feel threatened at the same level as a Caucasian may feel walking around East or South Central LA, parts of Brooklyn, North Philadelphia, or Washington D.C.

The terrorists in Indonesia, as in most of the world, keep invisible, hiding in plain sight until their button is pushed to produce their violence.

JAKARTA, Indonesia, July 19th 2009 (AP) — The terrorist attacks that struck two luxury hotels in the capital have shaken ordinary Indonesians who had grown more confident after waves of arrests had left the nation’s al-Qaida-linked militant network seriously weakened. Coming four years after the country’s last serious terrorist attack, Friday’s twin suicide bombings at the J.W. Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in Jakarta unleashed a new wave of anxiety in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country.

Co-workers in Indonesia are anxious to let foreigners know they are not terrorists. In any Indonesian office, you have a mix of Muslims, Christians, and indigenous religions represented among the staff. They all get along well, never argue over their ideologies or barbed wires surrounding a major hotel in central Jakartaphilosophies, but do occasionally compare notes on the difference in their faith and cultures. And of course there is a bit of friendly teasing and rivalry between those hailing from Sumatra, Java, Bali, or Kalimantan. Just like people from diverse cultures in any large country.

When a foreigner enters the conversation, the talk does eventually work its way into opinions on terrorism. Most people are afraid, and want everybody to know that Indonesians are not terrorists. Much like the United States, in a country with nearly 260 million people there will be incidents that are violent, and not representative of the population.

And they know Indonesia’s reputation as a sanctuary for terrorism is hurting their image.

Times Online, July 17th, 2009 — Manchester United will not play their match against an Indonesia Super League XI in Jakarta on Monday following today’s bomb attacks. The club hopes, however, that the game can be switched to Kuala Lumpur, having arrived there this morning.

At least nine people, including some foreigners, were killed and at least 50 were injured in two large explosions at luxury hotels in the Indonesian capital. Sir Alex Ferguson and his squad were due to fly to Jakarta tomorrow evening and to stay at the Ritz Carlton Hotel, one of the terrorist targets.

As an international community, we need to offer countries like Indonesia our support in finding terrorists, and eliminating the threat from their country, and the world. As an international community we will have much better success protecting the safety and security of all nations if we work together as an international community, not only on a government to government level – but also on a human level. It is not an issue of Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, or Buddhists – it is a matter of accepting each other’s differences, and working together to improve our global quality of life.

Idaho’s white supremacist Christians are no better than Afghanistan or Pakistan’s Muslim fundamentalists – all distort and corrupt their claimed faith in the interest of power. And then preach their word through terrorism and violence against those who are not like them.

In Jakarta the siege continues. After a couple days security in the face of everybody becomes oddly comforting. When I go to sleep in my central Jakarta hotel room I feel that I am as safe as possible from violence directed at foreigners in my hotel, and I have no problem presenting my backpack for inspection at a shopping mall or office building. I am somewhat saddened society has come to this point, but I am very happy Indonesians are just as tired of violence as anybody else, and have finally put their foot down and begun securing their country.

Imagine having to pass through a metal detector and screening prior to ordering a latte at the Starbucks on San Fernando Rd in Burbank.  That is Jakarta.

Filed under citizen journalism, LA Life, Social Issues Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Communities in the Cloud

May 8, 2010 Leave a Comment

In the 1990s community of interest networks (COINs) emerged to take advantage of rapidly developing Internet protocol technologies. A small startup named BizNet on London’s Chiswell Street developed an idea to build a secure, closed network to support only companies operating within the securities and financial industries.

BizNet had some reasonable traction in London, with more than 100 individual companies connecting within the secure COIN. Somewhat revolutionary at the time, and it did serve the needs of their target market. Management was also simple, using software from a small company called IPSwitch and their soon to be globally popular “What’s Up” network management and monitoring utility.

However simplicity was the strength of BizNet. While other companies favored strong marketing campaigns and a lot of flash to attract companies to the Internet age, BizNet’s thought leaders (Jez Lloyd and Nick Holland) relied on a strong commitment to service delivery and excellence, and their success became viral within the financial community based on the confidence they built among COIN members.

As networks go, so did BizNet, which was purchased by Level 3 Communications in 1999 and subsequently the COIN network was dismantled in favor of integrating the individual customers into the Level 3 community.

Cloud Communities

Cloud computing supports the idea of a COIN, as companies can not only build their “virtual data center” within a Platform as a Service/PaaS model, but also develop secure virtual interconnections among companies within a business community – not only within the same cloud service provider (CSP), but also among cloud service providers.

In the “BizNet” version of a COIN, dedicated connections (circuits) were needed to connect routers and switches to a central exchange point run by BizNet. BizNet monitored all connections, reinforcing internal operations centers run by individual companies, and added an additional layer of confidence that helped a “viral” growth of their community.

Gerard Briscoe and Alexandros Marinos delivered a paper in 2009 entitled “Digital Ecosystems in the Clouds: Towards Community Cloud Computing.” In addition to discussing the idea of using cloud computing to support an outsourced model of the COIN, the paper also drills deeper into additional areas such as the environmental sustainability of a cloud community.

As each member of the cloud community COIN begins to outsource their virtual data center into the cloud, they are able to begin shutting down inefficient servers while migrating processing requirements into a managed virtual architecture. Even the requirement for managing high performance switching equipment supporting fiber channel and SAN systems is eliminated, with the overall result allowing a significant percentage of costs associated with equipment purchase, software licenses, and support agreements to be rechanneled to customer or business-facing activities.

Perhaps the most compelling potential feature of community clouds is the idea that we can bring processing between business or trading partners within the COIN to near zero, as the interaction between members is on the same system, and will not lose any velocity due to delays induced by going through switching, routing, or short/long distance transmission through the Internet or dedicated circuits.

Standards and a Community Applications Library

Most trading communities and supply chains have a common standard for data representation, process, and interconnection between systems. This may be a system such as RosettaNet for the manufacturing industry, or other similar industry specifications. Within the COIN there should also be a central function that provides the APIs, specifications, and other configurations such as security and web services/interconnection interface specs.

As a function of developing a virtual data center within the PaaS model, standard components supporting the COIN such as firewalls, APIs, and other common applications should be easily accessible for any member, ensuring from the point of implementation that joining the community is a painless experience, and a very rapid method of becoming a full member of the community.

A Marriage of Community GRIDs and Cloud Computing?

Many people are very familiar with project such as Seti At Home, and the World Community GRID. Your desktop computer, servers, or even storage equipment can contribute idle compute and storage capacity to batch jobs supporting everything from searching for extraterrestrial life to AIDS research. You simply register your computer with the target project, download a bit of client software, and the client communicates with a project site to coordinate batch processing of work units/packets.

Now we know our COIN is trying to relieve members from the burden of operating their own data centers – at least those portions of the data center focusing on support of a supply chain or trading community of interest. And some companies are more suited to outsourcing their data center requirements than others. So if we have a mix of companies still operating large data centers with potential sources of unused capacity, and other members in the community cloud with little or no onsite data center capacity, maybe there is a way the community can support itself further by developing the concept of processing capacity as a currency.

As all individual data centers and office LAN/MAN/WANs will have physical connections to the cloud service provider (IaaS provider) through an Internet service provider or dedicated metro Ethernet connection, the virtual data centers being produced within the PaaS portion of the CSP’s will be inherently connectable to any user, or any facility within the COIN. Of course that is accepting that security management will protect non-COIN connected portions of the community.

Virtually, those members of the community with excess capacity within their own networks could then easily further contribute their spare capacity to the community for use as non-time critical compute resource, or for supporting “batch” processing. Some CSPs may even consider buying that capacity to provide members either in the COIN, or outside of the COIN, and additional resource available to their virtual customers as low cost, low performance, batch capacity much like SETI at Home or the Protein Folding Project uses spare capacity on an as-available basis. Much like selling your locally produced energy back into a power GRID.

We Have a New, Blank Cloud White Board to Play With

The BizNet COIN was good. Eleven years after BizNet was dissolved, the concept remains valid, and we now have additional infrastructure that will support COINs through community clouds, with enabling features that extend far beyond the initial vision of BizNet. CSPs such as ScaleUp have built IaaS and PaaS empowerment for COINs within their data center.

Cloud computing is an infant. Well, maybe in Internet years it is rapidly heading to adolescence, but it is still pretty young. Like an adolescent, we know it is powerful, getting more powerful by the day, but few people have the vision to wrap their head around what broadband, cloud computing, diffusion of network-enabled knowledge into the basic education system, and the continuation of Moore’s, Metcalf’s, and other laws of industry and physics.

COINs and community clouds may not have been in the initial discussions of cloud computing, but they are here now. Watching a Slingbox feed in a Jakarta hotel room connected to a television in Burbank was probably not a vision shared by the early adopters of the Internet – and cloud computing will make similar un-thought of leaps in utility and capabilities over the next few years.

However, in the near term, do not be surprised if you see the entire membership of the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ operating from a shared cloud COIN. It will work.

Filed under Cloud Computing, Entrepreneurs, Internet and Telecom, Virtualization Tagged with , , , , , ,

Giving Ourselves a Broadband Facelift for the 2010 Matrix

May 2, 2010 Leave a Comment

Of all the memories the telecom community has of the 80s and 90s, one of the most vivid is the sight of long haul fiber optic cable systems being buried throughout the United States. A product of deregulation, competition, and the birth of the Internet, American telecom companies saw a desperate need for greatly increasing transmission capacity, and responded with investments in long haul fiber, metro fiber, and digital switching needed to meet all visions of what we knew in those wonderful days of innovation.

Globally, broadband Internet, 3G + wireless, and the convergence of everything from entertainment to telephony into digital formats is driving not only Internet technologies, but also physical telecom transmission systems to the threshold of existing capacity. This explosive growth in information and communications technologies creates an interesting dilemma for telecom companies.

Do you spend your efforts finding ways to control the use of existing capacity? Or do we acknowledge the fact our network-enabled global community is not likely to get any smaller, and the world now needs our telecom thought leadership to both greatly expand what we already have, while aggressively investing in developing transmission technology that will enable, not restrict, growth in all things digital.

Not a US-Only Challenge

When a child in South Africa, Hanoi, or Denpasar has equal access to Hulu TV, Skype video chats, and eLearning systems from either a fixed workstation or mobile phone, it can be argued technology is serving the purpose of enabling and providing a new generation with the intellectual tools they need to flatten the geographic and political barriers we have lived with since the beginning of time.

All great, benevolent thoughts. Our children may need the tools to correct the problems we’ve created through irresponsible use of fossil fuels, exploitation of natural resources, human transmitted disease, war, and creation of toxic “stuff” that continues to restrict our planet’s ability to create an acceptable quality of life for all.

Face it, educated people in general do not make as many BIG mistakes as those who blindly follow others due to ignorance or lack of exposure to a wide variety of knowledge. Internet and telecom-enabled technologies may facilitate some people who thrive on physical or ideological control, however that is also diluted as the percentages bring their own knowledge of fact, and exposure to a liberal dosage or prism of different perspectives.

Or in other words, we can hope primary school students from different countries and cultures who meet each other through chatting or cooperative educational projects will be more likely to collaborate on useful endeavors in later life than those who are only exposed to a narrow view of society, culture, ideologies, and leadership.

Getting to the Vision

All this is great. An altruistic, warm, and fuzzy view of the future. Getting our vision to reality requires a tremendous amount of work. The current caretakers of industry and leadership do not have all the intellectual tools needed to keep up with a developing generation of children who were birthed in the Internet Age.

However we (the current caretakers) are pretty good at building things. Among those things are fiber optic transmission systems spanning oceans, continents, cities, and now even homes. We are good at building wireless transmission towers, and are still pretty good at building devices that can connect all this fiber, tower, and wireless infrastructure together.

And the younger generation is beginning to envision ways to exploit the transmission “matrix” that is beyond the comprehension of our current caretaker generation.

“The world is becoming one, big, ubiquitous, homogeneous system because of “the network” and the network exists and needs to exist because it exists (in other places) already. This is the justification to build. It is a self-fulfilling chain reaction.” (Hunter Newby, CEO Allied Fiber)

The Republicans in the US like to scream the need for Americans to “Drill Baby Drill,” exploiting domestic sources of fossil fuels, reducing our dependence on foreign sources for energy. In the telecom industry we are beginning to feel the need to “Dig Baby Dig.”

We need to increase our ability to continue delivering the network transmission capacity required to give our next generation the tools needed to really make a “Matrix-enabled” future, rather than spend our efforts scrambling, as in the energy analogy, to control or reduce our dependence on existing sources of telecom capacity.

How it is Going to Happen

In the US, for the past 30 years deregulation has allowed the telecom industry to build their infrastructure without any oversight other than what local or state governments impose for licensing and access to rights of way. Most debates have surrounded topics such as net neutrality, control over markets, or conduct of both content and users connecting to the Internet.

The US National Science Foundation inadvertently created the current, sometimes restrictive environment within the US Internet community by passing control of the NSFNet backbone to a select few commercial providers (AT&T, MCI, and Sprint). This award increased incentives for carriers to control their part of the US Internet space, and reduce incentives to aggressively build out physical capacity needed to meet the exponentially increasing demands for bandwidth and capacity.

It did not greatly meet infrastructure requirements needed to support the convergence of everything that can, does, should, and will travel over Internet Protocol (IP) networks over the next 25 or 30 years. While there are some positive developments in the local loop (FiOS, LTE, WiMAX, Uverse, etc), Newby cautions in the US there is a dearth of long haul and metro capacity needed to string all the local initiatives together.

The answer is to dig. Dig more conduits around the United States and Canada, drop the highest existing capacity fiber cabling within the conduits, connect wireless towers supporting LTE/4G+ to the high capacity backbone, connect buildings and homes, and develop new even higher capacity transmission technologies to parallel or exceed similar models of growth such as Moore’s Law and Metcalf’s Law.

But to give us the space needed to develop those technologies, for now, dig baby dig. Give fiber optic long haul, metro, and local digs the same tolerance we give to filling potholes and expanding lanes on a freeway system – while in the background we hope our leadership designs high speed rail, better road construction materials, and better ways to move from point “A” to point “B.”

Consider broadband, hyper-band, and uber-band development the true 4th Utility justifying extreme social priority, without which we will suffer the same fate as losing electricity, water, and roads. As with roads, everything we do going into the future will ride the broadband “matrix,” and without enough available lanes we will reduce ourselves to a frustrating gridlock of intellectual, business, and social development.

Dig baby dig…

NOTE: I was first introduced to the concept of the “Matrix” in the early 1990s, when a friend of mine suggested I read a book by John S. Quarterman entitled “The Matrix: Computer Networks and Conferencing Systems Worldwide.” 20 years after, and it is still the most enlightening view of the Internet, what the internet cloud and should be, as well as look into the future as anything I have ever read on the topic. It takes William Gibson, Neal Stephensen, and translates their fiction into a reality which continues to become part of our day to day lives. Or maybe it gave both authors additional ideas needed for them to develop fiction…

Filed under Cloud Computing, Government Regulatory, International ICT, Internet and Telecom, Social Issues, Social Networking Tagged with , , , , ,

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