licentious radio

Sunday, September 15, 2002
[11:03:59 AM]

I miss Wired. Used to be, I always new which stores got Wired on their shelves first. I'd be haunting them, waiting for the new issue. I'd read every word of every article, then go back and read every ad. Wired was really something "back in the day".

The current Wired has a few interesting articles. Negroponte touts the 802.11 fantasy. It's a good fantasy.

There's another article about an old good fantasy: bandwidth. The world is awash in unused bandwidth. It even has a romantic name: "dark fiber". (You can tell that wasn't made up by a marketing genius. A certified marketing genius would have made up something sick like "WiFi".)

We have plenty of bandwidth now for everybody to do streaming video and video teleconferencing, and rich, rich websites. Stupid product photo? How about product video?

But the pirates. The phone company pirates don't want to lose their long-distance business. The media pirates want total control more than they wanted to make money. The government utility boards misunderstood everything: the wires to buildings must be a public utility. It's ridiculous to try to open the wires up to competition: just let the telcos add $5/month and give everyone DSL. But make it symetric DSL, damn-it: everybody's a server. Everybody's streaming video and audio. And Microsoft screwed everybody by building security holes to destroy their competition.

All together you can count up hundreds of billions of dollars that were just waiting there for the world, but the pirates disappeared the opportunities to keep their piddling millions flowing.

The bandwidth fantasy was really something. The 802.11 fantasy is more grass-roots in nature, but it still runs up against the same pirates. Good luck.