Thursday, November 18, 2010

UK Gvt - Net Neutrality - light touch

Government favours light regulation on net neutrality

The UK government has laid out its position on net neutrality, arguing that the issue should remain lightly regulated and that competition between ISPs will ensure future openness.

Speaking at the FT World Telecoms Conference on Wednesday, communications minister Ed Vaizey claimed that a "lightly regulated internet is good for business, good for the economy, and good for people". However, Open Rights Group chief Jim Killock responded by saying the government seemed to want to "encourage 'walled gardens' of ISP-provided services".


(...)

Thursday, November 11, 2010

The economics of last mile fiber

[ The following excerpts are from Bill St Arnaud's blog, which draws on Herbert Wagter's (Amsterdam FTTH network) Fiber-to-the-X: the economics of last-mile fiber:

===


(...) Ninety-nine percent of the Internet's physical distance has been strung with fiber already; just a minor hop, and home and business users can have a fully fiber connection. The obvious question is, why has fiber been rolled out in globe-spanning networks without any public discussion whatsoever, while deploying fiber in the last mile is a huge deal? The answer is two-fold: money, and natural monopolies.


A Utility Infrastructure Law commonly quoted by engineers says, "The closer you get to the home, the more investment is needed, averaged per home connected." This law applies to all parts of the physical network, like water pipes, sewage pipes, and electricity cables. What are the applicable numbers for telecom cables?

A useful division of communication networks is between core networks (deep sea intercontinental, international, or core networks countrywide between exchanges), backhaul and middle-mile networks (from exchanges to local aggregation points), and access networks (from homes to local aggregation points). A quick, back-of-the-envelope calculation based on expert estimates indicates a relative investment level of 1:3:10 for core:middle:access networks, proving the Utility Infrastructure Law.

(...)

Given the fact that almost all costs in the access network are sunk, it is hard to envision two or more new fiber access networks being deployed in parallel to each home, leading to a stable competitive environment over time. (Unless the ISP’s or network's owners are allowed to divide the market and raise prices to compensate for the underutilization of the networks). If the medium is no longer limited and the access network is the expensive part of the investment, why duplicate the cables? We not do duplicate cables for electricity or other utilities either, for the same reasons.

Note that the current competition between the two wired communication infrastructures to the home—cable and telephone—is a historical accident. Both networks were built for and financed by services that were originally mutually exclusive (telephony and TV). Providers of each these services financed each access network, with relatively high utilization rates. The much later discovery that each network type could unexpectedly deliver packets of information to the home for some new newfangled thing called the Internet, and that users were willing to pay for that new service, was a stroke of luck. But now, with VoIP and IPTV, utilization is a major factor, and the sell-off of older, underutilized parts of the access network and investment in new networks has started.
It remains to be seen what models will emerge where. The European trend is to strive for unbundling and sharing of at least pieces of the new access network (France, Portugal), if not the complete access network (Netherlands, Switzerland). This gets utilization ratios up and average costs down. The US, in contrast, has chosen up to now a competition between networks.

(...)








Thursday, July 15, 2010

Google Fiber for Communities: Open Access Networks

[ Google - USA : New website launched for Google's community fibre networks initiative - seeking community partners, and providing Open Access Networks.

Whilst many community network projects have foundered re the strategic/scaleable/sustainable/replicable factors etc, Google USA has initiated a significant infrastructure intervention - capable of transforming the local communications landscape ecology? ]













Think big with a gig


  • Announcement video
Google's experimentalfiber network
1 min - 9 Feb 2010
Uploaded by Google

www.youtube.com



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


  • One message came through loud and clear: people across the country are hungry for better and faster broadband access.
  • We set up this site to thank you for your enthusiasm, to share our experiences as we move forward with our project, and to provide additional resources for anyone interested in ultra high-speed Internet access.


  • What is Google planning to build?
  • Google is planning to build and test ultra-high speed broadband networks in one or more trial locations across the country. We'll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today over 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We'll offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.
  • Why is Google doing this?
  • Our goal is to experiment with new ways to help make Internet access better and faster for everyone.
  • Why would consumers need 1 Gbps connections?
  • In the same way that the transition from dial-up to broadband made possible the emergence of online video and countless other applications, ultra high-speed bandwidth will drive more innovation – in high-definition video, remote data storage, real-time multimedia collaboration, and others that we cannot yet imagine. It will enable new consumer applications, as well as medical, educational, and other services that can benefit communities. If the Internet has taught us anything, it's that the most important innovations are often those we least expect.
  • Is there going to be a wireless component to this network?
  • Our focus is on developing a fiber-to-the-home network and we have no plans to include a wireless component at this stage. In general, we think wireless and wireline services are complementary, because wireless networks offer a nice degree of flexibility, while wireline networks can currently reach greater speeds.
  • Does Google plan to offer Internet service?
  • Yes, as part of the planned trial, Google will offer competitively priced, ultra high-speed Internet access service to residents of the chosen communities. In addition, we will allow third-parties to offer their own Internet access services, or other data services, on our open network.
  • (...)

More Information

Additional Fiber Resources

Frequently Asked Questions

Watch a video of microtrenching races

List of Local Responses




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

LINKS

  • Official Google Blog: Introducing our Google Fiber for Communities ...

    13 Jul 2010 ... With that in mind, today we're launching a new site called Google Fiber for Communities, where you can learn more about fiber networks and ...
    googleblog.blogspot.com/.../introducing-our-google-fiber-for.html - Cached
  • News for google fiber for communities


    Erictric
    Google Fiber for Communities website goes live‎ - 15 hours ago
    The Google Fiber for Communities project was first announced in February 2010 with the remit of building ultra-high speed broadband fibre-to-the-home ...
    ZDNet UK (blog) - 44 related articles »
  • Videos for google fiber for communities

    Google's experimental fiber network
    1 min - 9 Feb 2010
    Uploaded by Google

    www.youtube.com
    Google Fiber for Communities Search
    36 sec - 22 Mar 2010
    Uploaded by springfieldcityview

    www.youtube.com
  • Google Fiber - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    Google Fiber is a project to build an experimental broadband internet network in the United States in a community of Google's choice, following a selection ...
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fiber - Cached


    gigaom.com | Google Begins Using Its Planned Fiber Network to Flog ISPs |

    In short, Google is trying to create a community-action network around better broadband, starting with the more than 200,000 people who have already weighed in hoping to get fatter pipes.

    When Google announced its plans to build an experimental 1 Gbps fiber-to-the-home network in February, I wrote that the search engine wasn’t just looking for new web applications, but also for information that it could disseminate in order to show people and governments what a modern broadband network should cost– possibly lighting a fire under ISPs who are reluctant to upgrade their networks. Its new site gives people and municipalities a match to help with that fire, by encouraging citizens to email their representative in Congress and by providing a list of helpful suggestions municipalities can implement to ensure that fiber-ready conduit is put in place during road construction.


    Google has announced on its blog that the website for its Fiber for Communities project is now live, bringing the ambitious high-speed internet project one step closer to reality.

    The Google Fiber for Communities project was first announced in February 2010 with the remit of building ultra-high speed broadband fibre-to-the-home networks with a connection speed of one gigabit per second, which it says is 100 times faster than most US connections currently.

    Focused on the US, the project hopes that it will be able to provide between 50,000 and 500,000 homes with the high-speed connection; the exact location of which community or communities will play host to the project has not yet been decided, but the company says that it will announce the chosen community by the end of 2010.

    A company spokesperson told ZDNet UK that there are currently no plans to extend the project "beyond a small number of communities in the US".

    In order to achieve its goals, the freshly launched Google Fiber for Communities website urges those involved to write letters of support to Congress relating to pending legislation that would require the installation of a fibre cable conduit in federally funded transportation projects.

    Similarly, Google has also sketched out suggestions for city-sponsored road works that it says would help expedite works towards high-speed internet connections, which include each city creating a conduit plan as road works are carried out.

    A Google spokesperson said that it is pursuing the scheme to "experiment with new ways to help make Internet access better and faster for everyone".

    In offering the services to consumers and resellers, "Google will offer competitively priced, ultra high-speed Internet access service to residents of the chosen communities. In addition, we will allow third-parties to offer their own Internet access services, or other data services, on our open network," said a statement on its website, adding that it's too early to tell exactly how much it will cost.

    During the original proposal Google asked local governments interested in the scheme to respond to a request for information, which would then help the company decide where to deploy first. Google says in a post on its blog that it received nearly 1100 government responses and 194,000 individual responses before the deadline passed.




    techworld.com | Majority of US states request Google broadband fibre network

    Google promises 1Gbps for up to half a million

    Nancy Gohring, 15 July 10

    Communities in every US state but three, Delaware, Florida and South Dakota, have applied to become test markets for Google's planned high speed broadband network. Approximately 1,100 communities and 194,000 individuals responded to Google's request for information about communities interested in getting the network, Google said on a new website about the program.

    The company launched the site this week and said it is designed to thank people for their enthusiasm and share information about the project. The site lists every county in each state and US territory that applied to become test markets.

    In February, Google announced plans to build what it calls an "ultra high speed" fibre network in one or more trial locations. It plans to deliver 1 gigabit-per-second fibre connections to 50,000 to 500,000 people. End users will pay a "competitive price" for the access, Google says. The company plans to choose where to build the network by the end of this year. (...)

    Wednesday, July 07, 2010

    Back to Schumpeter: Technology, Innovation, Capital

    [ The Cook Report on Internet duly processed my Scumpeter - Drucker cue to provide the following reflection on Schumpeter's revisionist political economy thinking on the relations of technology, innovation and capital:]

    Gordon Cook's stark conclusion re the 2010 situation of dominance of global finance capital which has short-circuited productive technology innovation ... hollowing out the centre, the social democratic nation state and its social welfare provisions ... so that the emphasis of future opportunity or survival shifts to the edge, to local forms of enterprise and democratic redress?

    In 2010 in the USA, given that the two major parties are both joined at the hip in this relationship to private business, a relationship that, as we have seen, is nearly a century old, and given the current ruinous state of affairs, it makes more sense to look at the questionable sustainability of the relationship and at what might replace it. After all the agencies and functions stay the same and the people involved now carry out basically the same functions no matter which party is in power.

    What is troubling is that society’s resources have been shifted no longer to business that innovates in a way that improves the lives of ordinary Americans but to subsidies of business legally incorporated in other countries to move jobs abroad in order to be more competitive in the global market that, in order to carry out their fiduciary duty to shareholders who may be citizens of any country. t The innovation going on is innovation that has turned financial capital into a gambling casino that has destroyed wealth for some hundreds of millions around the globe while leaving vast winnings in the hands of a few thousands who either bet right or were the croupiers running the collateralized securities creation machines.

    Given this outcome as the capital that the center has used as a social safety net for its citizens is redirected to the arbiters of global financial capital, the people in the towns and cities will be increasingly lest to their own devices. their future will become a function of how we they can work together to rebuild their economy at a local level.


    I therefore repeat my previous reference to the strategic view of Carlota Perez: regarding the constellation of finance, technology, innovation and investment factors and a possible progressive political and investment agenda to steer beyond the current global finance crisis . Consistent with Scumpeter's "creative destruction" interpretation of capitalist economic cycles and technology innovation and society transformations, Perez sounds a clarion call for a high-level agenda for "Creative Construction"
    • call to action - by Carlota Perez [ Open Economy, March 2009:After Crisis: Creative Construction] : "Ultimately, the length and depth of the global recession (perhaps depression) will depend, not on the financial rescue packages but, to a much greater extent, on whether the wider measures taken are capable of moving the world economy towards a viable investment route with high innovation potential. The technological transformation that occurred during the past few decades has already provided the means for unleashing a sustainable global golden age. The environmental threats offer an explicit directionality for using that creative potential across the globe in a viable manner. The major financial collapse has generated the political conditions to take full advantage of this unparalleled opportunity. It is everybody's responsibility to make sure this possibility is not missed."
    • ie Perez addresses the "destructive creation" / "creative destruction" dialectic that comes from Schumpeter's approach to technology-social transformations [ see wikipedia discussion of this theme http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction ]




    Here is Gordon Cook's full commentary:


    === paste===

    John Wilson’s item just republished below inspired me to read the Drucker article. It seems that our current troubles started with the methodology adopted by the nations and identified by Schumpeter in 1918 to fight world war one…. financialize and borrow.

    A 1983 article by Peter Drucker
    shows us that the reasons for the current alliance between Washington and Wall Street were first clearly enunciated in 1918 in the writings of Joseph Schumpeter more than a decade before Keynes spread the same hypothesis — albeit with much more benign conclusions.

    The critical idea is focused upon the availability of profit needed to enable the economic innovation necessary for better products and support on going growth in an economy.

    Drucker: If you assume that innovation is what keeps a capitalist economic growing, the basic economic policy question becomes:

    “How can capital formation and productivity be maintained so that rapid technological change as well as employment can be sustained? What is the minimum profit needed to defray the costs of the future? What is the minimum profit needed, above all, to maintain jobs and to create new ones?”

    At the end of World War 1 Schumpeter realized that the war had resulted in the “miniaturization of the economies of all beligerents.” In every country that engaged in the hostilities the government poured in not only troops but mobilized all the liquid wealth of the country not only through taxation but also through borrowing.

    Money and credit, rather than goods and services, had become the “real economy,” he wrote in a brilliant essay published in a German economic journal in July 1918. The mechanization of warfare meant operation on such a scale that the government found that it had to combine with the industrialists to centralize and co-opt entire economies on a scale never previously seen in order to get capital needed to achieve an innovation arms race.

    Schumpeter “argued that, from now on, money and credit would be the lever of control. What he argued was that neither supply of goods, as the classicists had argued, nor demand for goods, as some of the earlier dissenters had maintained, was going to be controlling anymore. Monetary factors - deficits, money, credit, taxes - were going to be the determinants of economic activity and of the allocation of resources.”

    Where Keynes theorized that these changes could mean that the economist could become philosopher king and show governments how to balance conflicting forces to maintain economic stability. Schumpeter however concluded that these changes by revealing the fulcrum on which policy could be so powerfully levered invited tyranny. Drucker concludes: “above all, he saw that it was not going to be economists who would exercise the power, but politicians and generals.”

    Also in 1918 Schumpeter published a work he called the Fiscal State. In this work he concluded: that “the modern state, through the mechanisms of taxation and borrowing, has acquired the power to shift income and, through “transfer payments,” to control the distribution of the national product.” Keynes agreed and assumed the government would act with benevolence. But reality showed that once the relationships between government and industry were formed, they were very difficult to dismantle.

    However to Schumpeter “this power was an invitation to political irresponsibility, because it eliminated all economic safeguards against inflation. In the past the inability of the state to tax more than a very small proportion of the gross national product, or to borrow more than a very small part of the country’s wealth, had made inflation self-limiting. Now the only safeguard against inflation would be political, that is, self-discipline. And Schumpeter was not very sanguine about the politician’s capacity for self-discipline.”

    “But Schumpeter’s real contribution during the thirty-two years between the end of World War I and his death in 1950 was as a political economist.” In 1942 in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy Schumpeter “argued that capitalism would be destroyed by its own success. This would breed what we would now call the new class: bureaucrats, intellectuals, professors, lawyers, journalists, all of them beneficiaries of capitalism’s economic fruits and, in fact, parasitical on them, and yet all of them opposed to the ethos of wealth production, of saving, and of allocating resources to economic productivity.”

    Schumpeter warns that “in a democracy, to be popular, government would increasingly shift income from producer to non producer, would increasingly move income from where it would be saved and become capital for tomorrow to where it would be consumed. Government in a democracy would thus be under increasing inflationary pressure. Eventually, he prophesied, inflation would destroy both democracy and capitalism.”

    “It is this constant emphasis in Schumpeter on thinking through the long-term consequences of the expedient, the popular, the clever, and the brilliant that makes him a great economist and the appropriate guide for today.” concluded Drucker in 1983.

    In 2010 in the USA, given that the two major parties are both joined at the hip in this relationship to private business, a relationship that, as we have seen, is nearly a century old, and given the current ruinous state of affairs, it makes more sense to look at the questionable sustainability of the relationship and at what might replace it. After all the agencies and functions stay the same and the people involved now carry out basically the same functions no matter which party is in power.

    What is troubling is that society’s resources have been shifted no longer to business that innovates in a way that improves the lives of ordinary Americans but to subsidies of business legally incorporated in other countries to move jobs abroad in order to be more competitive in the global market that, in order to carry out their fiduciary duty to shareholders who may be citizens of any country. t The innovation going on is innovation that has turned financial capital into a gambling casino that has destroyed wealth for some hundreds of millions around the globe while leaving vast winnings in the hands of a few thousands who either bet right or were the croupiers running the collateralized securities creation machines.

    Given this outcome as the capital that the center has used as a social safety net for its citizens is redirected to the arbiters of global financial capital, the people in the towns and cities will be increasingly lest to their own devices. their future will become a function of how we they can work together to rebuild their economy at a local level.


    === paste ends ===




    Saturday, July 03, 2010

    Towards Creative Construction? Notes on The Cook Report on Internet

    [ The following notes explore themes that emerge from recent published issues of The Cook Report on Internet, and related arch-econ private mail-list discussions:]

    In consideration of teasing out the themes of recent
    Cook Report on Internet disc-list and reports:

    Creative Construction?

    The main theme that emerges seems to be "The Challenge of Creative Construction for a Broken World":


    Notes
    • The "resilient communities" theme ... was a response to your post regarding the direction/priorities of the list. And the city-state / nation state theme likewise. And all consistent with your previous June 2010 Power of Pull theme. Your Bauwens P2P theme likewise. I know I am stating the obvious.
    • All consistent threads with your COOK REPORT June 2010 Exec Summary (para 2) of the global theme of "In some ways, what the authors describe has overtones of Carlota Perez but goes beyond her work in showing with finer resolution how the productivity enhancements of our new digital infrastructure enable what he calls creative edge that can pull the no longer productive aspects of the core to innovative projects at the edge. Edge based skunk-works transform the core in this new world."
    • ie moving beyond the world of broken global finance, telecoms etc, towards the on-the-ground challenge of building next generation communications IP infrastructure and business models that support sustainable local-regional communities and empowerment. - And thence your forthcoming Portland case study.

    • = all of which chimes in with this recent conclusion - and call to action - by Carlota Perez [ Open Economy, March 2009: After Crisis: Creative Construction] : "Ultimately, the length and depth of the global recession (perhaps depression) will depend, not on the financial rescue packages but, to a much greater extent, on whether the wider measures taken are capable of moving the world economy towards a viable investment route with high innovation potential. The technological transformation that occurred during the past few decades has already provided the means for unleashing a sustainable global golden age. The environmental threats offer an explicit directionality for using that creative potential across the globe in a viable manner. The major financial collapse has generated the political conditions to take full advantage of this unparalleled opportunity. It is everybody's responsibility to make sure this possibility is not missed."
    • ie Perez addresses the "destructive creation" / "creative destruction" dialectic that comes from Schumpeter's approach to technology-social transformations [ see wikipedia discussion of this themehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction ]
    • ie Cook Report - through various recent strands - is addressing a parallel agenda for "Creative Construction" of local/regional, edge-based and assets-based telecoms and community development / empowerment


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

    Postscript, 18 July

    Back to the future: Perez at Schumpeter 2010

    Comment

    Carlota Perez's recent presentation to the 2010 Schumpeter Conference further engages the agenda for "creative construction" noted above; highlighting the political, policy and research challenges through which to "engage the business world in a positive-sum game", in order to break through the current global finance crisis towards the implementation phase of General Purpose digital technologies (ICT).

    A pattern recognition therefore emerges between the concerns of the 2010 Schumpeter Conference's aims and recent themes of The Cook Report on Internet.
    • There is a clear convergence of agendas regarding the digital communications revolution in which ICT is a critical driver of the next phase of technology and business innovation and social transformation.
    • At the strategic meta- and global level of analysis, the challenge is to steer global political economy, finance reform, the role of the state, and the channeling of new investment into technological innovation, ecological sustainability, and equitable social transformation at both the global and local levels.
    • Moreover there appears to be a shared frame of reference regarding the strategic vision and insights of THE POWER OF PULL: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion (Basic Books; April 2010) by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, where the demand-pull side of the equation is critical for the implementation phase of the communications and green economy transformation.

    At the abstract level the sense of a synthesis here suggests a systems approach, and an identification of the ground of convergence as that of the evolutionary process of technological, economic and social development ( - back to Schumpeter's "entwicklung"), leaving aside for the moment disciplinary disputes about the approaches of evolutionary economics and technological evolution.


    Notes

    Carlota Perez's recent presentation to the 2010 Schumpeter Conference

    The 13th Conference of the International Schumpeter Society took place at Aalborg Congress and Culture Centre on 21-24 June 2010. The title of the conference was "Innovation, Organisation, Sustainability and Crises". Conference presentations are available here.

    Carlota Perez's plenary presentation:
    • slide-set available as pdf here ;
    • plus accompanying paper MAJOR BUBBLE COLLAPSES AND THE CHANGING ROLES OF MARKETS AND GOVERNMENTS (pdf here)

    We may note in particular:

    Slide 10: "The structural shift involves A CHANGE IN THE DRIVERS OF INNOVATION
    from SUPPLY-PUSH to DEMAND-PULL":



    Slide 12: "Expansion and shaping of demand for a possible global positive-sum game":
    • posits the structural dynamics of Cheap ICT (externalities), Full Global Development (demand volume) and "Green" (demand direction)
    • and note the orders of magnitude here, framed in terms that relate the drivers of the preceding post-45 "Post War Golden Age" of implementation of the Fordist mass production economy phase of General Purpose technology, economic expansion and wealth creation. Note for instance the infrastructure scale of "Full internet access at low cost":

    • Cheap ICT: Full internet access at low cost is equivalent to electrification and suburbanisation in facilitating demand (plus enabling education)
    • FULL GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT: Incorporating successive new millions into sustainable consumption patterns is equivalent to the Welfare State and government procurement in terms of demand creation
    • "GREEN": Revamping transport, energy, products and production systems to make them sustainable is equivalent to post-war reconstruction and suburbanisation

    • As well as referencing the drivers of the post-45 boom phase in this way, Perez also recommends (see slide 11) a synthesis of the insights of both Schumpeter and Keynes, ie the combined global and national perspectives and enrichment of Schumpeter regarding Technology & Globalization and of Keynes regarding institutional innovation ( - re the role of the state, finance reform, innovation policy)





    Saturday, May 15, 2010

    Google admits wi-fi data collection blunder

    15 May 2010 | Google admits wi-fi data collection blunder

    By Maggie Shiels, Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley

    The Street View car takes photos for the service Google has admitted that for the past three years it has

    wrongly collected information people have sent over unencrypted wi-fi networks.

    The issue came to light after German authorities asked to audit the data the company's Street View cars gathered as they took photos viewed on Google maps.

    Google said during a review it found it had "been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open networks".

    The admission will increase concerns about potential privacy breaches.

    These snippets could include parts of an email, text or photograph or even the website someone may be viewing.

    In a blogpost Google said as soon as it became aware of the problem it grounded its Street View cars from collecting wi-fi information and segregated the data on its network.

    It is now asking for a third party to review the software that caused the problem and examine precisely what data had been gathered.

    "Maintaining people's trust is crucial to everything we do, and in this case we fell short," wrote Alan Eustace, senior vice president of engineering and research.

    "The engineering team at Google works hard to earn your trust - and we are acutely aware that we failed badly here."

    'Pushing the envelope'

    Google said the problem dated back to 2006 when "an engineer working on an experimental wi-fi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast wi-fi data".

    That code was included in the software the Street View cars used and "quite simply, it was a mistake", said Mr Eustace.

    "This incident highlights just how publicly accessible, open, non-password protected wi-fi networks are today."

    Dan Kaminsky, director of penetration testing for security firm Ioactive, said there was no intent by Google.

    "This information was leaking out and they picked it up. If you are going to broadcast your email on an open wi-fi, don't be surprised if someone picks it up."

    John Simpson, from the Consumer Watchdog, told the BBC: "The problem is [Google] have a bunch of engineers who push the envelope and gather as much information as they can and don't think about the ramifications of that."

    Friday, May 14, 2010

    The Innovation Journey of Wi-Fi

    The Innovation Journey of Wi-Fi:
    The Road Toward Global Success
    Cambridge University Press
    • Wolter Lemstra, Technische Universiteit Delft, The Netherlands
    • Vic Hayes, Technische Universiteit Delft, The Netherlands
    • John Groenewegen, Technische Universiteit Delft, The Netherlands
    Hardback | ISBN-13: 9780521199711
    Not yet published - available from December 2010

    Wi-Fi has become the preferred means for connecting to the internet “ at home, in the office, in hotels and at airports. Increasingly, Wi-Fi also provides internet access for remote communities where it is deployed by volunteers in community-based networks, by operators in 'hotspots' and by municipalities in 'hotzones'. This book traces the global success of Wi-Fi to the landmark change in radio spectrum policy by the FCC in 1985, the initiative by NCR Corporation to start development of Wireless-LANs and the drive for an open standard IEEE 802.11, released in 1997. It also singles out and explains the significance of the initiative by Steve Jobs at Apple to include Wireless-LAN in the iBook, which moved the product from the early adopters to the mass market. The book explains these developments through first-hand accounts by industry practitioners and concludes with reflections and implications for government policy and firm strategy.

    Web revolution sweeps Whitehall

    "This is the first time we have had a change of government in the internet age. When Labour came to power in 1997, government departments were just beginning to feel their way on the web".


    Web revolution sweeps Whitehall

    bbc.co.uk | 14 May 2010 | Brian Wheeler, Political reporter, BBC News

    Never mind the events in Downing Street. There is a revolution going on in cyberspace too.

    DCLG website
    Work is under way to update departmental websites

    Government web activity was frozen during the general election campaign but now that the new coalition Lib Dem/Conservative government is taking shape it has exploded into frenetic life.

    Mouse-wielding civil servants across Whitehall are engaged in a frantic rush to archive old pages full of defunct policies and pen portraits of now departed Labour ministers and to replace them with shiny new web pages that reflect the priorities and personalities of their new political masters.

    Many of the main departmental sites are currently carrying this warning on their home page: "Content on this site is under review following the formation of a new government."

    Others, such as the Department of Communities and Local Government, are stripped back to the bare essentials.

    Brown pictures

    The most dramatic change is at the Department for Children, Schools and Families, which has been rebranded as the Department for Education.

    Foreign Office website 1997
    The Foreign Office website had few frills in 1997

    Out goes the rainbow logo and touchy-feely graphics; in comes a sober blue colour scheme and a stern warning to the casual web browser: "All statutory guidance and legislation linked to from this site continues to reflect the current legal position unless indicated otherwise, but may not reflect Government policy."

    It only takes a few clicks to find old DCSF-branded material, although again there are ample warnings that the documents may not reflect government policy, and search engines still throw up the old dscf.gov.uk web address.

    The Downing Street site has undergone a few changes too.

    The Number 10 channel names for Flickr, Twitter and YouTube have all changed to Number10gov.

    There are pictures and videos of David Cameron and Nick Clegg everywhere on the Downing Street website. It is difficult to find any images of Gordon Brown and the site's search engine has also been temporarily disabled while old content is archived, to stop people searching for them.

    But Mr Brown's biography has been added to the list of "prime ministers in history".

    Historic moments

    Mr Cameron's "Meet the PM" biography is a work in progress. It has a moody picture of the Conservative leader with wife Samantha but the biographical details are thin, with a statement from the new PM promised shortly.

    It says: "Mr Cameron's family has always been the starting point of everything he has wanted to achieve in politics. He is proud of the values that were instilled in him when he was young."

    Foreign Office website 2000
    The Foreign Office site had moved by 2000 - it had a drop down menu!

    Documents singing the praises of Labour's economic policy have been removed from the Treasury site, into the National Archives.

    This is the first time we have had a change of government in the internet age. When Labour came to power in 1997, government departments were just beginning to feel their way on the web.

    Just how much has changed can be seen from newly released archive pages charting the development of government websites during the 13 years of Labour rule.

    Historic moments such as the May 1997 decision to hand control of interest rates to the Bank of England are captured on the Treasury website from that time.

    Other historic government websites, including early versions of the Downing Street site, are avaiable to view on the National Archive website.

    Downing Street website
    The Downing Street site in 2000 - very web 1.0

    David Thomas, Director of technology at the National Archives, said: "We are the only government archive in the world regularly capturing and preserving government websites.

    "The ephemeral nature of websites means there's a risk that important information could be lost without a comprehensive web archiving programme."

    Since 2003, the National Archive has been trawling 1,500 government websites three times a year to take screen shots for its archives, which can be viewed by the public on its website.


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