Friday, April 16, 2010

The National Broadband Plan

The FCC led by Julius Genachowski is currently working on a proposal for a national broadband plan. There are many different and important technological,policy,and financial issues related to the possible plan.
Let's begin with a discussion of broadband Internet and the different technology that could be used. Many of the users will remember the early days of the Internet in the mid to late 90's. The first Internet connection I had was based on a 64k modem, that screeched and screamed every time I connected, connected to a phone line. Now we have available technologies that allow us to transfer data at much higher rates. These technologies also don't hog the phone line like the 64k modems did. Among the alternatives are cable, fiber optic, BPL, and DSL. Some cable television providers are providing high speed Internet through their networks. The consumer can purchase Internet service along with their cable television. In this technology the data that is the information on the internet is encoded and decoded by a modem with the client. The data is transferred using a radio wave that travels in the cable losing energy along the way. At certain points along the path the signal must be boosted in strength or else the communications are not discernible. Fiber optic cable shows a lot of promise to distribute broadband Internet. Fiber optic cable is made from glass fibers and acts as a tunnel to transfer light from one point to another. The great advantage is that it can handle more bandwidth since multiple frequencies can be used to carry data. There is still a need to increase the signal a certain points along the transmission line, but this is less often than traditional cable systems due to the very low losses of the glass. Broadband over Power Line has remained an experimental technology that could posibly handle broadband Internet. The main motivation for creating this technology and implementing it is that there would be no need to add the infrastructure since rural electrification was completed in the 1930's. The downside is that every few miles you need to have a repeater that boosts the signal. Ideally however broadband Internet will not interfere with any other application of spectrum. This is a significant problem with amateur radio operators having significant interference from BPL experimental sites. The data is passed at approximately 10MHz over the unshielded power lines. This technology doesn't seem to be effective for rural broadband due to interference issues and the cost of implementation. DSL is a technology that most landline phone companies provide using the existing telephone networks. The copper phone lines are used as the medium to transfer the data. The main office where the Internet connection is truly made must be with a specified distance for the purposes of reliability. In addition with the need for much higher bandwidths that are desired to run interactive website and web video DSL is becoming outdated if not slow.
The last technology that I would like to discuss has not been in the discussion of possible remedies to expand broadband access. The technology is satellite based Internet connections. It has been shown to be resilient to disasters as shown in this article in IEEE Spectrum magazine. The technology does have high initial implementation costs due to launching satellites. The client side would only require a decent sized satellite dish and not the miles of cables. This would allow for implementation in areas with rough terrain and remote areas where houses are separated by many tens of miles.
The current proposal is to alter the rural phone subsidy program to include subsidization of broadband Internet. The main reason we have not seen the implementation of broadband networks in more rural areas of America is that the revenue would not cover the investments required in a reliable manner. If the current proposal being discussed is implemented Internet to rural communities will be subsidized through a fund controlled by the FCC. Everyone should be able to get Internet access whether they be in the most dense cities of America or on rural farmsteads. The important part of this plan is to figure the most effective technology for each part of this nationwide broadband network. If we don't want to spend money endlessly on subsidizing rural broadband networks good solid engineering needs to be done to keep maintenance and replacement costs from being onerous.

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Digital Nation

My first real post is not going to be an extensive article by the author. Instead I am posting a link to an amazing documentary by frontline on the effects of the technologies we have created that are based on the internet backbone. I highly recommend seeing this video.

Friday, April 9, 2010

Raison d'etre

I created this blog to discuss the issues related to the social impacts, politics, and policies related to technology. My goal is to inform the reader about the technology, the social implications, the policies being proposed and to analyze them in a fair and balanced manner. My focus will be on informing the reader with facts and information about the technology and not tag lines or propaganda from any side. I will make an effort to explain both sides of the political arguments, but I may violate this guideline on issues too important for me to remain impartial. Certain topics are heavily discussed in the blogosphere and main media that I may decide to omit posting on these issues to bring up more exotic topics which have been not properly brought in to the public thought.