Re-Inventing Wires: the Future of Landlines and Networks
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Re-Inventing Wires: The Future of Landlines and Networks National Institute for Science, Law & Public Policy Washington, DC “The Internet has become one of the defining technologies of our society. It is our central medium for commerce and communication and—more importantly—for our public discourse, engagement, and democratic governance. However, it has been hijacked by the commercial motivations that have come to re-define and constrain the availability, quality, content, and media of high-speed access in the United States.” The Author Timothy Schoechle, PhD is a communications technology expert, international consultant in computer engineering and standardization, former faculty member of the University of Colorado, College of Engineering and Applied Science, and Senior Research Fellow, National Institute for Science, Law & Public Policy (NISLAPP). He is an expert on the international standards system and serves as Secretary of ISO/IEC SC25 Working Group 1, the international standards committee for Home Electronic Systems. He previously served for a decade, until 2016, as Secretariat of ISO/ IEC SC32 Data Management and Interchange. Dr. Schoechle is a founder of BI Incorporated, a pioneer developer of RFID technology. He is faculty member of Colorado State University-Global Campus where he develops graduate and undergraduate courses on cyber-security and privacy and a Principal Investigator for a research grant to demonstrate innovative electricity management, solar, and control system technologies for the City of Boulder. Dr. Schoechle authored the landmark white paper, “Getting Smarter About the Smart Grid,” as well as “Green Electricity or Green Money? Why some environmental groups hamper clean energy,” and a critical review of the report, “Future of the Grid—Evolving to Meet America’s Needs,” by the Department of Energy and the GridWise Alliance. He holds an MS in telecommunications engineering and a PhD in communications policy from the University of Colorado, Boulder. The Publisher Re-Inventing Wires: The Future of Landlines and Networks has been published by the National Institute for Science, Law & Public Policy (NISLAPP) under the direction of Camilla Rees, MBA. NISLAPP is a 501(c)(3) non-profit based in Washington, D.C. whose mission is to reconcile legal and scientific concerns in the formulation of intelligent, safe, and sensible public policy. Re-Inventing Wires: The Future of Landlines and Networks Timothy Schoechle, PhD Senior Research Fellow National Institute for Science, Law and Public Policy May 2018 The Internet has become one of the defining technologies of the modern world. Why has America, the Internet’s creator, become one of its most impoverished users among all the developed nations in terms of the proportion of its people with Internet access and the speed and quality of that access? Why has the Internet been growing in an inefficient, insufficient, and unsustainable direction? Is wireless access being oversold? Why are existing copper phone lines being abandoned when current protocols allow them to deliver data at gigabit speed? This report seeks to address these questions and propose answers and solutions. It explores the historical forces at play, the emerging technologies that will define the future of landlines and networks, and the public policy choices and opportunities that confront us today. “The history of U.S. communication infrastructure increasingly supports the proposition that it is unrealistic to expect private monopolies, duopolies, or triopolies—regulated or unregulated—to make the long- term investments necessary to build the enduring and sustainable public broadband fiber information highway that the country needs. Corporations will invariably seek the cheapest, quickest, and most profitable path, which has led to the current emphasis on wireless.” Foreword The paper you are about to read provides a beacon of light, a reasonable voice for our turbulent world. It analyzes the current state of modern communications and clearly explains the benefits and accessibility of national wireline systems that can guarantee for everyone a superior foundation of Internet access, unequalled connectivity speed, safety, privacy, security, resiliency, energy efficiency, and long-term sustainability. This paper sets the record straight and fills our current information vacuum, offering consumers, business leaders, and policy makers the critical facts they need to rethink a more intelligent and secure future with reliable, secure, wired communications more resilient to storm, flood, and fire, and reducing the enormous carbon footprint from the present wireless approach. It also demonstrates why the mistaken upcoming 5G frenzy, with its millions of small cell antennas destined to clutter all neighborhoods and public right-of-ways, is dangerous, wasteful, and unnecessary. At a time when we are fortunate, thanks to the Internet, to have ready access to international medical and scientific reports demonstrating the carcinogenicity and neurotoxicity of ubiquitous microwave radiation emitted by wireless technologies, Re-Inventing Wires: The Future of Landlines and Networks explores a wide path of opportunity for establishing far safer and exceptionally reliable Internet connectivity that we all want and need. Buried across North America are large networks of copper wire and state-of-the-art optical fiber that provide the bedrock for a health-safe national communication system of the future. For too long we have been misled, turned astray by corporate propaganda, by compromised politicians, and by our own technical ignorance into accepting inferior, problem-ridden, and expensive wireless systems. Importantly, wireless systems also have negative economies for speed, such that adding speed becomes progressively more expensive, which then requires more spectrum and cell sites. Capitulation to imprudent wireless mania has saddled America with vulnerable and monopolistic communications services, and technological inferiority, leaving many sectors unserved, and widening the ‘digital divide.’ As you will read in Re-Inventing Wires: The Future of Landlines and Networks, the U.S. has fallen to #17 of 20 among developed countries in fixed broadband penetration as a percentage of the population. Nationwide, locally built and financed networks that provide optical fiber-based Internet access to the premises, both metropolitan and rural, are do-able. Wired systems are comparatively far more cost- effective, and are approximately 100x faster than wireless systems. Furthermore, fiber to the home avoids the potentially disastrous outcome of populations rendered sick and disabled by acute and chronic exposure to wireless radiation pollution. Wireline municipal broadband services, currently operating in such places as Longmont, CO and Chattanooga, TN, are demonstrating the monumental economic benefits of high-speed wired systems that pay for themselves, bringing tremendous economic growth. For example, in Chattanooga, as Dr. Schoechle points out, a $220 million investment has yielded $865 million in economic growth for the city. And in Longmont, a new municipal broadband system there provides access to fast, inexpensive $49/month 1 Gigabit service, at a fraction of the cost others pay in many other cities today, an extremely attractive offering to businesses and residents alike. Re-Inventing Wires: The Future of Landlines and Networks builds the case that combining fiber access systems with electric (continued on next page) i power distribution systems, as in these two situations, can provide many synergistic advantages and opportunities for states and communities. Re-Inventing Wires: The Future of Landlines and Networks is a blueprint for an imperative technological renaissance, and a re-envisioning of national communications infrastructure. Once communities at all levels—rural, town, city, and nation—realize that they must assume local responsibility for creating safe and economical high-speed Internet access for all of their citizens, this renaissance will unfold. A sturdy, wired communication infrastructure, using wireless only as an adjunctive technology, has vast potential to become the electronic commons essential to commerce, education, jobs, the economy, social cohesion, communications, and international competitiveness. This paper presents indisputable technical, economic, and sustainability reasons why wired technologies portend the best and highest future. I wish you intriguing and profitable reading. Frank M. Clegg Past President, Microsoft Canada CEO, Canadians for Safe Technology ii Prologue In the fall of 2000, I had occasion to visit Sonoma County, California, to sample wine and enjoy the rugged beauty of the wild coastline. One afternoon, as I was returning to my lodging near Mendocino, I explored a remote and seldom-traveled winding backroad across wooded coastal hills that separate the inland valley vineyards from the coast. Rounding a curve on the narrow byway, I came across a flagman with orange vest and hardhat working with a small crew digging a trench along the road. When I inquired about the purpose of the project, I was told that the crew was laying fiber-optic cable. Pressing further, I asked where such a cable could be going in such a remote and sparsely occupied area. The flagman replied that the crew was laying a portion of a new “information highway.” From Silicon Valley, the fiber traversed Sonoma County, winding past the vineyards and through the coastal hills and redwood forest,