Tag Archives: internet

Freedom To Connect: Be There

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From friend Esme Vos:

Freedom to Connect, the annual event organized by David Isenberg, will be held on March 30-31, 2009 in Washington, DC. I am partnering with David to make this event fun and informative. This year is a very important one because President Barack Obama has made wired and wireless broadband – its cost, quality and availability – a major issue for his administration to tackle. Broadband is, in the eyes of the new administration, not just there for its own sake. It is a necessity for improving our lives: from the education of our children to the reduction of social isolation among seniors to efficient management of our energy grid.

There will be a lot of new people in Washington D.C. and as you have seen from the Inauguration ceremonies this week, there’s tremendous energy pushing for change. In the past, many of Freedom to Connect’s attendees have come from the FCC, various federal government agencies, the Congress and the Senate. This year we will see many new faces. We need to have a dialogue with them about the future of broadband and technological innovation in the United States.

The key topics for discussion include:
on-line, network-enabled industry and culture, new jobs and sustainable growth;
Burlington VT, where muni fiber enables business, artistic endeavor, and new telemedicine applications;
how Lafayette, Louisiana’s community came together as it built its muni fiber network;
the twin cities of Cedar Falls and Waterloo, Iowa, where one twin has a muni net, and the other doesn’t;
what municipal CIOs are planning for Seattle, Portland and San Francisco municipal fiber networks;
city nets, wired and wireless, that didn’t work – what went wrong and what we can do better;
what President Obama’s infrastructure and economic recovery plans mean for tomorrow’s network.
Sascha Meinrath (New America Foundation) and I will discuss in great detail what caused the municipal wireless networks in Philadelphia, San Francisco and other cities not to be built. Call it a post-mortem. It’s important for us to know what went wrong so we don’t make the same mistakes. We will also identify the key areas where cities and regions can use Wi-Fi networks not just to deliver public Internet access but to improve municipal and county services.

Among those who have already confirmed attendance to F2C are the CIO of San Francisco, the CTO of Seattle, the Commissioner of Telecommunications of Massachusetts and the Chair of the Vermont Telecommunications Commission, and 20-some other important shapers of the Internet who care about using it to spur economic growth, enhance participatory democracy and make our planet greener.

Get all the details, and sign up at http://freedom-to-connect.net.

One TLD to rule them all

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.Tel, a new top-level domain-name, is said to offer registrants the ability to store contact information in their own domain records. This could be a good way to stay on top of things like phone number and street address changes. This way, you can tell people how to reach you via your domain, no matter how often your contact info changes.  It’s not completely different from contact update services, but this is the first time we’ve seen it done using DNS. The New York Times has the story here.

NASA creates new protocol for deep space IP transmissions

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DTN is the outer space version of TCP.  Transmission control with the ability to store an forward large amounts of data in the event of a solar storm or other disruption.  It takes 4 to twenty minutes using DTN to transmit data from Mars to Earth, which, at the speed of light, accounts for ‘space lag’.  The protocol was co-designed by Internet luminary Vint Cerf and NASA. Now when do I get my flying car? Pretty cool, check it out.

FCC says yes to TV spectrum deal, networks pissed

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Well, this is a harbinger.  The deal supported by Microsoft, Google, and others to unlock spectrum between frequencies used by television station for unlicensed data access applications was approved by the FCC yesterday, and the usual suspects are upset about it.

That is–NBC, Disney, and the traditional TV gang are concerned that localized use of these relatively low frequency channels will impeded delivery of television service.  To which I’ll say this.  Most folks who consume a lot of TV (me not included) already receive television delivery through cable, fiber, or satellite schemes, making interference a non-issue.  The remainder tend to be people who don’t watch a lot of TV or people who are of little interest to advertisers.

So the question is: what are the TV people so upset about? Control.

Their industry is vanishing under sands blown by the winds of change.   Consumers’ awareness of user-centricity has pushed the debate over good access technologies into the spotlight, and the stubbornness of local telcos and cable operators to deliver on the promise of post-broadband Internet services has forced the hand of those who benefit most from a heavily utilized Internet infrastructure: Microsoft, Google, and the like.

Not surprising. And definitely a welcome move from my point of view.

It will be interesting to see how the spectrum ends up getting used.  What devices will facilitate the use of these channels?  Will we see new kinds of access points, or will local service operators finally be able to deliver good wireless last mile access along with their other services? Imagine post-broadband speed from your satellite operator or even your local television broadcaster.  This opens up a lot of possibilities.