Telepocalypse

Join the dots

I’ll pick on two of David Isenberg’s recent entries, but there are many others that illustrate the same point.

First quote:

The Death of Distance first appeared in The Economist about a decade ago. In that decade we’ve seen international telephony prices fall from dollars per minute to Skype-free, while we think nothing, nothing, nothing of accessing a website halfway around the world. Minutes are dead. Area codes mean nothing. Country codes are fading.

Indeed. I read Frances Cairncross’s similarly-titled book on the matter a few years ago and enjoyed it immensely.

What it missed, however, is shown by the next quote:

What does wireless broadband have in common with water and solid waste management? Like the first two items, wireless broadband is becoming a municipal utility as dozens of cities have started the process of creating public wireless networks.

The city of Cerritos, California started the trend early in the year and, by year-end, dozens of U.S. cities had jumped on the bandwagon. […]

What this tells us is that, short of pervasive wireless broadband utopia, where you are really matters. If you’re in the right coffee shop, community or city, you’re in luck; you can connect quickly and cheaply. If not, tough.

So where you are matters, whereas the distance to where others are doesn’t. The death of distance is fuelling the rise of geography. It really matters if you’re in Cerritos or the next-door town. (But when you Skype someone over that municipal wireless network they could be anywhere in the world. (Indeed, you can’t even tell where the callee is without calling them to ask! A weakness in Skype’s presence system and an oportunity for a premium feature of enhanced presence?)

If you can work anywhere, wouldn’t it be nice to have a beachfront home? How about some well-heeled and community-conscious neighbours? These things are in short supply, however. Even worse, they are often positional goods. There is a best beach, or poshest district. No amount of sand trans-shipping or landscape gardening will change that.

The rapid spread of broadband may indeed do as much to alter human geography as the internal combustion engine changed our physical environment. There will be more intense clustering, and churning of existing land use. Building and roads may stay fixed; their occupants less so.

I wonder even if the next wave in urban geography is the death of the city suburb. A century ago you would have been brave to predict the motor car would turn teeming downtown areas into semi-derelict relics. But who wants to spend their life communing? Why not live right next to the facilities in the city or a small town, or get out entirely and live somewhere more rural? Perhaps after the suburbs and exurbs come the ultrurbs?

Taking the earlier analogy between sewage and Internet content a bit further (and why not!), let’s speculate on what they year 2104 looks like. Well, in the city centre we pay homage to my Victorian ancestors and their municipal sewage systems. Municipal networks rule. High urban densities make these networks economically feasible. Out in the countryside you build your own septic tank and soak-away system. User-owned networks dominate. (Take away universal service funds and the uncontrolable urge to lay twisted copper everywhere gives way to a more rational wireless approach.) And in the suburban middle? Only the losers of society live there now, glued to their old-fashioned cable TVs and telephones.