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Wednesday, April 9, 2003
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The Segway vehicle continues to fascinate me - an incredibly clever piece of engineering coupled with hype, serious malfeasance in the investment community and a poor understanding of the sociology and anthropology of human transport in the US.
Small environmentally friendly vehicles make sense in many areas, but creating one doesn't mean you've got it right. For some people the Segway is perfect. Unfortunately the urban sprawl and uneven climate that most of us live in make this impractical at the price.
A bicycle or an electrically assisted bicycle probably makes more sense than a Segway for most people, but safety (visibility, lack of proper bike lanes, dissimilar traffic speeds, poor passenger protection...) limits their popularity. It would probably take five dollar a gallon gas to jumpstart alternate transportation.
8:50:22 AM 
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The 802.11 variants are great for creating wireless LANs at home or in office settings, but generally fail if you are interested in "last mile" fixed wireless.
Another standard (802.16) is better suited for fixed wireless/last mile applications but, until recently, few companies supported moving towards an open standard. All of that changed recently.
There must be a recognition that the only way to lower costs enough to get serious about deploying this class of service is to move to an open standard. It will probably take a few years, but it now looks inevitable.
A serious problem is figuring out where the money is going to come from for deploying fixed wireless. Will two years be enough time to move telecom from its current depression? One also wonders about the status of currently planned projects. Fixed wireless is expensive at this point, so it doesn't make sense to move ahead until 802.16 has made progress down the price curve.
6:56:07 AM
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Ah - what happens next? (thanks for the link Sukie)
Before people get too excited about total victory, it is important to remember that the Israelis were initially greeted as liberators and heros in Lebanon and the Russians took Kabul triumphally in less than twenty four hours. The anger and distrust generated in much of the world - specifically in the young Arab Street - tmay create serious issues down the road in the midEast an within our own boundaries.
A good metric for success, if this is a war on terrorism (although I doubt that is the real motive), might be the return of civil liberties in the US to pre-911 levels. Until this happens I would claim that terrorists have won the important battle.
6:29:52 AM
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