Computerwold has a very intriguing article. The jest of it is businesses are encourging ‘casual telecommuting’ in an effort to support a reduction in commuting and drive down fuel prices. It is in companies interests to do so as they too consume fuel. –

A Reuters report today highlights organizations that are cutting back the number of days employees are required to physically show up at work because of soaring gas prices. Even employees who are required to be on-site in order to work, such as janitors, are being cut down to four-day workweeks to save gas. White collar workers, of course, are being allowed, encouraged or forced to stay home once a week or more often and telecommute.

One thing leads to another. High gas prices prompt employers (including the federal government) to allow employees to work from home once a week. Once that’s accepted culturally, an elephant appears in the boardroom: If it’s OK once a week, why isn’t it OK five times a week? (This is what happened with “casual Friday” — its once-a-week acceptance lead to the current trend of casual wear every day.) Once telecommuting is accepted, “extreme telecommuting” — working from the Bahamas or Paris or an internet-connected shack on the Australian Outback — becomes acceptable, too. After all, once you’re out of the office and connecting to the company over the Internet, it doesn’t really matter where you are, does it?

“… it doesn’t really matter where you are, does it?”, well yes it does unfortunately. That is if you are going to telecommute then you need a broadband connection on a fairly regular basis. Which is the rub. Say my company said I only had to show up for a video conference once a week the rest done via telecommute. To pull that off I have to be located in cities providing the service. For example here is a map of FIOS deployment.. Were I to want to be in Denver I would be out of luck.

The point? If We the American People want to put a stake thru the hearts of the middle east then we need to complete a transcontinental broadband system. We did it with the railroads in the 1800’s, the phone system in the 1900’s. It is time to do the same in the 2100’s. Till we have the top 500 metro markets covered in broadband and wireless access nearly everywhere we will not achieve the dream of ‘extreme telecommuting’ and deliver a death blow to both high gas prices and middle east geopolitics.

The article does have a kernel of opportunity though. The gas situation may just be the point at which corporations do finally figure out that management by proximity is not the most efficient method of management. If that occurs there will be an explosion in cottage industry employment. With location decoupled from employment results becomes more important than schmoozing as companies will have to develop result oriented metric management styles. We can only hope.

Drive bits not cars.

Compterworld article.

Whenever AT&T talks up a network utilization crisis, they’re usually up to no good. Recent comments by AT&T VP for legislative affairs Jim Cicconi point to more trouble ahead for consumers at the hands of the death star. Watch your wallet!

“The surge in online content is at the center of the most dramatic changes affecting the Internet today,” he said. “In three years’ time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today.”

Cicconi, who was speaking at the event as part of a wider series of meetings with U.K. government officials, said that at least $55 billion worth of investment was needed in new infrastructure in the next three years in the U.S. alone, with the figure rising to $130 billion to improve the network worldwide. “We are going to be butting up against the physical capacity of the Internet by 2010,” he said.

He claimed that the “unprecedented new wave of broadband traffic” would increase 50-fold by 2015 and that AT&T is investing $19 billion to maintain its network and upgrade its backbone network. (Cnet)

Shed no tears for this company who continues to bilk their customer on every front. In comparison to Verizon, AT&T has been very slow to upgrade their network. In comparison to companies like France’s Orange, AT&T’s per customer investment in a simple broadband pipe is tiny. AT&T has never hesitated to invest heavily in acquiring other companies, in lobbying to maintain their monopoly, investing heavily in dubious ventures like pay TV and spending large to crush potential competitors. Instead of fishing for more government dollars, rate increases, regulations or all of the above, AT&T should invest first in delivering service. If they can’t manage to deliver adequate service with their nearly limitless resources, then they should suffer the consequences of poor management and go out of business. That may have already happened if they had any real competition.

No, I’m not trying to earn the tin foil hat award this week, but I am starting to think the the cable cuts in and around the middle east are much less likely to be coincidental:

Reports are coming in this morning that a fifth undersea fiber optic cable was severed in the Middle East. However, by several accounts, the fifth cable cut is actually a second cut on a different segment of the FALCON cable. How exactly these cables are being cut is still unknown, though Egyptian officials maintain a ship didn’t cause the breakages near the port of Alexandria.

The saga of cut cables and lost bandwidth began on January 23 when the Flag Telecoms FALCON undersea fiber optic cable near the Egyptian port of Alexandria was severed. On January 30 another cable called the SeaMeWe-4 (South East Asia-Middle East- Western Europe-4) cable was cut according to the Khaleej Times Online. Egyptian officials said that a review of ship traffic in the area at the time of the breakage precludes the damage being caused by a ships anchor.

Khaleej Times Online reports that on February 1 another cut appeared in the FALCON cable, which resulted in severe disruption of data service in the Gulf region. The rundown of cut cables in the region includes the FLAG Europe-Asia cable near Alexandria, FALCON near Bandar Abbas in Iran, SeaMeWe-4 near Alexandria, SeaMeWe-4 near Penang, Malaysia, and FLAG near the Dubai coast. (from Daily Tech)

With a third fiber bundle in the middle east now damaged, disaster has struck a huge portion of the world’s population, and the entire planet will feel the effects.

quoting GigaOm (click here for a map): The fact that a pair of central Internet paths are just 2 km apart should serve as a cautionary tale as to just how fragile the Internet can be.TeleGeography, a company that tracks cable capacity, said the two cables “account for the majority of international communications capacity between Europe and the Middle East.” With both cables cut, capacity has been reduced by 75 percent to only 620 Gbps. The cables also carry a considerable amount of traffic bound for India and Pakistan.

We have a real world demonstration of what could happen just as easily in more developed parts of the world. Lest we forget, most of the traffic in the US is carried beneath highways, and alongside rail tracks and pipelines. This means a construction crew more likely to create catastrophe than either a natural disaster or act of terror.
I believe that it would benefit all parties concerned to at least explore the idea of a world wide grid. Not that it would have totally taken up the slack from 3 points of failure in the same general area, but there would still be access for more people, and a faster recovery. If a creative politico could devise a way to create a more competitive business environment for backbone bandwidth, this would happen quickly.

Rural Vermonters are demanding their Third Pipe, and they are making happen without the Duopoly. These small towns will be laying fiber to bring them into the 21st century. In a Third Pipe world, you can do almost anything almost anywhere, if you have access.

Using Burlington Telecom’s municipal broadband network as a model, 22 rural Vermont towns are poised to pool their resources and launch a fiber-optic project that could go online by the end of 2009.

It’s more than a twinkle in a technician’s eye. Members of the East Central Vermont Community Fiber Network announced Wednesday that formal agreements are in the works from Windsor to Montpelier that would bring the strength of numbers — and attractive financing — to universal broadband Internet coverage. (from Burlington Free Press)

In an interesting twist California has been issued a recommendation that they float infrastructure bonds to increase broadband penetration in underserved areas. The rationale being that like rail, air and interstate, broadband improves productivity. –

California should consider issuing debt to augment private investment in enhancing and expanding high-speed communications services, a state task force said on Thursday.

It said that better, faster and more available broadband capabilities would propel economic growth for the most populous U.S. state, where 96 percent of households already have access to basic high-speed communications.

The task force did not specify how much debt California should issue, or in what kind, to help finance future broadband infrastructure, noting public debt is just one form of funding that should be considered.

“It’s a way to get different pots of money available,” Anne Neville, manager of the California Broadband Initiative in the state’s business, transportation and housing agency, told Reuters in a telephone interview.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger commissioned the report, which recommends California issue infrastructure bonds and use proceeds “in partnership” with investment from the private sector to finance components of high-speed capable networks in unserved and underserved markets.

5 years ago this would have made sense, but now it is probably a dead letter. California is in the midst of a funding crisis right now so additional bond debt would probably not be considered. Nor would a typical wired infrastructure be the most cost effective for a low density usage environment. That is why this country needs to get WiMax off the ground in a big way. It is uniquely designed to handle these type of scenarios.

Interesting but it will sit on a shelf in Sacramento never to be acted on.

Amazon is running with a relatively new service UnBox. Has all the usual services we have come to expect from Amazon for over the wire video downloads and rentals. 1-click buys, customer reviews, etc. Heck they even have Episode 1 of the Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles up for free.

What’s the down side? Well my first gripe (and its personal) is it requires a amazon only player. Now that’s ok, but there is not a Linux/Unix variant of the player available. They are targeting Windoze users. The other of course is with Time Warner testing ‘pay by the byte’, depending on the rates provisioning online services like UnBox might die before they get off the ground.

Funny, wireless voice services are slowly reaching the point that it would be cheaper on the backend to go flat rate. Give it 2 years and one of the majors will do so. Countries like South Korea, Germany and France are getting fiercely competitive. Yet here we sit in the US with talk from one of the carriers about raising rates under a tiered pricing scheme.

CongressCritters talk a good game about a broadband future. But its countries like Australia, France and the UK that are DOING it. I have a excellent suggestion for Congress. Throw away the latest CAFE standards. Fact get rid of all of them. Instead change the tax law for the following inducement:

1) Institute the equivalent of the Railroad Act of the 1840’s for Telecom. For every residence that is wired for 1Gb flat rated fiber they get = full deduction of the expense of deploy + $100 housing unit + 12% return for 5 years.

2) Institute a deduction for both the employer and the employee to have home offices. Sliding scale, the more employees that are telecommuters daily the higher the % deduction for both parties.

Imagine what would happen to fuel prices if half, nay even a quarter of the daily commuters went from behind the wheel to behind the keyboard? Hugo Chavez would have a cow. America we talk a good game but we ain’t doin’ it you understand? Entrenched interests and political gamesmanship have trumped innovation and common sense.

Now where was I?

With it’s final destination the Chinese mainland, with stops in Taiwan and Korea, Verizon is expanding its presence as a trans pacific carrier.

Verizon announced back in 2006 they’d be taking part in a different, $500 million project to run a new, 11,000 mile cable from the United States directly to mainland China. Construction started on the Trans-Pacific Express project last September, and this week Verizon got the FCC’s approval to land the fiber line in Oregon. The new pipe should provide some very serious bandwidth:

The TPE cable - being built by a consortium comprised of Verizon Business, China Telecom, China Netcom, China Unicom, Korea Telecom and Chunghwa Telecom (Taiwan) — can support the equivalent of 62 million simultaneous phone calls, more than 60 times the overall capacity of the existing cable directly linking the U.S. and China. The cable will initially provide capacity of up to 1.28 terabits per second (Tbps), and the system will have a design capacity of up to 5.12 Tbps to support future Internet growth and advanced applications such as video and e-commerce. (from Broadband Reports)

Packets traveling between the US and China will soon have less hops skips and jumps to slow them.  It will be interesting to see which of the 2 nations changes more as a result of the connection. I’m betting both will benefit economically if the 2 governments can resist the temptation to manage or regulate.

THE FIRST direct fibre-optic undersea cable to China has received regulatory approval to make landfall on the US West Coast.

Named the Trans-Pacific Express (TPE), the cable link is the first next-generation optical cable system to span the Pacific to China and will be the first undersea cable system to land on the US West Coast in seven years. (from the Register)

Looks like industry has come to recognize that there is value in those slivers of 700mhz space. Several groups are not angling to grab hold of it if they can. –

Sprint Nextel Corp. and T-Mobile USA Inc. urged the Federal Communications Commission to embrace a plan to allocate vacant TV channels — known as white spaces — on a fixed-licensed basis for wireless backhaul services. The move injects a new element into an already fiery debate between high-tech groups that want the propagation-rich spectrum for Wi-Fi and a broadcasting industry fearful of interference to digital transmissions.

“Because backhaul comprises a significant cost for wireless carriers, and incumbent local exchange carriers’ special-access charges are exorbitant, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile must find more affordable alternatives to the ILECS’s special-access offerings,” the No. 3 and No. 4 carriers told the FCC. “Despite this need, the amount of spectrum in the lower bands that is realistically available for the provision of wireless backhaul services has declined dramatically over the years. As wireless carriers expand the development of their 3G and 4G wireless networks, the need for reliable and cost effective backhaul will increase.”

Using the white space for wireless backhaul is useful. But there could be higher and more profitable uses.

Linky.