We can hope that right wing FAKE 5% FREEMASON religious players like QUAYLE and his mythology of ANTARCTICA reaches only his immediate family and friends but there are citizens even in US having no access to REAL JOURNALISM so please create media outlets locally to assure 99% of WE THE PEOPLE are able to know what is REAL NEWS.
We find articles in Google searches telling us fiber optics cable is filling the SOUTH ATLANTIC criss-crossing from South America to Africa, from Africa to Indonesia and Australia but they insist Antarctica is not in this cable network. We have known these few decades ANTARCTICA was indeed targeted as the BIG DEAD HEAD'S ENERGY SOURCE in microwave capture so no doubt there are large radio and microwave towers capturing and relaying these through those massive systems of underwater ocean cables. Why is this bad? It creates a reason to ALLOW OZONE DEPLETION with the global 1% telling 99% of WE THE PEOPLE ---DON'T WORRY ALL THESE HOLES WILL CENTER AT TOP AND BOTTOM EARTH POLES. Indeed, Earth's spin does move these dangers to poles but as we already see that HOLE GETS LARGER AND LARGER. As with CLIMATE CHANGE and 5 degree level rise in temperature ---we cannot KNOW how high these temperatures will rise nor can we KNOW how expansive these OZONE HOLES will become. Humans and all life forms will die under these OZONE HOLES due to radiation exposure. Humans and life forms in SMART CITIES will feel chronic illness and DNA denaturing from long-term exposure to 5G SATURATION WITH MICROWAVES.
All of this infrastructure development trillions and trillions of dollars spent these few decades of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA will be the major source of microwaves for 5G with the seeding for clouds over SMART CITIES attempting to keep those microwaves radiating at Earth's surface from rising and escaping into outer atmosphere.
Scenes from Antarctica
Down in Antarctica, November marks the end of spring, the beginning of austral summer, and the beginning of Antarctica's cruise season. The Sun just rose for the first time in 6 months on September 22nd, and is now visible in the sky all the time. Recent studies in Antarctica have brought new insights into the origins of deep sea octopus species (a 30 million-year-old ancestor from Antarctic waters), volcanic contributions to disappearing antarctic ice, and the effects of increasing numbers of icebergs scouring the seafloor. Collected here are 32 photographs of Antarctica from the past several years. (32 photos total)
'building a land link from the coast would total more than $200 million, while building a microwave link to McMurdo station, a larger U.S. base on the Antarctic coast with 24-hour T-1 access, would cost an estimated $45 million. Other options were also deemed too expensive'.
Here in Baltimore we had scandal around our MAYOR OF BALTIMORE and Board of Estimates installing this VoIP system in Baltimore City Hall----here we see it is tied to microwave transmission.
This article from year 2000 CLINTON/BUSH and the fraudulent Presidential elections Bush/Gore illegally placing Bush in office. Remember our ROBOT music video-----THE DISTANT FUTURE THE YEAR 2000 ROBOTS TAKE OVER THE WORLD. When we have REAL information we can stop MOVING FORWARD and reverse to 99% sustainability.
VoIP smokes at minus 100 degrees in Antarctica
Welcome to the U.S. Amundsen-Scott South Pole station home to just 250 people during the Antarctic summer and one-fifth that number the rest of the year. Until recently, their communications with the rest of the world were extremely limited. That changed with the arrival of voice over IP.
Jeff Thompson, a network engineer for the United States Antarctic Program(USAP), was responsible for upgrading communications links with the isolated Amundsen-Scott South Pole base.
Clearly, the rudimentary voice links that relied on ham radio and ATS-3, an ancient NASA satellite originally used to support the Apollo lunar missions, were simply not enough to meet the growing requirements of the scientists and support personnel at the South Pole.
But upgrading the system to handle the needs of a world-class research facility wouldn't be easy. Because of the station's isolated location and the frigid environment, building a new communications infrastructure would be very impractical -- since there are no roads leading to the station, equipment and workers have to be flown in by special military aircraft during the Antarctic summer. In addition, temperatures reaching minus 110 degrees Fahrenheit the rest of the year not only make prolonged work outside impossible, but also require equipment that can withstand the extreme conditions.
Then there were costs to consider -- laying an undersea cable beneath the churning South Atlantic and building a land link from the coast would total more than $200 million, while building a microwave link to McMurdo station, a larger U.S. base on the Antarctic coast with 24-hour T-1 access, would cost an estimated $45 million. Other options were also deemed too expensive.
In the end, Thompson's communications woes were solved by new satellite links and a new technology: voice over IP.
"The implementation of VoIP was the only solution that would allow voice traffic at a very small cost," says Thompson, a former Navy engineer who first came to Antarctica 10 years ago and is now vice president of technology at Holmes & Narver/McClier, one of the primary contractors for the USAP.
The key to setting up the voice-over-IP network was the arrival at the pole of three satellites -- GOES-3, LES-9 and TDRS F1 -- for data communications. In 1998, the University of Miami, which operates two of the satellites ground stations, installed a Selsius call manager and sent several Selsius IP phones to the South Pole for trials.
Thompson liked what he saw. "We tested them out during the summer of 1998/1999 at South Pole station," he says. "This allowed South Pole to make commercial toll-grade calls for the first time." Realizing the potential of voice over IP to drastically improve voice communications from the South Pole, Thompson and his colleagues began to explore ways to move from a testing phase to a full-scale implementation.
There were several factors that had to be taken into consideration. Because the South Pole's location falls well outside of the footprints of most geosyncronous satellites, direct links are only possible with satellites in highly inclined orbits that are only visible at certain times of the day.
Because of LES-9s limited bandwidth, it was relegated to handling low-speed Internet traffic only. TDRS F1, however, could easily manage voice-over-IP traffic on its two-way, 1024K bit/sec data link, while the satellite's one-way, 6M bit/sec transmitter could be used for the transmission of large graphic and datafiles by the astronomers, physicists and climatologists working at the South Pole. GOES-3 was also assigned voice over IP and data traffic.
At the South Pole, and at the satellite ground stations at the University of Miami and White Sands, N.M., Thompson and his colleagues gradually took on the task of expanding the voice-over-IP system. Since last June, a number of new components have been installed at the South Pole station's communications building and several outlying structures, starting with a half-dozen Cisco 12 SP+IP phones, which are plugged into a Catalyst 2924M-XL distribution switch with two 100BaseFX uplinks to a Catalyst 6509 core switch.
From there, the voice-over-IP traffic travels over fiber-optic cable to a Linux-based Netmax Firewall, then to a Packeteer PacketShaper 2000, where quality-of-service standards are applied. The traffic is then passed on to a Cisco 4000 router, and either sent to the satellite dish for GOES-3, or to a Cisco 2500 router that oversees traffic to the TDRS F1 satellite uplink.
The GOES-3 voice-over-IP traffic arrives at a ground station in Florida, where it is channeled via two T-1s to the University of Miami. The TDRS F1 traffic, on the other hand, is downlinked to White Sands and then sent over the NASA backbone, which is connected to the University of Miami by two T-1s.
At the University of Miami, the voice-over-IP traffic arrives at the university's Windows NT-based call manager before being passed off to either a Cisco DT-24+ digital voice-over-IP gateway or to one of two analog Selsius gateways, which are connected to the university's PBX. According to Thompson, there were some integration issues at the university, but these have since been overcome. Still, after his experience building and tweaking the South Pole voice-over-IP system, he hopes future product releases will include "Unix-based call managers and the ability to move phones from subnet to subnet with zero reconfiguration."
Overall, however, Thompson is extremely satisfied with the voice-over-IP phones. He adds that more improvements are on the way, in line with the South Pole Station Modernization (SPSM) project, a $128 million endeavor to modernize the living quarters, scientific equipment, support buildings and IT infrastructure at the Amundsen-Scott base and outlying scientific structures by 2005.
"We currently have six phones scattered around the station, and as part of the SPSM we'll [probably] be installing a total Ethernet-based phone system. We will, however, have analog copper lines for 911 services," he says. Other upgrades under consideration involve adding up to 15 more IP phones, incorporating a planned link to the Marisat F2 satellite and building a new ground station at the South Pole.
There is also talk of discarding the Ethernet-based phone system in favor of a different architecture that would include a traditional PBX with a voice-over-IP interface at the pole. Cost-wise, Thompson is pleased with the way voice over IP has worked out. The Cisco IP phones cost $350 apiece, and much of the other recently purchased gear was included in the budget for the ongoing SPSM network upgrades. "My network upgrade budget for this year, which included a core switch, eight distribution switches and the Packeteer, was around $175,000," he says. "We got really good pricing."
Users who have tried new voice-over-IP system are ecstatic with the improvement in communications. Steve Barwick, a scientist working on the Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array (AMANDA) astronomy project at the pole, remembers all too well the days before voice over IP.
"When I first started to come to [the] pole in 1992, communication was very restrictive," Barwick says. "Bandwidth was limited, so e-mail was censored to ensure that only business-related communication took place. For personal communication, a ham radio was used to patch to the phone system in the U.S. Sometimes four people were listening to your call, so privacy was not a strong concern."
Barwick says there is a direct correlation between the integrated voice-over-IP/data traffic system and the amount of science that can be conducted by the AMANDA team.
"The voice-over-IP phone is now a useful scientific tool, since we can call from any phone at the station. This is a wonderful advance," Barwick says. "Imagine what it was like two years ago. If there was an unexpected problem and we needed to talk to a colleague in the U.S. or Europe and the satellite was up, we would walk about 1 kilometer to the phone, then usually wait for a clear period, and then get a busy signal or no answer. Compare that to now. We can call from the building that we normally work in. If the person on the other line is out, we can leave a message and that person can call us back. Voice communication becomes a viable tool when there is this level of convenience." Thompson agrees: "VoIP has really changed the way we do business."
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While local media makes all this about CORRUPTION and revenue waste-----no information telling 99% of WE THE PEOPLE VoIP is microwave transmission tied to 5G. We would have had open public discussions about all this in Clinton-era 1990s----we would have had more public policy debates before installation of these infrastructures-----and today we would have lots and lots of REAL left non-profits leading marches and shaking fists at global Wall Street Baltimore Development and global Johns Hopkins----those institutions promoting 5G SMART CITIES in Baltimore--and yes, historically black college Morgan State and University of Maryland Baltimore.
All this occurred at the same time US Treasury bond and state/local municipal bond frauds were setting the stage for massive movement of revenue from our government agencies......AGAIN.
So, VoIP is 5G is microwave adding yet another product filling our US cities with ambient microwave on the road to SATURATION. These VoIP cables are connected to underwater SOUTH ATLANTIC cables connected to ANTARCTIC cables.
admin • June 29, 2012
VoIP War Rocks Baltimore City Hall
So it seems that the city of Baltimore came to the same conclusion as more and more enterprises of all sizes have – that switching to voip phone service can save lots of money. In the case of the municipal government of Baltimore, the estimate is millions of dollars per year. And that’s cold, hard taxpayer cash, folks.
It would all seem pretty straightforward, except for the fact that the transition to VoIP has sparked an ugly little turf war in the city. In one corner is Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. In the other is Comptroller Joan Pratt. The background is simple: The comptroller’s turf has included the city government’s telephone system going all the way back to the 1940s. Data processing, meanwhile, has been in the mayor’s province.
Rawlings-Blake set off a bomb when she bought 80 VoIP phones, using an existing city data processing purchasing contract. Pratt, who had plans for a VoIP system going out for bid, screamed foul. A few days ago City Solicitor George Nilson ruled that what Rawlings-Blake did was legal. Pratt’s threatened to hire an outside lawyer to review that opinion.
Basically what we have here is what’s emerging throughout the enterprise world (and government is an enterprise for purposes of this analysis). The simple fact is that VoIP rides on the data networks run by data departments. Traditional enterprise telephony departments are being cut out of the loop, and they don’t like it. Indeed its particularly hard for them to explain why the million dollar PBX they bought not that many years ago is no longer needed in this brave new world of the virtual PBX.
But, turf wars aside, what I see as most significant is that all sides agree that VoIP can cut an enterprise’s telephony costs by substantial amounts. And for smaller enterprises, all the way down to the SOHO market, the turf battles at large corporate entities aren’t relevant, since at smaller companies typically the same folk are responsible for voice and data.
Put another way, no matter who wins the turf wars, enterprise VoIP is the real winner.
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Here are the community groups selling the idea that SMART CITIES is a good thing------getting those 99% of WE THE PEOPLE feeling like SMART CITIES will include them when these 5% global 1% players---black, white, and brown citizens KNOW these policies are VERY, VERY, VERY bad for US cities and citizens.
In Baltimore we have what are called ANCHOR INSTITUTIONS----that is Morgan State University, Johns Hopkins, and University of Maryland Baltimore all having executive boards filled with those 5% ----working to install 5G SMART CITY structures in early stages by PRETENDING TO BE HELPING THE POOR.
Here in Baltimore we have our local TECH MEDIA outlets working for global 1% keeping 99% of citizens UNINFORMED as to goals and conditions created.
'To close out the day, the new, seven-startup cohort of Conscious Venture Lab will officially be launched'.
We shout against this START UP ECONOMY without connections to 5G ---but here we are shouting, this SMART CITIES start up economy is simply trying to justify installing a very bad infrastructure that will kill 99% of WE THE PEOPLE. Each US CITY DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE has these 5% players MOVING FORWARD 5G microwave SMART CITIES.
Sep. 26, 2017 12:23 pm
Innovation Village brings Smart Cities Summit to West Baltimore
The event puts a focus on technology that's changing cities, as well as how to make sure the benefits reach everyone. It's being held during Baltimore Innovation Week.
By Stephen Babcock / reporter
The term “smart city” often brings thoughts of new technological tools to improve civic functions.
For Andre Robinson, however, people are also front and center in the conversation.
The executive director of the Mt. Royal Community Development Corporation sees key questions for Baltimore as it prepares for the future: “What city could consider itself smart if it’s not inclusive? How do you become a smart city if it’s not for the benefit of as many people as you can get into the mix?”
That will be one jumping-off point for the conversations at next week’s Smart Cities Summit. Organized by Innovation Village, the Oct. 2 event will be held during Baltimore Innovation Week. The daylong event will take on many of the themes at play in the creation of an innovation district in West Baltimore.
Like innovation districts that are rising around the country, the effort focuses on aligning companies, talent and capital around startups and small businesses in a highly-concentrated area. The West Baltimore effort also extends the innovation economy into an area of this majority-Black city where decades-old inequalities come into sharpest relief, yet has talented entrepreneurs, universities, transit and parks, Robinson said.
“All the ingredients are baked in,” he said. We have everything that we need.”More than 500 leaders were invited to the daylong event at the new Conscious Venture Lab space at Baltimore City Community Colleges seeking to shine a light on unique tech and innovation efforts taking place inside the city, which will be highlighted in a panel moderated by Innovation Villages CEO Richard May.
Projects from outside the city will also be highlighted by speakers including
To close out the day, the new, seven-startup cohort of Conscious Venture Lab will officially be launched.
While there will be plenty of networking, the organizers also want to create a platform that can inspire action, Robinson said.
“The fundamental premise is that Baltimore is what’s next,” Robinson said.
OH, REALLY??????
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We will segue into closer looks at our local universities having been taken corporate these few decades filled with corporate executives as board and committee members replacing what were ACADEMIC professors. Our southern universities right wing Republican have always been corporate but our north and western public universities were filled with REAL left social progressive academics like us-----replaced as Clinton expanded corporatized higher education.
Please think of the national and international news being broadcast in mainstream media ----we are seeing all kinds of FAKE NEWS as with ANTARCTICA now with ARCTIC region. This is home of HAARP antennae with stories of high-powered lasers beaming at NORTH POLE to deliberately create that same OZONE HOLE at north as exists in south just to capture those same microwaves to fuel 5G SMART CITIES.
All this technology being developed because these products tied to microwave will be needed for space colonies along with the robotics.
Educate broadly because news media is filled with propaganda and myths around our ARCTIC 5G development as well. We are questioning whether these stories of high-energy beams opening the OZONE LAYER in the north are real because remember, it is the ARCTIC CIRCLE to where that global 1% will need to set up those MINING SHAFT ECO-DOME LUXURY APARTMENTS. Those global 1% whose only talent is LYING, CHEATING, STEALING ---living for today are crazy enough to open both EARTH POLES to harvest microwaves.
'Quintillion Networks'------OH, REALLY????
We can see why an ALASKAN Sarah Palin hit mainstream politics as Alaska is central in these microwave and fiber optic cable installations. As is always said----WE CANNOT PUT LIPSTICK ON THESE 5% AND 1% PIGS...black, white, and brown citizens!
Arctic Fibre Acquired by Quintillion Networks
Winston Qiu
Arctic Fiber
22 May 2016
Quintillion Subsea Holdings LLC (“Quintillion”) announced on 18th May 2016 that it has acquired the assets of Arctic Fibre as part of a plan to build a submarine fibre optic cable from Asia to Europe with the first phase in Alaska.
Quintillion will build, own and operate the network. The founding shareholders of Arctic Fibre hold an ownership stake in Quintillion and Michael Cunningham, the CEO of Arctic Fibre, has joined the board of Quintillion. Cooper Investment Partners, a New York-based private investment firm, is the majority investor in Quintillion.
The Alaska segment of the project is the first phase of a three-phase project to connect Asia and Europe through the Arctic. Phase two will be constructed from Alaska to Japan, and phase three will connect Alaska to Europe via the Canadian Arctic.
Construction activities are currently underway in Alaska to complete phase one, which includes the installation of a 1,850km subsea fibre optic cable from Prudhoe Bay to Nome with spurs to the Alaska communities of Barrow, Wainwright, Point Hope, and Kotzebue.
The Quintillion cable system will make available much-needed bandwidth to these communities by early 2017.
In addition to phase one of Quintillion’s subsea system, a new terrestrial fibre optic cable is under construction and will provide connectivity from Prudhoe Bay to Fairbanks, Alaska. At Fairbanks, the fibre will connect to existing networks reaching Anchorage, Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, providing a fibre link between the continental United States and the Arctic.
Phase two, the Pacific segment, is intended to extend the backbone cable laid off the Alaska coast west, from the branching unit offshore Nome, to Japan with options for additional spurs into Alaska. Phase two will create additional redundancies of service to the System and open new markets for the project.
Phase three is planned to extend the subsea system from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska east through the Northwest Passage, south of Greenland, across the Atlantic Ocean to the United Kingdom with spurs into select communities in the Canadian Arctic. Once completed, phase three will provide multiple redundancies for the System and open additional international markets.
In connection with the transaction, Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. acted as exclusive financial advisor to Arctic Fibre.
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WATCH OUT GLOBAL 99%-----these are the cities where citizens will be studied to see the effects of saturated microwaves---living, breathing, eating, covered inside and out with robotics with antennae capturing and transferring microwave energy for 5G.
All those UNITED NATIONS ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE GLOBAL 1% NGOs pretending to be fighting for OPEN BORDER justice for global labor pool 99% calling what will become US SMART CITIES---sanctuary cities KNOW these are the first cities where citizens will be exposed and studied for that exposure to microwaves so these global 1% and their 2% UNITED NATIONS OPEN BORDERS citizens and their 5% ALT RIGHT ALT LEFT players are no friend to our global 99% citizens----steering them right into 5G MICROWAVE SMART CITY TEST GROUNDS.
Is that like the US nuclear bomb testing in Nevada and Utah where our military were allowed to stand close to atomic mushroom cloud for maximum exposure knowing of ill effects? ABSOLUTELY.
All of this MOVING FORWARD 5G installation and operation will take a few generations to have the worst of effects this is why 21st century agenda needs to STOP MOVING FORWARD.
Ionospheric Heaters: How HAARP really works
By Jim Lee
Saturday, Oct 18, 2014
Please be aware of sensational reporting on HAARP-----again, there are extremes at both end of news media.
Crunching a list of variables about innovation and sustainability, we rank the world’s smartest cities, from New York to Hong Kong (and with an unexpected winner)
By Boyd Cohen
Last year, I spent considerable time researching best practices for climate resilient cities–an endeavor that culminated in what I believe was the first ever global ranking of resilient cities. Now, after extensive research on smart cities initiatives around the globe, I have developed what may be the first ever global rankings of smart cities.
A note on methodology: There are many other rankings that are relevant to this conversation. I leveraged about a dozen global and regional rankings of smart-city components in order to develop a global ranking of smart cities.
I took into account the Innovation Cities Top 100 Index from 2thinknow to get a fair comparison of the level of innovation in top global cities. I also used more well-known rankings of the quality of life of cities, as well as the Siemens regional rankings of green cities, the digital city rankings of Digital Community for cities in the U.S. (indicated as DC in the table), and the IDC rankings of smart cities in Spain (indicated as IDC in the table). Finally, I used the digital governance in municipalities worldwide study to compare cities on their innovative use of ICT.
I am including a table which summarizes the rankings used to develop this first global ranking of smart cities.
The term “smart cities” is a bit ambiguous. Some people choose a narrow definition–i.e. cities that use information and communication technologies to deliver services to their citizens. I prefer a broader definition: Smart cities use information and communication technologies (ICT) to be more intelligent and efficient in the use of resources, resulting in cost and energy savings, improved service delivery and quality of life, and reduced environmental footprint–all supporting innovation and the low-carbon economy.
IT'S ALL ABOUT LOW-CARBON SAVING THE ENVIRONMENT----BUT IT KILLS THE EARTH'S ENVIRONMENT!
Here, then, are the top 10 smart cities:
1.) Vienna. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, as going into the research I had not heard much about Vienna as a smart city. But Vienna was the only city that ranked in the top 10 in every category: innovation city (5), regional green city (4), quality of life (1) and digital governance (8). Vienna is establishing bold smart-city targets and tracking their progress to reach them, with programs like the Smart Energy Vision 2050, Roadmap 2020, and Action Plan 2012-2015. Vienna’s planners are incorporating stakeholder consultation processes into building and executing carbon reduction, transportation and land-use planning changes in the hopes of making the city a major European player in smart city technologies.
2.) Toronto. The highest rated smart city in North America, Toronto also scores pretty well across the board. Recognizing its importance in the movement, IBM recently opened a Business Analytics Solutions Center in Toronto. Toronto is also an active member of the Clinton 40 (C40) megacities, which seek to transition to the low-carbon economy. The private sector in Toronto is collaborating too, creating a Smart Commute Toronto initiative in the hopes of increasing transit efficiency in the metro area. Toronto also recently began using natural gas from landfills to power the city’s garbage trucks. That’s smart closed-loop thinking.
3.) Paris. As is typical of sustainability-related rankings, Europe fared well. Paris was highly rated in several categories including innovation (3), green cities in Europe (10), and digital governance (11). Paris was already on the world map for its highly successful bike sharing program, Velib, and just last month, the mayor launched a similar model for small EVs called Autolib, which currently has 250 rental stations.
4.) New York. New York scored higher than most other cities in the ranking in all of the categories outside of quality of life, where it ranked a miserable 47th. New York partnered with IBM in 2009 to launch the IBM Business Analytics Solution Center to address “the growing demand for the complex capabilities needed to build smarter cities and help clients optimize all manner of business processes and business decisions.” In New York, IBM is already helping the city prevent fires and protect first responders as well as identify questionable tax refund claims–a move that is expected to save the city about $100 million over a five-year period.
5.) London. The UK capital also scored relatively high across the board. London has been well-recognized for some of its sustainability innovations (i.e. congestion tax) and its robust transit system. The city will soon be home to Smart Cities research center housed at Imperial College, which will leverage transport, government, business, academic and consumer data in hopes of making the city more efficient and innovative. Just the other day, London announced a partnership with O2 to launch the largest free Wi-Fi network in Europe.
6.) Tokyo. Tokyo is the first Asian city on this list, scoring well in the innovation (22) and digital city (15) categories. Last year, the city announced plans to create a smart town in the suburbs. In partnership with Panasonic, Accenture, and Tokyo Gas (among others), the eco-burb will contain homes that integrate solar panels, storage batteries, and energy efficient appliances all connected to a smart grid. Tokyo is also focused on promoting smart mobility solutions.
7.) Berlin. Berlin also performs well across the board, with good scores in innovation (14), green-ness (8th in Europe) and quality of life (17). In collaboration with Vattenfall, BMW, and others, Berlin is testing out vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technologies in the hopes of creating a virtual power plant from electric vehicles.
8.) Copenhagen. Lately, it seems Copenhagen has been doing a lot right. It was rated number one on the green scale in Europe by Siemens and also achieved number one ranking in my global resilient cities ranking last year. All with good reason: Copenhagen is taking a real leadership role on sustainable innovation. The city has committed to carbon neutrality by 2025 and 40% of its citizens regularly commute via bicycle. Furthermore, I was quite impressed with the way their mayor, Frank Jensen, recently articulated the role of cities as growth engines and the potential to stimulate the economy through cleantech innovation.
9.) Hong Kong. Hong Kong scored quite well in key areas, including the digital governance ranking (3). However, its quality-of-life score (70) dropped the city down to ninth in my ranking of smart cities. Hong Kong is experimenting with RFID technology in its airport, as well as throughout the agriculture supply chain. The city has also been a leader in the use and adoption of smart cards, which are already used by millions of residents for services like public transit, library access, building access, shopping, and car parks.
10.) Barcelona. Barcelona was recently ranked the number two smart city in Spain in the IDC report, and with good reason. The city is a pioneer in smart city and low-carbon solutions. It was among the first in the world to introduce a solar thermal ordinance about a decade ago, recently launched the LIVE EV project to promote the adoption of EVs and charging infrastructure, and the city also recently announced a major partnership to develop a living lab for smart-city innovation.
There were many other strong candidates which are runners-up in this first ranking, including Amsterdam, Melbourne, Seattle, São Paulo, Stockholm, and Vancouver.
Pundits and industry insiders expect smart cities to become a sizable market, with projections of nearly $40 billion spent on smart-cities technologies by 2016. And real estate experts predict that smart cities will in the future be attractive to the educated work force and will therefore become real-estate gold. All reasons enough to get on the smart-city bandwagon. Who knows? Maybe next year your city could crack the top 10 rankings.
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“The cost of providing TV programming continues to rise,” the company said in an email notifying customers of the rate increase. The price change will hit existing customers paying $130 a month for Fiber 1000Mbps service + TV. Current customers will pay $150 a month going forward. New customers will pay $10 more for the bundle – $160 a month'.
Here comes the culling of services handed free or low-price and here comes the ever-rising rates to access internet as 5G claims these expensive infrastructure and technology require market-rate prices and global corporations will be the only ones affording those prices. This article shows all that was FREE AND DEMOCRATIZING about these 1G, 2G, 3G, 4G is now unprofitable and need to be axed.
99% WE THE PEOPLE MUST SIMPLY STOP MOVING FORWARD END US CITIES DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE DESIGNATION, STOP BUILDING GLOBAL CORPORATE CAMPUSES, AND REBUILD LOCAL, SMALL BUSINESSES AND SMALL BUSINESS MANUFACTURING, AND KEEP OUR INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE FREE FROM 5G.
WHERE DID IT ALL GO WRONG? WE THE PEOPLE THE 99% ALLOWED CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA NOW TRUMP AND THEIR 5% ROBBER BARON POLS AND PLAYERS CONTROL OUR GOVERNMENT.
There will be no ability to opt for only 1G texting or 2G cell phone or 3G Smart phone or 4G Smart phone streaming video-----it will be a 5G package and costs will be sky high.
Stop the Cap!
Promoting Better Broadband, Fighting Data Caps and Usage-Based Billing
The End of Google Fiber Expansion: Where Did It All Go Wrong?
Phillip Dampier October 5, 2017
Alphabet, the parent company of Google Fiber, has lost interest in expanding its fiber to the home service and is showing signs of pulling the plug on its cable television alternative while it drags its feet on keeping promised rollout commitments.
The first sign of trouble for the upstart fiber network came as early as 2015, when without warning Google co-founder Larry Page suddenly unveiled Alphabet, a new holding company that would be at the heart of Google and its many ventures, including Google Fiber. The concept was tailor-made to please Wall Street and investors, because it would better expose which Google projects were earning money and which were hemorrhaging cash with no sign of profitability. But an equally important event occurred in May with the hiring of Ruth Porat, who would become Alphabet’s chief financial officer.
Known inside by some at Google as “Ruthless Ruth,” Porat is Wall Street’s definition of a proper executive that keeps shareholder interests first in mind. Porat lead Morgan Stanley’s technology banking division at the heart of the first dot.com boom in the late 1990s, served as an adviser to the Treasury Department on the taxpayer bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and was chief financial officer at Morgan Stanley by 2010. Her mission at Google: put an end to expensive innovation for innovation’s sake. If a project did not show signs of making money for shareholders, it would face intense scrutiny under her watch.
Her key priorities are “discipline” and “focus,” something Google never had to be concerned with while earning truckloads of ad-click cash. Google’s reputation for cool innovation and free services earned the company a lot of goodwill with the public, but that left money on the table for investors who want the company to step up shareholder value. Google’s founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page had enjoyed a long run innovating and announcing new projects, including scanning every printed book on the planet, giving away e-mail and office apps, and laying fiber optic cables to deliver the kind of internet service big phone and cable companies were not delivering. The company also acquired other innovators, including Nest Labs — which made connected thermostats and Webpass, which provides wireless high-speed internet access.
But for all of its success, Google also had several high-profile failures that cost billions, setting the stage for future project accountability.
One of the biggest failures was its Google Glass wearable tech project. The first edition, dubbed Explorer, was a flop and received terrible reviews. But the device also clashed with a country increasingly preoccupied with personal privacy. Not everyone appreciated Google Glass’ always-watching camera pointing in their direction, and some wearing the device were derided as “glassholes.”
“I was a Google Glass Explorer, and the experience was horrible from the start. Google Glass now sits in my office museum of failed products,” said Tim Bajarin, President of Creative Strategies Inc. in this post at re/code. “The UI was terrible, the connection unreliable and the info it delivered had little use to me. It was the worst $1,500 I have ever spent in my life. On the other hand, as a researcher, it was a great tool to help me understand what not to do when creating a product for the consumer.”
Google Glass: a major misstep
Google’s other experiments weren’t exactly pulling in a lot of money either. The company’s vision of driver-less cars met the reality of real world driving conditions (some accidents were the result) and traffic planning and safety regulators were cautious about giving a green light to the concept on American streets and highways. A long-time favorite project of Brin and Page, Project Loon — sending 100,000 balloons, blimps, and/or drones into the sky to deliver internet access is still seen by conventional wisdom as weird. These and other experimental projects lost $3.6 billion of Google’s revenue in 2016, almost twice as much as they lost the company in 2014.
After “Ruthless Ruth” entered the picture, as Bloomberg News documented, it appeared the open door to the experiment lab was closed and an exodus of project leaders and engineers began:
Six months after Teller’s rousing speech, Loon’s Mike Cassidy stepped down as project leader. Around the same time, Urmson, the self-driving car engineer, left Alphabet, as did David Vos, the head of X’s drone effort, Project Wing. Vos’s top deputy, Sean Mullaney, left the company as well. Other recent departures: Craig Barratt, chief executive officer of Access, its telecom division; Bill Maris, the CEO of its venture capital arm, GV; and Tony Fadell, the CEO of smart-thermostat company Nest, who was also working on a reboot of Google Glass. That project, now called Aura, also lost its leads of user design and engineering.
Barratt: The former head of Google Access.
The bean counters also arrived at Google Access — the division responsible for Google Fiber — and by October 2016, Google simultaneously announced it was putting a hold on further expansion of Google Fiber and its CEO, Craig Barratt, was leaving the company. About 10% of employees in the division involuntarily left with him. Insufficiently satisfied with those cutbacks, additional measures were announced in April 2017 including the departure of Milo Medin, a vice president at Google Access and Dennis Kish, a wireless infrastructure veteran who was president of Google Fiber. Nearly 600 Google Access employees were also reassigned to other divisions. Medin was a Google Fiber evangelist in Washington, and often spoke about the impact Google’s fiber project would have on broadband competition and the digital economy.
Porat’s philosophy had a sweeping impact on Alphabet and its various divisions. The most visionary/experimental projects that were originally green-lit with no expectation of making money for a decade or more now required a plan to prove profitability in five years or less. Wall Street was delighted and Alphabet’s stock was up 35% since “Ruthless Ruth” arrived, winning praise for remaking Alphabet/Google into a conventional American corporation using familiar corporate principles.
But Alphabet’s transition seems to break a promise Google co-founders Brin and Page made when Google became a public company in 2004.
“We do not intend to become one.”
Both men promised Google would never focus on short-term profitability and would encourage employees to devote 20% of their working hours on exactly the kinds of innovative projects and product developments Porat was intent on cutting or killing. Porat even has a willing army of helpers — executives were paid bonuses to kill their projects before expenses got out of hand. This helped halt development of Tableau, a project to create enormous size TV screens originally championed by Brin.
Porat also had a major hand in slashing the budget at Google’s Nest Labs division. Google spent $3.2 billion acquiring the home thermostat and smoke alarm company in 2014. Nest CEO Tony Fadell came along as part of the deal and was initially considered a major asset, having been the former Apple engineer who built the original iPod prototype. But Fadell clashed with Google’s culture and reports surfaced he was a tyrannical boss comparable to Steve Jobs at his nastiest. Google executives expected more products out of the Nest division, and didn’t get them. Fadell blamed employees and ruthless budget cuts that broke Google’s commitment to allow Nest to lose up to $500 million annually for the first five years under Google’s ownership. Even when Nest managed to generated $340 million in revenue in 2015, Porat wasn’t pleased. The higher-ups expected more considering the amount of money Google spent buying Nest Labs.
Google Fiber was launched knowing it would take billions of dollars and years to pay off for Google. Laying fiber optic cable is expensive, time-consuming, and frequently bureaucratic. Google projects that still have support from Brin and Page are usually protected from Porat’s red pencil, but if either’s optimism waivers, Porat is likely to start cutting.
By the time Barratt tried to jump-start excitement for the slowly progressing fiber service by announcing a series of new launch cities, Page appeared to have lost interest. Former employees say Page became frustrated with Google Fiber’s lack of progress.
“Larry just thought it wasn’t game-changing enough,” says a former Page adviser. “There’s no flying-saucer shit in laying fiber.”
Charter Communications took out newspaper ads trumpeting Google’s abandonment of some of its potential fiber customers in Kansas City.
Left unprotected, Porat’s budget cutters invaded and further fiber expansion has been suspended, except in areas where Google was already committed to provide the service. But the cutbacks have been so significant, cities are now complaining Google is dragging its feet on its commitments.
In Kansas City — the first to get Google Fiber, the network remains incomplete. In March 2017, Google signaled it was likely to remain incomplete indefinitely after returning hundreds of $10 deposits — many paid years earlier — to residents who were informed Google Fiber would no longer expand into their neighborhoods. In the last two years, Google has become very conservative about the neighborhoods where it will expand service. In most cases, the company now targets multi-dwelling units like condos and apartments, which are cheaper to serve than single family homes.
In late September, Atlanta noticed Google Fiber was stalled in the city and nearby Sandy Springs and Brookhaven. A clear sign Google had effectively suspended construction was a sudden end to construction permit applications around six months ago. Google Fiber denies it is pulling out, but city officials notice work progress has slowed to a crawl.
“Google Fiber is currently available in over 100 residential buildings in the metro Atlanta area and in several neighborhoods in the center of the city. We’re working hard to connect as many people as possible, and encourage people to sign up for updates on our website,” a Google Fiber spokesperson said.
There have been similar problems with Google Fiber expansion in several Texas cities. Some neighborhood residents complained about shoddy installation work because of poor quality third-party contractors, and expansion has slowed down markedly in many areas.
Ironically, AT&T may have been responsible for helping kill Page’s enthusiasm for Google Fiber, serving as a regular obstacle to Google Fiber’s expansion in states like Tennessee where it has been delayed by bureaucratic pole attachment disputes, some resulting in legal action. For Ma Bell and its progeny, a five-year delay is nothing for a company that has been around since the early 1900s and took decades to build out its original telephone network.
Google Fiber Huts – Nashville, Tenn.
Utilities employ a small army of workers that do nothing but deal in a world of tariffs, permit applications, and various filings to regulatory bodies that still govern parts of their operations. For a dot.com company in a hurry, filing permit applications, negotiating pole attachment agreements, hiring subcontractors that can meet regulated specifications, and dealing with incomplete or inaccurate infrastructure maps could be hell on earth. But for phone and cable companies, it is just another day on the job, and their “concern trolling” over the danger of allowing a neophyte like Google to mess with existing electric, phone, and cable wiring to make room for fiber did give some local officials pause.
Page’s hurry to accomplish his fiber dreams were effectively dashed by AT&T’s very close relationship with local officials and its ability to generate a mountain of regulatory and legal paperwork. As a result, Google admitted with great frustration that in Nashville, after months of work, it had only upgraded 33 telephone poles out of 88,000 in the city. The delay also took its toll on a Nashville-based subcontractor helping to build out Google Fiber in the city. Phoenix of Tennessee declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September with liabilities between $1-10 million. It also laid off 70 employees. The reason? Google Fiber is stalled in the city.
One Alphabet employee mischaracterized the end effect of the dispute in comments to the Wall Street Journal last year, “Everyone who has done fiber to the home has given up because it costs way too much money and takes way too much time.”
Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Project summarized the situation more succinctly for Gizmodo: “the new guy gets screwed.”
Yet it would be more accurate to say companies with short attention spans and an evolving commitment away from innovation and towards Wall Street and its fixation on short-term results will have more difficulty than other companies and communities that have successfully built fiber networks with a patient focus on the future.
Porat has been defending Alphabet’s increasingly conservative spending plans and pull-backs.
“As we reach for moonshots,” she told investors on a financial results conference call, “it’s inevitable that there will be course corrections along the way.” She called some of the shifting priorities and cutbacks “taking a pause” in some areas of business to “lay the foundation for a stronger future.”
For Google Fiber, that is coming in a number of different directions.
The company this week announced it is pulling back on offering cable television service in its new markets, including Louisville, Ky., and San Antonio, Tex., and is raising rates $20-30 a month for bundled customers in areas where television service is still being sold.
“The cost of providing TV programming continues to rise,” the company said in an email notifying customers of the rate increase. The price change will hit existing customers paying $130 a month for Fiber 1000Mbps service + TV. Current customers will pay $150 a month going forward. New customers will pay $10 more for the bundle – $160 a month.
“We’re not afraid to try new things as part of our normal way of doing business, focused on the end goal of getting superfast internet into people’s homes,” wrote head of sales and marketing for Google Access Cathy Fogler in a blog post.
Google Fiber has been a minor player in the cable television business, according to analysts, attracting around 54,000 customers nationwide as of December — only 24,000 more than it had in 2014.
As for the future, with Porat in charge of finances, it is likely Google will downscale expectations and rely on its acquisition of Webpass for future expansion, providing high-speed wireless internet to multi-dwelling apartments, condos, and businesses in dense urban areas. That eliminates costly fiber expansion to individual homes or businesses and is much less expensive to install and maintain.
Any plans for a major Google Fiber push in the future seems unlikely, considering Wall Street’s demands for Return On Investment are not easily tempered. That leaves independent local overbuilders with established ties to their communities the most likely to pick up where Google Fiber has left off. But even those are in short supply. Like any major project of this scope, the best option for getting fiber optics in your community, assuming the local cable or phone company isn’t doing it already, is to treat it as a public infrastructure project like water, sewer, roads or sidewalks.
Most cities were all too happy to compete for Google’s attention (and infrastructure investment). But now that is no longer likely, and many communities will have to decide for themselves which side of the digital divide they want to live in -- the side without 21st century broadband or the side that has elected to control their own broadband future and not wait for someone else to get the job done.
We find articles in Google searches telling us fiber optics cable is filling the SOUTH ATLANTIC criss-crossing from South America to Africa, from Africa to Indonesia and Australia but they insist Antarctica is not in this cable network. We have known these few decades ANTARCTICA was indeed targeted as the BIG DEAD HEAD'S ENERGY SOURCE in microwave capture so no doubt there are large radio and microwave towers capturing and relaying these through those massive systems of underwater ocean cables. Why is this bad? It creates a reason to ALLOW OZONE DEPLETION with the global 1% telling 99% of WE THE PEOPLE ---DON'T WORRY ALL THESE HOLES WILL CENTER AT TOP AND BOTTOM EARTH POLES. Indeed, Earth's spin does move these dangers to poles but as we already see that HOLE GETS LARGER AND LARGER. As with CLIMATE CHANGE and 5 degree level rise in temperature ---we cannot KNOW how high these temperatures will rise nor can we KNOW how expansive these OZONE HOLES will become. Humans and all life forms will die under these OZONE HOLES due to radiation exposure. Humans and life forms in SMART CITIES will feel chronic illness and DNA denaturing from long-term exposure to 5G SATURATION WITH MICROWAVES.
All of this infrastructure development trillions and trillions of dollars spent these few decades of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA will be the major source of microwaves for 5G with the seeding for clouds over SMART CITIES attempting to keep those microwaves radiating at Earth's surface from rising and escaping into outer atmosphere.
Scenes from Antarctica
Down in Antarctica, November marks the end of spring, the beginning of austral summer, and the beginning of Antarctica's cruise season. The Sun just rose for the first time in 6 months on September 22nd, and is now visible in the sky all the time. Recent studies in Antarctica have brought new insights into the origins of deep sea octopus species (a 30 million-year-old ancestor from Antarctic waters), volcanic contributions to disappearing antarctic ice, and the effects of increasing numbers of icebergs scouring the seafloor. Collected here are 32 photographs of Antarctica from the past several years. (32 photos total)
'building a land link from the coast would total more than $200 million, while building a microwave link to McMurdo station, a larger U.S. base on the Antarctic coast with 24-hour T-1 access, would cost an estimated $45 million. Other options were also deemed too expensive'.
Here in Baltimore we had scandal around our MAYOR OF BALTIMORE and Board of Estimates installing this VoIP system in Baltimore City Hall----here we see it is tied to microwave transmission.
This article from year 2000 CLINTON/BUSH and the fraudulent Presidential elections Bush/Gore illegally placing Bush in office. Remember our ROBOT music video-----THE DISTANT FUTURE THE YEAR 2000 ROBOTS TAKE OVER THE WORLD. When we have REAL information we can stop MOVING FORWARD and reverse to 99% sustainability.
VoIP smokes at minus 100 degrees in Antarctica
- Ian Lamont (Computerworld Antarctica)
- 03 June, 2000 11:54
Welcome to the U.S. Amundsen-Scott South Pole station home to just 250 people during the Antarctic summer and one-fifth that number the rest of the year. Until recently, their communications with the rest of the world were extremely limited. That changed with the arrival of voice over IP.
Jeff Thompson, a network engineer for the United States Antarctic Program(USAP), was responsible for upgrading communications links with the isolated Amundsen-Scott South Pole base.
Clearly, the rudimentary voice links that relied on ham radio and ATS-3, an ancient NASA satellite originally used to support the Apollo lunar missions, were simply not enough to meet the growing requirements of the scientists and support personnel at the South Pole.
But upgrading the system to handle the needs of a world-class research facility wouldn't be easy. Because of the station's isolated location and the frigid environment, building a new communications infrastructure would be very impractical -- since there are no roads leading to the station, equipment and workers have to be flown in by special military aircraft during the Antarctic summer. In addition, temperatures reaching minus 110 degrees Fahrenheit the rest of the year not only make prolonged work outside impossible, but also require equipment that can withstand the extreme conditions.
Then there were costs to consider -- laying an undersea cable beneath the churning South Atlantic and building a land link from the coast would total more than $200 million, while building a microwave link to McMurdo station, a larger U.S. base on the Antarctic coast with 24-hour T-1 access, would cost an estimated $45 million. Other options were also deemed too expensive.
In the end, Thompson's communications woes were solved by new satellite links and a new technology: voice over IP.
"The implementation of VoIP was the only solution that would allow voice traffic at a very small cost," says Thompson, a former Navy engineer who first came to Antarctica 10 years ago and is now vice president of technology at Holmes & Narver/McClier, one of the primary contractors for the USAP.
The key to setting up the voice-over-IP network was the arrival at the pole of three satellites -- GOES-3, LES-9 and TDRS F1 -- for data communications. In 1998, the University of Miami, which operates two of the satellites ground stations, installed a Selsius call manager and sent several Selsius IP phones to the South Pole for trials.
Thompson liked what he saw. "We tested them out during the summer of 1998/1999 at South Pole station," he says. "This allowed South Pole to make commercial toll-grade calls for the first time." Realizing the potential of voice over IP to drastically improve voice communications from the South Pole, Thompson and his colleagues began to explore ways to move from a testing phase to a full-scale implementation.
There were several factors that had to be taken into consideration. Because the South Pole's location falls well outside of the footprints of most geosyncronous satellites, direct links are only possible with satellites in highly inclined orbits that are only visible at certain times of the day.
Because of LES-9s limited bandwidth, it was relegated to handling low-speed Internet traffic only. TDRS F1, however, could easily manage voice-over-IP traffic on its two-way, 1024K bit/sec data link, while the satellite's one-way, 6M bit/sec transmitter could be used for the transmission of large graphic and datafiles by the astronomers, physicists and climatologists working at the South Pole. GOES-3 was also assigned voice over IP and data traffic.
At the South Pole, and at the satellite ground stations at the University of Miami and White Sands, N.M., Thompson and his colleagues gradually took on the task of expanding the voice-over-IP system. Since last June, a number of new components have been installed at the South Pole station's communications building and several outlying structures, starting with a half-dozen Cisco 12 SP+IP phones, which are plugged into a Catalyst 2924M-XL distribution switch with two 100BaseFX uplinks to a Catalyst 6509 core switch.
From there, the voice-over-IP traffic travels over fiber-optic cable to a Linux-based Netmax Firewall, then to a Packeteer PacketShaper 2000, where quality-of-service standards are applied. The traffic is then passed on to a Cisco 4000 router, and either sent to the satellite dish for GOES-3, or to a Cisco 2500 router that oversees traffic to the TDRS F1 satellite uplink.
The GOES-3 voice-over-IP traffic arrives at a ground station in Florida, where it is channeled via two T-1s to the University of Miami. The TDRS F1 traffic, on the other hand, is downlinked to White Sands and then sent over the NASA backbone, which is connected to the University of Miami by two T-1s.
At the University of Miami, the voice-over-IP traffic arrives at the university's Windows NT-based call manager before being passed off to either a Cisco DT-24+ digital voice-over-IP gateway or to one of two analog Selsius gateways, which are connected to the university's PBX. According to Thompson, there were some integration issues at the university, but these have since been overcome. Still, after his experience building and tweaking the South Pole voice-over-IP system, he hopes future product releases will include "Unix-based call managers and the ability to move phones from subnet to subnet with zero reconfiguration."
Overall, however, Thompson is extremely satisfied with the voice-over-IP phones. He adds that more improvements are on the way, in line with the South Pole Station Modernization (SPSM) project, a $128 million endeavor to modernize the living quarters, scientific equipment, support buildings and IT infrastructure at the Amundsen-Scott base and outlying scientific structures by 2005.
"We currently have six phones scattered around the station, and as part of the SPSM we'll [probably] be installing a total Ethernet-based phone system. We will, however, have analog copper lines for 911 services," he says. Other upgrades under consideration involve adding up to 15 more IP phones, incorporating a planned link to the Marisat F2 satellite and building a new ground station at the South Pole.
There is also talk of discarding the Ethernet-based phone system in favor of a different architecture that would include a traditional PBX with a voice-over-IP interface at the pole. Cost-wise, Thompson is pleased with the way voice over IP has worked out. The Cisco IP phones cost $350 apiece, and much of the other recently purchased gear was included in the budget for the ongoing SPSM network upgrades. "My network upgrade budget for this year, which included a core switch, eight distribution switches and the Packeteer, was around $175,000," he says. "We got really good pricing."
Users who have tried new voice-over-IP system are ecstatic with the improvement in communications. Steve Barwick, a scientist working on the Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array (AMANDA) astronomy project at the pole, remembers all too well the days before voice over IP.
"When I first started to come to [the] pole in 1992, communication was very restrictive," Barwick says. "Bandwidth was limited, so e-mail was censored to ensure that only business-related communication took place. For personal communication, a ham radio was used to patch to the phone system in the U.S. Sometimes four people were listening to your call, so privacy was not a strong concern."
Barwick says there is a direct correlation between the integrated voice-over-IP/data traffic system and the amount of science that can be conducted by the AMANDA team.
"The voice-over-IP phone is now a useful scientific tool, since we can call from any phone at the station. This is a wonderful advance," Barwick says. "Imagine what it was like two years ago. If there was an unexpected problem and we needed to talk to a colleague in the U.S. or Europe and the satellite was up, we would walk about 1 kilometer to the phone, then usually wait for a clear period, and then get a busy signal or no answer. Compare that to now. We can call from the building that we normally work in. If the person on the other line is out, we can leave a message and that person can call us back. Voice communication becomes a viable tool when there is this level of convenience." Thompson agrees: "VoIP has really changed the way we do business."
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While local media makes all this about CORRUPTION and revenue waste-----no information telling 99% of WE THE PEOPLE VoIP is microwave transmission tied to 5G. We would have had open public discussions about all this in Clinton-era 1990s----we would have had more public policy debates before installation of these infrastructures-----and today we would have lots and lots of REAL left non-profits leading marches and shaking fists at global Wall Street Baltimore Development and global Johns Hopkins----those institutions promoting 5G SMART CITIES in Baltimore--and yes, historically black college Morgan State and University of Maryland Baltimore.
All this occurred at the same time US Treasury bond and state/local municipal bond frauds were setting the stage for massive movement of revenue from our government agencies......AGAIN.
So, VoIP is 5G is microwave adding yet another product filling our US cities with ambient microwave on the road to SATURATION. These VoIP cables are connected to underwater SOUTH ATLANTIC cables connected to ANTARCTIC cables.
admin • June 29, 2012
VoIP War Rocks Baltimore City Hall
So it seems that the city of Baltimore came to the same conclusion as more and more enterprises of all sizes have – that switching to voip phone service can save lots of money. In the case of the municipal government of Baltimore, the estimate is millions of dollars per year. And that’s cold, hard taxpayer cash, folks.
It would all seem pretty straightforward, except for the fact that the transition to VoIP has sparked an ugly little turf war in the city. In one corner is Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. In the other is Comptroller Joan Pratt. The background is simple: The comptroller’s turf has included the city government’s telephone system going all the way back to the 1940s. Data processing, meanwhile, has been in the mayor’s province.
Rawlings-Blake set off a bomb when she bought 80 VoIP phones, using an existing city data processing purchasing contract. Pratt, who had plans for a VoIP system going out for bid, screamed foul. A few days ago City Solicitor George Nilson ruled that what Rawlings-Blake did was legal. Pratt’s threatened to hire an outside lawyer to review that opinion.
Basically what we have here is what’s emerging throughout the enterprise world (and government is an enterprise for purposes of this analysis). The simple fact is that VoIP rides on the data networks run by data departments. Traditional enterprise telephony departments are being cut out of the loop, and they don’t like it. Indeed its particularly hard for them to explain why the million dollar PBX they bought not that many years ago is no longer needed in this brave new world of the virtual PBX.
But, turf wars aside, what I see as most significant is that all sides agree that VoIP can cut an enterprise’s telephony costs by substantial amounts. And for smaller enterprises, all the way down to the SOHO market, the turf battles at large corporate entities aren’t relevant, since at smaller companies typically the same folk are responsible for voice and data.
Put another way, no matter who wins the turf wars, enterprise VoIP is the real winner.
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Here are the community groups selling the idea that SMART CITIES is a good thing------getting those 99% of WE THE PEOPLE feeling like SMART CITIES will include them when these 5% global 1% players---black, white, and brown citizens KNOW these policies are VERY, VERY, VERY bad for US cities and citizens.
In Baltimore we have what are called ANCHOR INSTITUTIONS----that is Morgan State University, Johns Hopkins, and University of Maryland Baltimore all having executive boards filled with those 5% ----working to install 5G SMART CITY structures in early stages by PRETENDING TO BE HELPING THE POOR.
Here in Baltimore we have our local TECH MEDIA outlets working for global 1% keeping 99% of citizens UNINFORMED as to goals and conditions created.
'To close out the day, the new, seven-startup cohort of Conscious Venture Lab will officially be launched'.
We shout against this START UP ECONOMY without connections to 5G ---but here we are shouting, this SMART CITIES start up economy is simply trying to justify installing a very bad infrastructure that will kill 99% of WE THE PEOPLE. Each US CITY DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE has these 5% players MOVING FORWARD 5G microwave SMART CITIES.
Sep. 26, 2017 12:23 pm
Innovation Village brings Smart Cities Summit to West Baltimore
The event puts a focus on technology that's changing cities, as well as how to make sure the benefits reach everyone. It's being held during Baltimore Innovation Week.
By Stephen Babcock / reporter
The term “smart city” often brings thoughts of new technological tools to improve civic functions.
For Andre Robinson, however, people are also front and center in the conversation.
The executive director of the Mt. Royal Community Development Corporation sees key questions for Baltimore as it prepares for the future: “What city could consider itself smart if it’s not inclusive? How do you become a smart city if it’s not for the benefit of as many people as you can get into the mix?”
That will be one jumping-off point for the conversations at next week’s Smart Cities Summit. Organized by Innovation Village, the Oct. 2 event will be held during Baltimore Innovation Week. The daylong event will take on many of the themes at play in the creation of an innovation district in West Baltimore.
Like innovation districts that are rising around the country, the effort focuses on aligning companies, talent and capital around startups and small businesses in a highly-concentrated area. The West Baltimore effort also extends the innovation economy into an area of this majority-Black city where decades-old inequalities come into sharpest relief, yet has talented entrepreneurs, universities, transit and parks, Robinson said.
“All the ingredients are baked in,” he said. We have everything that we need.”More than 500 leaders were invited to the daylong event at the new Conscious Venture Lab space at Baltimore City Community Colleges seeking to shine a light on unique tech and innovation efforts taking place inside the city, which will be highlighted in a panel moderated by Innovation Villages CEO Richard May.
Projects from outside the city will also be highlighted by speakers including
- Former Google SRE Director (and Johns Hopkins alum) Joe Pistritto.
- Wole Coaxum, founder and CEO Mobility Capital Finance, a fintech startup seeking to serve underbanked communities.
- Mayor Eugene Grant, of Seat Pleasant, Md.
To close out the day, the new, seven-startup cohort of Conscious Venture Lab will officially be launched.
While there will be plenty of networking, the organizers also want to create a platform that can inspire action, Robinson said.
“The fundamental premise is that Baltimore is what’s next,” Robinson said.
OH, REALLY??????
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We will segue into closer looks at our local universities having been taken corporate these few decades filled with corporate executives as board and committee members replacing what were ACADEMIC professors. Our southern universities right wing Republican have always been corporate but our north and western public universities were filled with REAL left social progressive academics like us-----replaced as Clinton expanded corporatized higher education.
Please think of the national and international news being broadcast in mainstream media ----we are seeing all kinds of FAKE NEWS as with ANTARCTICA now with ARCTIC region. This is home of HAARP antennae with stories of high-powered lasers beaming at NORTH POLE to deliberately create that same OZONE HOLE at north as exists in south just to capture those same microwaves to fuel 5G SMART CITIES.
All this technology being developed because these products tied to microwave will be needed for space colonies along with the robotics.
Educate broadly because news media is filled with propaganda and myths around our ARCTIC 5G development as well. We are questioning whether these stories of high-energy beams opening the OZONE LAYER in the north are real because remember, it is the ARCTIC CIRCLE to where that global 1% will need to set up those MINING SHAFT ECO-DOME LUXURY APARTMENTS. Those global 1% whose only talent is LYING, CHEATING, STEALING ---living for today are crazy enough to open both EARTH POLES to harvest microwaves.
'Quintillion Networks'------OH, REALLY????
We can see why an ALASKAN Sarah Palin hit mainstream politics as Alaska is central in these microwave and fiber optic cable installations. As is always said----WE CANNOT PUT LIPSTICK ON THESE 5% AND 1% PIGS...black, white, and brown citizens!
Arctic Fibre Acquired by Quintillion Networks
Winston Qiu
Arctic Fiber
22 May 2016
Quintillion Subsea Holdings LLC (“Quintillion”) announced on 18th May 2016 that it has acquired the assets of Arctic Fibre as part of a plan to build a submarine fibre optic cable from Asia to Europe with the first phase in Alaska.
Quintillion will build, own and operate the network. The founding shareholders of Arctic Fibre hold an ownership stake in Quintillion and Michael Cunningham, the CEO of Arctic Fibre, has joined the board of Quintillion. Cooper Investment Partners, a New York-based private investment firm, is the majority investor in Quintillion.
The Alaska segment of the project is the first phase of a three-phase project to connect Asia and Europe through the Arctic. Phase two will be constructed from Alaska to Japan, and phase three will connect Alaska to Europe via the Canadian Arctic.
Construction activities are currently underway in Alaska to complete phase one, which includes the installation of a 1,850km subsea fibre optic cable from Prudhoe Bay to Nome with spurs to the Alaska communities of Barrow, Wainwright, Point Hope, and Kotzebue.
The Quintillion cable system will make available much-needed bandwidth to these communities by early 2017.
In addition to phase one of Quintillion’s subsea system, a new terrestrial fibre optic cable is under construction and will provide connectivity from Prudhoe Bay to Fairbanks, Alaska. At Fairbanks, the fibre will connect to existing networks reaching Anchorage, Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, providing a fibre link between the continental United States and the Arctic.
Phase two, the Pacific segment, is intended to extend the backbone cable laid off the Alaska coast west, from the branching unit offshore Nome, to Japan with options for additional spurs into Alaska. Phase two will create additional redundancies of service to the System and open new markets for the project.
Phase three is planned to extend the subsea system from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska east through the Northwest Passage, south of Greenland, across the Atlantic Ocean to the United Kingdom with spurs into select communities in the Canadian Arctic. Once completed, phase three will provide multiple redundancies for the System and open additional international markets.
In connection with the transaction, Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. acted as exclusive financial advisor to Arctic Fibre.
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WATCH OUT GLOBAL 99%-----these are the cities where citizens will be studied to see the effects of saturated microwaves---living, breathing, eating, covered inside and out with robotics with antennae capturing and transferring microwave energy for 5G.
All those UNITED NATIONS ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE GLOBAL 1% NGOs pretending to be fighting for OPEN BORDER justice for global labor pool 99% calling what will become US SMART CITIES---sanctuary cities KNOW these are the first cities where citizens will be exposed and studied for that exposure to microwaves so these global 1% and their 2% UNITED NATIONS OPEN BORDERS citizens and their 5% ALT RIGHT ALT LEFT players are no friend to our global 99% citizens----steering them right into 5G MICROWAVE SMART CITY TEST GROUNDS.
Is that like the US nuclear bomb testing in Nevada and Utah where our military were allowed to stand close to atomic mushroom cloud for maximum exposure knowing of ill effects? ABSOLUTELY.
All of this MOVING FORWARD 5G installation and operation will take a few generations to have the worst of effects this is why 21st century agenda needs to STOP MOVING FORWARD.
Ionospheric Heaters: How HAARP really works
By Jim Lee
Saturday, Oct 18, 2014
Please be aware of sensational reporting on HAARP-----again, there are extremes at both end of news media.
- 01.11.12
Crunching a list of variables about innovation and sustainability, we rank the world’s smartest cities, from New York to Hong Kong (and with an unexpected winner)
By Boyd Cohen
Last year, I spent considerable time researching best practices for climate resilient cities–an endeavor that culminated in what I believe was the first ever global ranking of resilient cities. Now, after extensive research on smart cities initiatives around the globe, I have developed what may be the first ever global rankings of smart cities.
A note on methodology: There are many other rankings that are relevant to this conversation. I leveraged about a dozen global and regional rankings of smart-city components in order to develop a global ranking of smart cities.
I took into account the Innovation Cities Top 100 Index from 2thinknow to get a fair comparison of the level of innovation in top global cities. I also used more well-known rankings of the quality of life of cities, as well as the Siemens regional rankings of green cities, the digital city rankings of Digital Community for cities in the U.S. (indicated as DC in the table), and the IDC rankings of smart cities in Spain (indicated as IDC in the table). Finally, I used the digital governance in municipalities worldwide study to compare cities on their innovative use of ICT.
I am including a table which summarizes the rankings used to develop this first global ranking of smart cities.
The term “smart cities” is a bit ambiguous. Some people choose a narrow definition–i.e. cities that use information and communication technologies to deliver services to their citizens. I prefer a broader definition: Smart cities use information and communication technologies (ICT) to be more intelligent and efficient in the use of resources, resulting in cost and energy savings, improved service delivery and quality of life, and reduced environmental footprint–all supporting innovation and the low-carbon economy.
IT'S ALL ABOUT LOW-CARBON SAVING THE ENVIRONMENT----BUT IT KILLS THE EARTH'S ENVIRONMENT!
Here, then, are the top 10 smart cities:
1.) Vienna. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, as going into the research I had not heard much about Vienna as a smart city. But Vienna was the only city that ranked in the top 10 in every category: innovation city (5), regional green city (4), quality of life (1) and digital governance (8). Vienna is establishing bold smart-city targets and tracking their progress to reach them, with programs like the Smart Energy Vision 2050, Roadmap 2020, and Action Plan 2012-2015. Vienna’s planners are incorporating stakeholder consultation processes into building and executing carbon reduction, transportation and land-use planning changes in the hopes of making the city a major European player in smart city technologies.
2.) Toronto. The highest rated smart city in North America, Toronto also scores pretty well across the board. Recognizing its importance in the movement, IBM recently opened a Business Analytics Solutions Center in Toronto. Toronto is also an active member of the Clinton 40 (C40) megacities, which seek to transition to the low-carbon economy. The private sector in Toronto is collaborating too, creating a Smart Commute Toronto initiative in the hopes of increasing transit efficiency in the metro area. Toronto also recently began using natural gas from landfills to power the city’s garbage trucks. That’s smart closed-loop thinking.
3.) Paris. As is typical of sustainability-related rankings, Europe fared well. Paris was highly rated in several categories including innovation (3), green cities in Europe (10), and digital governance (11). Paris was already on the world map for its highly successful bike sharing program, Velib, and just last month, the mayor launched a similar model for small EVs called Autolib, which currently has 250 rental stations.
4.) New York. New York scored higher than most other cities in the ranking in all of the categories outside of quality of life, where it ranked a miserable 47th. New York partnered with IBM in 2009 to launch the IBM Business Analytics Solution Center to address “the growing demand for the complex capabilities needed to build smarter cities and help clients optimize all manner of business processes and business decisions.” In New York, IBM is already helping the city prevent fires and protect first responders as well as identify questionable tax refund claims–a move that is expected to save the city about $100 million over a five-year period.
5.) London. The UK capital also scored relatively high across the board. London has been well-recognized for some of its sustainability innovations (i.e. congestion tax) and its robust transit system. The city will soon be home to Smart Cities research center housed at Imperial College, which will leverage transport, government, business, academic and consumer data in hopes of making the city more efficient and innovative. Just the other day, London announced a partnership with O2 to launch the largest free Wi-Fi network in Europe.
6.) Tokyo. Tokyo is the first Asian city on this list, scoring well in the innovation (22) and digital city (15) categories. Last year, the city announced plans to create a smart town in the suburbs. In partnership with Panasonic, Accenture, and Tokyo Gas (among others), the eco-burb will contain homes that integrate solar panels, storage batteries, and energy efficient appliances all connected to a smart grid. Tokyo is also focused on promoting smart mobility solutions.
7.) Berlin. Berlin also performs well across the board, with good scores in innovation (14), green-ness (8th in Europe) and quality of life (17). In collaboration with Vattenfall, BMW, and others, Berlin is testing out vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technologies in the hopes of creating a virtual power plant from electric vehicles.
8.) Copenhagen. Lately, it seems Copenhagen has been doing a lot right. It was rated number one on the green scale in Europe by Siemens and also achieved number one ranking in my global resilient cities ranking last year. All with good reason: Copenhagen is taking a real leadership role on sustainable innovation. The city has committed to carbon neutrality by 2025 and 40% of its citizens regularly commute via bicycle. Furthermore, I was quite impressed with the way their mayor, Frank Jensen, recently articulated the role of cities as growth engines and the potential to stimulate the economy through cleantech innovation.
9.) Hong Kong. Hong Kong scored quite well in key areas, including the digital governance ranking (3). However, its quality-of-life score (70) dropped the city down to ninth in my ranking of smart cities. Hong Kong is experimenting with RFID technology in its airport, as well as throughout the agriculture supply chain. The city has also been a leader in the use and adoption of smart cards, which are already used by millions of residents for services like public transit, library access, building access, shopping, and car parks.
10.) Barcelona. Barcelona was recently ranked the number two smart city in Spain in the IDC report, and with good reason. The city is a pioneer in smart city and low-carbon solutions. It was among the first in the world to introduce a solar thermal ordinance about a decade ago, recently launched the LIVE EV project to promote the adoption of EVs and charging infrastructure, and the city also recently announced a major partnership to develop a living lab for smart-city innovation.
There were many other strong candidates which are runners-up in this first ranking, including Amsterdam, Melbourne, Seattle, São Paulo, Stockholm, and Vancouver.
Pundits and industry insiders expect smart cities to become a sizable market, with projections of nearly $40 billion spent on smart-cities technologies by 2016. And real estate experts predict that smart cities will in the future be attractive to the educated work force and will therefore become real-estate gold. All reasons enough to get on the smart-city bandwagon. Who knows? Maybe next year your city could crack the top 10 rankings.
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“The cost of providing TV programming continues to rise,” the company said in an email notifying customers of the rate increase. The price change will hit existing customers paying $130 a month for Fiber 1000Mbps service + TV. Current customers will pay $150 a month going forward. New customers will pay $10 more for the bundle – $160 a month'.
Here comes the culling of services handed free or low-price and here comes the ever-rising rates to access internet as 5G claims these expensive infrastructure and technology require market-rate prices and global corporations will be the only ones affording those prices. This article shows all that was FREE AND DEMOCRATIZING about these 1G, 2G, 3G, 4G is now unprofitable and need to be axed.
99% WE THE PEOPLE MUST SIMPLY STOP MOVING FORWARD END US CITIES DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE DESIGNATION, STOP BUILDING GLOBAL CORPORATE CAMPUSES, AND REBUILD LOCAL, SMALL BUSINESSES AND SMALL BUSINESS MANUFACTURING, AND KEEP OUR INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE FREE FROM 5G.
WHERE DID IT ALL GO WRONG? WE THE PEOPLE THE 99% ALLOWED CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA NOW TRUMP AND THEIR 5% ROBBER BARON POLS AND PLAYERS CONTROL OUR GOVERNMENT.
There will be no ability to opt for only 1G texting or 2G cell phone or 3G Smart phone or 4G Smart phone streaming video-----it will be a 5G package and costs will be sky high.
Stop the Cap!
Promoting Better Broadband, Fighting Data Caps and Usage-Based Billing
The End of Google Fiber Expansion: Where Did It All Go Wrong?
Phillip Dampier October 5, 2017
Alphabet, the parent company of Google Fiber, has lost interest in expanding its fiber to the home service and is showing signs of pulling the plug on its cable television alternative while it drags its feet on keeping promised rollout commitments.
The first sign of trouble for the upstart fiber network came as early as 2015, when without warning Google co-founder Larry Page suddenly unveiled Alphabet, a new holding company that would be at the heart of Google and its many ventures, including Google Fiber. The concept was tailor-made to please Wall Street and investors, because it would better expose which Google projects were earning money and which were hemorrhaging cash with no sign of profitability. But an equally important event occurred in May with the hiring of Ruth Porat, who would become Alphabet’s chief financial officer.
Known inside by some at Google as “Ruthless Ruth,” Porat is Wall Street’s definition of a proper executive that keeps shareholder interests first in mind. Porat lead Morgan Stanley’s technology banking division at the heart of the first dot.com boom in the late 1990s, served as an adviser to the Treasury Department on the taxpayer bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and was chief financial officer at Morgan Stanley by 2010. Her mission at Google: put an end to expensive innovation for innovation’s sake. If a project did not show signs of making money for shareholders, it would face intense scrutiny under her watch.
Her key priorities are “discipline” and “focus,” something Google never had to be concerned with while earning truckloads of ad-click cash. Google’s reputation for cool innovation and free services earned the company a lot of goodwill with the public, but that left money on the table for investors who want the company to step up shareholder value. Google’s founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page had enjoyed a long run innovating and announcing new projects, including scanning every printed book on the planet, giving away e-mail and office apps, and laying fiber optic cables to deliver the kind of internet service big phone and cable companies were not delivering. The company also acquired other innovators, including Nest Labs — which made connected thermostats and Webpass, which provides wireless high-speed internet access.
But for all of its success, Google also had several high-profile failures that cost billions, setting the stage for future project accountability.
One of the biggest failures was its Google Glass wearable tech project. The first edition, dubbed Explorer, was a flop and received terrible reviews. But the device also clashed with a country increasingly preoccupied with personal privacy. Not everyone appreciated Google Glass’ always-watching camera pointing in their direction, and some wearing the device were derided as “glassholes.”
“I was a Google Glass Explorer, and the experience was horrible from the start. Google Glass now sits in my office museum of failed products,” said Tim Bajarin, President of Creative Strategies Inc. in this post at re/code. “The UI was terrible, the connection unreliable and the info it delivered had little use to me. It was the worst $1,500 I have ever spent in my life. On the other hand, as a researcher, it was a great tool to help me understand what not to do when creating a product for the consumer.”
Google Glass: a major misstep
Google’s other experiments weren’t exactly pulling in a lot of money either. The company’s vision of driver-less cars met the reality of real world driving conditions (some accidents were the result) and traffic planning and safety regulators were cautious about giving a green light to the concept on American streets and highways. A long-time favorite project of Brin and Page, Project Loon — sending 100,000 balloons, blimps, and/or drones into the sky to deliver internet access is still seen by conventional wisdom as weird. These and other experimental projects lost $3.6 billion of Google’s revenue in 2016, almost twice as much as they lost the company in 2014.
After “Ruthless Ruth” entered the picture, as Bloomberg News documented, it appeared the open door to the experiment lab was closed and an exodus of project leaders and engineers began:
Six months after Teller’s rousing speech, Loon’s Mike Cassidy stepped down as project leader. Around the same time, Urmson, the self-driving car engineer, left Alphabet, as did David Vos, the head of X’s drone effort, Project Wing. Vos’s top deputy, Sean Mullaney, left the company as well. Other recent departures: Craig Barratt, chief executive officer of Access, its telecom division; Bill Maris, the CEO of its venture capital arm, GV; and Tony Fadell, the CEO of smart-thermostat company Nest, who was also working on a reboot of Google Glass. That project, now called Aura, also lost its leads of user design and engineering.
Barratt: The former head of Google Access.
The bean counters also arrived at Google Access — the division responsible for Google Fiber — and by October 2016, Google simultaneously announced it was putting a hold on further expansion of Google Fiber and its CEO, Craig Barratt, was leaving the company. About 10% of employees in the division involuntarily left with him. Insufficiently satisfied with those cutbacks, additional measures were announced in April 2017 including the departure of Milo Medin, a vice president at Google Access and Dennis Kish, a wireless infrastructure veteran who was president of Google Fiber. Nearly 600 Google Access employees were also reassigned to other divisions. Medin was a Google Fiber evangelist in Washington, and often spoke about the impact Google’s fiber project would have on broadband competition and the digital economy.
Porat’s philosophy had a sweeping impact on Alphabet and its various divisions. The most visionary/experimental projects that were originally green-lit with no expectation of making money for a decade or more now required a plan to prove profitability in five years or less. Wall Street was delighted and Alphabet’s stock was up 35% since “Ruthless Ruth” arrived, winning praise for remaking Alphabet/Google into a conventional American corporation using familiar corporate principles.
But Alphabet’s transition seems to break a promise Google co-founders Brin and Page made when Google became a public company in 2004.
“We do not intend to become one.”
Both men promised Google would never focus on short-term profitability and would encourage employees to devote 20% of their working hours on exactly the kinds of innovative projects and product developments Porat was intent on cutting or killing. Porat even has a willing army of helpers — executives were paid bonuses to kill their projects before expenses got out of hand. This helped halt development of Tableau, a project to create enormous size TV screens originally championed by Brin.
Porat also had a major hand in slashing the budget at Google’s Nest Labs division. Google spent $3.2 billion acquiring the home thermostat and smoke alarm company in 2014. Nest CEO Tony Fadell came along as part of the deal and was initially considered a major asset, having been the former Apple engineer who built the original iPod prototype. But Fadell clashed with Google’s culture and reports surfaced he was a tyrannical boss comparable to Steve Jobs at his nastiest. Google executives expected more products out of the Nest division, and didn’t get them. Fadell blamed employees and ruthless budget cuts that broke Google’s commitment to allow Nest to lose up to $500 million annually for the first five years under Google’s ownership. Even when Nest managed to generated $340 million in revenue in 2015, Porat wasn’t pleased. The higher-ups expected more considering the amount of money Google spent buying Nest Labs.
Google Fiber was launched knowing it would take billions of dollars and years to pay off for Google. Laying fiber optic cable is expensive, time-consuming, and frequently bureaucratic. Google projects that still have support from Brin and Page are usually protected from Porat’s red pencil, but if either’s optimism waivers, Porat is likely to start cutting.
By the time Barratt tried to jump-start excitement for the slowly progressing fiber service by announcing a series of new launch cities, Page appeared to have lost interest. Former employees say Page became frustrated with Google Fiber’s lack of progress.
“Larry just thought it wasn’t game-changing enough,” says a former Page adviser. “There’s no flying-saucer shit in laying fiber.”
Charter Communications took out newspaper ads trumpeting Google’s abandonment of some of its potential fiber customers in Kansas City.
Left unprotected, Porat’s budget cutters invaded and further fiber expansion has been suspended, except in areas where Google was already committed to provide the service. But the cutbacks have been so significant, cities are now complaining Google is dragging its feet on its commitments.
In Kansas City — the first to get Google Fiber, the network remains incomplete. In March 2017, Google signaled it was likely to remain incomplete indefinitely after returning hundreds of $10 deposits — many paid years earlier — to residents who were informed Google Fiber would no longer expand into their neighborhoods. In the last two years, Google has become very conservative about the neighborhoods where it will expand service. In most cases, the company now targets multi-dwelling units like condos and apartments, which are cheaper to serve than single family homes.
In late September, Atlanta noticed Google Fiber was stalled in the city and nearby Sandy Springs and Brookhaven. A clear sign Google had effectively suspended construction was a sudden end to construction permit applications around six months ago. Google Fiber denies it is pulling out, but city officials notice work progress has slowed to a crawl.
“Google Fiber is currently available in over 100 residential buildings in the metro Atlanta area and in several neighborhoods in the center of the city. We’re working hard to connect as many people as possible, and encourage people to sign up for updates on our website,” a Google Fiber spokesperson said.
There have been similar problems with Google Fiber expansion in several Texas cities. Some neighborhood residents complained about shoddy installation work because of poor quality third-party contractors, and expansion has slowed down markedly in many areas.
Ironically, AT&T may have been responsible for helping kill Page’s enthusiasm for Google Fiber, serving as a regular obstacle to Google Fiber’s expansion in states like Tennessee where it has been delayed by bureaucratic pole attachment disputes, some resulting in legal action. For Ma Bell and its progeny, a five-year delay is nothing for a company that has been around since the early 1900s and took decades to build out its original telephone network.
Google Fiber Huts – Nashville, Tenn.
Utilities employ a small army of workers that do nothing but deal in a world of tariffs, permit applications, and various filings to regulatory bodies that still govern parts of their operations. For a dot.com company in a hurry, filing permit applications, negotiating pole attachment agreements, hiring subcontractors that can meet regulated specifications, and dealing with incomplete or inaccurate infrastructure maps could be hell on earth. But for phone and cable companies, it is just another day on the job, and their “concern trolling” over the danger of allowing a neophyte like Google to mess with existing electric, phone, and cable wiring to make room for fiber did give some local officials pause.
Page’s hurry to accomplish his fiber dreams were effectively dashed by AT&T’s very close relationship with local officials and its ability to generate a mountain of regulatory and legal paperwork. As a result, Google admitted with great frustration that in Nashville, after months of work, it had only upgraded 33 telephone poles out of 88,000 in the city. The delay also took its toll on a Nashville-based subcontractor helping to build out Google Fiber in the city. Phoenix of Tennessee declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September with liabilities between $1-10 million. It also laid off 70 employees. The reason? Google Fiber is stalled in the city.
One Alphabet employee mischaracterized the end effect of the dispute in comments to the Wall Street Journal last year, “Everyone who has done fiber to the home has given up because it costs way too much money and takes way too much time.”
Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Project summarized the situation more succinctly for Gizmodo: “the new guy gets screwed.”
Yet it would be more accurate to say companies with short attention spans and an evolving commitment away from innovation and towards Wall Street and its fixation on short-term results will have more difficulty than other companies and communities that have successfully built fiber networks with a patient focus on the future.
Porat has been defending Alphabet’s increasingly conservative spending plans and pull-backs.
“As we reach for moonshots,” she told investors on a financial results conference call, “it’s inevitable that there will be course corrections along the way.” She called some of the shifting priorities and cutbacks “taking a pause” in some areas of business to “lay the foundation for a stronger future.”
For Google Fiber, that is coming in a number of different directions.
The company this week announced it is pulling back on offering cable television service in its new markets, including Louisville, Ky., and San Antonio, Tex., and is raising rates $20-30 a month for bundled customers in areas where television service is still being sold.
“The cost of providing TV programming continues to rise,” the company said in an email notifying customers of the rate increase. The price change will hit existing customers paying $130 a month for Fiber 1000Mbps service + TV. Current customers will pay $150 a month going forward. New customers will pay $10 more for the bundle – $160 a month.
“We’re not afraid to try new things as part of our normal way of doing business, focused on the end goal of getting superfast internet into people’s homes,” wrote head of sales and marketing for Google Access Cathy Fogler in a blog post.
Google Fiber has been a minor player in the cable television business, according to analysts, attracting around 54,000 customers nationwide as of December — only 24,000 more than it had in 2014.
As for the future, with Porat in charge of finances, it is likely Google will downscale expectations and rely on its acquisition of Webpass for future expansion, providing high-speed wireless internet to multi-dwelling apartments, condos, and businesses in dense urban areas. That eliminates costly fiber expansion to individual homes or businesses and is much less expensive to install and maintain.
Any plans for a major Google Fiber push in the future seems unlikely, considering Wall Street’s demands for Return On Investment are not easily tempered. That leaves independent local overbuilders with established ties to their communities the most likely to pick up where Google Fiber has left off. But even those are in short supply. Like any major project of this scope, the best option for getting fiber optics in your community, assuming the local cable or phone company isn’t doing it already, is to treat it as a public infrastructure project like water, sewer, roads or sidewalks.
Most cities were all too happy to compete for Google’s attention (and infrastructure investment). But now that is no longer likely, and many communities will have to decide for themselves which side of the digital divide they want to live in -- the side without 21st century broadband or the side that has elected to control their own broadband future and not wait for someone else to get the job done.
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