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 | Stacey Higginbotham Jul. 13, 2010

    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.


    ZDNet UK | Google Fiber for Communities website goes live | By Ben Woods, 14 July, 2010

    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. (...)

    Posted by at No comments:

    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===

    Joseph Schumpeter Identified in 1918 The Interaction Between Technology, political Ecomomy and Capitalism that plagues us today

    July 5th, 2010 by Gordon Cook

    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 ===




    Posted by at No comments:

    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)





    Posted by at No comments:
    Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)