Month: April 2009

end-user services on national broadband networks

Singapore, New Zealand, and Australia are building national fiber-optic networks that will provide high-capacity connectivity to all residences and workplaces. All three national projects separate network facilities from retail service providers. Government investment, government ownership, and government control, to various degrees and in various institutional forms, will be a major aspect of the facilities layer. Commercial competition among private retail firms seems to be the central concept for end-user service provision.

Plans for government involvement in broadband networks might benefit from more thinking about retail services and end-user services. Some points for thought:

  1. Some health, education, and energy-consumption management services might be provided universally, at no direct cost, over the national network.  In order to do so, everyone must have some type of end-user service.  Organizing access to universal end-user network services would increase the value of national networks.
  2. The Singapore proposal specifies a residential/non-residential pricing distinction that goes all the way down to the network layer.  Non-residential prices are about 3.5 times higher than residential prices (see slide 29, Overview of Next Gen NBN Wholesale Prices).  Favoring residential customers over business customers is a historically prevalent pricing structure for telephone service.  That pricing structure shifts network costs into common costs for businesses.  It can be understood as a non-transparent value-added tax.  Such a tax is advantageous for incumbent politicians. More generally, politicians often are concerned about particular retail prices.  Policy analysis should recognize this reality in thinking about government involvement in networks and retail services.
  3. Advertising and marketing services can be quite expensive for competing, commercial firms.  In 1997, U.S. long-distance telephony competitors spent about $5.4 billion on advertising and promotional expenses.  That was much more than the capital cost for building major national fiber-optic networks.  Government provision of relatively simple, well-understood, universally valued services generates much less advertising and promotional expenses than commercial retail competition.  On the other hand, government provision of services has its own costs and risks.  Thinking about the characteristics of specific end-user services can help to inform analysis of trade-offs between government service provision and commercial service provision.
  4. Government service provision can be an important tool for restructuring the communications industry.  In the communications industry around the world today, plain-old telephone service (POTS) still generates a huge amount of revenue.  National networks could be understood as a national commitment to eliminating this revenue.  On the other hand, users are used to paying large monthly bills for telephone service, but not for email service or web search service.  Recognizing user payment habits and their implications for business structure and service innovation is an important component of understanding the implicit regulatory effect of national networks.
  5. Traditional print (newspapers, magazines, books) and broadcasting (radio, television) businesses are under enormous strains.  High-speed national networks are likely to increase the speed of transition to new media organizations. The democratic potential of new media organization is enormous, but the path to realizing publicly valuable media change is likely to be quite difficult.  New national networks can foster much better direct communications among community organizations and their constituents. These important end-user services should be explicitly recognized within national network projects.
  6. Providing some retail services may be crucial to making national networks economically viable.  Tim Nulty, who has world-leading expertise in the matter, argues strongly that retail service provision is essential to making municipal fiber-optic networks economically viable.  The same may be true for national fiber-optic networks.

Government overviews, with links to additional government documents  —

Singapore: Next Generation National Broadband Network (Next Gen NBN)
New Zealand: Broadband in New Zealand
Australia: National Broadband Network

Heaven on Earth: media in the Middle Ages

Music, visual art, literature, and information tend to be associated with different categories of media and communicative experiences.  Recent media convergence, however, has opened a wide range of choices in how to organize technologically mediated communication.  The U.S. National Gallery of Art’s exhibition, Heaven on Earth: Manuscript Illuminations from the National Gallery of Art, displays innovative media organization that predates by more than a half-millennium our age of new media.

The exhibition includes large, beautifully illuminated choir books from Europe in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. The choir books were large so that the choir could read from one book the words and notes that they would sing together. Along with these written representations of the sacred Christian music were miniature paintings related to the subject of the music and designed around the initial letter of a song-word on the page.  Known as historiated initials, these paintings both re-enforce the meaning of the music and accent its sensuous beauty.

A choir-book page created in Lombardy, 1450/1460, is a wonderful artifact of convergent sense in mediated communication. It includes four lines of musical notation, words in two colors, a large historiated initial M, and a lavishly decorated border that undoubtedly formed the left half of a fully bordered opening for the choir book. The choir looked into this ornate window to sing the Magnificat, a song of Mary, the mother of Jesus.  The historiated initial shows an angel announcing to Mary that she will give birth to the Messiah.  Just visible behind the central column of the M is a book. Mary reading a prophetic book (Isaiah) became a typical feature of Annunciation iconography in the late Middle Ages.  Thus the moment of this choir music is individual, contemplative reading interrupted by world-changing bodily action of the word within Christian world history.

Prior to about a millennium ago, letters dominated the texture of texts in Europe.  Texts consisted of columns of letters, without upper-and-lower case distinctions, without spaces between words, without periods at the end of sentences (or any other punctuation), without paragraphing, and without paratextual headings and other organizational indicators. Reading meant serial processing of letters. Transposed to audiovisual media,  reading texts was once like watching a traditional television channel.

The rise of scholasticism in twelfth-century Europe prompted reformating of texts to aid accessing and processing information in scripture. A leaf from a Tuscan bible from the fourth quarter of the twelfth century highlights this development.  The leaf provides a section of text from the Gospel of Mark.  The text has no chapter, paragraph, or verse indicators. But spaces separate the words, and periods terminate sentences. Moreover, marginal notes record scriptural cross-references, and an inserted prologue precedes the text of the Gospel. Between the prologue and the Gospel is a seventeen-point summary of the Gospel, with points that are numbered serially with Roman numerals. A huge, lively, painted bookmark indicates the beginning of the Gospel proper.  In the midst of this informational apparatus is an illumination showing a pensive St. Mark, at a lectern, looking out at the viewer. The leaf leads the reader into analytical scripture study, but also hints at the different bodily joy that the choir books invoke.

Media in the Middle Ages were generally neither transparent nor neutral.  The exhibition includes what was originally a frontispiece (c. 1140) to an instance of Bede’s Commentary on the Apocalypse.  The illustration shows a dove (the Holy Spirit) inspiring St. John who dictates to Bede.  This intricate mediation gives Bede’s text its interpretive authority.  More generally, institutional church services, saints, shrines, and relics provided consciously present, differentiated media  for communication with God.  End-to-end communication was extraordinary visions or revelations. Intermediaries that highly structured communication were normal and central to the medieval communications business.

If you can, go see Heaven on Earth at the National Gallery of Art. You may never again get such an opportunity here on earth.

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Read more:

Notes:

Heaven on Earth is on display at the National Gallery through August 2,2009.  Most of the works on display are from Lessing J. Rosenwald‘s priceless donations to the National Gallery.  Rosenwald also made a major donation of rare books to the Library of Congress.  Many of those books can be viewed online.  Sadly, Rosenwald’s donations to the National Gallery are much less accessible to persons across the U.S. and across the world.

[image] Belbello da Pavia (Italian, active c. 1430 – c. 1473), Initial M: The Annunciation to the Virgin. Miniature from a choir book (antiphonal) (Lombardy), 1450/1460. Tempera and gold leaf on vellum. Rosenwald Collection, 1948. Image courtesy of the National Gallery Press Office.

cosmic regulation

We must write a law
to address the case
of a cow flying without
a tail-light in the early hours
of the night.

But there are no cows here,
only milk and steaks.
That’s not the same
as a cow.

We need to set a time
to start the night, in
each zone a time its own,
and there appears to be reason
to index by the season.

There are no cows here,
not in the dark, not in the
light, none.

Clearly cows
in the sky at night
can’t be seen when in flight.
Planes must have lights.
Cows should not have
any special rights.

There are no cows here.
And if there were,
they wouldn’t be able to fly.

We need not entertain
conjectures or complaints.
Is there any reason
why law should not apply
to every conceivable body
in the sky?