The area in which I live in Edinburgh is at the edge of what's called the New Town. The distinguishing feature of New Town -- certainly compared to suburban Overland Park, Kansas from which we've fled -- is its considerable oldness. The trees surrounding our apartment complex were originally planted as part of an arboretum, which relocated about 200 years ago further outside the city centre. Yet the pavements beside the cobbled streets have ubiquitous "CATV" hole covers, and coax sneaks up the building facades.
If we can get cable TV, we should be able to get optical fibre. But I'm not holding my breath. A 1Mbit/sec DSL connection is all I'm getting for now.
One reason for such slow change is that the nature of the immovable incumbents is changing. People assume that the enemy of fibre is the old telco running copper lines into your home. But it isn't necessarily so. In fact, there's a whole digital ecosystem based around the ekeing out of artificial scarcity.
Take Microsoft's foray into DVD video formats. Clearly, they are trying to capture the interface between machine and digital instructions to operate that machine (again). No doubt they have some splendid wavelet-cum-fractal patented recipe incorporated into the MPEG standards. But if everyone has gigabit fibre to their homes, I don't need to care about your stinkin' compression patents. If I have to choose some public domain and inefficient alternative, or no compression at all, who cares?
Similarly we're seeing an end to storage scarcity, which opens up new services like Google's GMail. This threatens Microsoft's Outlook franchise.
Then the scarcity of CPU cycles in mobile devices starts to erode. Your ASIC that sipped a few milliwatts of power gets replaced with a general-purpose CPU that can run a multitude of VoIP applications. What was once co-dependent on a bunch of smart base stations and switches at the carrier gets liberated.
So there's a whole digital economy based on the rationing of scarce resources that are rapidly ceasing to suffer from contention. Before you berate and bash a telco, consider who else has an interest in keeping you underfed and hungry for more connectivity, storage and CPU cycles. There are many out there who stand to lose their cosy lifestyle.
In the face of such overwhelming inertia, it's no wonder few entrepreneurs risk breaking the copper legacy. What we need is public policy that creates new public land and ends the digital enclosures.
There's a slightly stretched historical analogy to this. One reason, I believe, for the success of the USA is the historical difficulty of imposing tyrrany and sustaining repression. The abundance of land has encouraged the fleeing from opression and poverty: blacks from south to north and whites from east to west. Likewise (and an intellectual hyperspace jump later) for virtual real estate. Once you have a fiber connection to your home, you effectively have your own digital homestead. You no longer need to rely on someone else to host your pictures, archive your email or give you permission to put up a web page.
There's a catch, however. New Town in Edinburgh has gorgeous architecture, with buildings complementing each other in great circles, broad streets and quaint back-alleys. It took planning and central control to get there. An Act of Parliament, no less. It was created anew because the Old Town had become a squalid and overcrowded cess-pit. The days of malnourished serfs pandering to the needs of a monarch were over, and enlightenment had taken hold.
What we now need is the same radical insistence on building for the future. Any fixed telecom facility that traverses public property must be fiber-based. No exceptions. It should be impossible to obtain permission to dig up a road to access a copper cable except to replace it with glass. It isn't a question of money and budgets, but one of permissions and property rights.
Of course, the Old Town didn't go away. The route up to the castle is lined with shops and tourists. The area is clean and pleasant. But the lifeblood of the city has moved on. Time to wave goodbye to the feudal communications system, too.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 7:01 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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