Mike O’Connor

I'm heading into a big project, and as part of preparing for it I revisited the site I maintained while participating in the Y2k preparations for my home town of St Paul, MN.

Just about every single Y2k link on that site is busted now, although one is selling some strange kind of medical nostrum that's not likely to live up to it's claims of Improving My Life In Every Way.

But one of the links led me to the new site run by Peter de Jager. For those of you who don't remember, Peter was considered by many to be the person who first voiced the Y2k problem in terms that were compelling enough to get people off the dime. Opinions vary -- some think Peter was a nutcase, sounding the alarm for a non-problem -- and I agree, Peter got a little shrill at times. But I also think he's a very good thinker and did us all a great service by sticking to his guns.

I'm glad to see that Peter is still thinking, writing and active. I recommend his publications pages if you are interested in large-scale change management projects (like I am).

Another instance of a huge price drop changing the nature of a market. I just bought a quarter of a terabyte of backup storage for the server that this weblog and my other web stuff runs on. How much do you think a quarter of a terabyte (250 gigabytes) in a network attached, standalone backup server cost me? Remember, not too long ago people were paying $50,000 for a terabyte...

Well, i just paid $350 ($300 with the rebate) for a Buffalo Linkstation.

Those of you who've messed around with NAS and SAN know that those things are often a pain in the neck to install too, right? Well, this one took longer to get out of the box than it did to get it up and configured on the network.

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be NAS vendors. The world has changed. Oh, did I mention that it's a print server too? And that you can hang an additional quarter of a terabyte on there for another few hunnert bux?

Friends of mine at ETA Systems used to say "a supercomputer is defined as the fastest computer of the moment" and the same can be said of NAS and SAN. So I imagine a few of you will point out that this isn't a very big storage system these days. But it's big enough for a whole lot of folks that the EMC's of the world used to go after.

Pretty cool gizmo.

Here's my daily dose of rants and puzzlements. Today's revolves around the recently-announced wireless project in Philadelphia. Like lots of folks, I'm hoping they'll make it go. Like lots of folks, I can't quite figure out how they're going to make the numbers work. Here's why.

Get an envelope out, we gonna do some figuring on the back of it. Let's see here, the Philly folks say they're going to light up the whole town for free Internet access. Ok, great. Presume all the geek problems away and let's say they get it lit. Now, if they really finally run with "free" they've basically replaced all the ISPs in town. Well, maybe that's ok. After all maybe this is an amenity that cities should do, like roads and sewers and stuff. Here's where the numbers get hard...

If residential Internet access is free, then most everybody will switch to it. Some significant percentage of 1,000,000 households. First "numbers" problem -- how much is upstream access for all those folks going to cost??

Get your envelope out. Let's say we give everybody up to 3 mBits (kinda like cable). And let's assume that people aren't all going to use it at the same time. That's called "oversubscription" and everybody does it - ISPs, phone companies, you name it. What oversubscription ratio? For the sake of the envelope, say 30-times. So for every megabit of upstream access, we can sell 30 mBits of "downstream" or customer access. Or 10 customers (remember? 3 mBits/customer). So for every 10 customers, we need another megabit of upstream access for those peak times (after supper).

If most of our 1,000,000 households switch to our free service, we gonna need a *lot* of upstream access. Let's say 20% of the households sign up. 200,000 customers means we have to buy 20,000 MBits of upstream access. 20 GigaBits! Wow! A T1 line is 1.5 MBits, so that would be 13,000 T1's. That a lot. Ok, Internet access is overbuilt and getting really cheap, so maybe they've got a really good deal. Maybe $10/month per MBit (that's cheaper than anything I've heard of, but hey, benefit of the doubt that's my motto...). $200,000/month for upstream. $2,400,000 a year of taxpayer money...

Once the customers have signed up for Internet, any time anything goes wrong with their computer that they can't understand, who they gonna call? The ISP, that's who. So now Philly's got to provide help-desk support for 200,000 customers. Let's say each customer calls once a year with a hard question that takes an hour to answer. 200,000 hours a year. People work 2000 hours a year, so that's 100 people answering help-desk calls at, say $50,000/year. Hmm, $5,000,000/year...

See where this is heading? I could run through all the rest of the stuff that an ISP does -- network maintenance, upgrades, fixing people's connections, paying the bills, etc. Roll all that up in a ball and it looks to me like you've got at least $10-15 million/year to keep it running.

On the one hand, that's a lot of money. On the other hand, compared to losing money on ballparks and stadiums and roads and sewers and economic incentives for people to move in, maybe it's not. I'd love to see the numbers for that project.

I missed this rumpus when it first happened. Nick Carr wrote an article in Harvard Business Review in 2002 called "IT Doesn't Matter" which triggered a heck of a debate.

I ran into the debate yesterday when CNET published this summary and rebuttal on their site.

I like the premise -- that IT is becoming a commodity and needs to be managed that way. Lots of interesting parallels to other industries -- electricity, railroads and (a new one for me) machine tools. There's been a very healthy debate over the article, which Nick has collected on this page for your reading enjoyment.

This is another angle on my earlier rant about why tech startups are a dead end.

Everybody's hyperventilating about how SP2 "breaks stuff" today -- here's a typical article that ran last night. I wish they'd describe this in less dramatic terms. 'Turns out they're talking about the impact of having the firewall turned on by default, instead of turned off (which is the default up until now). So a better version of the headline would be "XP SP2 needs to be reconfigured if you use certain apps" or some such...

Which got me thinking -- why doesn't Microsoft bundle anti virus and anti adware software in too? Sure, it'll annoy the companies that have made a business out of fixing MS flaws, but so what? 'Sure would make life easier...

Assuming this will never happen, here are the (free - well, donations-accepted) packages I currently use.

AVG Anti-Virus software

Spybot Search and Destroy - anti adware/spyware software.

I was pleased to see that Consumer Reports just gave Spybot the nod as a "good thing" in their latest issue.

Ok, I'm a Democrat. Might as well get that out of the way early. But if the tables were reversed and all these folks were aiming all this cool community technology at the DNC, I'd still be pumping out my engineer's victory salute.

Local Twin Cities Type Guy Paul Schmelzer has written up a great piece on his blog summarizing the technology that will be used by various demonstrators at the RNC in a few weeks.

I'm glad to see that the community-technology movement is still coming up with great new ideas to tweak the establishment and have some fun at the same time. Carry on, peepul!

Here's a great site to go look for the latest and greatest thinking about radio networking. The link is to the page where the speaker's notes are posted.

A terrific resource for community-technology geeks, like me.

I woke up wondering what would change if legislators (at any level, local through international) could vote over the Internet. What's the implication of that (inevitable, although maybe not in my lifetime) change in the way that representative government takes place?

Here are some initial thoughts before heading off to the farm this morning.

Legislators;

- would spend more time in their home district

- would be more influenced by the voices of the people they represent

- would be harder for lobbyists to reach

- wouldn't need to be paid as much (since they would only need one residence)

- would spend less time on travel

I think there are some great quality, performance and cost enhancements possible here. I'll keep editing this for a few days...

David Coursey has a piece this week about MindJet's Mind Manager software that caught my eye. I like David's stuff a lot -- like the Baby Bear he's usually thinking about stuff that's in the "just right" place for me, not too far out there in rocket-science exotic whacko new-idea land, but not talking about stuff that I've looked at six months ago and already evaluated.

read on for more observations about mind-mapping software and the community-collaboration connection... (more...)

Every once in a while conversation will turn to trying to solve a problem that has people stumped -- like the lunchtime conversation today with my friend Bruce McKendry in which we decided to take on the problem of fixing health care. Yep, you heard it here first. Don't say we didn't warn you.

Something Bruce said ("this is a problem that needs to be solved outside, or along side, the existing institutions") reminded me of Dee Hock. 'Bet you haven't heard of Dee Hock, but your life has been influenced by his creation. He's the person who led the project that created the VISA network and thus solved a problem that was vexing all the banks that were creating their own independent bank-card systems and going broke in the process.

Hock's solution was to form a new kind of entity (VISA) which allowed the banks to cooperate and compete at the same time. The story of the creation of the VISA network is a fascinating tale. Dee Hock decided to generalize from that experience and see if he could help others apply the lessons-learned to their big complicated problems.

He made up a new word, "chaordic", to describe this process of bringing order out of chaos and formed an organzation to carry on the work. The Chaordic Commons is their home on the 'net.

Read on for notes, commentary and useful links into their site... (more...)

Back from my speech this morning. I had a great conversation with Steve Kelley about the "layer cake" problem that VoIP regulation presents. After scribbling a few things on a pad of paper, it was time to give my talk but I thought it would be a Good Thing to get the scribbles into this blog. Read on for the details...

Suppose you decided to approach regulating VoIP (or any other telecommunications thingy) from the standpoint of regulating differently depending on what layer that thingy was. Here's a picture of the layers;

The bottom layer is the physical link between you and your provider. It could be copper wire to the phone company, coax cable to the cable company, fiber optic cable, a microwave radio link, a laser link, etc. It's the physicall stuff that makes the connection. Very expensive to put in, very unlikely that you're going to have these connections to more than one place. Aka a natural monopoly.

The middle layers make the connection between your physical stuff and the physical stuff at the destination. Phone switching (SS7), TCP/IP, routers, switches, all fall into this layer. It's where ISPs and CLECs sit, and it's much easier to have competition at this layer -- witness all the ISPs and CLECs that popped up in the mid-90's.

The top layer is the application that you actually use to get things done. An email browser, a web browser, a database, or a VoIP software/hardware package all fall in this top layer and there are virtually no barriers to competition at this layer. There are lots and lots of web pages, VoIP phone companies, email providers and so forth and the problems of monopoly are virtually non-existant. So one view would be to say -- "hey, there's no need to regulate VoIP at all, it's just an application."

But wait, what if we added the notion of a "service" to the mix. We might say, let's regulate similar things in similar ways. Here's another picture;

Now, in addition to thinking about layers, we think about the "service" that is running across those layers. Perhaps we should regulate all TV the same, all phone-calls the same, etc. If you deliver TV pictures over cable or the Internet, what's the difference? They're TV pictures and it's silly to have completely different regulation for each -- they're doing the same thing. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it's a duck. In the case of VoIP, the argument would be -- "either regulate VoIP like POTS, or remove the regulation from POTS" and put them on a level playing field.

But wait... What about the technology that's being used? Doesn't that enter into the discussion as well? Here's a picture;

This is a tricky thing -- especially in light of the current enthusiasm for protecting "The Internet" from regulation. If you make regulatory decisions based on technology, perhaps the baby goes out with the bathwater. Depending on where I wanted the outcome to wind up, I could pick my argument to use the technology dimension to trump all the other dimensions.

There are more dimensions, but I don't know how to draw pictures with any more dimensions than 3, so I'll stop here. I think the point of this ramble is that the regulatory picture around VoIP can be "segmented" a lot of different ways. If I were trying to push an argument, I would put this segmentation into my bag of tricks and use it to push things into a configuration that favored my outcome.

I'm finding myself sending the same links and email message to people over and over, so here's a blog entry that covers the waterfront. Old hat for you experienced blog type people, this entry is for us newbies.

Bloglines is a great place to start subscribing to and managing blog/RSS feeds.

This page is where I've put some basic info about what RSS feeds are all about, and is also where you can find the link you need in order to subscribe to this blog.

RSS feeds are the Rosetta Stone that unlocked blogging for me and transmogrified them into something useful/powerful. I wrote this entry describing RSS feeds for PR folks to puzzle through some of the implications.

For the technical people, Xoops is the freeware that this blog is built in. It sits on top of two other powerful pieces of freeware -- MySQL a very powerful database (competes nicely with the likes of ORACLE or Microsoft SQL Server) and PHP a nifty cross-platform programming language. That mySQL/PHP plumbing environment is a bubbling hotbed of great innovative software development.

I'm off to give a speech to the assembled regional telecommunications lawyers gang this morning -- my topic is the regulatory issues in VoIP. Good thing there are folks like Jeff Pulver out there doing a great job of blogging this issue -- there's an amazing amount of stuff going on in this arena with new twists every day. Read his stuff to stay up to date.

Here's the outline of my speech.

How should we classify VoIP?

- A voice service?
- A mobile service?
- A data service?

Which way should we be consistent as regulators?

- By technology?
- By service?
- By layer?

Which things do we want to break?

- Universal Service?
- Access charges?
- Long-distance rates?
- LATAs?
- POTS?
- The Internet?
- CALEA?
- Numbering?
- Disability access?
- 911?

Whose ox do we want to gore?

- LECs and CLECs?
- LD Carriers?
- VoIP over Internet providers (eg. Vonage)?
- ISPs?

What is our goal?

- Promote new technology adoption and investment?
- Preserve existing investments/infrastructure?
- Assure quality and standardization?
- Level the playing field?
- Assure non-discrimination and access?
- Promote competition and lower prices?

Who does the regulating?

- International - ITU?
- National - FCC?
- State - PUC?
- City – Cable Commissions?
- Nobody?

I'm a huge fan, and long time user of, Groove -- one of the "Internet aware" sequels to Lotus Notes. I use it on projects when I come across fellow-addicts although I've never been very good at evangelizing new users into the fold. This is one of those things that you have to come to at your own speed, I guess.

Anyway, the new version (3.0) is due to come out next week and looks pretty darn nifty to me. One of the big complaints that many of us have had is that it's dang slow, both launching and switching between workspaces, which really gets annoying. All the Groovies are saying that this new version fixes that, which may go a long way towards bringing more converts into the fold.

Not freeware, but a very good value. It's got some pretty nifty "always on" encryption built in and I like the way copies of the shared workspaces reside on every members' computer. That saved my bacon one time when a computer crash wiped out the work on one team-member's computer and we could get them right back up to speed by pushing the workspace over to their backup machine.

Ah lahk et...

For you history buffs; Lorenzo Milam, Bill Thomas and I organized the first national community-radio-organizer gathering back in 1975. Held in Madison, WI, we called it NARC (national alternative radio convention). I, living in Madison, was responsible for the actual logistics of the conference and overlooked a few things. Like, places for people to stay... But it didn't matter because we all just sat around and talked to each other for 72 hours straight and then headed home.

This conference -- the 2004 National Summit for Community Wireless Networks looks to be the same kind of "ignition" event for the community wireless folks.

Check out the "sponsor" links if you're interested in finding out who the movers and shakers are around the country. Looks like a pretty energetic bunch. I hope they have as much fun, and get as much started, as we did way back in Madison.