When it comes to determining who has how much in real terms, not marketing terms, content delivery provider Akamai is in a position to know. A new report that is expected to be revised quarterly shows that a paltry 20% of US connections accessing their servers has a =>5MBPS connection. This is very bad news because a great many of the new applications and services now in the pipeline will simply not worl correctly with the majority of the US connections. Talk about killing the economy! Before you bash Mr. Bush by his lonesome, remember that the other party controls both houses of Congress where laws are actually written of repealed. The entire cast of DC Pols are collectively out to lunch.

Akamai data shows that South Korea is the leader in delivering what the Massachusetts-based CDN provider calls, high broadband. It means connections that connect to Akamai’s at speeds exceeding 5 Megabits per second. Nearly 64% of South Korean connections qualify as high broadband.

US, by that metric is a deplorable, with only 20 percent connections qualifying as high broadband. Interestingly, when you reduce the connection speed to 2 megabits per second, US ranks at #24 with 62% of connections at speeds exceeding 2 Mbps.

In US, the state of Delaware has 60% connections that qualify as “high broadband.” California scores rather poorly and is not even among the top ten. Thanks to Cablevision, Verizon and Time Warner, New York comes in at #3 with 36% of its connections at speeds exceeding 5 Mbps. (Gigaom)

Memo to Pols: Make no new laws unless the said laws end the conditions that created the duopoly and continue to protect it from competition. Laws do not make for improvement in service. An open competitive market does.

Entire new businesses and communities have been built around user generated media. While the devoted amateur could always find a way, the declining cost of good production tools along with the ease of web distribution brought UGM to the masses. The blog you are reading now was enabled by a collection of free and easy to use open source products. As of today, the lines have completely blurred between producer and consumer as so many of us are both.

Applications may be the next wave. Imagine anyone who has learned how to use a few simple tools being able to create the next Digg or Facebook. Unlimited free to cheap utility computing becoming available in the cloud, combined with easy to use tools will supercharge the most devoted non-coder, and inspire many more casual users to create apps for themselves and share them. While the tools that powerful are not here yet, they are progressing in that direction. An open source project called Open Mashups may be on the cusp of that next wave.   If you’d like to automate some of the ways you use the web, or have a glimpse of what the near future holds, Open Mashups is a free download.

While we are still in the process of defining what is Web 2.0, pundits are beginning to postulate what will constitute Web 3.0. A thorough study of the complete article sited below brings us to the unavoidable conclusion that all scenarios postulated require abundant ever expanding bandwidth at low cost.

“In May 2006, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web stated:

‘People keep asking what Web 3.0 is. I think maybe when you’ve got an overlay of scalable vector graphics - everything rippling and folding and looking misty - on Web 2.0 and access to a semantic Web integrated across a huge space of data, you’ll have access to an unbelievable data resource.’ (Gimme The Scoop)

Of course, the complete post has several more chiming in besides Mr. Berners-Lee. As for the Third Pipe viewpoint, Web 3.0 will not happen without a Third Pipe. With Web 2.0 we are beginning to view the Web as a utility where capacity should grow to meet demand without rationing. In order for Web 3.0 to become possible, we must first have free and open competition with a growing list of access providers instead of the entrenched duopoly that stifles innovation and limits growth.

Yes, like the 1984 flick ‘Runaway’ starring Tom Selleck. The plot for that film was that small industrial ‘bots were running around killing people. Selleck’s character was assigned to a police unit that exterminated such wayward bots. Well folks the plot is coming true. At least the ‘bot piece is.

It may have seemed like just another improbable scene from a Hollywood sci-fi flick – Tom Cruise battling against an army of robotic spiders intent on hunting him down.

But the storyline from Minority Report may not be quite as far fetched as it sounds.

British defence giant BAE Systems is creating a series of tiny electronic spiders, insects and snakes that could become the eyes and ears of soldiers on the battlefield, helping to save thousands of lives.

Now part of the key to this ‘bot army will be wireless technologies — Wifi, UWB and others. The reason being that if you are going to send in a ‘bot you want to see the target and make assessment of next moves. Then possibly having identified the target use the ‘bot as the targeting sensor for an appropriately designed warhead.

The world, when I leave it, will be more like Star Wars than I ever could have imagined..

Linky.

There’s more to keeping the web free and open than encouraging fierce competition between access providers and equally impartial treatment of traffic. Free and open also extends to software technologies that enable and extend our use of the net.

When it comes to software, we like free. Free insures quick adoption by those who have a compatible platform. Free and open is better, but in the case of the net, open is a necessity to insure continuous development, improvement, and availability to the broadest range of platforms.

According to Mozilla’s Tristan Nitot :

“proprietary solutions running on top of the Web are trying to take over”…”So far, there has not been a problem,” Nitot said. “Both Adobe and Microsoft have been willing to give (Flash and Silverlight away) for free. But maybe they have an agenda. They’re not here for the glory; they’re here for the money.”Nitot gave two historical examples of Microsoft and Adobe withdrawing or withholding products from certain platforms: Microsoft’s discontinuation of Internet Explorer for Unix and Mac, and Adobe’s long-standing refusal to “provide a recent version of Flash for Linux users.” He suggested that Web developers should be asking those companies whether they are “sure that Silverlight and Flash will always be available on all platforms (and) run decently on all platforms.” (Cnet)

Adobe’s recent move to partly open Flash is an improvement, but does not go far enough. Closing software that is dominant also causes stagnation. Windows is a great example of that.

Channeling Intel: Dear Americans, we conceived and largely developed Wimax here, and believe that there is a ready market. While the builders of the first nationwide Wimax networks are strapped for cash and looking for investors we are handing Tiawan a load of cash to build out there instead.

INTEL ANNOUNCED bright and early on Monday morning that they’ll be chucking $500 million Taiwan’s way, spread out over the next half a decade to develop the Island’s WiMax infrastructure. The agreement will also apparently try to promote a greater level of WiMax congruency among gear developers. (The Inquirer)

Unfortunately for Americans, the developers of Laptops and other portable technology are in Taiwan, so they get first dibbs. It makes sense when you consider there is nary a single PC manufacturer in the LTE camp today and Wimax has a time to market advantage over competing technologies. Could it also be that Intel would rather not do battle with the US telcos who now have a lock on the majority of access both fixed and wireless access?

Despite all of the bad press you have been reading about Wimax, some deserved and some FUD, the Wimax devices are coming. Acer is the first mainstream notebook maker to announce a laptop with built in Wimax capability.

The Acer Aspire 5920 is already being manufactured by notebook PC contract maker Quanta Computer and could be available by the end of this year.

The notebook will be sold along with WiMax service in a manner similar to the way mobile phones are sold along with service packages, said Trisha Pan, a product marketing manager at Acer, on the sidelines of a WiMax news conference in Taipei.

Intel is also buying some of the laptops for testing, said Pan. The laptops will be made available to all WiMax network operators. They won’t be out until Sprint or other companies start selling the devices with their WiMax services. (Yahoo)

This is only the first of many to come. There are small pockets of successful Wimax deployments in the US and extensive success stories world wide making a ready market for Wimax enabled devices. In the near future a tech writer who is touting the alledgedly superior LTE will be transmitting said article via Wimax while waiting for the telcos to deploy LTE.

Mike Liebhold of the Institute for the Future addressed the O’Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference a little over a year ago about the roadblocks to and promise of an open wireless web. In view of recent developments, this 17 minute presentation is right on topic. While progress has been made, the roadblocks he clearly identified remain in place.

Network operators have invested millions into reliable networks. In order to recover their costs, they have developed a strategy of offering enhanced services developed by and limited to their own in-house resources. But there is a fundamental flaw in this strategy. This “walled garden” approach to enhanced services ignores the many entrepreneurs and creative people who are eager to develop new services on wireless networks. The social trend of users at the edge of the network wanting to create their own experiences is ignored. The end result is that the growth of the mobile web is stifled. (IT Conversations)

 Standard Podcast [17:02m]: Download

Mr. Malone of the WSJ lays out aspects of societal and business change that the US faces in say the next 50 years. He throws terms out like ‘fat pipe’, ‘process patents’, ‘free internet’, etc. Our loyal Thridpipe readers already know all this because we have this electronic pulpit on high. We have been laying this prescription down since this blog was created. —

- Build up Brand America. Government agencies, including the USAID and United States Commercial Service, need to promote American brands, via the Web, hardware and software, to everywhere in the world where they are currently unknown or disliked. Voice of America needs to become a massive Internet portal to the American economy and media.

The U.S. International Trade Commission must actively pursue illegal international threats to our e-economy from hackers to scammers — such as bringing serious economic sanctions against nations that look the other way (or even support) these activities. We need to capture the dominant share of the minds of the next two billion, enforce an honest Web, and make America again synonymous with the best.

- Create a Fat Pipe. Many of the great fiber optic lines entering and leaving the U.S. were almost dark a decade ago, and that abundance created an opportunity that helped propel the creation of companies like Google. But Google’s recent announcement that it was going to install its own cable across the Pacific to Japan suggests that the age of cheap bandwidth is almost over. Late last year, a report by Nemertes Research predicted a bandwidth shortage by 2011.

The U.S. needs to have the fastest, cheapest and most reliable Internet access on the planet, both inside our borders and in our connections to the rest of the world. Like the railroads and the interstate highway system before it, we need a program of direct investment, subsidies and tax breaks to assure that Americans always have the world’s best Web access – and the rest of the world has the best access to us.

- Revamp Nafta. While the Democratic candidates are calling for the abolition, or crippling of the North American Free Trade Agreement, what we should be discussing is how to revamp it and other trade accords to reflect the newly emerging world of people-to-people, not just business-to-business, trade. We need to be prepared for a world where knowledge workers around the world are hired online by the minute – in other words, radically simplified employee contracts, payroll tax documentation and W-2s, and improved tax laws on home offices, part-time work, and self-employment.

But most of all, we must not impede this inevitable transformation by doing anything to limit free trade – even if that means reaching individual trade accords with countries regarding buying and selling on eBay, MySpace, Facebook and the like.

- Promote a Free Internet. The lights of intellectual freedom that have been created by the Internet are slowly going out all over the world – look at China’s recent blackout of Web videos of events in Tibet. We need to fight to keep the Internet open and accessible to everyone on the planet, and keep tyrants from censoring their people.

Short of that, we need to keep the U.S. an island of Web freedom, open to anyone who can reach our servers and sites. A good start would be to require U.S.-based companies to maintain free speech in all their international subsidiaries – no more Yahoos helping foreign governments locate dissidents.

- Reform patent laws. In an era characterized by “free” downloads as well as the proliferation of pirate content sites, the overly broad U.S. patent and copyright laws need to be reformed to reflect these new sensibilities. Today they stifle innovation. A good place to start would be a revamping, if the not the elimination, of “business method” patents, which even Justice Anthony Kennedy has suggested can suffer from “potential vagueness and suspect validity.” Meanwhile, patent approvals need to be made faster, tougher and cheaper.

- Make education more open. It is time for the rest of us to accept the reality that education in the U.S. is now a multi-platform (public, private, home) experience, and begin building Web-based curricular support for all three. It is in our national interest to make all schoolchildren well-educated and competitive in the modern economy.

Now we are not Malone clones. There have been articles we have vehemently disagreed with. But for once he is firing all the cylinders. Most definitely get rid of the ‘business process’ patents. They are a scourge. But we ought to go further. First roll back patent use to 17 years as was originally fostered. If you can’t turn a profit in that period of time you don’t deserve to keep the patent anyway. Patents and copyrights should also have innovation and sunset provisions. If a patent holder does not utilize the patent or license it for deployment within the first 4 years then the patent is invalidated. As well if a copyright is not longer a published work available for first release purchase or the death of the author then it becomes public domain. I love Elvis Presley recordings, but something is wrong when the estate is still in force collecting royalties.

There is also one that Malone missed. ‘Promote the Everyman’. Foster an environment that anyone who wants to compete can do so. The function of government should be to build that stadium of equal opportunity. The place to start is in revamping small claims court to include all the provisions of superior court as to court directed remedies. Today most small claims are only available for remedy of monetary damages. The problem is in many cases the damage stems from systemic abuse by corporations. The little guy has to be able to have their day in court. Abolish one way contracts and forced arbitration as a manner to receiving products & services. Eliminate legal extortion by making it a penalty of disbarment for a lawyer to blindly issue legal threats without ascertaing that there has been actual damages to his client.

Mr. Malone is to be commended for this piece.

Read the whole article here.

According to the real inventor of the internet (sorry Al Gore, but it’s not you) the next wave is not the web, but instead a grid. IF you take a top floor view this makes sense. The technology of the web is being pushed into duty to perform tasks it was never intended to do, with unintended consequences.

At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.

The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.

David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.

The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their “red button” day - the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates. (Times Online)

Sounds good to me. We’ll talk ours now please!