Dana Blankenhorn

Father of the Year

This is Cantrell Johnson. I'm proud to say he has been my neighbor for almost 23 years.

He is a part-time pastor. He supports his family doing odd jobs. He used to tile floors. These days he often mows lawns.

Rev. Johnson doesn't just preach about Jesus. He tries to live as Jesus did. He takes care of people quietly, without fanfare. He wants no credit. He demands no help.

He'd be embarrassed to know you are reading this.

At 66 he is thankful for everything he has. He is thankful for his family, for his neighbors, for his God, for his health. That health is not all it could be. He is diabetic, he has trouble with his eyes and had to lose a lot of weight. But thanks for what one has should not imply anger or resentment over what one doesn't have.  Rev. Johnson taught me that.

Some years ago one of Rev. Johnson's sons suffered the first in a series of strokes. The last ones left him in a very bad way. The son is now dependent on oxygen, and lives in a wheelchair, in his father's house. Rev. Johnson's son is dieing before his eyes and there is nothing he can do about it.

Did I mention that Rev. Johnson's daughter is divorced? She is, sadly. She lives with him, and works hard, selling things. Her three sons also live in the house. It is a very crowded house, a very crowded life. With sadness that would kill lesser men, would kill me were I burdened with it.

But God only gives us the pains we can bear, and Rev. Johnson is a strong, strong man. He is the happiest man I have ever known.

Want to know how Rev. Johnson reacted to this latest pain in his life?

C'mon Google Light Your Fiber

A lot of water has gone under the bridge lately over Google's WiFi plans.

Among the chief critics is Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital 
Democracy. In a long piece at The Nation, he calls it a ploy, a trick aimed at destroying privacy. The reason? Google would offer some service free, in exchange for ads fed by a Google cookie.

Unstrung notes that this is just the low-speed plan, that Google (and its new partner, Earthlink) will offer All You Can Eat (AYCE)  WiFi for $20/month, at much higher speeds, so those with means will be paying customers. This leads us back to the argument of municipal WiFi advocates, including me. The service should be free (since the frequency is free) and the "franchise" can't be exclusive.

All this misses the key point, however.

                               Given a business model, Google will light its fiber.
                                                       (C'mon Google Light Your Fiber)

Over the last few years Google has been buying all the dark fiber it could get its hands on. Most of the purchases have been at fire sale prices. Most of the fiber remains unlit.

But if Google can see a reason to light its fiber, everything changes. Everything.

• The Bells' stranglehold on the U.S. core is broken. According to the economics of light, a single competing core means prices can fall to the floor, because both cores can handle all the traffic.
• The Bells' stranglehold on local access is broken.

According to the details in the media, Earthlink is going to build-out the local access portions of these networks. Google will not be a consumer ISP, Earthlink will be. Earthlink will build wherever it can find customers. Earthlink figures, for instance, that it can build-out New Orleans from a 15-mile radius of the city center for $15 million.

After five years of being slowly strangled by Bell lobbying and intransigence, Earthlink will, with Google's help, be a national ISP, with an incentive to provide ever-faster service speeds, and a radio-based plant that can be written-off (and re-installed) every three years.

Best of all, Earthlink doesn't have an exclusive here. Once the fiber is lit, Google can look for other backhaul customers. Essentially it becomes Level 3 with a better balance sheet. It becomes the Bells' worst nightmare.

The Economics of Light

In an important OECD discussion forum, Tom Vest and KC Claffy of the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), along with Bill St. Arnaud, posit a very important concept:

The Economics of Light.

The Economics of Light is a direct outgrowth of what I have called Moore's Law of Fiber, or DWDM. It is that one fiber line is enough. (The picture, from the CAIDA home page, is a diagram  of the Internet core.) 

Given an unbroken terrestrial right-of-way between any two points, an initial if sizable one-time capital outlay will yield what amounts to infinite network capacity between those points relative to all conceivable human demand for the imaginable future.

This is an extension of something I wrote in my own Moore's Law book. I illustrated this point with a story about Enron.

     Economics teachers like to talk about widgets in their classes – imaginary products with endless utility but no real economic value. I figure kittens are the same way.

    Enron was trading kittens. It signed a contract for bandwidth, then assumed all its lines would sell for the same price. It knew the bandwidth was really costing it nothing to produce, so it set aside all that money as pure profit.

    The same thing can happen with kittens. Mr. & Mrs. Enron have two cats and a litter of 8 kittens. Some fool offers them $100 for one of the kittens. So they take the money, call it profit, and look again at the litter. I guess that means we have $700 worth of kittens, they figure, plus we still have the cats. Those cats might produce, say, a half-dozen more litters over their lifetime. And the kittens will produce cats, too. So the “asset value” of the two cats might be as much as $10,000. Guess where they put the money – right, they bought more cats.

Moore's Law of Bandwidth

Mark Cuban (right) today quotes extensively from testimony analyst Carl Moffet gave on net neutrality recently.

Afterward Cuban writes the following:

There is no moores law for bandwidth to the home.

This may be both the most ironic and false statement I have read this year.

Ironic, because Cuban made his immense fortune from Broadcast.Com based on the proposition that the Internet would become a media channel. False, because the only reason there is "no Moore's Law of bandwidth to the home" is because of Bell and cable hoarding.

Consider Moffet's statement "the existing infrastructure from the telcos – DSL running at speeds of just 1.5Mbs or so –   simply won’t be adequate to be considered “broadband” in five years or so."

Why is DSL 1.5 Mbps? Anyone, Mark, anyone? It's because that is all the Bells choose to sell. Use VOIP for voice, use all the copper frequency for Internet service, and even with 1999 technology you're looking at 7 MBps. I have seen gear that moved data even faster over existing copper plant. But the Bells won't buy it so there is no market for research in this area.

You don't have to fun fiber to every home in order to boost that considerably. Cable doesn't. Cable is now a two-way street because fiber was run to neighborhoods, to pedestals serving hundreds of homes each. Just running fiber between existing switch centers, and placing pedestals for inter-connects every half-mile or so, would probably equal that. (And in most cities I bet that job is half-done already.)

And as for cable. How much of the digital capacity of a cable service is served through the cable modem? One channel. That's it, one channel out of 100 (sometimes 500).  How difficult would it really be to serve two or four channels of Internet service in the average cable household? What would it cost -- a gospel channel? Maybe the umpteenth Disney channel, the one dedicated to 1930s cartoons? Who's going to notice? And besides, you can always extort better deals from cable channel producers if your capacity is constrained providing Internet service.

The claim Cuban is repeating, in other words, is 100% false. It's what I like to call Bell-shit.

The Power to Tax is a Duty to Defend

A friend asks a good question:

What I’m trying to understand is the immense effort that is going into trying to maintain the fictional telecom industry and so little effort to enable a real marketplace.

The answer is very simple.

 

Power.

 

Political power, government power, economic power,  yes.

 

But also taxing power.

 

Because these old networks are heavily taxed, in many different ways, government and the political classes have become co-dependent on the telecom and copyright industries.

Conservatives love to quote John Marshall's aphorism that the power to tax is the power to destroy. But the power to tax also brings with it a duty to defend. Those in the Internet industry first saw this in the Third World 10 years ago, and we laughed at it.

Laugh no more.

 

The Wealth of Nations in the 21st Century

We can sum up what we want on Internet issues in one word:

                                                                            Connectivity

Connectivity will never be perfect. Connectivity will also be somewhat subjective. But when we use the Internet this is what we want.

There are natural limits to connectivity:

• Language is a limit. Much of China's Internet is now unreachable because the URLs are in Chinese. This will increase, and we will become dependent on translators to push the best of both worlds through language walls that block connectivity.
• Security is a limit. All governments consider some forms of connections out of bounds. All governments seek to control those actions, even within connected networks. And all efforts to do this limit connectivity.
• Speed is a limit. The slowest speed between you and the data (or person) you wish to reach is the speed of your connectivity. This will usually be sub-optimal somewhere along the way, but we can work to fix that. Latency translates as temporary loss of speed.

Connectivity is not what the Bells and cable operators provide. It is not what they wish to provide. What they wish to provide, what they claim they do provide, is:

                                                                            Services

Services combine the connection and what is transacted between the ends. A phone call is a service. A TV show on cable is a service. A software program (or other downloadable file with a fixed cost) is a service. A service provides a business model to one side of the transaction, and rains unearned money on the company providing the connectivity.

When Harold Feld of Wetmachine talks of Whitacre Tiering, he's talking about the Bells conflating connectivity with services. By defining the former as the latter, then holding up delivery until one side pays extra, AT&T seeks to create a bogus "service" it can charge extra for.

This is, of course, nonsense.

Ah, but what of the cost? Click and find out.

Why No Always-On?

When I launched Mooreslore four years ago, at Corante, I was fascinated with the idea of combining RFID with 802.11 networking, resulting in enormous markets for medical, home automation, and home inventory applications.

I saw RFID as a consumer technology.

What got in the way? Many people in the industry are still asking that question.

The answer, in a word, is politics:

1. People won't trust systems controlled by others.
2. The Administration used a top-down approach to RFID aimed solely at its own security.
3. RFID became associated with Big Brother.

This did not have to happen, and it can still be undone. But it can't be undone in the current political environment.

What's needed to jump-start these applications is a simple statement of privacy law:

                                                              Data I create belongs to me.

The Real Political Struggle of the Internet

The reason the Internet's political struggles aren't understood is that they are hard to explain.

Fortunately Bob Frankston can explain it. In his latest on SATN, about Skype, he defines it as a struggle between the center and the edge.

The Internet as it is, and should be, is about applications controlled in your PC or the server you choose to connect with. You are the edge.

The Internet, as the Bells want it, is about applications controlled at the center, inside the network.  AT&T is the center.

Here is how this applies to Skype:

It's an example of how communities can stay connected independent on the accidental properties of the Internet and the gatekeepers. Because the relationships are maintained at the edge mobility is fundamental. You don't need the network to do meshing when the applications maintain their own relationships. Meshing then becomes a low level technique for pooling routers rather than a way to make applications mobile.

In other words, what is politically right is also better technically.

Brer' Osama

Who does Osama bin Laden support? (Get the book, it's great.)

Bush Administration rhetoric has long been devoted to portraying Republicans as his Great Satan, but is that really the case?

After all, we know 9-11 was bungled. We know Osama has popped up, conveniently, whenever Bush has seemed to be in trouble.

And now, with support for the Iraq War down to a small number of Bush dead-enders, good Al Qaeda soldier Zaccharias Moussaoui suddenly cops to everything, practically demanding the death penalty when his advocates had just about gotten him off. 

See, he's saying. Bush protected you from me. These evil lawyers had my life spared. Now get back in line or they'll let me kill again. Bwaa-hah-hah-ha!

As an Atlantan, I have finally figured out the plot. Uncle Remus.

Where Georgia Leads, Trouble Follows

Historians recall the 1966 election, in part, for its epic battle between avowed racist Lester Maddox and closet neo-racist Bo Callaway.

Lester won, but it was the last time Democrats would unite around an avowed racist. Four years later saw the election of Gov. Jimmy Carter, and a gradual retreat among Democrats which continues to this day.

Georgia took a similar  leadership role this week when its legislature approved SB 529, a rather stiff anti-immigration bill, and brought to the fore a new Maddox, Sen. Chip Rogers. Among its sillier provisions is one to impose a 5% tax on all out-of-the-country (Mexico) wire transfers, when the person placing the order can't prove they are in the country legally. I called it the "stick to your mule" bill, since all you need to avoid the tax is to know someone legal who will place the order for you.

In passing the bill, pro-business Republicans who really paid for this legislature were silenced, possibly by promises that enforcers would not really go after farms and homebuilders. They were told that this was the price of maintaining their majorities, and that Democrats would be  fooled into taking the immigrants' side.

Maybe. It's very hard for me, as a Georgian, to see a system whereby a large group of people are given no status, yet continue to work under exploitative conditions, as anything other than racist.

The argument being made by immigration supporters is that Mexicans are taking jobs Americans "do not want to do." Well, yes and no. They are taking jobs, at wages and under working conditions native-born Americans will not accept. They are working very hard in conditions Americans would find violate their rights.

In Georgia, today, Mexicans are the new niggers. Black folks resist exploitation, many employers will not accept the idea of offering living wages and good working conditions, and so a new underclass is imported.