NASA may finally be ready to blast off, literally, with greatly expanded capacity, by going to the private sector for space transportation rather than owning and operating all its own space vehicles.

Faced with the problem of using the literally antique Space Shuttles (more than thirty years old in design) just to get food and supplies to the space station and many years from having a replacement, NASA appears to be finally shifting course.

Part of what enables this shift is technology. What was truly pioneering engineering and research effort twenty or thirty years ago can now be designed with inexpensive CAD/CAM programs on powerful and cheap computers. New materials and computer manufacturing allow small space start up companies to build sophisticated space vehicles quickly and economically.

Regions that have been investing in space (New Mexico, Texas, Virginia, among others) may see a small but steady economic development benefit as space startups win big NASA contracts for various kinds of space vehicles and equipment.

"Whaling" is a new form of phishing attacks. It is called whaling because the spam emails are carefully targeted towards big fish, or whales. Spammers have been sending carefully crafted emails that look like an official U.S. Federal Court sub poena. Clicking on the link embedded in the email secretly installs a keystroke logger on your computer which then sends userids, passwords, and credit card numbers to the spammer.

We actually got one of those sub poenas about two weeks ago, and it certainly looked official. But sub poenas are usually delivered in person, and so after looking closely at the email and some of the links, we quickly determined it was spam.

FCC Commissioner Deborah Tate spoke on the last day of the Broadband Properties conference. She had some interesting statistics that should give pause to anyone who thinks that DSL and cable modem broadband services are "good enough." Commissioner Tate noted that:

• Demand for bandwidth has been doubling every two years for the last ten years.
• By 2015 (just seven years from now), the FCC thinks bandwidth requirements will be fifty times (50x) what they are today.
• In Japan, where they have had 100 megabit connections to homes and businesses available for several years, they are already observing congestion--meaning 100 megabit pipes are already filling up.
• Americans are watching more than 10 billion videos per month over the Internet.

Tate went on to enumerate that choice was important to buyers of telecom services, and she listed that choice should be available for services, for providers, and for equipment.

Graham Richards, the former Mayor of Ft. Wayne, Indiana, spoke at the Broadband Properties Summit about why Ft. Wayne pushed fiber to the home. Some of the services and benefits included:

A green affordable housing initiative cut monthly energy costs for lower income families, and the broadband network was used to monitor energy use.

The network enabled live video monitoring of latchkey children whose parents had to work. Parents could have high quality video chats with their children as soon as they arrived home in the afternoon.

Local schools were able to offer enhanced distance learning opportunities to their students, including afternoon and weekend mentoring with tutors (enabled by the fiber network).

Their vision was fiber everywhere: a community broadband network dedicated to equality of opportunity and universal access.

They began a pilot initiative to have the city use hybrid plug in vehicles to reduce fuel and transportation costs for city workers.

They set a goal of saving 5% of the city budget through IT/broadband and green strategies--helping to conserve taxpayers dollars.

While Richards was mayor, he was able to turn the economic growth of the city from a deep loss of jobs to a dramatic turnaround in jobs creation and new businesses, and he attributed it to setting a vision, sticking to it, and broadband.

At the Broadband Properties Summit, there was a case study on IP TV (TV delivered via broadband). DirecTV and an apartment owner in Alexandria, Virginia teamed up to provide competitive TV services in a large, 350 unit apartment building. Some of the highlights of the experiment:

Prior to the introduction of the new service, the biggest tenant complaint was about the incumbent TV provider service. The number one tenant demand was for more choice in selecting a TV provider.

After introducing the competitive DirecTV service, complaints are down and compliments are up.

The case study confirmed my longstanding bandwidth calculations about future network planning. A single channel of HD TV on the system requires 10+ megabits of bandwidth on the system, and live HD events (e.g. sports, racing, etc.) requires 15+ megabits of capacity per channel. This demonstrates the inadequacy of DSL, wireless, cable, and even FiOS to deliver next generation services.

Cat5e or Cat6 cable is needed from a distribution closet to each apartment, where a set top box converts the signal and sends it to the TV. The system performed so well that most residents did not realize it was IP TV. There have been claims that "IP TV doesn't work well compared to satellite and cable." We can put those to rest.

The take away for the talk was really about making sure that new homes and apartments are broadband ready. Most communities still do nothing to encourage builders and developers to build "broadband ready" homes and commercial buildings, which is a missed economic development opportunity, especially given the ease and low cost of doing this.

Bruce Mehlman, from the Internet Innovation Alliance, which is a lobbyist group in D.C., had some interesting statistics on the state of broadband in the U.S. today. He spoke this morning at the Broadband Properties Summit.

293,000 new jobs are created with every 1% increase in broadband availability in the United States. This is a statistic that you might want to pass on to local economic developers and elected officials who may be skeptical about the benefits of broadband. It is easy to do the math to calculate how many new jobs would be created in your community from a community-wide commitment to universal broadband access.

About 66% of the homes in the U.S. are using the Internet, and 50% of those have broadband. This means two-thirds of U.S. home still have no broadband.

There is a $580 billion dollar global market for IT services, indicating there are lots of job and business opportunities for U.S. companies if they have affordable broadband infrastructure.

Think your local economy would benefit from a steel plant? It turns out that the number of people making a full time living from selling things on eBay exceeds the employment of the entire U.S. steel industry. Note to rural communities: this is a work from home opportunity that requires broadband.

Broadband is a green technology. By one estimate, universal access to broadband in the U.S. could create a billion ton reduction in greenhouse gases over a ten year period. Broadband is a net energy saver.

Another study estimates that the healthcare industry could cut costs by as much as 25% by making better use of broadband and IT. Note to rural communities: broadband may cut healthcare costs.

Skeptics of the demand for Internet-based video take note. YouTube did not exist four years ago, and today has 100 million viewers per day.

Broadband will not be affordable in most areas without a business model that creates and sustains competition.

Dan Rogers, an economic developer from Kendall County, Texas, just told a story about a conversation that just occurred last week. A middle manager who lives in Kendall but commutes about an hour to work out of the region related to Rogers that he had negotiated an agreement with his firm to let him work two days a week from home to save on the cost of commuting. He was able to do that because he has fiber to the home and can access the corporate network as if he were sitting in his office at the main company location.

Gas prices are going to start changing the way we make decisions about where we live and where we work. Communities with fiber have a better chance of weathering those changes successfully, as it gives both workers and businesses more options.

Dan Rogers, President of the Kendall County, Texas Economic Development Corporation, just spoke at the Broadband Properties Summit here in Dallas-Fort Worth. Kendall County is a rural area between Austin and San Antonio, and is part of the Texas Hill Country--a beautiful area of mostly very small towns.

Kendall County is served by a rural telecom coop that is deploying fiber to the home, and Rogers indicated it has had a significant impact on economic development. He now views fiber as a relocation "eliminator," as he termed it, meaning that communities without fiber services are eliminated early in the relocation process.

Rogers also said something interesting about retention. He indicated he viewed fiber as part of Kendall County's retention strategy. Businesses already in the region are telling him that they are able to stay because the high capacity fiber services are enabling them to get bigger contracts with companies that expect them to have the same kind of broadband connectivity that is available in bigger metro areas.

Rogers also talked about "big broadband" and "little broadband." He viewed "little broadband" as areas with copper-based DSL and cable modem services, and noted that he saw Kendall County as having a significant advantage because they had "big broadband," meaning fiber-based broadband.

The notion of "big" and "little" broadband is a useful shorthand for cutting through the fog of just what kind of broadband is available in a community, and could be a useful marketing slogan: "Bring your business to our community, where we have BIG broadband."

When an audience member asked Rogers what he would tell elected officials who are reluctant to make an investment in community-wide broadband, he had sobering advice: "Tell them they won't be able to bring in the kind of businesses they want."

The average size of a Web page has tripled in the past five years, on track with other studies that show demand for bandwidth has been tripling at about the same rate.

For those that think DSL and cable modem services are "good enough," those copper-based systems can't keep up with demand that triples twice a decade. The cable Internet providers, despite their "up to six megabits" advertisements, would not be trying to throttle popular services like peer to peer filesharing if their copper networks were not groaning under the load. And that is today. Where does that leave communities in five years?

The sharp increases in gas and diesel fuel are raising the cost of commuting. Even if fuel prices recede (as they did after the '73 oil crunch), it seems likely that we will never see $2 gas again, and it may be that $3 gas becomes the new normal.

While the cost of fuel affects everyone to some extent, rural communities may be at most risk. Many workers in rural towns drive long distances to work, and a doubling of the cost of such drives may make it too expensive to make those commutes for a $12 or $14 per hour job.

Like the Chinese ideogram that can be read both as "danger" and "opportunity," the fuel crisis may, over the long term, be an opportunity for some rural towns, and could be the end of others. If it is too expensive to drive long distances to work, some workers and families may move closer to the work, further reducing the viability of some rural communities that are already struggling with long, slow declines in population.

But some businesses may decide to move closer to workers, and rural communities with the right economic development strategy to attract such businesses may have an edge--if they have good quality of life, attractive and vibrant downtowns, and .... broadband.

Community broadband projects can have a double impact. Properly designed community networks that extend affordable broadband into residential neighborhoods and along rural roads can bring new kinds of work from home opportunities to a rural workforce--getting them off the road completely and eliminating long commutes entirely. Fiber in business and industrial parks can attract businesses, which won't even consider some communities unless fiber services are available.

Rural communities will have to respond to the fuel increases with well thought out, long term strategies to help reduce commuting costs for their residents. Those that don't will see more workers and families moving away--reluctantly, but leaving nonetheless.

Look for "fuel surcharges" to rapidly increase the cost of certain kinds of services. Our last Fedex bill included a $10 fuel surcharge on top of the normal $48 delivery charge for a single package. It's hard to imagine, given the volume of packages that Fedex handles, that every package now requires a 20% surcharge.

Tempe, Arizona's foray into community and municipal wireless has not worked out as expected. Like many other communities that have tried the same thing and have also failed, Tempe tried to avoid spending any money. They simply granted an untested wireless firm access to city lightpoles and structures for wireless equipment. The private firm had to bear the entire cost of build out. The wireless system was also not seen as reliable as a wired system, and the wireless firm has not been able to attract many subscribers.

The lesson learned is that there is no free lunch for community broadband. Communities that spend very little are getting very little in return, and if all of the risk is left in the private sector, the private sector won't come or won't stay long. Another lesson is that building out without a solid business plan to attract customers is also a non-starter. The right approach is to target underserved areas and/or to be able to offer innovative services that are not already available from other providers.

A senior AT&T official has indicated that video is eating up Internet capacity at a rapid rate, and predicted that in three years, the demand for video in all forms, especially HD video, will put enormous strains on the Internet and Internet access providers like AT&T. Here is the key quote:

Video will be 80 percent of all traffic by 2010, up from 30 percent today,"

Communities that are not making plans now to invest in telecom infrastructure will find attracting and retaining businesses far more difficult, as business relocation will be increasingly driven by the availability of affordable broadband services.

When I tell people that I don't use a GPS device in my car, they are often shocked. The seem to assume that anybody who has a day job in the telecom business should be using the popular devices routinely.

This article demonstrates perfectly what happens when blind faith in technology replaces common sense. A bus driver, staring perhaps a bit too much at the GPS on his dash, sheared off the top of a tour bus by trying to drive through a low tunnel, apparently because the route was displayed on his GPS. Fortunately, the occupants of the bus received only minor injuries. It could have been much worse.

The use of BitTorrent, a peer to peer file sharing service, is up 24% in the past four months. Like the big jump in YouTube traffic in December, some it may be related to the writer's strike. The lack of anything new on that old-fashioned TV thingy in the rec room apparently had people headed in droves to the Internet for some mindless entertainment. And of course, the Internet has plenty of mindless entertainment. Sadly, almost any random 2 minute video clip on YouTube is funnier than most half hour TV comedies.

What's coming? I think it is now safe to say that TV is over. It will be a long slow decline, but the writer's strike created the tipping point that economists always look for. The Internet access providers can monkey around with traffic management to try to discourage the use of services like BitTorrent, but that's just silly over the long term. Imagine any other business saying, in effect, "We're glad you love our product. Please stop using it." That's what the Internet providers and the entertainment industry are doing with their lawsuits, "Internet toll booths," and traffic manipulation.

The solution is to start building networks that are focused on delivering services--any services, including things like BitTorrent--rather than just blindly delivering bandwidth by the bucket. That model doesn't work. If it did, we'd all have a fiber connection by now.