The Whalesong Project: Whalelog

Friday, 21 November 2003

WIRED: Fiber to the People. Lawrence Lessig. If a traditional network provider owned an advanced fiber network in a particular area, that network provider, acting rationally, would charge customers a monopoly price, or restrict service to get its monopoly benefit. But if the customer owned the network, then the customer could get the same access at a much lower price and be free of use restrictions.

[Source: Tomalak's Realm]
8:04:13 PM

Utah's Digital Infrastructure.

NYTimes reports on a landmark effort by the state of Utah:

In a 21st-century twist on Roosevelt-era public works projects, Salt Lake City and 17 other Utah cities are planning to build the largest ultrahigh-speed digital network in the country.

Construction on the project is scheduled to start next spring - if the cities can raise the money to pull it off. The network would be capable of delivering data over the Internet to homes and businesses at speeds 100 times faster than current commercial residential offerings. It would also offer digital television and telephone services through the Internet.

With a $470 million price tag, the project is considered one of the most ambitious efforts in the world to deploy fiber optic cables, which carry data in bursts of light over glass fibers.

The cities involved argue that reliable access to high-speed data is so important to their goals of improving education and advancing economic growth that the project should be seen as no more controversial than the traditional public role in building roads, bridges, sewers and schools - as well as electric power systems, which are often municipally owned in the Western United States.

This is what India needs to do - recognise that the digital infrastructure is as important as the physical infrastructure, and remove all restrictions on the sectors.

[Source: E M E R G I C . o r g]
8:02:36 PM

Broadband could be £22bn boost. The increased use of broadband could add £22bn to the UK economy by 2015, a report suggests.

[Source: BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]
7:56:57 PM

Korea plans ultra fast broadband. South Korea is upgrading its national network to give citizens an even faster link to the net.

[Source: BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]
7:55:50 PM

It's Not a Model: It's One-to-One Scale. This sounds like the biggest toy train set in the world: Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway Co. use Wi-Fi to remotely control their engines in trainyards. You can't make this stuff up. Less amusing and more interesting, the company wants to look into opening up their private microwave network to public cellular and data communications as a way to provide service in underserved areas....

[Source: Wi-Fi Networking News]
7:43:52 PM