Freedom to Connect -- Manifesto

I'm beginning to figure out that Freedom To Connect is a conference of people who espouse the following principals (with reservations by some).

1. Just as we first served homes with copper wire for electricity, and then copper wire for telephone service, we are now at an historical juncture where we should serve homes with fiber optic cable. It will actually cost less than either of the first two, because the poles and infrastructure are already in place for putting fiber into homes. Applications that would be supported by fiber include (but are by no means limited) to:

• The Smart Grid, or "infotricity" a two-way connection between the power company and home appliances, water heater, air conditioners, and furnace that would automatically smooth demand for electric power throughout the day. This would result in a projected saving of 25% of the current base power load and eliminate the need for new coal and nuclear power plants.
  
• "Triple Play", cable TV, telephone and high-speed internet service.
  
• Telemedicine, Telehealth and Distance Learning applications via two-way interactive multipoint videoconferencing
  
• Security monitoring
  
• Tele-Presence -- viewing a neighbor or relative (located next door or across the globe) in their home to share photos, stories, grandchildren, whatever.
  
• etc. ad. infinitum.

2. The notion that wireless technology is somehow a substitute for FTTH should be disabused. It is a necessary and desirable supplement, but not a replacement for FTTH.

3. Many believe wireless is actually twice as expensive to install and manage rather than fiber for the following reasons:
a. Wireless towers and transmitters still must be served by a fiber connection. ("backhaul")
b. Wireless requires substantial density to provide effective coverage.
c. Wireless is subject to interference, (leaves, weather, etc).
d. Wireless technology is volatile and becomes obsolete quickly.

4. There are many definitions of "under-served" populations. However, DSL technology with something like 320KB up and 1.5 megabits down does NOT constitute "broadband" in any meaningful sense, nonwithstanding that it is an improvement over dialup.

5. A working definition of broadband would be, at a minimum symmetrical speeds of, say, 20 megabits, (both directions), at the equivalent of $60.00 per month or less.

6. Under lobbying pressure (corruption? payoffs?) no less than 15 states in the U.S. have actually passed laws that prohibit municipalities or citizen groups from creating and forming their own broadband utilities. Examples cited in our meeting this week (Lafayette LA, and Glagsgow KN), described debilitating litigation initiated by incumbent phone and cable companies to shut down efforts to provide muni wireless and fiber networks. After the dust settled, the incumbents reduced their rates by three quarters when they had to compete with the municipality. So, unfortunately, incumbents must be seen as the enemy, until proven otherwise.

======================

Personally, I think this has parallels with other current battles.

• We can't have single payer healthcare because it would hurt the insurance companies.
  
• We can't have high-speed broadband, because it would hurt the incumbent cable and telephone companies.
  
• We can't have realistic fuel-economy standards because it will hurt the car companies.
  
• We can't get loans, because the banks won't lend any of their multi-million dollar bailout money.
  
• We can't have affordable higher education, because it would hurt the educational institutions (and the athletic programs).
  
• We can't find out who is responsible for the policies of torture and rendition, because it would "damage" our government's credibility and reputation.

Oh well. Might as well go back to watching television.

Freedom to Connect - Day 1

Free to Connect (F2C) is being held at the American Film Institute's Silver theater in Silver Spring Maryland, a suburb of Washington DC It is an exemplary demonstration of how to hold a no-frills conference... skeleton (but highly competent) conference crew, judicious outsourcing of food and reception, in a compact venue which offers lots of opportunities to meet the other attendees and presenters. The presentations are being streamed on the web, and there is an interactive Campfire chat which is projected next to the PowerPoint slides and which can be monitored by the speakers so that questions can be taken from outside the conference. As might be expected, the interactive chat is a mixture of serious comments and snark. Its a little disconcerting to type and see your comment projected full screen twenty seconds later.

About 250 participants. We were invited to bring our wireless laptops, and looking at the audience during my own presentation it seemed that well over 70% of the audience machines were Macs. We used my own Macbook for my presentation and the colleagues in our session; two were PowerPoint presentations that we ran in Keynote after listened to catcalls as Parallels tried to boot up Vista. Balance seems to be a mixture of Dells, IBM/Lenovo and a few netbooks. Acer Aspire, etc.

David Weinberger is live-blogging.

Session 2: Net politics and other applications
Ellen Miller, Sunlight Foundation,
Nathaniel James, Media and Democracy Coalition,
Larry Keyes, Telehealth via Broadband, and
Eva Sollberger, Stuck in Vermont Video Blog

4th set of presentations. Chris Savage is a lawyer, had a really interesting talk about the death of the Chicago School and how right now there is a unique opportunity to retool regulation to make it more consumer friendly.

Derek Slater - Google policy analyst. Talking about �Measurement Lab� an open platform for researchers to make measurements of internet bandwidth and for consumers to figure out what their internet speed is. There is so much we don�t know how the internet is performing. Could we fund some servers at the University that would host the Measurement Lab applications?

John Peha - FCC chief technologist. Mythology of Rural Broadband
1 in 3 households do not have access to wired broadband at any price.
Broadband has positive benefits for communities who have it, even for members of those communities who don�t subscribe.

Unserved communities don�t gain from broadband, and broadband installed elsewhere can actually degrade things in unserved communities.

Comment: Government should write the rules so that it easier to do the right thing than the wrong thing.

Technology neutrality is something to aim at.

The people who are comfortable with technology are the non-engineers they just use what works.

Comment: Technology neutrality is a false mantra.

Amy Wohl -- �recovering Chicago School economist.� When govt. attempts to fix mistakes by the market there is a lag.

---

The conference takes place on Monday and Tuesday. I arrived Saturday afternoon at Reagan airport and took the Metro to Silver Spring. Sunday, I ran around the mall. The Holocaust museum was jammed with school groups. I didn't quite know what to expect, I rather thought it would be like going to a cathedral in Europe, but it was more like the science museum. To get to the regular part of the exhibits you have to get a ticket and you are assigned a time. Because of the crowds mine wasn't until two hours later. I spent 90 minutes on the lower level looking at an exhibit of Nazi propaganda, and after that, I was done. Why people bring small children to this museum is beyond me.

I also went to the Native American museum, (outstanding kayaks) and the National Gallery. The Smithsonian museums are truly a national treasure..and they are all free.

Tom Friedman at the Freedom to Connect Conference

I'm at the Freedom to Connect conference, Thomas Friedman gives a keynote speech drawn from his latest book Hot Flat and Crowded. Notes:

Khakis, white shirt, tie. Looks shorter and younger than I expected. :-)
Turns out he lives in Bethesda, so it is just a quick ride on the Metro.
Based on his book Hot, Flat and Crowded.

Looks at the running chat -- �What the f*ck is that?�

Takes off shoes.
Someone immediately posts a photo on the interactive chat.

Motivation to write the book was that �we lost the groove of our country�.

New unit of measure -- the Americum == 300 million people living like Americans

First Law of Petro Politics:

Price of oil has an inverse proportion to the pace of freedom.

Moderated a panel between Al Gore and Bono.

According to the World Bank, 1.6 billion or 1/4 of all humanity have no access to electricity.

Loosing a species every 20 minutes. We are experiencing the biggest loss of biodiversity.

An incredible list of opportunities masquerading as a series of disasters.
Solution to the problems of climate change, poverty, (and everything else) is abundant cheap reliable energy.

The country which dominates energy technology will be the leader going forward. This country has to be the U.S.

You�ll know it is a revolution when somebody gets hurt.

American golfers get 41 miles per gallon, based on the number of miles walked per year (900) and the average amount of alcohol consumed. (22 gallons) (LK: does this statistic factor in the lower efficiency of ethanol?)

The difference between technology and commodity.
Wind, nuclear solar, etc. are technologies == the more used the price goes down.
Fossil-fuels are commodities. == the more used, the price goes up.

Change the leaders, not the light bulbs.

When we leave Iraq it will be the biggest transfer of air conditioners known to mankind.

BANANA = build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything

Smart grid --> Smart home --> appliances automatically day trade electricity --- stores power in electric car battery.

The future is here it is just not widely distributed yet.

I love being a reporter. It is a noble craft.

Conference: Freedom To Connect

Another plug for the Freedom To Connect conference to be held in Washington DC March 30th and 31. To crib from the home page.

F2C 2009 will tell the story of:

• on-line, network-enabled industry and culture, new jobs and sustainable growth
  
• Burlington VT, where muni fiber enables business, artistic endeavor, and new telemedicine
  
• how Lafayette LA�s community came together as it built its muni fiber network
  
• the twin cities of Cedar Falls and Waterloo, Iowa, where one twin has a muni net, and the other doesn�t
  
• how municipal CIOs are planning for Seattle, Portland and San Francisco municipal fiber networks
  
• city nets, wired and wireless, that didn�t work � what went wrong and what that teaches
  
• what Obama�s infrastructure and economic recovery plans mean for tomorrow�s network
  

Tech Friday -- WES and Ruby

Microsoft has made available considerable information about Windows Embedded Standard, (WES) which is the latest version of Windows Embedded, based on Windows XP.

There are (roughly) three versions of embedded operating systems from Microsoft:

Windows Embedded Standard: Allows a stripped down version of Windows XP for powering set-top boxes, game boxes, and machines dedicated to a single application. This is what we're using in one version of our telemedicine set-top box.

Windows Embedded POS: An enhanced version of WES for cash registers and checkout scanner applications.

Windows Embedded CE: This is the version of Windows used for mobile phones and other hand-held and portable devices. The code base and software development tools for CE are different than Windows Embedded, with many of these related to WES.

There are a total now of twenty-nine (29!) training videos related to Windows Embedded Standard.

The Windows Embedded Developer Center site is the gateway on Microsoft's Developer Network to all things related to Windows Embedded.

The Windows for Devices web site has information related to all version of Window Embedded as well as hardware that runs under Windows Embedded.

Other Notes:

Smashing Magazine has a nice introduction to Ruby on Rails.

Remote Access via iPhone and iPod Touch

Logmein now has a version of Ignition for the iPhone and the iPod Touch.

Logmein continues to provide terrific value for remote access. We're using it extensively, with a combination of the free version for most workstations and LogMeIn IT Reach for our servers and critical workstations. Ignition is the desktop client which is slightly more convenient than accessing your Logmein computers from a web page.

Danner Article on U.S. Torture Policy

I don't even know how to title this blog post.

This is the article in the New York Review of Books by Mark Danner, that comments on the International Red Cross report about the treatment of prisoners (oh, excuse me, detainees) after rendition to Guantanimo Bay and other secret U.S. prisons.

And so, after a devastating and unprecedented attack, the gloves came off. Guided by the President and his closest advisers, the United States transformed itself from a country that, officially at least, condemned torture to a country that practiced it. And this fateful decision, however much we may want it to, will not go away, any more than the fourteen �high-value detainees,� tortured and thus unprosecutable, will go away. Like the grotesque stories in the ICRC report, the decision sits before us, a toxic fact, polluting our political and moral life.

A shorter synopsis appeared in the Sunday New York Times.

The author's web page includes audio interviews.

Revisiting

After more than two years, a former and much loved non-profit client called for some help in sorting out their donor database. That's another story which may be worth telling, but I was interested in seeing how they have weathered the economic downturn, and how some of the networking decisions that we took some years ago have held up. They have a main office and several field offices scattered among three counties. They have about 55 employees.

1. By the time I had left, most of field offices had a broadband connection. That work was completed, and each office now has a DSL broadband connection, either from a local ISP, or from Fairpoint (the company who bought the Verizon landline and consumer data service in the three northern N.E. states). After working with it for a couple days, I'd say performance is OK.. although today, curiously, there was a twenty minute outage.
   
   
2. With broadband available, they how have remote access software going to EVERY computer in EVERY office, as well as their central file server. Much desktop maintenance that required an on-site visit, can now be accomplished over the wire.
   
   
3. Electronic mail accounts are hosted by the local internet service provider. People use Outlook or Outlook Express as their desktop eMail client....and access their eMail account when away from the office via webmail.
   
   
4. They refreshed their desktop hardware with Dell Optiplexes that were donated by a local large employer. Although the machines are hand-me-downs, they are more than adequate for eMail, web browsing, and running the database application. The donor also gave them several laser printers that were only a few years old. Everyone is running XP, with Office 2007. (Without prompting, they said that Office 2007 is fine.) They have Norton Anti-Virus which is managed from the file server. No less than three of the staff said, in casual conversation... "well, I do have a Mac at home". I nodded toward my Macbook, running Parallels, wondering if this turns out to be a longer term gig, if I will need to get a new Windows laptop.
   
   
5. Their Dell file server is probably going on five years; but it is built like a tank, with RAID drives, and the original HP backup tape system. They have HP Procurve 2124 ethernet switches, and HP continues to keep replacing them under a lifetime warranty, when the fans go bad. I think we've replaced two or three switches with this client, and a couple of them with other clients. It takes one phone call.
   
   
6. Several old battles were, well, old, if not forgotten. They have made their peace with a state-mandated performance data application which gave us all fits for years. The Executive Director attributes this success to attentive support from the state agency which mandated the system.
   
   
7. If there is one especially popular non-business application being used by the staff, it is streaming audio. In fact, today, the first indication that there was a glitch in the internet connection was when a staff member came in and asked why her "radio" wasn't working.
   

In short, it Just Works. I think this is attributable to the existing staff who have educated themselves over the years, and new staff who have come on board with full expectations of a functioning network and desktop workstation and how to use it. Add in some longstanding support from management who recognize the value of investing in technology and training, and the efforts of the current part-time network manager who keeps it all humming.

NPower - Network Documentation Template

NPower Seattle has a Network Documentation Template which is in Word. This is a great start for documenting your computer network. The file is called SBS2003template.doc which suggests it might have been modified by one supplied by Microsoft, and it includes inserted Visio files to show the networking diagrams. If you are a MS shop this will work out of the box. If not, you can easily modify it in OpenOffice, or Pages, or whatever. The object of documenting your network is not necessarily perfection...but to have something to give you a clue when things start going haywire.

Desktop Video: First Impressions of Polycom CMA

I had a visit from John Palaszynski, our regional Polycom rep the other day and had a look at the Polycom CMA client. (CMA stands for Converged Management Application. Doesn't that sound like something out of corporate?) This appears to be their answer to Tandberg's Movi client...which is a little ironic, because although the Movi client appears to have gotten the greater mindshare, version 2 (much improved) has been rumored for almost a year, but not yet deployed. CMA is indeed available; and has been since August 2008 or so.

Both are "server-based" videoconferencing clients which work on the Windows platform. By server-based, it means that if a user wants to participate in a videoconference, they click on a web site within their browser which takes them to the video server. After authenticating the user, the server checks to see if the videoconferencing client software is installed on the user's machine. If it isn't, it asks permission to download and install the client. This gets around the issue of installing a fat client on the machine, (i.e. PVX).

The client looks a lot like a chat client or Skype. It has buddy lists and so on. So far I've been unable to ascertain whether there is an API, or whether the appearance is configurable. For example, I still don't think there is a way to have the client open up full screen and wait for a video call. There seems to be no way to suppress the buddy screen/directory window.

Many of the set-up screens look as if they were lifted from the Polycom PVX product; they are identical. One major improvement over PVX is the support for high-definition video.

Of interest is that if you have the CMA server, it does NOT replace the need for an multipoint controller (video bridge), if you want to make multipoint calls. So, the product appears to be ideal for a large corporate deployment on a LAN or VPN-WAN.

Here is the data sheet.

Here's a press release with a fair amount of background.

They also have a white paper describing a number of example applications.

Grants.Gov in danger of collapse?

A Heads Up from the superb Medical Writing Editing and Grantsmanship Blog:

A new funding mechanism covering hundreds of scientifically diverse research topics to be scored under new scoring procedures using new review criteria by as yet unidentified reviewers untrained in this process � and now, the feds suddenly realized grants.gov might not be up to the task of receiving 1.3 million submissions at 5 p.m. ET on April 27th.

We're preparing an application for the April 27th deadline ourselves. Fortunately, we had the unnerving experience during the conversion from paper applications to the online electronic applications (was it only two years ago?) and so we have yet to get out of the habit of submitting earlier than the last day. You have been warned.

Bringing Broadband to Rural Vermont

Nice article and video in the Wall Street Journal that summarizes a project to bring municipal fiber internet access to 22 rural towns in central Vermont. The comments are especially amusing.

Let them eat cake!

Non-Profits and the Federal Stimulus Package

The National Association of Nonprofits has issued a series of reports outlining opportunities for non-profits who want to tap into some of the funding that is being made available through the federal stimulus package.

Link, courtesy of the Vermont Community Foundation.