Archaic Telecom

The Road to UTOPIA

 , , , , , , 1

In the National Broadband Plan, there is hardly any mention of a wholesale or “unbundled” model of fiber-to-the-home. That’s unfortunate. There are many examples of successful deployments of fiber in which the physical part is built by the public sector (or through public-private partnerships), with private providers stepping in to resell access for voice, video, and data at the retail level. For a nitty-gritty description of one European city’s experience laying fiber under cobblestones and into canals,  you can read about Amsterdam’s CityNet project, written by the company’s CEO.

The US does have many open access projects in which municipalities in underserved areas take the lead in financing fiber’s significant sunk costs.  There’s one deployment that stands out, linking together over 16 cities in Utah and serving about 40,000 households. It’s called the Utah Telecommunications Open Infrastructure Agency, which acronymized becomes UTOPIA.Continue reading

The Rack

Is CrowdFlower the Future of Work?

 , , 6

About two years ago while researching a blog post on crowdsourcing, I discovered Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. As a  crowdsourced labor solution, the Turk completely turns around the relationship between computers and people.  Instead of asking silicon to perform complex pattern matching (finding words or concepts in text documents), speech recognition (transcription), or image processing (identifying road signs in photos), why not have software call out for help? That is, we the humans become non-software subroutines that tap into our unique biological processing engines especially suited for CPU-stumping tasks.

Other companies have followed suit delivering what are essentially systems to manage piece-meal work for conceptually intensive tasks.  CrowdFlower is one of them.  They’ve taken the “labor in the cloud” model one step further.Continue reading

The Rack

Freescale's $200 Tablet Supports Multiple OSes

 , ,

At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Freescale was showing off what its chips can do. Freescale’s 7″ tablet reference architecture was meant to inspire manufacturers. And to my eyes, I think they’ll generate lots of interest. Since CES, they’ve added Chromium and Android OS to the line-up— at CES, they had a Linux mock-up. The expected retail price for a  Freescale gadget is in the  $200 to $250 range. Check out the demo after the jump.

Updated 3/23/2010: Read James Surowiecki’s article on why low-end (FreeScale-based) and high-end tablets (iPad) will dominate the market.
 Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

National Broadband Plan Has Goal to Study Harder

 , , , ,

That’s not an Onion headline. But after perusing a few key sections of the officially released National Broadband Plan I learned that the FCC recommendations involve either more study or vague posturings on important policy debates that have been raging since dawn of time: broadening the universal service fund (USF) to include VoIP carriers (see weakly worded Recommendation 8.10), wholesale access and pricing (see tepid Recommendation 4.7), openness of mobile devices (no recommendations that I can find), and the overall question of whether we have a competitive broadband market (for what it’s worth, Recommendation 4.2).

The Rack

The Twitterization of Google

 , , , ,

About two weeks ago I became one of the small group of users who are currently trialing the new Google look. I was vaguely aware of a shift in the left margin, which I decided at first was a glitch in my browser. Then my search results jumped to life when I came across a box of automatically scrolling tweets.

Deep thought: will timeliness trump PageRank-ness?