Microsoft Closes Digital Divide! Heh, Just Kidding
Happy Prime Day! Here’s one special deal you don’t want to buy: Microsoft’s grand plan to bring high speed broadband to the less-populated fringe of rural America for peanuts. It…
Congestion Pricing for Infrastructure: I Still Don’t Know Why Net Neutrality is Important
When usage, delay tolerance, and loss tolerance are all unknowns, we fall to an unknown level of quality. While this simplifies billing, it doesn’t do justice to the needs of applications, innovation, or investment.
A side effect of switching from the current billing model to a quality-based model is that the unproductive net neutrality debate summarily ends. When users have control over the end-to-end quality of each application transaction, the means used by the provider to deliver the desired quality are unimportant.
Highly Illogical Broadband Claims
What the FCC can do is help to keep large swathes of the American population from falling behind. And it can do this by saying yes to network deployment and innovation. A good first step in that process is to let go of the vacuous virtuous cycle of networks + apps innovation. That argument is illogical.
Faster Internet up to Web Sites
The ISP can take traffic from a server to a user as fast as the speed of light, but if the web server is underpowered or overloaded with badly written tracking code, the user isn’t going to be happy.
San Francisco’s Cultural Divide
The failure of Google Fiber to connect America’s cities to ultra-fast gigabit networks took a bizarre turn this week: San Francisco, the incubator of the apps economy, is seriously considering…
Magic Headsets
Video headsets are critical elements of augmented reality. They come in two basic designs: Optical See-Through (OST) where the wearer perceives the real world directly, and Video See-Through (VST) where cameras are…
Google Grows Up: Innovation WITH Permission
When a company as large as Google that aims to hire the best and brightest fails to prove its value by making money, it’s not uncommon to see the course correction we’re seeing now. Between Netflix, Amazon, AT&T, Apple, and YouTube it appears the tech sector is remaking Hollywood in its own image. This is going to make a great show.
5G vs. FTTH: The End of Wire
You can count on rural networks being built out of a variety of wireless technologies in present and near future. As needs for capacity increase, signal processing systems that enable more efficient sharing will keep the rural folks ahead of the tsunami.
FCC Course Correction
The FCC has made a number of expected decisions on pending issues and signalled a willingness to alter the course of network regulation in a more permissive, innovation-friendly direction. Here are some highlights of recent actions.
Reimagining the FCC for the 21st Century
I read an intriguing article on Airbus’s plans for flying cars in Digital Trends. Before the end of the year, Europe’s aircraft maker will be testing both single-passenger and no-passenger flying…