Broadband Planning Regional Meeting

Yesterday, Bob Ingalls and I attended the second planning meeting for an ambitious project, currently called Central Sierra Connect. It is being spearheaded by the Amador-Tuolumne Community Action Agency (A-TCAA), with funding from the California Emerging Technology Fund (CETF). Although the project is in its early stages, its objective is to facilitate broadband availability to unserved and under-served areas of five counties: Mariposa, Tuolumne, Calaveras, Amador and Alpine. Significantly, all five county governments have indicated that they will participate and several business communities were also represented. Of the 25-30 people who attended yesterday's all day session, several expressed the opinion that there is currently a window of opportunity for this issue to be addressed by the counties of the foothills and if we do not start the process now, we may fall so far behind the urban areas of the state that we may never catch up.

A-TCAA has been invited to apply for a $250,000 grant from the CETF, which could be received as early as Q2 2008. They have already received a "pre-grant" of $10,000 to prepare the application. Part of that process has been the two planning meetings that took place in Sonora, aimed at bringing together participants (stakeholders, in planning-speak) from the five counties. Those of you hoping to see new wireless towers springing up in the next six months are likely to be disappointed. This is a long term project and the first step will be to develop a comprehensive plan that addresses the issues concerning all of the stakeholders. This phase of the project is likely to take a least a year from the time the grant is awarded. Years two and three of the grant cycle will implement the plan.

So, to recap, A-TCAA has received some money to help them apply to receive more money to pay for a plan. Believe it or not, this is real progress and I'm excited about it. It means that there is agreement across all of the foothill counties that this is a serious issue that requires action (or at least a plan of action). They have the support of a major source of funding in the CETF, which can open the doors to other sources. The participants in the meetings so far have been committed and capable. Bob is a member of the Infrastructure team and I have chosen to work with Outreach. The other teams in the project are: Advisory Council (administration), Demand Survey and County Liason.

The next milestone will be a completed grant application to the CETF, which we plan to submit by the end of February, for consideration at CETF's March board meeting. There should be a Central Sierra Connect web site available soon and I will continue posting here as we progress.

Will USA Recover Lost Ground In Broadband?

Pundit "Bob Cringely" cites pressure on regional carriers to improve broadband service and reduce prices over the long term:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070720_002525.html

$10 DSL from AT&T

Yahoo! News and The Consumerist are reporting that AT&T, as part of concessions to the FCC for their acquisition of Bell South, are offering basic DSL service for $10 per month, on a one year contract. The plan is called FastAccess on the Bell South web site and it is supposed to be available in all 22 states served by AT&T. According to The Consumerist:

The plan provides download speeds of up to 768 kilobits per second and upload speeds of up to 128 kbps, matching AT&T's basic plan.

If you can't find the plan listed on the website, don't worry. AT&T wants it that way. They've hidden it, according to the AP.

...

To take advantage of the plan, you'll need to sign a 1 year contract and you need to be a new customer to AT&T broadband. This sounds like a good opportunity for anyone you know who still has dial-up, or for people who don't need cable internet and want something slower and cheaper. The modem is free.

Keep an eye out for the next concession, so-called "naked DSL." Within 6 months, AT&T will be required to offer DSL with no local phone service. The treasure hunt to find that one on their site should be equally fun.

Remember that this is for new DSL service only. If anyone reading this tries to get this service, please report on your experience in the comments.

Update: A reference to this program being offered by AT&T Yahoo! in California can be found in their Terms and Conditions, in the section headed AT&T YAHOO! HIGH-SPEED INTERNET.

Also this, reported in comments on another blog:

You can find the info on the att.COM website.

You have to “shop” for it by clicking on the learn more button.

Under Basic Plan for $14.99 click on the link that says “See if you Qualify”.

You have to answer a couple of questions then, put in your existing phone number.

The next page shows if you qualify, if you do the $10.00 deal shows up.

TA DA.

Wow...just, wow

Everything is Miscellaneous

Google Tech Talks has a new video by one of my favorite authors, David Wineberger, who's new book is titled Everything is Miscellaneous. Although it's kind of long (57:00), it's well worth watching. Here's the abstract:

David Weinberger's new book covers the breakdown of the established order of ordering. He explains how methods of categorization designed for physical objects fail when we can instead put things in multiple categories at once, and search them in many ways. This is no dry book on taxonomy, but has the insight and wit you'd expect from the author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, and a former writer for Woody Allen.

Watch it here or go to Google to watch the video.

State of Tuolumne County Broadband

Network Sierra has seemed pretty dormant for the last several weeks but there has in fact been activity on the county level that could move the broadband agenda forward. Following the Conxx Presentation made to Network Sierra on April 18th, which was attended by several members of county government, efforts are underway to bring the Conxx team back to Sonora in June to make a presentation to the County Board of Supervisors. Teri Murrison (Supervisor, District 3) has been instrumental in keeping the process moving. She writes in her latest newsletter:

...opportunity is here too. The county is investigating a possible regional project to build a hi-tech backbone system that would host broadband, cell phone service, and police and fire radio communications. We will evaluate the technology over the next few months and if everything lines up and makes sense, may do a feasibility study and implementation within the next year or so. Such a system could benefit our local economy significantly and help attract new business opportunities.

Notice that the scope of this system goes well beyond providing county-wide broadband Internet service. The Conxx system provides nothing less than a replacement telecommunications system for the county. It also offers the scalability to expand to a multi-county regional system.

Of course, the claims that Conxx makes for their system cannot be taken at face value. If the county decides to proceed, they will need to do their due diligence and research other projects that Conxx has taken on in the past. This will require the dedication of staff resources, although Network Sierra members are more than willing to help with this phase of the project. It is worth noting that the Conxx system is already operating in a rural county in Maryland, that has many similarities to Tuolumne County. Ed Fernandez, of Network Sierra, has been in contact with some of the managers at AllCoNet and they report a mainly positive experience with their system.

If the Board of Supervisors agrees to move forward following the Conxx presentation in June, I believe that the next job of Network Sierra will be to raise the awareness of both the general public and potential stakeholders in a system like Conxx. Having an alternative telco infrastructure is not a trivial change to the status quo. We will need to make every effort to win broad support for this far-reaching project.

Update: Teri reports that there probably won't be any action until after the Board approves the budget (last Tuesday in June) and the first step will be a Board discussion of economic development goals. This will probably push any Conxx presentation into July.

RSS In Plain English

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an incredibly useful technology that's often not very well understood. Commoncraft has produced this video that does a great low-tech job of covering the basics in 3 1/2 minutes.

Click To Play (opens popup)

When you're done, subscribe to this blog!

Conxx Presentation

On April 18th, representatives from Conxx, Inc. gave a presentation to a general meeting of Network Sierra, which was also attended by several members of county government. Conxx provides a turnkey system for replacing the telco infrastructure in a county or region. Their technology was developed in Alagany County, Maryland and they hope to replicate it in rural areas around the country. As Marv Dealy reported in his Byte by Bite column:

While a bit larger than Tuolumne County, comparisons between the two could be made and the information was compelling. To summarize, this company is providing services to the county, to businesses and to residents that include Internet connections with speeds up to 26 mb at very affordable rates. The system can also provide other services traditionally only offered by a telco like AT&T, such as voice circuits, T1, DS3/OC1, Frame relay, ATM and more. The system uses towers and antennae, fed by wire when available and linked with microwave when not, to broadcast a cloud, and the company said that the trees in Maryland are just as tough as the ones surrounding Craig Will's house, high in the mountains up Highway 108, and that they don't present a problem.

The discussion turned to how such a system could be financed in our county, and it appears there are pots of money that, if the pots can be connected, could do the trick.

Here are the Powerpoint slides used in the Conxx presentation.

Note: Use this link if you have trouble viewing the slides in this post.

This is the first fully integrated technology solution that I've seen that seems to address the needs of Tuolumne County. It's not inexpensive (~$5 million) but such sums have been provided to other rural areas through grants. It's important to stress that we don't expect that any significant amount of money will be available from Tuolumne County. We will however, require support and cooperation from the county in order to proceed with such an ambitious plan. So far, I'm cautiously optimistic that such support will be forthcoming.

These Directions For Planning Purposes Only...

Planning a trip from New York to Paris? Of course you'll want to use Google Maps. Here's the link but make sure you pack dry clothes for use after step 23.

Broadband Expansion 101

The task of bringing broadband Internet service to an unserved area has two key components:

1. the local connection
2. the long distance connection

The logistics are similar to setting up a town with postal service. The neighborhood post office is responsible for moving mail to and from all local addresses. It is also responsible for transferring mail to and from trucks sent by the large regional post office for long distance travel. Note that all in-town mail traffic travels through the neighborhood post office whether it stays in town or travels long distances.

In place of a local post office, broadband service relies on an automated device called a router located somewhere in the neighborhood. The router is so named because it is responsible for routing messages sent over the Internet toward their destination. All Internet messages sent or received by local addresses pass through the neighborhood router. Either wires or antennas must be installed to establish a link between each individual customer and the neighborhood router. It must also have a link to at least one high capacity long distance router to handle Internet messages traveling to or from out-of-town destinations.

Local Versus Long Distance

The equipment and labor required to run a local post office is distinct from what is involved in getting mail between distant post offices. At the local level, postal workers must concern themselves with local street names and addresses. Between post offices, the focus is on the zip code and country name. At the local level, individual letters are sorted by hand and delivered on foot or in small trucks. Long distance mail traffic travels in boxes sorted by regional destination and is carried in large trucks and planes.

The equipment required to maintain broadband Internet service at a local level is similarly distinct from the long distance requirements. At the local level, the neighborhood router is focused on carrying a relatively low volume of Internet traffic between many different customers located in relatively close proximity. Outside the local level, the focus is on high capacity and long distances.

High capacity, long distance, broadband equipment is generally referred to as backhaul infrastructure. To remember this term, I think of hauling lots of stuff and that it takes place in the background rather than in my vicinity. Backhaul routers generally don't support nearly as many connections as neighborhood routers. They just have to handle a lot of capacity and hand off messages to the next router in line.

Local broadband equipment is generally referred to as last-mile infrastructure. It does not have to support the distance or capacity required by backhaul infrastructure but it does have to support lots of individual connections with all the unique complications of maintaining a reliable connection with each individual customer. These complications are commonly known as the last-mile problem. It is similar to all the local knowledge that an individual mail carrier accumulates about which houses have dogs, where individual mailboxes are hidden, etc.

Economies of Scale

A single postal employee with a sorting table and small vehicle can handle all the mail traveling in or out of a single neighborhood route. The complexity, labor and capital required to operate a regional postal hub is huge by comparison. Despite this greater complexity and capital expenditure, the cost of moving one letter one mile is much lower at the regional level than at the local level due to economies of scale.

The same economies of scale apply to broadband infrastructure. The large cables and high capacity equipment that carry long distance Internet traffic are more expensive to set up than local equipment but per mile and per message sent they operate at a far lower cost than local equipment. The last-mile problem can be solved with less expensive equipment but it must be largely solved one customer at a time.

Risk and Return on Investment

It is generally assumed that the cost of setting up broadband infrastructure will ultimately be paid for by the customers who benefit from the service. On paper, it is not terribly difficult to justify these costs. The required equipment is nowadays produced at amazingly low cost. Once people become accustomed to having broadband service they generally find that the value they receive is well worth the cost. The tricky part is managing the up front investment required to put the infrastructure in place.

Google TiSP - Going With The Flow

Google TiSP was announced today, offering free home wireless broadband service via fiter-optic cable installed through municipal sewage lines. From the FAQ:

We believe that all users deserve free, fast and sanitary online access. To offset the cost of providing the TiSP service, we use information gathered by discreet DNA sequencing of your personal bodily output to display online ads that are contextually relevant to your culinary preferences, current health status and likelihood of developing particular medical conditions going forward. Google also offers premium levels of service for a monthly fee.

Leave it to Google to provide services never before imagined!

FCC Correspondence

After reading the recently signed Comcast contract, and having others validate my belief that it is a poor contract that will leave much of Tuolumne County without wireline Broadband for ten years, I sent an email to Michael Copps of the FCC. FCC Commissioner Copps had recently written an op-ed piece in the Washington Post regarding the state of Broadband in the United States. After my email is the link to his op-ed piece.

Commissioner Copps,

I applaud your stance in the attached article. Tuolumne County California just signed a new contract with Comcast to upgrade their service. The County was induced to signed the contract quickly by Comcast as they warned the State would take over the contract negotiations starting 2007. The contract is horrible and will leave 40% without Comcast service including Broadband Internet for 10 years. Part of the contract reads that if Comcast completes their upgrade in three years, the five year contract gets extended another five years. Comcast only has to provide service to neighborhoods with 40 connections per cable mile. This equates to one acre parcels or less in size. That leaves us out that are in two and three acre minimum parcels.

AT&T has completed all DSL expansion in our rural county and at least 40% of the homes do not have access to wireline Internet. At&T's answer is for us to sign up with the satellite provider WildBlue.

How can the United States get out of this mess? It is hurting the economy. Young adults want Broadband access even when they go on vacation now. Tourism in rural counties will be hurt in the future as they cannot provide this service in remote areas.

Bob Ingalls

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/07/AR2006110701230.html

His personal reply was marked Not Public: For Internal Use Only, so I will paraphrase his reply.

He thanked me for taking the time to get in touch. Commissioner Copps believes the way we'll get out of this is to develop a national strategy, a real commitment, to get broadband out to everybody. He suggested that broadband be funded under the Universal Service Fund, but there are other ways, too. He did not state what the other ways are. He further stated that the important thing is to make the commitment to this important infrastructure. He also believes that Broadband is the central infrastructure-building challenge of our time.

While it is encouraging that we have an enlightened FCC Commissioner, there are four other FCC Commissioners and if Commissioner Copps can't get anything done we are going to have to do it ourselves.

Long distance via the Internet: $29.95 per year

One of the reasons why broadband should include fast speeds for uploads, as well as downloads, is the increasing use of Voice Over IP (VoIP). Unlike a web browser, which mostly receives data, voice applications send as much data as they receive (even if you're a slow talker). 128 kb/sec is about the lower limit for voice calls but add a web-cam and you'll want as much throughput as you can get. Latency (delay) with satellite systems can also cause problems with audio data.

With a stable broadband connection however, VoIP can be put to use today by the average home user, at a big cost savings over Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS). The key to making this system usable is to make it work with a standard telephone and to be able to make calls to any ordinary land-line phone. No one wants to make all their calls while tethered to their computer by a headset or spend big bucks on specialized WiFi phones. I have put together a system in our home using the Skype service, an analog phone adapter and our existing cordless phones. There are other VoIP services out there besides Skype; it's just the one I have experience with. Here's a diagram (courtesy of Von-Phone) of how the pieces fit together:

What you'll need for this system:

• A Skype account, with "SkypeOut" service
  This service currently costs $29.95/year and allows unlimited outgoing calls to any phone in the US or Canada. International calls can be made at an additional per minute and per connection charge (see Skype for details).
• VoIP phone adaptor
  This adaptor is about the size of a deck of cards. It connects to your computer via a USB port and to a phone using a standard RJ-11 jack. I am using a Yealink B2K adaptor that I purchased from Amperor Direct. The same unit is also available from Von-Phone. A search for "Skype Phone Adaptor" on eBay will turn up a number of products with prices ranging from $14 - $35 (watch out for shipping charges).
  
• A phone to talk into
  You could connect a single phone to use only for Skype calls but a better solution is to plug in the base station of a wireless phone system, allowing all phones to have access to Skype. The software that comes with the adaptor allows you to toggle between the POTS dial tone and Skype using the phone's star (*) key.

Special bonus: unlimited calling and two phone lines for $29.95. About six months ago, we decided to disconnect the 2nd phone line to our home. It was originally installed as a data line, back when we had dial-up Internet access and a fax machine (I now actively discourage people sending me faxes). When DSL became available, between consolidating our phone and Internet service and disconnecting the 2nd line, we saved a pot of money. But we missed being able to make voice calls on two separate lines. Skype to the rescue! Because we have a two-line cordless phone system, we were able to connect POTS to line 1 and the Skype adaptor to line 2, effectively creating a new second line. Both lines can be in use simultaneously; they can even be conferenced together.

So, how does it sound? On my system, the call quality is comparable to a cell phone. Somewhat worse than a POTS call but perfectly acceptable. Some Skype users have complained of echos and delays but that hasn't been my experience, probably because I have a stable DSL connection at 3m down and 384k up. I've had no complaints from the people that I call (including my 71 year old mother), however I should point out that at this time Skype does not support caller ID. This could be an issue if you frequently call people who won't pick up if they don't recognize the caller. There have been many requests for this feature but Skype will only say that, "currently tests are being conducted with several PSTN carriers for the possible future introduction of callerID."

Adapting to any new phone system means learning a few new habits. For example, unless you use Skype's built-in speed dial, there are a lot of numbers to punch in on a Skype call. Once you get the hang of it though, in most cases you just pick up the phone and dial. The Skype service offers many options that I haven't touched on here. Read about them and get user feedback on the forums at www.skype.com.

Comcast Contract Follow-Up

Network Sierra member Bob Ingalls writes:

I had an action item from our first Network Sierra meeting to talk to Greg Applegate regarding the Comcast contract. Greg referred me to Marian Jackson (Government Affairs) of Comcast.

Marian told me that after Comcast upgrades their network, they will be offering Internet and telephone service. The key word is AFTER the upgrade as their current network does not have the capacity.

She also stated that they do stick to their 40 connections per cable mile. Their standard is that they have to cover the cost of installation in 60 months or the customer can pay for the cost for the connection. She estimated to get Comcast cable into Lambert Lake Estates would cost $100,000.

Bob notes that at such a cost, it is highly unlikely that a subdivision such as Lambert Lake Estates will be served. He has also forwarded this information to the Board of Supervisors.

How A Neighborhood Gets On The Internet

Getting Connected

It is Network Sierra's mission to get Tuolumne County better connected to the Internet. To make this happen, it is helpful to understand how any individual computer or any local community becomes connected to the Internet in the first place.

I hope that the following basic description of Internet infrastructure provides some understanding without being so oversimplified that it runs roughshod over important details. I welcome any critique that might help us connect people the basic ideas in addition to getting computers connected.

How the Internet is Organized

How is the Internet Organized? The smart aleck answer is that it isn't. The Internet was designed not to require a centrally planned structure. Instead, it was designed to adapt to whatever connections happen to exist at any given time.

The following link provides a visualization of a portion of the Internet:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Internet_map_1024.jpg

This illustration gives a sense of a pattern that exists despite the fact that the Internet is constantly changing as people add or move connections.

Nodes and Connections

Each connection in the Internet can be visualized as a line between two points referred to as nodes. One task that does require some centralized coordination is the assingment of unique addresses to nodes so that each node can be distinguished. The nodes themselves are responsible for communicating with thier neighbors about who they are connected to. They update this information to adapt as connections come and go.

Nodes that have multiple connections are called routing nodes. When a routing node receives a message, it is responsible for passing it along. It must choose from among its immediate connnections which path is going to move the message closer to its final destination.

Nodes that have only one connection are called leaf nodes, as in the leaves of a tree. Leaf nodes are where individual computer users connect to the Internet. When information is sent between two computers it has to find its way from one leaf node to another. The first leg of this trip is easy to choose because there is one route out of a leaf node.

Attaching One More Computer

Attaching one more computer to the Internet is a matter of finding a nearby routing node that can support one more connection. By "nearby" we mean close enough that either a wired or wireless method of connecting can be achieved at a reasonable cost.

If you want a new Internet connection for your home, it is fairly easy to have a local Internet Service Provider (ISP) set you up with a modem and dialup account. Dialup service works over regular phone lines but is relatively slow. The term "broadband" commonly refers to any Internet service that is at least 20 times faster than dialup. Many of the latest and greatest web sites assume a broadband internet connection. Because of this, many people consider dialup service as too far out of date to be a real option.

Most ISP's offer broadband service in various wired and wireless forms. To get broadband service in your home, you have to live close enough to a routing node to make the final "last mile" connection practical. If there is no such routing node available in your neighborhood, you are out of luck. This is a common problem in rural areas.

Internet service via communications satelites is one alternative that people often turn to in rural areas. This type of service solves part of the capacity problem posed by dialup. Unfortunately, the distance that the signal must travel between earth and satelite is far enough that the turn around time on messages cannot keep up with many of the applications that people have come to use the Internet for.

Attaching A Whole Neighborhood

Routing nodes capable of supporting broadband service exist only in the more densely populated areas of Tuolumne County. Network Sierra aims to help ISP's justify the infrastructure that will bring routing nodes within reach of more neighborhoods. There are two key technical pieces to this puzzle:

• The "last mile" problem
• Backhaul

We touched on the "last mile" problem when discussing how to attach an individual computer to the Internet. It is essentially the means used to attach a leaf node to a routing node. In remotely situated areas, the last few routing nodes closest to the leaf nodes are sometimes also lumped into the "last mile" category.

Backhaul refers to the routing nodes and connections that tie locally situated routing nodes to the rest of the internet. It would be slightly oversimplified but appromimately correct to say that "last mile" infrastructure consists of leaf nodes plus routing nodes that touch a leaf node and that backhaul infrastructure consists of all other routing nodes and connections.

Cell Tower Maps

The following maps show the locations of cell towers in Tuolumne County, excluding those on Forest Service lands. A request for those maps is pending.

Map 1 (437 KB PDF): http://www.networksierra.org/pdf/cell_tower_1.pdf
Map 2 (409 KB PDF): http://www.networksierra.org/pdf/cell_tower_2.pdf

Final Comcast Agreement

Below is a link to the agreement signed by Tuolumne County and Comcast, on 12/19/06. Thanks to Supervisor Teri Murrison for providing it and to Ed Fernandez for requesting it. Ed notes the following:

After a quick perusal I noted two significant things:

It calls for an update completion date in five years.

It obligates service to be provided where there are a minimum of 40 connections per cable mile. Connections not meeting the 40 minimum can still be made at Comcast's option. This probably exludes most of the rural areas and high end subdivisions like Curtis Creek, Lambert Lake Estates, Ridgewood, Whispering Woods, etc.. Consider that a square parcel of 300 by 300 feet is just over two acres. Assuming connections on both sides of a road this equates to about 35 connections and does not take into account the miles of cable that are needed just to get to the development. (Most of the lots in the above mentioned developments probably have footage well in excess of 400 feet.)

Document link (1295 KB PDF): http://www.networksierra.org/pdf/agree-comcast.pdf

Google Calendar

Another in an occasional series about online applications that I use regularly.

Google Calendar has become one of my mainstay applications. I use it to manage all my appointments and also to keep track of my wife and son (no easy task). Google Calendar excels at working with multiple calendars, even those that aren't part of the same Google account. Since my wife has allowed me to view (but not change) appointments on her calendar, they show up on mine too. Any entry from someone else's calendar is highlighted in a different color. At right is the display for managing calendars. Each one can be shown or hidden, as you choose.

Google makes extensive use of AJAX technology throughout the Calendar, making it more like a desktop app. For example, clicking on any date displays a popup in which an appointment can be entered without having to reload the page. Using artificial intelligence techniques, a meaningful calendar entry can be created by typing "7pm Dinner at Pancho's" into the popup's textbox (provided of course that you actually are going to dinner at Pancho's).

If you're planning on meeting up with a group, you can send multiple invitations to an event. The recipients can then confirm and even leave comments about the event ("if I'm late, order me the won ton soup"). After you've entered an appointment, Google Calendar can help to get there on time by sending you a reminder via email or SMS.

If you've entered a street address in your appointment, clicking the Map link will bring up the appropriate Google Map. The Calendar also integrates with Gmail, by offering to create a calendar entry for any date that appears in your email messages.

Google took an innovative approach to printing, outputting calendars in PDF format on-the-fly. This allows for precise layout control without the need to download, save and print a PDF file. Ironically, we print out a calendar around the first of each month, stick it on the refrigerator and then scribble on it for the rest of the month.

Lastly, you can export your calendar(s) in ICAL, XML or HTML formats. Using Google's configuration tool, you can embed your calendar in a web page and any changes you make to it will be reflected in real time.

FCC Supports VOIP Connections To Phone Network

A recent ZDNet article reports an FCC ruling that requires regular phone companies to cooperate in allowing VOIP services to connect with their networks. This is of particular interest to rural customers who want to switch to VOIP to help justify the cost broadband access.

Computer Education

Usability guru Jakob Nilsen has posted a brief essay on Life-Long Computer Skills that I would love to see taught here in Tuolumne County. As a technology provider, I often see people frustrated by a lack of understanding of how their computer works below the surface of the desktop. There are many computer classes available locally which focus on the use of a particular program or tool, but none that I know of that provide the broader picture that Mr. Nilsen suggests:

Teaching life-long computer skills in our schools offers further benefit in that it gives students insights that they're unlikely to pick up on their own. In contrast, as software gets steadily easier to use, anyone will be able to figure out how to draw a pie chart. People will learn how to use features on their own, when they need them -- and thus have the motivation to hunt for them. It's the conceptual things that get endlessly deferred without the impetus of formal education.

Picking and choosing from the article's list of course topics, almost every computer user that I know would benefit from a better understanding of:

• Search Strategies
• Information Credibility
  
• Information Overload
• Writing for Online Readers
• Computerized Presentation Skills
• Workspace Ergonomics

Notice that none of these topics are tied to any particular program or operating system. Rather, they teach strategies for working more easily and successfully with any computer, particularly one that is online. With a grounding in skills such as these, students can branch into more technical subjects such as debugging or user testing and usability issues.

To use military jargon, these skills are strategic, rather than tactical. Understanding them is a necessary step to being successful in today's information economy. Again, Jakob Nilsen:

In their book, The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market, Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane highlight three key skills that are less likely to be offshored or automated in the future. Those skills are problem solving, understanding the relation between concepts, and interpersonal communication. The life-long computer skills I've outlined here can similarly prepare students for the type of careers that will be sustainable as globalization intensifies.

Read all of Life-Long Computer Skills.

Broadband Speed Test

The design may be a little over the top but check out this cool new Broadband Speed Text tool.

Remarks To the Board of Supervisors

The following remarks (well, most of them) were made to the Board of Supervisors, as part of the public discussion on economic development:

Good morning. My name is Greg Falken. I'm a partner in webdancers, a web development company in Twain Harte. I'm also a member of an ad hoc group of citizens called Network Sierra, who are advocating for broadband Internet access in all parts of Tuolumne County.

I don't think I need to go into the many benefits to business that broadband Internet access provides, because I know that this information has been brought to you many times before. In the context of business development however, I would point out that few businesses would even consider establishing themselves in Tuolumne County without access to broadband. And for businesses that are already here, lack of broadband access makes them less competitive. As you know, our broadband coverage is spotty and there is currently no publicly available plan to bring this critical service to all parts of the county.

I'd like to tell you about another county, similar to ours, that has looked forward and taken action.

Henry County, Ohio is a rural county in the Northwest corner of the state, in an area once known as The Great Black Swamp. They have a population of about 30,000 and a median household income of $44,200 a year. Henry County's telephone company is currently spending over $6 million dollars in funding from the USDA Rural Development Broadband Access and Telecommunications Program to build a broadband system known as Fiber To the Home. These folks in Ohio will soon have access to the Internet at speeds more than 1000 times faster than DSL or cable can provide. They are thinking for the future. They are investing in technology that will allow them to connect with the rest of the world, where in many countries DSL-type speeds have simply been leapfrogged. This is the difference between running a business using computers, or on pocket calculators.

Would the technology that's being installed today in rural Ohio be viable here in Tuolumne County? I really don't know the answer to that. I do, however, have a suggestion for finding out. This Board should create a County Commission for Communication Technologies. This commission would have the mandate to research, recommend and implement broadband access throughout the County. There are smart, willing people available today to serve on such a commission and many sources of funding available to pay for it. I ask you to give this your serious consideration.

Thank you.

More Online Applications - Gmail

Can an online email application really compete with the best desktop applications? Prior to using Gmail I would have said no. I've had a Yahoo Mail account for many years, which I found useful for testing purposes but never considered using as a primary email application. I still use Outlook for my business emails, mainly because of the archive of messages in it, going back to 2002. About a year ago, I set up a Gmail account to receive personal mail sent to my falken.name domain. It has worked well enough that I have since recommended it to several people and businesses for use as their primary email application.

Gmail was designed from the ground up to be an online application and the programmers at Google have played to their strengths. They came up with the first usable interface for grouping threaded emails together (Outlook 2003 is horrible at this), which they call Conversations. The screenshot below shows 5 messages received today that belong to the same thread. I can easily move between them and respond to any one or all of them.

Yes, those are ads on the right and you know what, I don't even notice them any more. It's actually kind of interesting to note the ads that Google thinks are relevant to my messages.

In another example of their clean-slate approach, Gmail doesn't use folders for organizing mail. Instead, you define and attach "labels" to mail messages, which are then used to group similar messages together and to aid in searching.

In the Gmail system, there is only a single copy of each message (which is actually stored in "All Mail"). Labels are simply a convenient way of referencing messages. Of course, being Google, you can search your mail six ways from Sunday.

A common refrain among Gmail users is, "it's hard to explain; you just have to try it". An early review at A Whole Lotta Nothing put it this way:

I can say that after using gmail for a few days I finally get what everyone is raving about. On first glance there's nothing impressive there. To see what it is capable of doing well, you have to use it: get a few email discussions going with folks and the more you use it the more obvious the benefits become. I bet you could say the same thing about blogging. Show a blog or the Blogger.com app to someone that has never seen it or heard of blogging. I'm sure they'd dismiss it as nothing special, one page being some sort of boring public diary, while the app itself is just a giant form and a button marked "post and publish", whatever that means.

Gmail is pretty incredible about tracking discussions. I've tried several email packages that offer threading and gmail's is simpler and more straightforward. It automatically trims replies and shows email threads as top-down discussions, so it's easy to keep track of where people are in a discussion. Replying to email is really easy, you just start typing in the textarea below a message and it automatically starts a response.

Here are a few Gmail tricks that I've learned in the past year:

• If you have forwarded your mail to Gmail from another account, you can add that account under "send mail as..." in Gmail. When you respond to these messages, they will show the return address of the account from which they were forwarded.
• You can create a local archive of your Gmail messages by installing Google Desktop and indexing the mail in your Gmail account. This will also allow you to read your Gmail messages offline.
• There are several "notifier" utilities that will alert you when new mail arrives at Gmail. I use two: Gmail Notifier for Firefox (on my laptop) and GmailGeiger for Yahoo Widgets (on my desktop). There is also one available from Google but I haven't tried it.
• You can display cute little quotes of the day, news tickers, etc. above your inbox but more importantly, you can turn them off. Look in Settings under Web Clips.

Email is one of the must-have applications on any modern computer and I do not hesitate recommending Gmail. It even works surprisingly well over a dial-up connection (when doing so, I'd suggest either the "Standard Without Chat" or "Basic HTML" settings). However, to take full advantage of Gmail's integration with other Google applications, you're going to want a broadband connection. More on those in another post.

And it was always thus

Medieval help desk:

David Weinberger über Cluetrain

Nice video interview with David Weinberger, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. As David writes on his own blog:

I blather on about Cluetrainy stuff, plus how to explain Net neutrality to "Aunt Tilly." And because there are German subtitles, you can have the illusion that you are now fluent in that language.

Note: the first minute or so of the video is in German but the interview itself is in English.

Grassroots Broadband

Does the following drill sound familiar to you?

"You want broadband where? Just give me your phone prefix and I'll see if it is available"
...
"Oh I guess its not available there yet. Would you like to leave your info so I can let you know when it becomes available? If enough people in your area are interested it will happen.

Most of my neighbors say they'd sign up for DSL, cable, or wireless broadband if it were available. This got me on a mission to ask providers what formula they use to decide when it becomes worthwhile for them to invest in the necessary infrastructure. Noboby is willing to give a formula that might get quoted but I have been able to get a sense of the ballpark.

If you can find a place to put up an antenna that has access to T1 and a line of sight to 25 people willing to sign up as customers, any of the local ISP's would be interested. In fact, you could be your own neighborhood ISP if you wanted to. It would cost about $300 per installation and the monthly cost per customer would be $40 or more. T1 speeds are comparable to DSL and your individual speed would depend on how many are online at the same time.

If this sounds like a solution for your neighborhood, don't assume that you can find an ISP to jump at the opportunity to set this up for you. The scenario I described can break even but will not cover the cost of proving that the customers will be there. But if you and your neighbors take the grassroots initiative you can lead the way rather than waiting years for the infrastructure to find its way to you.

Online Applications

Much has been written about the increasingly blurry line between the desktop and the web. I find that more and more people don't care, and don't need to care, where their computing is taking place. People like my mother, who thinks of Yahoo! Mail as "her" email program, even though it's located on a server hundreds of miles from her home. I'm writing this document using Google Docs & Spreadsheets (who's in charge of naming things at Google, anyway?), not because I don't have a perfectly good word processor installed on my laptop but because I want to be able to edit it later on my work computer and the whole thing's going to end up online in Blogger eventually anyway.

So, I thought I'd start an occasional series of posts about the online apps that I personally find useful. I like to experiment, so I've used quite a few of them but most quickly become more trouble than they're worth. To qualify for regular use, an application has to meet a need and not add to my workload (I don't multi-task all that well). Oh yeah, and they almost always have to be free.

First up is Google. Most of you know it's not just a search engine anymore. In fact, the number of programs that come hurtling out of Google Labs is pretty astonishing. Let's start at the top, with the Google Home Page. The classic Google Home Page is a model of simplicity:

By selecting Personalized Home, you can customize the home page, not just to look different, but also to serve as a launching pad for many online applications. Here's a condensed screen shot of my home page:

From here, I can access the big 3 of personal information management: email/contacts, calendar and the todo list. Two of these programs - Gmail and Google Calendar - are native to Google and the third (a task management program called Remember the Milk) integrates with the Google home page using a widget. This combination gives me 80% of the functionality of Microsoft Word and Outlook, accessible from any computer with an Internet connection, anywhere in the world.

To get started, go to the Google home page and sign in. Strictly speaking, you don't need an account to create a personalized home page but you will need one to use any of Google's other services, like Gmail and Calendar. If you don't have a Google account, you can create one from the sign in page. Then, click the Personalized Home Page link and start adding stuff (really, the link is called "Add Stuff"). Experimentation is the name of the game and it may take a little while to find a layout that works for you.

Next time I come back to this topic, I'll talk a bit about Gmail and Google Calendar. BTW, I recently read that Gmail no longer requires an invitation to sign up. It's open to everybody, even though the logo still says beta.

Upper 108 Weather

Linda Emerson, of Twain Harte, has organized a great weather station site at www.twainharteweather.com. She writes:

Thought I'd let you know I finally have my weather station website online that provides more accurate weather reporting for Twain Harte & the High Country. There will be adjustments made over the next several weeks but the link is working fine and updates are provided every 15 minutes.

Stay dry...
Linda

The site has links to real-time reporting stations at Twain Harte, Cedar Ridge, Arnold and Cold Springs. Also snow reports from Dodge Ridge and Bear Valley and highway conditions from CalTrans. Thanks, Linda!

Webmail Apps Reviewed

I'm working on my own post about the Internet applications that I'm currently using. In the meantime, Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has a nice Comparison of Live Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

A picture is worth...

Chris Anderson, over at The Long Tail, says this is the most inspiring thing [about the Internet] he's seen all day. He's right.

Steve Weinberger, at Joho the Blog says:

This video is a beautiful piece of work. It will be a classic statement. Don't be the very last person to see it...

Network Sierra Forums

Just a short note to say thanks to everyone who's participating over at the Forums. The majority of the traffic to www.networksierra.org is going to the forums and we're developing a solid base of content. The graph at right gives you an idea of the increase in traffic over the last week.

Fiber To the Home

Right after my last post, in which I talked about really high speed internet, I became aware of a number of news reports about fiber to the home (FTTH), a.k.a. fiber to the premises (FTTP). Verizon plans to spend $17.5B (yes, billion) on capital expenditures in 2007–most of it allocated to a fiber to the premises (FTTP) rollout. Fiber provides throughput in the range of 15-30 megabits per second (mb/sec), versus the 1.5-3 mb/sec provided by phone companies DSL connections.

From ZDNet:

While the company reported solid fourth quarter results and added 2.3 million Verizon Wireless customers, analysts are watching Verizon's big bet on its FiOS service, which rides on FTTP. For the uninitiated, Verizon is going through neighborhoods and laying down fat fiber optic pipes that will pump broadband access into your home. Verizon is also hoping you'll buy TV service on that same pipe.

If Verizon's bet pays off, it'll recoup the billions it is spending to lay new fiber optic lines. These lines are designed to feature broadband speeds as high as 50Mbps to the home. If customers flock to FiOS, Verizon will have a moat around its business to fend off Comcast and AT&T. If the bet doesn't pay off Verizon will have a lot of explaining to do.

Interestingly, while Verizon will probably target major metropolitan areas, rural carriers are also working to deploy FTTH.

From the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation:

COLUMBUS – Ohio joined three other states in sharing $30 million in funding from USDA Rural Development’s Broadband Access and Telecommunications Program. Ohio’s share of the funding totals $6,167,000 and goes to McClure Telephone Company in Henry County.

USDA Rural Development's Telecommunications program creates public-private partnerships to finance the construction of telecommunications infrastructure in rural America. Rural Development makes loans to finance the improvement, expansion, construction, or acquisition of telecommunications facilities in rural areas.

The McClure Telephone Company of McClure, Ohio, will use the Broadband loan to construct a fiber to the home system throughout their exchange in Henry County, providing service to 245 data, 808 voice and 256 video subscribers.

And this from the Lincoln Journal (Lincoln County, GA):

Local residents will soon be surfing the net with the best of them as the result of a project undertaken by the Wilkes Telephone & Electric Company (WT&E) to install Fiberto the-Home (FTTH) cable in Lincoln County.

WT&E decided to offer this progressive technology to Lincoln County residents first, due to the high

demand for high-speed Internet access in some of the more rural areas of the county.

The project will be completed in phases. The first phase, which includes homes and business along the Thomson Highway, should get underway this week.

FTTH utilizes the same type of cable that traditionally served complete neighborhoods or towns and extends it directly to each home. The fiber cable eliminates the band-width limitations found in traditional copper and coaxial cables because it is 1,000 times faster than current DSL and cable modems.

I hate to be geo-centric but if they can do it in rural Georgia fercryingoutloud, why not Tuolumne County? Just think of the possibilities for home and business users with connection speeds 1,000 times faster than what is available today.

Who Cares About Broadband?

Why should we care if there is widespread broadband Internet access in Tuolumne County? There are plenty of areas of our lives that do not need more technology and the complexity that goes along with it. We can get a couple of hundred channels of digital TV from Comcast, what more do we want?

Allow me to offer a hand-wavy, big picture sort of answer: There's something really interesting going on around the ways we are communicating with each other using the Internet. (And make no mistake, we have barely begun the process of learning to do this.) The rest of the world is forging ahead with making these connections. Compared with most of Europe and large parts of Asia, what we consider high speed Internet access is laughably slow. I was thrilled when a couple of weeks ago, Frontier Communications boosted my DSL speed to 3 mb/sec. Who would have thought that dinky little Frontier would be providing the highest speeds in the county? However, there are places in the world where regular folks like you and me are getting 10 times that speed for the same cost. I believe there will come a time in the not too distant future when most of the people in the world will have access to most of information in the world and to each other. We need to insist on being part of those conversations.

Closer to home, there are newly emerging ways of conducting business that go beyond the convenience of free shipping from Amazon.com. Companies are discovering the value of extending information about their products and services beyond their physical premises. Customers are finding each other and sharing their stories about the businesses that they deal with, bypassing the marketing departments. Collective knowledge is being created every time one of us writes a review on Amazon, posts a video on YouTube or submits their profile on MySpace (I didn't say it was useful knowledge). One of the most encouraging things I heard recently about broadband adoption is that there is a direct relationship between increased time spent online and decreased time spent watching TV. While a lot of that online time may be spent wandering aimlessly around the web, I suspect that a fair amount of it is spent interacting; blogging, IMing, emailing and looking at things we're actually interested in.

So, those are my big picture thoughts on why we should care about broadband. But I don't plan on beating this particular drum very often in this blog. I come in contact with a lot of technology and spend much of my day online. When I find something that I think is useful or fun, I'd like to pass it along. Most of these things are online so...you'll want to have a broadband connection to check them out. If you have any thoughts, please add them in comments and if you want to start your own discussion, hop over to the Network Sierra Forum.