The Pew folks have rolled out another hilarious study that suggests most dial up users don't want broadband. Uh huh. And I have some swamp land in Florida for sale.

I have observed this phenomenon for fifteen years now--much longer than the Pew folks. It is very simple, really. People that have never had a broadband connection are, in fact, likely to believe it is something that they don't want or need.

But here is the problem. The Pew folks have never asked broadband users if they would to back to dial up. And you need to ask that question in order to be able to place the dial up question in the appropriate context. We all know the answer we would get from broadband users: no one wants to go back to dial up. In fact, I've been asking that question to rooms full of people for many years, and I have never had a single broadband user stand up and say, "Oh yea, broadband is waaaay too fast for me. I'm switching back to dial up next week."

You need to query both groups with the complementary version of the same question if you want to be able to draw any useful conclusions. Why the Pew folks refuse to do this is a mystery.

We are beginning to see the broadband coop as one very viable form of governance for community broadband efforts. Coops are a great ownership and governance model because they firmly vest the enterprise in the community--every subscriber is also a shareholder in the enterprise, and shareholder/members are able to vote and select board members. The Ripton Broadband Coop serves rural customers in rural Vermont via wireless, using an open access, open service model. Two service providers are selling services on the network.

T-Mobile has announced $10/month VoIP (Voice over IP) phone service. It's an interesting twist on VoIP, with the company leveraging portions of its wireless cellular network to reduce the cost of providing the service. It is, however, a landline service, and you have to have T-Mobile cell service AND a broadband connection at your home. But you can't beat the price, which looks pretty good compared to an average $40-$50 per month cost of old-fashioned copper-based local/long distance bundles.

We already have too many people driving around with cellphones glued to their ears, not paying attention (clue: driving seven miles under the speed limit, wandering back and forth across the lane). Now Chrysler has announced they are building in support for WiFi in some of their automobiles. Great....now we'll have people driving while talking AND watching YouTube at the same time.

The FCC has finally released new definitions of broadband.

• First Generation: 200 Kbps up to 768 Kbps

• Basic Broadband: 768 Kbps to 1.5 megabits per second
• 1.5 Mbps to to less than 3 Mbps
• 3 Mbps to less than 6 Mbps
• 6 Mbps to less than 10 Mbps
• 10 Mbps to less than 25 Mbps
• 25 Mbps to less than 100.0 Mbps
• 100 Mbps and beyond

This is a major improvement over the old definition of "200 kilobits" as broadband. By this old definition, the country has very high levels of broadband penetration, but made the U.S. the laughingstock of the rest of the world. In much of Europe, residential broadband tends to be north of 40+ MEGABITS, or about 200 times more capacity than the FCC definition.

The graded scale is useful because it can provided benchmarks to measure progress in a community or region. If the FCC has provided targets, that would have been even better. For example, a ten year target could be to have 90% of businesses and homes in the "100 Mbps and beyond" category, and indeed, U.S. community broadband projects like the one in Danville, Virginia are deploying "100 Mbps and beyond" today.

This article provides more data on the fast-shifting but likely permanent change in how we decide where we want to live. We are probably seeing the biggest shift in housing since the end of World War II and the rise of the suburb. Suburbs are not going away overnight, but the cost of commuting to and from often rural subdivisions has caused sharp drops in the value of homes in such locations, and there will be a counterbalancing increase in the value of homes closer to work and shopping--welcome back, downtown neighborhoods.

Smart communities will aggressively begin rehabilitation of neglected older neighborhoods--street and sidewalk repairs, park improvements, fiber to the home--as this will help draw workers and families that want to reduce or even eliminate commuting costs. It also suggests a tremendous opportunity to finally bring back Main Streets, which have been struggling since the sixties as commerce moved out to the edge of town.

The "new" Main Street will be focused primarily on business and professional companies and food/entertainment--things to do after work and places to eat for business professionals. Class A office space on Main street and Main Street business incubators will draw businesses looking for "quality of business life," where walking to work, walking to lunch, and easy access to professional services (copy services, banking, accounting, legal) are all within a few steps of the office.

And as always, downtown fiber will make this work.

According to The Register, the airlines are planning to use mobile phones to cut costs and to sell ad revenue. As you book a flight, you will give your mobile phone number to the airline. They will use this to push information on the flight to you (not so bad), and once you get to the airport, they may even check you in electronically via your phone, which is already underway in Japan. What could get ugly is the the notion that they could also push ads to your phone once you get in the airport, so the idea is that you'll pay a fortune for a a cramped seat and then get spammed at the same time. If you have flown recently, you may have noticed some airlines have put ads on the seat back trays, so as you "enjoy" your free beverage (snacks seem to be out completely now on some airlines) you get to read the ad on the surface of the tray.

Apparently, multitasking (reading email, watching YouTube, texting, talking on the phone--all at the same time) is making us stupid. Literally. Our brains are being rewired, and not in a good way, according to this article.

It is more, apparently, than just a time management issue. How many times have you heard someone remark, only half-joking, "I need to get out of the office to get some work done."

It is why "email free Fridays" and other boycotts of technology are beginning to take hold. Our fixation on technology is causing the slow death of relationships. We are still in the infancy of all these gadgets and services, though, so there is still hope that we will learn better how to use all this stuff appropriately. Put in the context of the development of the automobile, it is really only about 1925. We have a long way to go.

Paper ballots will be used to collect votes in many elections this fall. There will be a drop in the use of electronic ballot equipment because of security problems, and more states are using paper ballots that are optically scanned because they are easy to use, ease to scan, and provide an auditable paper trail. The biggest shortcoming of the electronic equipment is the lack of a paper trail that can be used to verify results. Unfortunately, this shortcoming was widely noted in this column and in many other sources early in the rush to avoid any more hanging chad incidents.

Sprint's new WiMax initiative with partner Clearwire is stalling because the high capacity wireless access points don't work very well when backhaul (the connection from the wireless radios/antennas is over old-fashioned copper phone lines.

Do the math....

If Sprint/Clearwire is promising 3-6 megabits per user over a wireless connection and the copper phone line feeding it is a T1 line (1.5 megabits), customers are going to be very disappointed. Clearwire may become a valuable customer of communities that are building out fiber networks.

The Pure Electric Vehicle is just what we need. If this car actually gets built, it has the simplicity, low cost, and small size that could potentially win millions of buyers. The designer is promising to sell it for $9,999, meaning it will only cost the equivalent of four tanks of gas 8^). Kidding aside, for the price, a lot of households could quickly justify the cost of this vehicle as a second or third car.

The car is exactly as it is named, a "pure" electric vehicle, meaning it runs on batteries--no complicated hybrid gear trains, fossil fuel engines, or esoteric batteries. The car uses off the shelf sealed lead acid batteries, meaning they are cheap and easy to make. The car has a top speed of 65 mph, which is fine for around town errands and commuting, and could easily be recharged while sitting in the company parking lot from a cheap solar panel in the back window.

Clearwire has announced plans to operate its proposed national WiMax network as an open access system, and major players like Sprint, Comcast, and Time Warner have apparently already agreed to become resellers on the network. It will be interesting to see how this turns out, as an enormous investment will be required to build the national infrastructure required to meet the promised goals. One of the backers of Clearwire is Sprint, which is losing cellular marketshare rapidly, and may regard Clearwire as its last chance to keep from being broken up and sold.

A national wireless network makes sense only if the operator truly operates it as open. The dangerous part of the proposal is that Clearwire can make any rules it wants, and can change them anytime it likes. If most of the U.S. ends up relying on a single network owner for mobile access, is that a good thing? Again, it *could* work, if competitive service providers truly get treated equally.

Note also that the article talks about very realistic bandwidth projections of 6 megabits down and 3 megabits up for the WiMax system--excellent for mobile access but that kind of bandwidth won't support much video or other high bandwidth, multimedia services, like movie downloads, live HD events, and videoconferencing. We'll still want and need fiber to the premise (FTTP).

Once again, fairly small countries are far ahead of the U.S. in thinking about broadband. Malaysia has announced an ambitious but entirely doable plan to take fiber to major areas of the country, with the Federal government paying about 30% of the cost in a deal with the biggest telecom company in Malaysia. In the U.S., it would be the equivalent of the states making deals to write checks directly to the incumbent providers (which some states already do). The fiber system will have 100 megabit capacity, with a starter package of Internet access at 10 megabits.

The good news is that U.S. communities and regions still have the opportunity to surpass Malaysia. Malaysia's deal with the incumbent telecom will not increase competition and will not be likely to encourage the rollout of innovative new services. Open service networks like those in Europe are beginning to gather momentum here in the U.S., and open networks tend to lower prices and bring lots of new services to businesses and residents. Five or six years from now, Malaysian cities will be behind many broadband community efforts in the United States.

Spit (Spam over internet telephony) may be worse than spam, according to this article. As more and more businesses and people make the switch to VoIP telephone services like Vonage, the spammers are gearing up for the mother of all dinnertime sales call efforts. But wherease the Do Not Call list mandated by Congress managed to get those annoying POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) sales calls under control, Spit will be coming from servers in China, Nigeria, and other lawless areas of the globe, beyond the reach of U.S regulators.

While spam can be filtered at the mail server, before you ever have to see it, spit is just going to make your phone ring. Researchers are already trying to develop methods to try to combat it, but the end result will be to make VoIP services cost more as we all pay for anti-spit services. As one example of how these costs affect prices, Design Nine's cost of mail service is effectively doubled when the spam filtering service we use is added in. Email is still a bargain, but costs more than it needs to because of spam.

Every year about this time, I write about wireless. I'm at the beach, and have to use the local wireless service. It works great at 6 AM, when no one else is up, but once all the other people in the neighborhood start logging on, the service gets slower and slower. Wireless is a shared medium, like cable modem service. A wireless access node with, for example, 20 megabits of bandwidth, shares that bandwidth among all users. So if you have 20 users on at the same time, each one effectively gets only about 1 megabit--or less, if one of those users is trying to download video or music.

Wireless and cable modem work moderately well today because fortunately, not everyone connected to a cable node or wireless access point is doing something at the same time. You are not using any bandwidth while you are reading a Web page or your email. The fly in the ointment is our ever increasing demand for video and multimedia, which use hundreds of times the bandwidth of email and Web pages. Trying to download a Netflix two hour movie over your cable modem or wireless connection may grab most of the available bandwidth, making everyone else's access, for a few minutes or even an hour, very, very slow.

All network architectures, even the "Internet," rely on sharing to some extent. But at the local level--neighborhoods and communities--shared bandwidth can be a challenge. As more of get connected, we will do more locally, and that means better networks, designed to minimize the effects of shared bandwidth. As always, we end up needing fiber as part of the solution.