2007 August

What if a 1% increase in broadband penetration equaled 300,000 jobs?

Often I take Robert X. Cringely‘s columns with a grain-of-salt, but this one entitled, "Game Over: The U.S. is unlikely to ever regain its broadband leadership" really hit me since I make my living on Internet-centric management consulting and view broadband as the key enabler of business going forward. Cringely’s article is an important one to read if you care about US competitiveness in the future.

Back in the mid-1990′s I had an ISDN line with a whopping 128kbps access for $69 per month. Incredibly fast at the time, I even considered their bonded option for 256kbps (well over $100 per month) but I wanted to stay married. Today I have 8mbps per second downstream and 768kbps upstream for essentially the same price.

I have friends in San Francisco with 10mbps symmetrical (both upload and download) for under $100 a month. Others using Verizon’s fiber (FIOS) and getting 15mbps down, 2mbps up for $50 per month.

But Cringely talks about the 100mbps speeds in Japan, others have complained about them being ahead of us too and the OECD’s April, 2007 report (which showed the US at 25th in global broadband penetration and speed) is open to debate. So is it important for us to have competitiveness in broadband speeds and why aren’t we — the inventor and creator of the Internet — in the world’s leading position for broadband speed and penetration?

When you think about the relative sizes of countries vs. US states, you begin to get a feel for the enormity of the problem. Japan is roughly the size of Montana, for example, and (as of 2001), 79% of the population lived in urban areas with ~20% in Tokyo alone. That makes it considerably easier to provide a high speed broadband infrastructure for the overwhelming majority of Japanese. It’s a lot tougher to do so across the vast geography that is the United States.

The stakes are too high, however, to NOT solve this accelerating need for true broadband. ArsTechnica has a good article on House Democrats and discussions about ‘true’ broadband. I’m not even going to get into the lobbying and politics of broadband, telephony and wireless, but suffice to say there are alot of complexities on why we’re NOT the world’s leader. What most discussions don’t focus on, however, is that broadband is viewed as a driver of gross domestic product (GDP) output and we need to be accelerating the Internet — both in speed and penetration — now.

What if a 1% increase in broadband penetration equaled 300,000 jobs? Read on for a very interesting set of data…

A lot has changed since the civil war in the United States when the principal means of long distance communications was the telegraph. Newspapers took days to get the news into the hands of the citizenry and information traveled slowly.

Compare that with what we’re dealing with today: hundreds of TV channels; newspapers; magazines; web sites; and now the river of news and information that is streaming toward us helped along by the Internet and really simple syndication (RSS).

Most of yesterday I was tied up and got back to my office about 5:30pm and discovered 1,749 feeds in my RSS reader! Not all of these posts and articles are relevant or interesting, but scanning them is still important since every single day I pull a dozen or so into my saved articles for future reference or because they inform something.

Add to that email, SMS, instant messaging, voicemails, the newspapers I read and the shows I TiVo, the DVD’s I receive by mail, the podcasts I subscribe to, the music I own and continue to purchase, the five or six books I have going at any given time, and even *I* start to chuckle at the deluge of information that comes my way.

This is after I’ve been pretty rigorous about unsubscribing to feeds, podcasts and email newsletters, letting print publication subscriptions lapse, and deleting the recording of TV content I don’t care about any longer.

Here’s the kicker: about as fast as I push stuff away, new opportunities pop up. There are new online video sites I want to go to, Facebook apps to try out, new communications methods to explore and other bloggers with interesting things to say. More and more of my friends and colleagues want to reach out to me with alternative forms of communications and are asking me to join all sorts of new offerings.

How are you managing your tsunami of accelerating communications? This is only going to become a bigger issue and I need to figure out better ways to manage my information delivery and communications with better tools and approaches.