Dr. Tim Wu has recently penned an editorial to the New York Times entitled “OPEC 2.0.” which argues that we need an alternative source of bandwidth much like we need alternative sources of energy.
It’s the sort of editorial which causes other tech columnists and blog editors to immediately loathe themselves because it’s obvious in retrospect, but Dr. Wu thought of it first.
Just as the industrial revolution depended on oil and other energy sources, the information revolution is fueled by bandwidth. If we aren’t careful, we’re going to repeat the history of the oil industry by creating a bandwidth cartel.
Like energy, bandwidth is an essential economic input. You can’t run an engine without gas, or a cellphone without bandwidth. Both are also resources controlled by a tight group of producers, whether oil companies and Middle Eastern nations or communications companies like AT&T, Comcast and Vodafone. That’s why, as with energy, we need to develop alternative sources of bandwidth.
Pointing out that the average American spends roughly the same amount of money for bandwidth of some form or another, whether on their cellphones, land-line phones, cable TV, broadband Internet, etc., as they do on heating, cooling, electricity, and gasoline, Wu makes the case that we need the data equivalent of the compost garden, rooftop solar panel, and electric scooter.
The difference, of course, is that while rooftop solar panels have recently started to be affordable on a per-wattage basis, Wu’s suggestion of “running your own fiber to your home” isn’t. Even if you did put down your own last-mile fiber, you still need some place to connect it to… the whole point is that the value of a network is equal to the number of end-points on the network, squared.
The other solutions Wu suggests: re-allocation of the EM spectrum, municipal fiber as a public utility, and increasing the amount of competition are all more practical ideas, but they require significant changes in governmental policy – the same government elected from a two party system where the two parties are both heavily influenced by broadband providers and telecommunications companies.
But Wu is not wrong in identifying a significant problem – especially since e-mail, telecommuting, and teleconferencing are all considered important ways to reduce energy expenditure. It is disheartening to believe that we’re simply switching from one artificially overpriced commodity to another.
Damn. Well, I guess there’s no way around it then. Looks like we’ll have to recreate the Internet from scratch by hooking up everyone to self-installed network connections. So what do you say, you lay the fiber if I use the backhoe?
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