In 1992 a futurist, who's name I've long forgotten, came and gave a talk to Microsoft Canada's national sales meeting. During his talk he made outlandish claims such as this one — "a day will come when will be faster to boot your PC from a networked server halfway round the world than a local hard disk".
Mark Goldberg asks which Canadian ILEC will step up to the plate and deliver fibre to the home. As he points out, it's hard to know in the current "financial engineering" climate. Most of us will be doomed to 6 megabit DSL for some time to come. The world of Peter Löthberg's mum seems a far off fantasy for Canadians. She's got a 40 Gigabit connection to her house (it's a demo) that has the Swedes agog. Imagine, my Canadian brothers and sisters, being able to "flick through 1500 high definition channels simultaneously, or download a full high definition DVD in just two seconds."
… or boot your PC from a server halfway round the world.
Cringely has written a fantastic piece on treating the last mile as cooperatively owned infrastructure. Based on conversations he has had with my friend Bob Frankston, it’s a seemingly radical view of what might happen if the users of the network owned the access piece. On IP Democracy, Mitch Shapiro has published an additional lengthy commentary.Â
Radical? Actually, not really. Developers of planned communities have been doing this for years. In 1999 I had the opportunity to tour a development outside Indianapolis doing exactly what Cringely and Frankston suggest. Each home was provisioned with fibre at the curb, converging on a NOC at the center of the community. The community owned and managed all the utilities provided to home owners, and took bids from service providers for the raw services. Telephony, television, internet and so on were provided to home owners at an attractive bundled rate, returning a small profit to the developer / manager of the NOC.
It’s a great idea.
