Presidential executive order "US Ignite"

Just before Friday's executive order to skip enforcement of deportation of youth who are neither citizens nor covered by a visa, there was a Thursday executive order to streamline permission for internet providers to cross or to locate facilities on federal property. I learned of it in a Wednesday posting to the 1st-mile list.

In the past, I had considered placing conduit that crosses the south and north branches of Pueblo Canyon from Quemazon to the Western Area (south) and to 47th Street off Urban (north). I had also considered placing an antenna mast near the water tank above Quemazon. In pursuit of both of those I had called the Forest Service. They said they would call back, but they never did. I also considered putting a relay for a wireless link from Albuquerque on a mesa above White Rock Canyon inside Bandelier. I called Bandelier about that, and they said they would call back, but they never did. Maybe such things would now be possible, but maybe we'll never know. I certainly won't pursue any of that myself.

Another federal property (well, since San Ildefonso is a Native American Pueblo, maybe it's another nation) that may need to be crossed, say by the REDInet project, is our neighbor to the east. Maybe somebody from REDInet has already called them and been told they would call back, but they haven't. Or they called and the answer was no. Maybe the order can change the answer, or maybe not.

Here is a link to an article on the PC magazine website that seems pessimistic about the order. The main point of the PC magazine writer is that the real problem is that the legacy of Bell Telephone (Verizon, AT&T and CenturyLink) is still a monopoly and is still stopping progress.

Discussion, please?

Chattanooga offers financial incentives

Check out this WIRED article: Chattanooga bait

fiber vs. 4G

My previous posts on this blog have advocated fiberoptic internet technology. Some have mentioned the problems with wireless. The cellular phone companies, such as Verizon, AT&T and Sprint are transitioning over the next few years to a "4th generation" which some think might be a cure-all for all internet problems. I advocate the use of wireless in many bands and forms where it is appropriate, but I think for heavy-duty daily internet, fiber is far preferable.
Perhaps someone might like to offer other opinions?

Dale Carstensen

Los Alamos County has been taking a survey

Here is a link to an article, Web surfers could catch a big wave in the Sunday May 8, 2011 Los Alamos Monitor, and the content of the article follows:

Web surfers could catch a big wave
Fiber optic network could produce positive economic impact
By Kirsten Laskey
Saturday, May 7, 2011 at 10:50 pm (Updated: May 8, 6:47 am)

Web surfers in Los Alamos could be catching a really big wave in the not-too-distant future.

The community broadband project is gearing up to build a broadband network that would deliver Internet speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second. Additionally, the fiber optic network would allow service providers to offer "triple play" service bundles -- telephone, television and Internet.

Los Alamos County Council approved awarding a contract to Crestino Telecommunications Services for design and consulting on the project. The contract price tag: $511,690.

The results from a community survey are expected back this week, which collected people's input on the project.

A cost projection and timeline for the entire project has not been established.

In April, IT Manager Laura Gonzales told the Los Alamos Monitor that although the survey results were not in yet, the majority of people she and Project Manager John Jones have spoken to said they can't wait for community broadband to become a reality.

Jones said the purpose of the survey was to find out exactly what people's impressions of fiber broadband were, and if they have a service provider, what their service levels are for Internet, television and phone.

Additionally, he said the survey also looked at it from a business perspective. It studied how businesses currently use Internet services and how broadband could be used if businesses had 1 gigabit or what type of services they might be able to offer.

For instance, a video store might be able to offer video streaming to customers, Jones said.

The next step, he added, will be to conduct a public meeting, during which the community will be asked to give feedback on the survey. Additionally, the facilitators will address questions, concerns that people might have, and the information will be synthesized for the company working on preliminary designs for this project.

"Specifically, the survey feedback will be used in the business modeling that we will utilize to develop a business plan," Jones said.

The business plan will determine how the network would be administered, determine potential pricing for residential and business to access, establish maintenance and upgrade plans and finalize operational details.

Furthermore, a comprehensive design is expected to be completed by June 2012. The plan would include infrastructure designs, how the fiber would be routed, what equipment could potentially be used, and where to locate the network operations center.

Just what is broadband? According to the county's community broadband network report, broadband refers to high-speed Internet service that is always on and operates at sufficiently high data transmission speeds or bandwidth, to simultaneously deliver voice, video and data to users.

There are benefits to using broadband, Jones said. "I think there are a lot of stats across the country from other communities that have implemented this type of network -- it creates job growth, additional types of businesses, entrepreneurial businesses that are created as a result of the availability of a broadband network."

Gonzales added that offering broadband would help make Los Alamos more attractive to prospective residents.

Additionally, she said broadband impacts quality of life. For instance, the project would allow for teleconferencing, on-line gaming and video streaming.

"There are going to be more opportunities not only for jobs but services that people may want to offer from Los Alamos across the Internet. There are green benefits with people being able to stay at home to telecommute or teleconference rather than drive to conferences and meetings," Gonzales said.

Plus, Jones said, the broadband services would be accessible to everyone. Potentially, there would be a portal that folks and businesses can be included in, he said. Users would log into the portal and go from there.

Jones said the county could use it to offer a tax payment mechanism or a restaurant could use the portal to allow reservations online.

"It's only limited by one's imagination," he said.

The county's community broadband network report states the community broadband project should not be confused with REDI Net, the high-speed Internet backbone for northern New Mexico. Although Los Alamos is participating in the project, the effort was lead by the Regional Economic Development Initiative (REDI), which serves Santa Fe, Rio Arriba, and Los Alamos and Taos counties. REDI Net will be a "middle mile" service that connects a community such as Los Alamos and its community broadband project to the outside Internet.

Additionally while the community broadband would be offer [sic] to residents and businesses, REDI Net would supply services to anchor institutions such as schools or hospitals.

"Talking to different municipalities across the U.S., it is exciting to be a part of making Los Alamos County -- residents and businesses -- more self-sufficient and potentially increasing economic development," he said.

Infrastructure Fragility

This applies to just about all utilities, but phone, cable and any other communications utility are especially vulnerable. Just food for thought. Here's a blog entry that describes what happened in the San Francisco Bay Area early this morning: Destroy the Internet with a Hacksaw

Los Alamos County Electric System Unreliability

The power flickers this past week have caused me so much grief, I just have to comment about them. The Los Alamos Monitor has published a short explanation of most if not all of them in the next edition after the outage. Today the Sunday edition has a longer, front page, above the fold, article about a general problem with something called the RL 115KV line. I am curious what RL stands for. The article implies that Public Service Company of New Mexico (PNM) has something to do with it.

I think part of the general problem is the short-sighted thinking twenty to forty years ago. Then the emphasis was on burying electric and phone lines, eventually cable TV lines, too. I don't think there was any technical reason. There used to be the opinion that lightning would cause fewer outages, and phone linepersons have told me that woodpeckers do damage to overhead phone wires. No, the reason was aesthetics, just plain opinion about what is ugly and what is not so ugly.

Now, the burying could have been done in conduits. But it was cheaper to use direct-bury cable. In some high-density areas, the phone lines are in conduits. Brittle conduits susceptible to water intrusion that may be worse than spotty moisture for direct-bury cables, but some areas do have conduits none-the-less. But using conduits for electric wires only began more recently, maybe by the year 2000, maybe even later.

So now we need expensive trenching or horizontal boring to do it over with conduit this time. And with trenching we use short lengths of conduit with joints that will probably let water leak in, so that is not good, either.

Then there is the absence of the Ojo Line Extension. Another casualty of opinion about aesthetics.

Sigh.

I think OLE should be built, including dozens, maybe hundreds, of fibers along it. I think overhead utilities where direct-buried ones exist should be considered. I think high-density, commercial areas should have utility tunnels, which would also be storm sewers, where all gas, water, electric, communication and other utility connections can be maintained and replaced without digging or boring.

Will a return to circuit switching happen?

Ah, I still have a chance to get at least one July post into this blog. I have thought about lots of topics, but skipped actually writing any comments about them, in the past six or ten weeks. I have been busy, but's that's no excuse.

I ran across an item in a college alumni magazine that mentioned something about Internet2, in support of the Large Hadron Collider world grid, or whatever that large consortium working on the data from CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research, words for the acronym come out in the French order, though, since it's in the French-speaking part of Switzerland) calls their collection of networks and computers. Turns out they're setting up temporary 10 Gigabit connections on demand, sometimes only for several minutes, for large file transfers, then shutting down that route. Sounds like circuit switching for point-to-point packet networking to me.

Maybe packet switching, or TCP/IP, just doesn't scale very well much beyond 10 Gigabit backbones?? Multiple 10 Gb connections might not work well with packet switching??