Future trends

Look for "fuel surcharges" to rapidly increase the cost of certain kinds of services. Our last Fedex bill included a $10 fuel surcharge on top of the normal $48 delivery charge for a single package. It's hard to imagine, given the volume of packages that Fedex handles, that every package now requires a 20% surcharge.

A new study indicates that 92% of all email sent in the first quarter of 2008 was spam. In other words, all of us, users and service providers alike, are spending a fortune to haul worthless and contemptible spam traffic across the Internet.

Recently, when we have had people over to house for dinner or when at someone else's home, I notice that a common topic of discussion is what is showing on YouTube. Everyone has a story about some usually goofy thing they saw recently on the video site. Anecdotally, several people have shared that they often just spend a little time in the evening goofing off on YouTube. This is usually followed by the admission they don't turn on the TV much anymore.

Communities who think that DSL and wireless services are adequate with respect to bandwidth are going to be very disappointed, as neither technology is capable of delivering large amounts of video to thousands or ten of thousands of residential customers, no matter what you read about the amazing abilities of WiMax to bring world peace, solve human aging, and deliver massive bandwidth to everyone at the same time. WiMax is a terrific technology that is much better than WiFi, but the amount of actual bandwidth that WiMax will actually be able to deliver to residential and business users is not going to support heavy IP-TV use (i.e. YouTube, movies on demand, TV show downloads, etc.). WiMax has the capability of reaching more premises by virtue of being able to get a signal over longer distances than WiFi. But as you extend the reach of a wireless signal, you also spread the amount of usable bandwidth over a larger number of subscribers, in most cases. This means the amount of per subscriber bandwidth may not increase significantly.

Wireless is part of a complete solution, but fiber is needed alongside it to meet the fast-growing video demands of residences and businesses.

With the announcement of the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) which allows software developers to write native applications for the iPhone, Apple has also changed another set of rules for the game.

Apple is creating a special area in the iTunes Store for iPhone software applications. Software developers pay a small one time fee to have their software placed in the Apple store, and Apple takes on the responsibility for distributing, downloading, and installing the software, including certifying it is virus-free. Apple also takes on the responsibility for collecting the money for the software, processing credit card charges, bad debts, and all the associated headaches associated with running an online storefront.

In return for all that Apple support, the developer agrees to share revenue with Apple, on a 70/30 basis, with the developer getting 70% of the sales price.

This will unleash tremendous innovation and there will be, in the coming months and years, a flood of new software and services available for the iPhone because Apple has designed not just a piece of hardware, but an entire shared system that makes market entry for small, innovative businesses very low cost--Apple only gets paid once there is revenue flowing. Apple's approach makes it easy to try out new applications and services at low risk. It is identical to the open, multi-service networks being built in places like Danville, Virginia. In both cases, a shared system lowers the cost of offering products and services.

Apple unveiled the long promised SDK (Software Development Kit) for the iphone, along with serious support for business enterprise applications and services, including Cisco VPN (Virtual Private Network) support and Microsoft Active Sync support. The latter is needed to make the iPhone work fully with businesses using Entourage and other Microsoft business applications. The SDK allows developers to write and distribute iPhone native software applications, including games.

The iPhone is already the most popular cellphone in the world, but with today's announcements, Apple has unleashed the full power of the device, which actually runs Mac OS X. I wrote in this space years ago that the iPod was not a music player, but actually a new platform. Today, Apple has opened up the iPhone (which is actually an iPod) and has made the cellphone obsolete. RIM stock is off several dollars already (RIM makes the popular Blackberry), and Palm stock is down slightly, although Palm has had stock value issues for some time. But Motorola, Nokia, LG, and other phone makers are also in trouble, because the iPhone offers so much more than an old fashioned cellphone that Apple is well on the way to eliminating much of the competition, just as it did in the music player market.

According to this report, the merger of XM and Sirius has stalled, a year after the deal was first announced. It is a perfect storm because you have a combination of FCC confusion, Congressional confusion, silly prices paid for on-air talent, and a bad business model.

It is a lesson for terrestrial broadband and communities as well, because most of the same problems and lessons apply in community telecom, where we also have the wrong business models, lack of clarity at the Federal level about what to do, and prices for services that are out of whack.

In the satellite market, it is hard to understand how Sirius would ink a $500 million dollar five year deal for foul-mouthed Howard Stern when the company is only getting about $35 million a year in ad revenue, along with anemic subscription sales.

What would make sense, as part of the merger, would be for XM and Sirius to go to an open content model, in which they become just the carrier, and let anyone with the money buy channel space on their satellites. Right now, the two companies are flogging the same old, tired business model used by the cable companies, which is to bundle hundreds of channels together, most of which no one listens to.

It would make more sense to charge $1 a month per channel and let subscribers pick which channels they want to listen to, with something like a ten or fifteen channel minimum.

The FCC and Congress could help out by promoting this as an option, just as they could help out communities by promoting open, multi-service networks like nDanville, which is the country's first municipal open, multi-service network. Service providers from all over the country are starting to call the City to find out how to put their services on the network.

Satellite radio has a bright future, but only if the old business models are tossed and a new, "open" model is adopted.

Those digital photo frames that are becoming popular hold more than pictures. Millions of them apparently come pre-loaded with a potent virus designed to thwart computer anti-virus programs. The virus is spread from the frame to a computer when the frame is plugged into a USB port.

The virus is difficult to remove, and the article recommends plugging a suspect picture frame into a Linux or Macintosh first to see what is stored in the frame memory (and then deleting it).

I continue to be amazed that we seem to be abandoning the phone, which continues to be highly reliable, in favor of email, which is much less reliable.

Twice in the past couple of weeks two different people commented that I had been "out of touch." In both cases, they had sent me email. For different reasons, both emails had gone astray, and they assumed I was ignoring them. But I just had not received the emails. In one case, the email was delivered several days late--no apparent reason--it just happened. In another case, the email was sent to an account that I do not check daily.

But neither individual thought to pick up the phone and call, and I've seen this happen enough that it seems to be a trend. All sorts of things can happen to email--it can be filtered as spam, we can delete it accidentally when trying to select multiple messages, it can be discarded by a server if an attachment that is too large. The sender can have a typo in the address that sends it to the wrong person, as just a few examples.

Some of my colleagues and I find text messages useful to verify the availability of someone. Text messages are unobtrusive and represent a completely different communications channel that works well most of the time.

It is strange that in a time of so many communications options, we still have trouble communicating.

A carefully designed study of cellphone use indicates that using cellphones within an hour of bedtime disrupts sleep patterns, causing fatigue and other symptoms. The double blind study ensured that participants did not know if they were exposed to cellphone radiation or not, so the results appear to be worth careful consideration. The article found that teens with cellphones were often using the devices just before going to sleep, setting up a long term pattern of restless sleep and chronic fatigue.

I had just finished up a meeting at a community interested in investing in telecom infrastructure, and before I left the building, I decided to take advantage of the local WiFi to send an email to someone who had been at the meeting but had already left; I wanted to confirm a follow up meeting.

Not two minutes after I sent the email, he stuck his head back in the meeting room and said, "Hey, I got your email." The message had gone straight to his Blackberry, and unbeknownst to me, he had been outside in the hallway talking to someone. We both had a good laugh about sending email to someone standing a few feet away.

The amazing thing is that in just fifteen years, we have the technology to do that, cheaply and easily. It's a good example of why communities need fiber AND wireless--wireless in the future will provide ubiquitous mobile access--mobile access that we already take for granted, as my experience yesterday illustrated.