Transformational Thinking

Over the weekend I was talking with Dad about technology. The conversation started with a simple question about my Blackberry, "Is it a phone with the Internet, or the Internet with a phone?" Seems simple enough, and at first blush maybe even a bit trite, banal and irrelevant. However, I would posit that it is a highly relevant question.

Consider it like this: if its the Internet with a phone, who holds control? The people. If its a phone with the Internet, who holds the control? The service providers.

The transformational question is simply this: what would it take to shift the paradigm away from cell phones to truly pocket computers with sip capabilities? The answer, incidentally, is fairly short: a nation-wide wireless network.

How hard would it be to build a nation-wide wireless network? Lets run some simple numbers with some basic assertions. Lets assume that the whole country is flat and that buildings aren't an issue. Lets also assume we'd be building this network on existing technology -- lets use a basic ProCurve 530AP as an example. We have an effective radius of 100m. The effective coverage of a single access-point then is π*100², or 31416m² or 31km². Figuring that the continental US is 8,080,464.25 km²... you'd need about 260,000 access-points. Which, incidentally would only require about $91,000,000 to purchase, but now you've got to get towers, power, and internet connectivity to every one of these guys... figure you can get power to them for $5/mo and Internet for $45/mo, and now we're talking about a monthly cost of $13,000,000... $100 million to setup, $157 million/year to run, and that says nothing about maintenance costs, or the fact that many areas would need more than 1 AP for service. I think a conservative estimate would put this project at the $5 billion mark with little trouble -- we all know how the government can screw up even the simplest projects.

SO, if every man, woman and child kicked in about $15 we could pay for this thing... and everyone would have free broadband... wtf? WHY HAVEN'T WE DONE THIS YET? Imagine everyone having free access to the Internet... everywhere... most smartphones that I've seen are SIP capable (on a blackberry, you can see that it is by dialling ##000000 and scrolling down). I'll tell you why this won't happen: corporate greed.

Its amazing to me that a few pigdogs can halt progress because they want to be richer...