![](\"http:\/\/b-i.forbesimg.com\/chunkamui\/files\/2013\/04\/BobFrankston2.jpg\")
<\/a>\r\nChunka Mul wrote for Forbes 26 April 2013,\r\n\r\nThe Lunacy of Our Internet Access, and How Google Fiber Could Provide Needed Shock Therapy<\/a>,\r\n\r\n\r\nImagine you are the world’s largest operator of shopping malls, and\r\nshoppers can only get to your malls via the equivalent of dirt paths\r\nand country roads. What’s more, those meager routes are all\r\ncontrolled by an oligopoly of private, toll-road operators that\r\nfocus on their profitability, not on getting consumers to the stores\r\nin your malls.\r\n<\/p>\r\n
\r\nThe result would be a mess. The roads would be slow yet expensive.\r\nConsumers would limit shopping trips. The stores in your malls would\r\nhave a hard time generating business, so your malls would languish.\r\n<\/p>\r\n
\r\nYet the entire online economy runs on an analogous network. The\r\nnetwork could easily be lightning fast, pervasive and cheap (or even\r\nfree). Instead,\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n
\r\n a small group of telecom providers tightly controls\r\nrelatively dismal access, offering coverage and speeds that are a\r\nfraction of what is possible while charging relatively high prices.\r\n<\/p>\r\n\r\nAs software pioneer Bob Frankston pointed out to me recently, this\r\nnetwork is lunacy from a societal standpoint. There may be a\r\nsolution—and, as the headline suggests, Google could play a\r\nmajor role.\r\n<\/p>\r\n
\r\nWe learned a long time ago that open roads and common infrastructure\r\nare vital to community, commerce and innovation. In the U.S. alone,\r\nwe’ve invested many hundreds of billions on building that\r\ninfrastructure and make it mostly free at the time of use. According\r\nto nationalatlas.gov, there are 3.9 million miles of public roads in\r\nthe U.S., which annually carry more than 4.7 trillion passenger\r\nmiles of travel and 3.3 trillion ton miles of domestic freight.\r\nThose roads are used by about 270 million people, 6.7 million\r\nbusiness establishments and 88,000 units of government. Without\r\ngood, free roads, just about every person and every economic\r\nactivity would suffer.\r\n<\/p>\r\n
\r\nFrankston, the co-inventor of the first electronic spreadsheet, has\r\nbeen arguing in a\r\n\r\nlong series of articles and presentations<\/a>, that\r\nthe telecommunications network could be the equivalent of the public\r\nroads but, instead, so massively constrains our basic communications\r\ncapabilities that it puts a drag on community, commerce and overall\r\ninnovation.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n
\r\n\r\n
<\/a>\r\nThe local powers that be have recently\r\nsuddenly discovered infrastructure is more than roads and bridges:\r\n\r\nit’s also fast, affordable Internet access<\/a>.\r\nAs\r\n\r\ntiny Vermont is demonstrating<\/a>\r\nwe can have fast Internet access here if we want it.\r\nThat SPLOST election coming up would be a fine time to allocate\r\nsome Internet access funding.\r\nHouston County’s SPLOST included $2.525 million for a \r\nwide area network and it passed by a landslide last spring.\r\n<\/p>\r\n
\r\nWhat would this mean for South Georgia Medical Center and\r\nrural access to health care in south Georgia?\r\n
\r\n\r\nWhat’s more, Frankston argues, taking away the necessity to monitor\r\nusage and to bill per transaction across redundant networks would\r\nhave game-changing consequences. The change would simplify the\r\nnetwork by eliminating a very complex (and expensive) administrative\r\nlayer. It would eliminate the cost of building out, maintaining and\r\nupgrading multiple infrastructures. It would unlock a tremendous\r\namount of capacity, by encouraging the use of copper and fiber that\r\ncurrently goes unused or underused because it cannot be easily or\r\nprofitably billed for.\r\n<\/p>\r\n
\r\nEven more significant, he says, ambient connectivity would unleash\r\ninnovation. For instance, eliminating the need to negotiate how\r\ndevices communicate in the “Internet of Things” would\r\nsimplify how smart devices like pacemakers, thermostats and other\r\ntiny or embedded sensors, monitors and cameras can communicate with\r\nsmart apps. Innovators would have much greater opportunities for\r\nimproving our lives….\r\n<\/p>\r\n
\r\nImagine no digital divides separating the have-nots from important\r\napplications in healthcare and education, including telemedicine and\r\nMOOCs.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n
\r\nWe don’t depend on private toll roads to get employees to businesses\r\naround here, and we brag about I-75 and I-35, all built and maintained\r\nwith tax dollars.\r\nIt’s time to get serious about the infrastructure of the 21st century:\r\nthe Internet.\r\nThis doesn’t mean Internet access has to be completely built\r\nor maintained by the local governments.\r\nBob’s freemium model, for example, is mostly about franchising\r\nInternet connectivity through meshes among cooperating businesses.\r\nBut one way to jump-start fast affordable access, especially in\r\na rural area like ours,\r\nwould be for local governments and educational institutions\r\nto take a role in opening up Internet access and making it affordable,\r\nand that may or may not include direct Internet provision by some of them.\r\n
\r\n\r\nFrankston argues that it is time to construct the digital equivalent\r\nof an open road system, establishing ambient connectivity.\r\nRestricting connectivity, he says, makes no more sense than\r\nrestricting sunlight.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n
\r\nFor business, education, health care, agrotourism, and endless other\r\nopportunities, the Internet is the roads and bridges of the 21st century.\r\nBob includes a few concrete ideas that Google could implement.\r\nHas anyone around here talked to Google about bringing Google Fiber here?\r\nMany of Bob’s ideas don’t even require Google.\r\nThey just require political will.\r\nWhat do we want to do?\r\n<\/p>\r\n
\r\n -jsq\r\n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Slower and more expensive than the rest of the world: U.S. Internet access doesn’t have to be that way. Bob knows about our Internet issues here and is interested in helping. Chunka Mul wrote for Forbes 26 April 2013, The Lunacy of Our Internet Access, and How Google Fiber Could Provide Needed Shock Therapy, Imagine […]","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[14,132,52],"tags":[6261,6258,2281,8704,6259,1060,4613,6262,8701,639,1746,8741,8702,12,7,949,6,6260],"class_list":["post-3355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy","category-internet-access-speed","category-splost","tag-ambient-connectivity","tag-bob-frankston","tag-bridge","tag-economy","tag-fiber","tag-forbes","tag-franchise","tag-freemium","tag-georgia","tag-google","tag-infrastructure","tag-internet-access-speed","tag-lake","tag-lowndes-area-knowledge-exchange","tag-lowndes-county","tag-roads","tag-valdosta","tag-wifi"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-S7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3355"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3355\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3359,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3355\/revisions\/3359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}