Thomas Friedman keynotes Freedom to Connect Conference, March 30-31, 2009, Washington DC
Thomas Friedman, three-time Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times columnist, has been selected as keynote speaker at F2C: Freedom to Connect, a conference organized by David Isenberg every year in Washington DC. The aim of the conference is to connect beltway tech policy wonks with telecom practitioners and infrastructure builders across the United States and Europe.
Friedman will speak on “Green Innovation,” a topic that amplifies the major themes of F2C: Freedom to Connect. F2C is about building an open, abundant Internet as a central component of a thriving economy and a clean environment. Several F2C speakers will address successes and failures of broadband implementations around the world. F2C will cover the $7.2 billion broadband stimulus package and the $110 billion in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that also may be used to build broadband connections to the Internet. Several of the networks they have built serve as models for stimulus funding.
Thomas Friedman joined the New York Times in 1981. His two most recent books, “The World is Flat,” and “Hot, Flat and Crowded,” show how technology can address energy and environment issues and lower many barriers that divide the world’s peoples. “Tom has a genius for telling compelling stories about geeky topics,” said Isenberg, who has produced F2C for five years. “We’re looking to Tom for lessons about how to tell our story effectively.”
More information on F2C: Freedom to Connect is at http://www.freedom-to-connect.net.
Panel on Municipal Wireless Networks
On Monday, March 30 from 13:00 – 14:30, I am speaking on the fall and rise of municipal wireless networks – what went wrong, what cities are doing right (including updates on Philadelphia’s network) and what muni wireless 2.0 will look like. Other people on the panel at Sascha Meinrath (New America Foundation), Ken Biba (Novarum), Aaron Kaplan (co-founder, of FunkFeuer.at, the first fully meshed, free wireless community network in Austria) and Dewayne Hendricks (Dandin Group). Our panel will address: the impact of 802.11n on lowering the cost and improving performance in muni Wi-Fi networks, community mesh Wi-Fi networks in Europe, models that work in the US and abroad, the convergence of Wi-Fi, WiMAX, 3G and LTE in building truly ubiquitous wireless broadband coverage).
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What went wrong with municipal wireless networks is simple: inappropriate technology, inappropriate business model, inappropriate owners (the public sector has no business being in the broadband business). Municipal wireless networks not only do not work; they harm private enterprise by rendering the unlicensed spectrum useless for private providers, thus commandeering what should be a shared resource. They are a bad idea and should be outlawed.
Most municipal networks are run by private providers. The ones run by the town itself are in areas where there are NO providers. Those towns which had dial-up looked for a provider to deliver broadband, could not find any, and had to do it themselves. So, your objection is moot.
Brett, you have only one thing right in that statement, inapproprate business mode. The rest of your statement is not based on reality.
1) Inapproprate business model – yes. Free is not business plan and targeted advertising almost as silly with the capital expenditures made. Once that concept started, everybody else was pretty much out of the game until MetroFi and Earthlink went under or got out of the way.
2) Inapproprate Technology – NO! Inappropriate RF design. Poor RF analysis from AP to client. Poor RF/financial modeling. Do it the right way, and this technology is fine. In fact, there is a clause in the FCC rules that makes this model even more appropriate now.
3) Inappropriate owners – hmmm, tough one here. I have worked with some cities that are pretty solid and others that just don’t have the technical expertise or vision. No different than the private companies that deployed the failed models. Either way, the consultants or leader of the project needs to have more information and knowledge of the past and what new equipment has come to market to make a better design.
i would not be surprised if Brett G. was sponsored by major incumbents. He was pestering everybody even during the F2C conf via live chat.
Brett G.: what this country needs is more openness and honesty.
To my knowledge, Brett runs a wireless ISP business. He’s a small WISP so he has to buy his backhaul from a larger telecom operator.
The problem in the US is that small ISPs like Brett, are getting squeezed by the large operators who are not required to wholesale backhaul to small ISPs at low prices and who use unfair competitive practices to drive them out of business.
In the Netherlands, an ISP like Brett can buy capacity from the incumbent KPN (for VDSL) or from a fiber company (which is often a consortium involving the city/region). Incumbent operators who roll out fiber are also required to share their networks. In fact, the Dutch incumbent, KPN, decided to drop their objection to muni broadband (fiber) and declared that sharing networks is good for everyone, including KPN.
Brett hates the muni broadband movement because he thinks it competes with his business. So although he should direct his ire at large companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast, and at politicians who pass laws that favor the big guys at the expense of small WISPs, he prefers to target munis, in part because it’s easier and more acceptable to adopt an anti-tax, anti-government stance (the de facto religion in the US since 1980, now discredited after the financial crisis).
If the US has strong line-sharing regulations and if US local governments were rolling out fiber networks (not necessarily fiber to home, but fiber rings) that ISPs like Brett could access at a low price, there would be many more ISPs here who could make a decent living.
So I understand Brett’s concern with net neutrality laws. He has to manage the bandwidth he sells to his users because it costs him a lot of money to buy it from the backhaul operator. If the law prevents him from doing that, in effect, he cannot manage his costs. No business can survive that. The answer isn’t to ban muni broadband but to get munis and private companies to join together in creating robust fiber networks that offer backhaul to ISPs like Brett at low prices.