Building a National Public Knowledge Infrastructure

Looking at other succeeding countries, it seems that the way forward is a publicly owned fiber networks and related area:

While countries like Japan and South Korea have had Fiber–To–The–Home (FTTH) for a while. Countries like the Netherlands and Australia are investing massive amounts in this in a rather innovative way.

Australia just announced a (AUS) 48 billion dollars plan for such a network that will cover 93% of the population with direct fiber using a publicly owned network.¹

Meanwhile, the Netherlands are already looking way past basic internet infrastructure, having started deploying FTTH a few years back, and more toward a knowledge infrastructure permitting e–science, school, libraries, research and companies to flourish on what is fast becoming an important sector of the economy. Their position themselves as the default research hub for europe. ^{2 3}

Many countries are now turning to this approach to catch up as the traditional model of ownership from past era has failed to create much real forward looking growth in the past 10 years.

The major error in the Canadian strategy up till now has been to ignore it's own earlier fiber networks like CANARIE and CA*NET3 and view the internet as a broadcast media instead of a participatory one. It has to invest in it's capacity and development using local talents and resources. The individual is fast becoming a central part of the future economy and everyone must have the ability to connect in many forward looking ways from almost anywhere.

Economical growth in this sector will come if we're able to develop enough capacity to attract and make feasible the ideas of tomorrow. For that we need FTTH and not just to the last mile.

Network bandwidth is as important on the way down as it is on the way up if we want to lure and convince researchers, corporations, startup and freelancers that Canada is the place where innovation is going to happen next.

We have to stop thinking in the old fashion. We need to realize that we shouldn't try and save a dying economy for, at best, a few years. We shouldn't let things stagnate, protected by some artificial wall of legislation while the old oligopoly have their way… Meanwhile the rest of the world will move on.

We need to:

• Be really innovative by stopping to wait for the USA to act on something and then follow suit. The USA are as much in trouble in this field as we are and actually have very annoying lobbies trying to play us to their advantage. (They own more than 50% of patent worldwide explaining the situation).
• Build a publicly owned fiber network where ISP are able to resell bandwidth based on a hybrid of the best models worldwide and bring fiber directly to the citizens who will then own their local part of the network.
• Make the network neutral and truly participatory by making upload speed match download speed a lot more than now, allowing everyone to create the truly interactive society that we need to become a more efficient future oriented economy. This also implies that network should grow faster than need thus giving up on transfer limits currently acting as some kind of anti–development panopticon.
• Understand that laws like C–61 take into account the long term negative growth effect these type of restrictive legislation have on the economy. The world is moving toward open standards and code and need more freedom to share and work together, not less. We need to enable, not disable. Software patent should be banned.
• Encourage development at the national level of free and open source software (FOSS), networks and standards for a Canadian run knowledge infrastructure and economy. This would in the long run elevate us to the worldwide de facto country to look up to for the 21^st century. This also has the added bonus of creating a lot of local job and keeping expertise locally as everyone is moving toward a support economy while software become commodities. If we don't, we'll sink into obsolescence as others turn to faster networks and better knowledge exchange hub.

So, to conclude…

The Internet is becoming a public necessary infrastructure just like the roads or water. It's ability to let ideas move around faster, more efficiently and more importantly, in ways yet unforeseen is what will set us apart and make Canada into what it aspires to become, a world leader and economic power house of the 21^st century.

For this, we need to have a global strategy based on the few points I've listed that takes more into accounts than just the speed of connections but also the structure of developments of networks, software and knowledge based entity.

¹ 93% of Australia getting gov't–run fiber

² Building A national — Knowledge Infrastructure

³ Cook Report on "Building a National Knowledge Infrastructure"

Comments

R — 2010–05–12 00:38:43 EDT wrote

Bon il semblerait que mon message ait été classé en français alors qu'il devrait être dans la section anglaise.

Un sysop peut–il rectifier la situation?

Ron Van Holst — 2010–05–15 21:55:42 EDT wrote

So much of the infrastructure ideas have to do with shipping the bits, and so little have to do with adding value to the bits. If we build the best bit pipes in the world, how will that make us a more innovative nation. The commercial carriers have already figured this out, there is not much money to be made just shipping bits, even for a long distance. The money is in adding services on top of those bits. If we are to become a nation of innovators, we need to find ways to create and deploy creative new services over these bit pipes. Otherwise we will just use the pipes to be consumers of information and services, and the wealth will leave Canada and go to the creators of the information and services. The pennies will go to the builders of the bit pipes, and the dollars will go to the creators and providers of the new and innovative services.

R — 2010–05–19 00:31:28 EDT wrote

The money to be made in having the best bit pipes is in what it enables globally for the country.

We can't build those services on top of current connections that are expensive, throttled and asymmetrical and much slower than many other countries. I haven't seen any practical speed upgrade to the carriers in my area since 1998, seriously (those that do seem faster have ridiculous 60GB / month limits!).

I think we need to understand that carriers may not be the biggest or more direct beneficiary of the potential gains from faster networks, the country is. They will thus not invest in what will probably not bring them the most short term profits. They dream of selling us services at exorbitant price that don't add any value (think SMS) except for their investors. They really want us as consumer as our productions doesn't grow their profits.

The thing is, our production is what this new economy is all about and it DOES help the economy and freedom of this country.

This is why we really need to invest in a public infrastructure for the better good of the country and realize this is a much bigger issue than current carriers make it look like. It enables those added services on top of those bits much more easily and in a much broader way. Ever wondered why they don't allow servers?

That's also why I emphasized building a public knowledge infrastructure and not just public FTTH.

I haven't developed too much in that direction as this is after all the infrastructure part of this forum, in the mechanical sense but I think the way the foundation of this infrastructure is laid out is going to have a much more important impact on the added services on top of it than we think.

The internet has cut the middle man in many fields and enabled great new ventures unforeseen just 10 years ago.

If we want to continue evolving toward a much more productive economy the network might enable, where useless position can be recycled into productive work, we have to realize that we need to trust people and organization with their data by letting them broadcast it and share it as they see fit without barriers that are unjustifiably expensive to overcome.

rayc — 2010–05–19 13:51:45 EDT wrote

@Ron Van Holst: If we build the best bit pipes in the world, how will that make us a more innovative nation.

I'll take that it's a question. Just look at how the universities and research community innovated during the early days of the internet. Many of the pioneers and innovators of the web were from these very groups. Why does Google want to build a 1GB network? Wouldn't having the best pipes be like having the best labs to test out new ideas? And these ideas could become tomorrow's innovation. Perhaps a better infrastructure will spur garage startups and new cottage industries?

R — 2010–06–10 02:16:42 EDT wrote

To read: Breaking the Broadband Monopoly (fixed)

R — 2010–06–10 02:19:40 EDT wrote

Well well… it seems the site can't handle a–href tags…
Here is the link for you:

Breaking the Broadband Monopoly

Ron Van Holst — 2010–07–09 13:18:23 EDT wrote

Yes, rayc, it was posed as a question. I agree that when you have innovative people, the bigger the bit pipe between them, the better they will be able to collaborate and innovate.

I'm not opposed to improving bandwidth, I think it's important. I'm also supportive of making public data more accessible, so that innovative Canadians can create innovative services with this data. Although I personally like FTTH technology and did some research work in this area while I was at Nortel (including municipally owned fibre), and would love FTTH to my home, I think better mobile broadband (more bandwidth for less money) is an even greater enabler of innovation. Broadband to the home is more about consumption, and mobile broadband is more about participation. There will be more innovative services created for mobile than for fixed broadband.

That being said, my main point is that access and data are only two legs of the stool. The important third leg from my perspective is compute power to crunch that data in new and innovative ways. I have proposed the Canada build world class supercomputing facilities.