The latest Pew Internet survey shows America’s changing attitude to broadband
It appears the penetration of home broadband has peaked in the United States report the Pew Research Centre.
Since the organisation’s last home broadband survey in 2013, the proportion of adults living in a household with a fixed high speed connection has fallen from 70% to 67% while those relying solely on a smartphone connection has gone from 8 to 13 percent.
This also coincides with 15% of respondents reporting that they’ve cancelled cable or satellite TV subscriptions as they can now get the content they want from the internet. It’s clear the shift away from broadcast is now firmly on.
One of the jarring notes from the Pew survey is the digital divide developing with nearly half those without a home broadband connection citing cost, either of the Internet service or that of a computer, being the main barrier to going online.
According to Pew, Americans are acutely aware of the problems of not having broadband with two-thirds of those surveyed believing not having a home high-speed internet connection is a major disadvantage to finding a job.
The Pew survey shows how attitudes to Internet accessibility is changing, increasingly we’re seeing it as an essential like power and the telephone. Increasingly access to broadband is going to be a political issue.
Governments and politicians have an urge to restrict the internet
China held an internet conference today where, as Forbes reports, President Xi Jinping laid out the nation’s vision of an Internet that ‘complies with Chinese laws.’
That Internet is a walled garden where access to sites like Facebook are blocked and an army of censors make sure that subjects which aren’t to the Chinese Communists Party’s approval are promptly removed.
Meanwhile in the US, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump stated the Internet should closed down for America’s enemies.
That both the Chinese government and Donald Trump agree on something shouldn’t be surprising, however the urge to monitor and shut down the Internet is shared by many governments. It’s an urge that needs to be resisted.
The World Wide Web describes our times. San Francisco’s Internet Archive aims to be the keeper of that history
The World Wide Web describes our times but it’s an incomplete document as sites, pages and posts are lost, deleted or edited. San Francisco’s Internet Archive aims to be the keeper of that history.
As example of how fragile our online records are is illustrated by the tale of Kevin Vaughan’s Pulitzer Prize nominated story describing a 1960s community tragedy for the Rocky Mountain News.
The 34 part piece captivated the newspaper’s readership when it was published in 2007 but two years later, the Rocky Mountain News went broke and the story disappeared along with the rest of the website. The Atlantic Magazine describes Vaughan’s efforts to recover and republish his story.
Vaughan’s efforts to recover his work are not unique, websites are constantly being shut down, accounts censored and social media posts deleted. In the Coweb, The New Yorker’s Jill LaPore describes how the Ukrainian militia leader responsible for shooting down MH17 promptly deleted the message showing the plane’s remains and how the Internet Archive preserved that damming post.
Last week in San Francisco the Internet Archive held their Building Libraries Together event where director Brewster Kahle described their efforts to preserve as much of the web as possible for future generations.
The Internet Archive itself is in a restored church that seems almost custom built for the organisation. In her New Yorker piece, essential reading for those wanting to understand the project, LaPore describes Kahle’s affection for the building.
He loves that the church’s cornerstone was laid in 1923: everything published in the United States before that date lies in the public domain. A temple built in copyright’s year zero seemed fated. Kahle hops, just slightly, in his shoes when he gets excited. He says, showing me the church, “It’s Greek!”
For the Building Libraries Together event, the Internet Archive had spread out a series of exhibits on the organisation’s activities that range from trawling the web through to scanning books, digitising movie reels, saving old video games and collecting TV news broadcasts.
One of the important functions the Archive does is create collections around major events – the capture of the MH17 shoot down was part their Ukrainian War collection – which illustrates the problem of ‘link rot’ as many sites set up around events such as the Occupy movement or the Ferguson protests are now dead or occupied by cybersquatters.
Running a service like the Internet Archive is labor intensive and in an expensive city like San Francisco where almost all the staff could be paid substantially better working in the tech sector and the pay isn’t exactly stellar.
Kahle jokes “because we can’t pay stock options, those who stay three years here get a statue made of themselves.
The statues line one side of the old church hall that also doubles as an event space and the server room. At the back of the auditorium are the computers themselves quietly flashing away each time the archive is being read.
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For the presentations, Kahle bubbles away with his thoughts on the importance of preserving the Internet and Kalev Hannes Leetaru‘s presentation on data visualisation raised some important topics on copyright and communications which this blog intends to explore deeper in the future.
The final part of the night’s presentation was an award to the Grateful Dead’s lyricist, John Perry Barlow, for his work in trying to keep intellectual property open and accessible.
At the end of the night, the crowd left with their gifts and t-shirts and the exhibits had packed up.
One of the stand out exhibits was the virtual reality stand where an old lady tried an Oculus Rift headset for the first time, “this is wonderful. I just want to reach out and touch everything,” she cried.
Preserving that wonder and the promised possibilities of our time is possibly the most important thing The Internet Archive can do. In an era where many talk of open information but few genuinely practice it, we run the risk of leaving an information dark ages for future generations.
How we preserve a record of our times for future generations is a pressing concern. The Internet Archive is one step to solving that problem.
While that’s good news for those businesses and households in Chattanooga that need those speeds, there’s a much more important effect that Wired points out.
Municipal broadband providers are raising expectations nationwide for what good Internet service means, forcing commercial providers to improve their infrastructure. And by increasing the amount of bandwidth available, they could be setting the stage for the creation of new, more bandwidth-hungry applications. This is how better service goes from a “nice-to-have” to a “you’d-better-have” for the country’s recalcitrant cable companies.
A few municipal projects could be the trigger to getting better services across the country. This is a model that could work in many other fields as well.
Many of the new communications applications are enabling adhoc networks between smartphones and other devices. In times of civil emergencies and natural disasters, those networks may well turn out to be more reliable than the telecommunications networks.
With the various mesh technologies available, we’re seeing another way people can go ‘off the grid’ which will change many of the existing business models of many industries and possibly empower communities in unexpected ways.
Building a competitive nation is more than just rolling out broadband connections
How much does broadband really matter in developing a competitive and innovative modern economy? A corporate lunch with US software company NetApp last week illustrated that there’s more to creating a successful digital society than just rolling out fibre connections.
Rich Scurfield, NetApp’s Senior Vice President responsible for the Asia-Pacific was outlining the firm’s plans for the Australian market and how it fits into the broader jigsaw puzzle of economies across the region.
Like many companies in the China market NetApp is finding it hard with Scurfield describing the market as “chaotic”. This isn’t unusual for western technology companies and Apple is one of the few to have had substantial success.
Across the rest of East Asia, Scurfield sees them ranging as being mature, stable and settled in the cases of Japan, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand through to India where the opportunities and the challenges of connecting a billion people are immense.
Digital outliers
The interesting outlier is South Korea, one of the most connected nations in the world, where the promise of ubiquitous broadband isn’t delivering the expected economic benefits to the entire community.
In theory, South Korea should be seeing a boom in connected small businesses. As Scurfield says, “from a technology providers’ view this connectivity means you could do more things very differently because of the infrastructure that’s available.”
Global Innovation Rankings
Korea’s underperformance is illustrated by last year’s Global Innovation Index that saw South Korea coming in at 16th, just ahead of both Australia and New Zealand whose broadband rollouts are nowhere near as advanced as the ROK’s.
Making a close comparison of Australia and the Republic of Korea’s strengths in the WIPO innovation index, it’s clear the technology and engineering aspects are just part of a far more complex set of factors such as confidence in institutions, the ease of doing business and even freedom of the press.
Putting those factors together makes a country far more likely to encourage its population to start new innovative businesses that can compete globally. When you have a small group of chaebol dominating the private sector then it’s much harder for new entrants to enter the market – interestingly a private sector dominated by big conglomerates is a problem Australia shares.
Small business laggards
NetApp’s Scurfield flagged exactly this problem, “Korea is an interesting market in there’s about six companies that matter and from a competitive view those companies are extremely advanced, they have great technology and great people.”
“However what’s not happening across the rest of the country is this adoption isn’t bleeding into the broader community,” said Scurfield “Because of that I don’t see broadband connectivity as having a wide impact.”
That Korean small and medium businesses aren’t using broadband technologies to develop innovative new products and service in one of the most connected economies on earth raises a question about just how effective investment in infrastructure is when it’s faced with cultural barriers.
Certainly we should be keeping in mind that economic development, global competitiveness and the creation of industry hubs is as much a matter of people, national institutions and culture as it is of technology.
We shouldn’t lose sight of the importance of our people and institutions when evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of a nation in today’s connected world.
The dynamic pricing of GoGo’s inflight Wi-Fi is a marker for the future of many industries.
Possibly the holy grail of business is to find a product that your customers will pay almost anything for.
In flight Wi-Fi service provider GoGo may be close to achieving that with a product that business customers depend upon. The New York Times describes how the company has found it can use dynamic pricing to customise its prices for each flight.
One of the limitations GoGo faces is the connections between the aircraft and the ground stations is narrow so a plane full of bandwidth hungry travellers will quickly bring everyone’s service to a crawl.
To overcome this – and to make more money – the service has developed algorithms to anticipate the demand on each flight and then customise the charges to suit.
In many respects what we’re seeing with GoGo is similar to services like Uber where fast, intelligent systems can analyse traffic patterns and use the predicted demand to set prices. It’s the ultimate demand driven economy.
Over time, this model is going to flow out across many industries – the airline industry leads the way in pricing around demand management – and consumers need to get used to the idea of a fixed price tag being a quaint memory.
