First Post

Now is the time to get this ball rolling.

I knew when I first saw Mosaic, the web browser from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC,) that the old ARPAnet (Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense) and its e-mail, plus remote access and file transfer features, had taken a step that could be similarly significant when compared with Neil Armstrong's "Giant Step for Man." There was an earlier feature, the Wide Area Information System (WAIS,) and it almost showed that promise, but it didn't have pictures, a key part of the web.

After all, blogger.com wouldn't exist, google.com wouldn't exist. There wouldn't be Internet Service Providers (ISPs.) We wouldn't be searching using all those search engines, ordering from Amazon, ebay, and such. We wouldn't be doing banking and payments, watching youtube and revealing personal details on social networking sites. We wouldn't be doing all those good things, if the internet were as dull as dishwater. We wouldn't even be doing bad things like spam, outright crime, denial-of-service (DOS) attacks, if the internet were as dull as dishwater.

Here in Los Alamos, New Mexico, we have debated and dithered over "wideband," Digital Subscriber Loop (DSL,) cable TV delivery of internet, wireless, fiber, buried conduit, overhead utility poles, and such, for over 10 years. To what effect?? Qwest does offer really expensive fiber or DS- or OC- connections. Qwest also offers DSL, which is economical but bottom-end for speed and not available in some areas too distant from certain Qwest facilities. (I think DS- means Digital Signal and OC- Optical Carrier, but only phone company employees, and probably few of them, would care, and they're followed by numbers, like 3, also for DS-, 1, or also for OC-, 12, 48 or 192.) Comcast offers an option or two, probably faster than DSL except when it isn't, but not subject to the distance problem of DSL. However, it is still subject to problems with the physical cable in certain areas.

I work with Radio Shack's local owner, Bill Cabral, to offer fiber service in the Quemazon and Hawk's Landing developments and some downtown business locations and wireless to a few other spots via Bill's company, LA Commnet (Los Alamos Community Network.) Black Rock serves the Research Park building and some wireless customers, mostly in the Rio Grande Valley. Other companies sell Qwest's DSL, notably Virtual Los Alamos locally and several Santa Fe and Albuquerque providers. LANL (Los Alamos National Laboratory) has its deal with Qwest, subject to what the DOE (United States Department of Energy) and its NNSA (National Nuclear Security Administration) allow with their esnet (Energy Sciences) connections, and also provides certain contractors, such as LATA (Los Alamos Technical Associates) with internet access. UNM-LA (University of New Mexico, Los Alamos branch) has some way to communicate with the internet system at the main campus in Albuquerque. The Los Alamos Public Schools have some connection they buy via bids, and get some subsidy from that strange tax on everyone's phone bill, for schools and libraries. Those bids are not solicited locally, it appears to me, by the way. Mesa Public Library used to be part of the county government network, but that changed several years ago. Perhaps they are subsidized by some of that tax, too. But, for most residents and businesses, we continue to debate and dither, either person-to-person with no hope of any concerted action happening as a result, or in formal governmental meetings with, so far, about the same result. The county government has spent tens of thousands of dollars on consultants, resulting in more meetings and a bunch of paper with something printed on it. The county government has installed some of their own fiber, for their own use, plus several wireless links, again for their own use.

The county council at their February 26, 2008 meeting again discussed fiber coordinated with wireless. Maybe a blog, more specialized than Jim Rickman's btno (Bomb Town News Observer,) could contribute to less dithering and more action. Toward that purpose, I'm starting this fiberlanm blog.