Broadband Stimulus: Critical, But Not Ready to Rock

I've watched the US Broadband Stimulus legislation with great interest. I consider the intent of the action to be positive, but am beginning to be dismayed by delays and poor communication. The action will go a long way toward providing better access for unserved and under served areas in the US. With better access to communications for rural areas, these areas can become more productive and also allow virtual companies to work from places other than the normal metropolitan centers. Here's a great site for more updates. http://calix.com/bbs/

And here's a general purpose list of milestones for the Broadband Stimulus.

Of interest, many of the broadband stimulus projects are slated to be $5M, $20M, and more. Here is a survey that was done of attendees to the webinar, followed by their chosen access technology.

10 Years and Still Waiting For New Telecom Services

When are Telecom services going to become interesting? Other than "over-the-top" data services, which allow us to do Internet access (which we'd been doing on our PCs since the mid-90s), what's changed over the past 10 years? Speed, devices, and online sites have improved...but where's the bounty of new services and applications? Service delivery platforms, IMS, voice app servers, etc have done next to nothing to create new user experience. Where's that multimodal experience that is consistent between devices, that takes our preferences and real-time context into account? Is this really so hard?

Obviously, service providers are finding this just too damn hard. Not that SPs haven't made enormous strides. They have streamlined operations, they have provided almost anywhere connectivity, and they have created pricing and packages that suit most all of our needs. But where for art thou interesting content and user experience? Clearly, SPs are not that creative, so we have begun to turn to other players for this kind of innovation.

Apple has blown everyone away with their iPhone capabilities. Wow, it's a wonderful user experience...but unfortunately, it has done very little to create a new COMMUNICATION experience. Yes, the iPhone is cool and fun to use, but beside a very useful mapping capability, there is a paucity of new real-time services that could follow me, provide me targeted offers, route my calls based on my calendar schedule, integrate video in creative ways, or merge my social networking communications with my voice and data communications.

But, we shouldn't expect the Apples or Nokias, to be able to provide these services. They are device providers after all. They are not developers and service providers. So we must look to developers to create the next cool and integrated applications. We'll address this issue in my next post.
Dan Geiger