electricity pole, transmission towers, cable - universal icons crossing earth's surface; physical markers helped structure fundamental changes in everyday life - instant comm on global scale; equipment around which cities were built

transportation and telecom infrastructures caused both expansion and contraction

impact of sound transmission of urban theory - telecom engineering absorbed by modernist architects - Lewis Mumford, Frank Lloyd Wright illustrated assimilation of modern tech landscape - management of suburban sprawl

Mumford: transportation (cars), communication (interpersonal comm -> telephone lines; "the telegraph symbolically follows the railroad..."; "radio is a potentially distributive and decentralizing agency...")

Wright: "all pole and wires overhead [will be] a bad memory of ugliness and danger"; "crude, utilitarian scaffolding...does violence to our own character..."

1890 NY: Bell started laying wire underground

Imagine… a telecommunications company that puts privacy as its highest value and believes that the users should have the ultimate control and possession over their communications and data. The Calyx Institute is poised to turn this prospect into reality by launching the first privacy-focused Internet service and Mobile telephone service utilizing ubiquitous, opportunistic encryption as part of its research and development in privacy technology. Calyx's charter directs it to use all legal and technical resources available to protect the rights of its constituents and customers.

The Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation (CITE) will be the first of its kind, in scale and scope, fully integrated test, evaluation and certification facility dedicated to enabling and facilitating the commercialization of new and emerging technologies....

CITE will represent a 20th century American city with a population of approximately 35,000 people and be built on roughly 15 square acres. CITE’s test city will be unpopulated. This unique feature will allow for a true laboratory without the complication and safety issues associated with residents.

CITE will be a catalyst for the acceleration of research into applied, market-ready products by providing “end to end” testing and evaluation of emerging technologies and innovations from the world’s public laboratories, universities and the private sector.

CITE will be modeled after a mid-sized modern American city, integrating real-world urban and suburban environments along with all the typical working infrastructure elements that make up today’s cities. This will provide customers the unique opportunity to test and evaluate technologies in conditions that most closely simulate real-world applications.

09 Dec 2002 |National Post FP5.| by John Greenwood.

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Alternet article on the cost (to consumers) of large wireless carriers investing in politicians instead of infrastructure or competing with one another to increase service and lower cost.

After years of licking its wounds, and with much of the fiber-optic cable capacity in the ground still unused, the telecom industry is going on another building spree.

Some 19 million miles of optical fiber were installed in the U.S. last year, the most since the boom year of 2000, research firm CRU Group says. Corning Inc. a leading maker of fiber, sold record volumes last year and is telling new customers that it can't guarantee their orders will be filled... It is early days in what some in the fiber-optic business are calling a new boom for their long-beaten-down industry. Demand is being driven by skyrocketing Internet video traffic, requests from the financial sector for ever-faster trading connections, and soaring mobile phone use—which has to be tied into landline networks... But already some skeptics caution whether enough demand exists to warrant more building... But Andrew M. Odlyzko, a University of Minnesota math professor who warned a decade ago about slower-than-expected Internet growth, says predictions of skyrocketing mobile traffic seem overly optimistic: Mobile bandwidth may be too expensive to increase, he says. Every cellphone data connection generally runs from a phone company's cellphone tower into a landline telecom network. There is also plenty of excess capacity available on the nation's core fiber-optic networks, according to TeleGeography, a telecom market research firm. And capacity is expected to increase as engineers find new ways of squeezing more data traffic into a single strand of glass... Telecom builders say it is the location of the fiber-optic networks—rather than their capacity—that is driving new demand. Networks don't exist where they are needed—at cellphone towers, suburban office parks, and remote data centers, for instance. Carriers that prize reliability want alternative routes. And new uses, such as high-frequency trading, are also emerging that call for new routes. In fact, demand for fiber could explode if online video streaming continues to take off, some companies and analysts say.

Studio-X NYC hosted Fast Company's Greg Lindsay and the Institute for the Future's Anthony Townsend on February 21, 2012 for the first in a new series of events that will cast a much-needed critical eye on "smart city" hype.

Lindsay and Townsend are calling the series "X-Cities," where X marks the spot at which information technology and mega-urbanization converge. In this first session, the pair laid out their respective cases for the top-down, intelligent design of "smart cities" versus the bottom-up evolution of crowd-sourced "civic laboratories." Is information technology a real tool for city-building? And, if so, what is its bright and/or scary future?

RT @IBMdatamag: Best practices for governing key data types in #telecommunications, by @SunilSoares1

San Francisco, CA - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today supported a spectrum policy proposal from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and asked the FCC to acknowledge its First Amendment obligation to allocate additional spectrum for unlicensed use. Unlicensed use of spectrum would permit the expansion of wireless communication, including Wi-Fi-style technology.

When President Clinton used an electronic pen to sign the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the country assumed that he was unleashing tremendous telecom competition that would help consumers across America. The dream was that local phone service would be up for grabs, no longer controlled by a single incumbent, that the Bell companies would be allowed to provide competitive long distance services, and that the cable companies would be allowed into the phone business — and that as a result of all this jostling we’d all be better off. The New York Times reported that the act was “expected to unleash a wave of mergers and acquisitions but eventually knock down traditional monopolies in local telephone service and cable television.”

Pipeline
Susan Crawford

The Times got the first part right but not the second. Today, as phone, video, and broadcast services have become merely bits passing over a wire, Congress’s intentions embodied in the 1996 Act have been completely subverted. Through a wave of mergers and years of litigation (helped along by some gymnastic labeling fiestas by the FCC), new companies have found it almost impossible to compete.

We have Ma Cell instead of Ma Bell, with just two companies — AT&T and Verizon — utterly dominant, their vast spectrum holdings, control over handset manufacturing, and provision of backhaul adding up to moats around their businesses that Sprint and T-Mobile can’t cross. We have a handful of cable incumbents — chiefly Comcast and Time Warner — controlling high-speed wired access to everything at whatever prices they want to charge.

Given this context, and its direct impact on consumers’ pocketbooks and innovation in America, you’d think that Congress would want to have an empowered regulator able to do something to protect the country from the rational, profit-seeking depredations of our new generation of monopolists.

Instead, the House Republicans are going in exactly the opposite direction. They’re lining up big-company support to push legislation early next week on the floor of the House that would gut the FCC. The bill, H.R. 3309, is called the “FCC Process Reform Act of 2011.”

As Rep. Henry Waxman, the Ranking Member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee makes clear, the bill will disable the FCC, not reform it.

It does this by creating a special set of vague and novel procedural hurdles for the FCC to which no other agency is subject and that will require another decade of litigation to clarify. It does this by significantly reducing the FCC’s ability to take the public interest into account when considering mergers. And it provides innumerable additional routes for mischievous litigation, making every single one of the FCC’s regulatory analyses in support of a new rule — and not just the rule itself — subject to judicial review. Don’t like the FCC’s suggestion that public interest values are worth taking into account? Sue, and paralyze the Commission.

To be sure, it’s a job-creation bill. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that twenty additional government employees will be needed to handle the new rulemaking and reporting requirements of the legislation, at a cost of $26 million between 2013 and 2017. And the bill will trigger lots of lobbyist hours as everyone scrambles to figure out what the heck it means.

Although the bill’s proponents say they aim to make things work more quickly at the FCC, the legislation will have the opposite effect: it will make it very difficult for the FCC to deal with any of the real-time telecom problems the country faces. What the Republicans seem to want, at bottom, is to grant the giant companies that sell us basic communications capacity — an essential utility for the 21st century — the ability to throw sand in the works at every opportunity.

This story is much like the banking regulatory narrative: The huge companies that control banking in this country avoided any real constraint on their businesses, with public harm the result. Democrats and Republicans can all agree that free markets are a good idea, but when it comes to the necessary framework for those markets — a functioning commodity banking system or reliable, universal, standardized, low-cost communications capacity — the Republicans go haywire and demand that everything be deregulated.

Surely we have learned our lesson in the banking context. Surely we shouldn’t slip farther behind as a country to serve the interests of a few large companies.

In 1901, Republican Theodore Roosevelt took on another utility industry that had consolidated and was gouging Americans. “The railway,” he said, “is a public servant. Its rates should be just to and open to all shippers alike. The government should see to it that within its jurisdiction this is so and should provide a speedy, inexpensive, and effective remedy to that end.”

Leadership within the FCC and oversight by Congress will provide those remedies. Strangling the FCC’s ability to regulate will drive us backwards.

Photo: Vice President Al Gore looks on as President Clinton uses an electronic pen to sign the Telecommunications Reform Act, Thursday Feb. 8, 1996 at the Library of Congress in Washington. With high-tech fanfare and a touch of humor, the president signed the bill to revolutionize the way Americans get telephone and computer services. (AP Photo/Doug Mills)

More "mega" in the brute-force approach