I started working at seven thirty this morning.  My morning really was not all that bad.  I worked for about two hours getting everything caught up and in good order.  There was work to do, but I would not classify the morning as being necessarily busy.

I grab the train and headed off to Wall Street at what seemed to be the most appropriately slow time of the morning when no one was likely to require my attention for a little while.

Friday lunches are always an adventure in Manhattan.  Today, Katie came up from the waterfront and met me on on Stone to eat at Smorgas Chef, an upscale Swedish eatery there.  The food was excellent.  I had warm goat cheese and beet salad to start and my meal was Norwegian salmon and scrambled eggs on toast.  Very tasty. The one thing that was weird was that because the lunch rush was so busy we had to share a rather small four person table with two other people.  It was rather awkward.

Afterwards we hit Financier for coffee and take-home goodies.  I definitely love the food choices that working in Manhattan provides.

I was smart enough to grab take-home treats from Financier Patisserie for Dominica too. You can’t get food like this in New Jersey.

Tomorrow I have an extremely busy day scheduled.  My morning deployments start at eight in the morning and an all-morning conference call supporting a storage migration starts at nine.  In addition to five hours of already scheduled work I also have quite a bit of anytime work to do tomorrow when I have the opportunity.  I am going to be working a full day most likely.  Because I have to spend so much of the time on the phone we decided that I really needed to have a new phone before tomorrow if at all possible.

We shopped around a little and decided to get a Panasonic DECT 6.0 wireless phone system with three handsets and a speakerphone feature – which is actually the most critical feature at this point.  Our old Uniden wireless phone system died some time ago and we have been living with a $10 Walmart special bare-bones phone for the last two years and it is pretty awful.  We will be very happy to have wireless, speakerphone, CallerID, headset, etc.  It will make our lives a lot easier.

We really have to have a new phone soon either way as we will not be able to live with just a single, non-wireless phone once we move into the new house in Peekskill.  Having three floors and a baby will make that just impossible.  We will require there to be phone access throughout the house.

For those who are unfamiliar with the DECT 6.0 standard in wireless phones – this is a 1.9GHz frequency band standard (1.8GHz outside of the US) with a new standard designed just for voice communications.  This frequency range is nice because it does not interfere with the 2.4GHz band used for 802.11b/g/n that we normally use for our WiFi equipment in the house.  The 1.9GHz band also gets greater range than the higher frequency bands get.  If you are using WiFi, and who isn’t these days, and you still need a legacy phone system then DECT 6.0 is a very good choice.  It is also less expensive to manufacture due to the lower technical challenges of making transceivers in this range.  (We do not use a legacy phone system outside of the house, but our Vonage VoIP telephone system comes into the house digitally and then is transferred into legacy in-house analogue wiring.  It is a strange system but it is simple and straightforward.  I would prefer all digital but Vonage does not offer that in any useful form yet.)

Today involved more “trying out” of Twitter.  I am able to use it from my BlackBerry now.  I started using it via the web browser but that was pretty painful.  So I discovered and installed TwitterBerry to see if that would work a bit better.  That makes the Twitter updating process a million times easier and quicker.  Now I might do it all of the time.  I even got Dominica to sign up for Twitter today.  Now she can keep everyone up to date on her comings and goings.  She has tried blogging in the past but was unable to keep it up for any length of time finding it difficult to figure out what to write about.  Maybe with microblogging and having access from her BlackBerry she will be able to stick with it.

So far I had only put a single application onto my BlackBerry 8830 SmartPhone – an SSH terminal application used to access UNIX servers remotely which worked worlds better than a similar application on the sad Palm PDA that I had before the BlackBerry.  After trying TwitterBerry I realized that there is a world of useful handheld applications that I am missing.  So I downloaded the BlackBerry FaceBook application as well.  I am becoming more and more mobile as we speak.  Although we aren’t really speaking.

My evening was quite busy.  There is nothing “special” going on at the office which means that the developments are all running full steam ahead getting deployments ready making my night quite busy.  The more upheaval at work the less work there is for me.  When things are quiet is when I get really heavily loaded down on Friday nights.

My night became a very late one.  At one point I really thought that I would be leaving the office a little before six in the evening.  That was not to be.  One of my deployments ended up keeping me in the office until well after eight at night – constantly dangling the carrot of hope before my eyes thinking that the software to be deployed would be available any minute.  We didn’t end up getting to even begin the installation until ten past eight in the evening.  Dominica was already home and well into watching 27 Dresses while I was still preparing for the work to begin.

I was in the office so late this evening that they shut off the lights on me and, as far as I could tell, all but one other person from my entire floor had left.  It was very lonely, reminding me of my days working at Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C. where I would often work late into the night in an office where everyone had left hours before.

I got home at a quarter until ten!  What a late day.  I had just enough time to call Emily and to wish her a happy birthday.  For her birthday we bought her an 8.1MP Samsung digital camera.  She has been a bit of a photographer for a while always stealing her mom’s camera so we thought that she should have her own.  She is the same age that I was when I got my first camera.  My first camera was given to me by my parents while on our way to Bar Harbor, Maine for my first ever vacation there.  Emily just got back from her first trip to Maine a few days ago.

It was pretty much straight to bed for us after eating the goodies that I brought home from Financier.  I have to be up early tomorrow to go back to work, unfortunately.

Roads are possibly the easiest to visualize since we see them every day. For most people there is only one road that passes near enough to their property, assuming that they own or rent property, to allow direct access. Even if another road exists nearby it is often not accessible without crossing other people’s property lines to reach it. For the average person having a “backup” access road to their home is simply not possible.

More importantly than the theoretical ability to access a second road (since we could mandate that all houses be built with a road on either side – at massive additional cost financially and environmentally) is the improbability that we could manage a system where one company would own and manage one set of roads and another would own and manage the second set of roads so that every resident would have the choice of whose roads to drive on. At best the road directly at your driveway would be clear but as soon as you reached an intersection there would be a dispute as to whose responsibility the intersection was. Each family would need to choose which road system they were going to access and pay road maintenance fees for repairs, snow removal, insurance, etc. just for the one that they use. That company would then need to pay access fees to the alternate road company so that you would have the right to visit friends across town who opted to use the primary road carrier – the one that you didn’t choose. At some point you will need to switch onto their roads to get into your friend’s driveway. Remember that the choice is to which road system you can access. Just because the road is next to your house doesn’t mean that you are allowed onto it – it is simply the competitor’s product.

The same situation would be true of water. What if you want a company to compete with your town’s water supply. Perhaps they will offer cleaner water at a premium price or cheaper water but that is only good enough for washing the car. Sounds like a great deal. But now a new set of water mains has to be dug under your entire city. That isn’t going to make people happy. And a second water treatment facility will have to be built somewhere in town. And every yard, yes even yours, will have to be dug up to allow the water hookup to be brought to your house. And if you think that the price of water will go down because of competition keep in mind that all of this infrastructure cost money and now each water treatment facility only processes half as much water meaning it takes more people and more equipment to process the same amount of water. Prices have to go up. Inconvenient and more expensive.

It is because of these factors that you have never heard of a village offering competitive road or water services – imagine the disaster with competing sewage systems! Villages, towns and cities almost ubiquitously oversee all key utilities of this nature because it is in everyone’s interest that everyone have clean, safe water, efficient sewers and safe roads. It keeps the population healthy and allows everyone to go to work. These utilities are so obvious and have been around for so long that every village knows exactly how to perform these services and how to do them very efficiently.

We begin to see problems arise when we start looking at core infrastructure services that have only existed for the last century or so. Principally this means electrical, gas, telephone and cable. These services, because they required additional capital investments, connect to additional infrastructure outside of the village or town and require greater technical knowledge have almost purely been left to the purview of private industry generally operating under strict regulations.

Electrical power supply is the oldest of the “new” infrastructure services and, as such, has the most potential to be taken over and managed by the municipality itself. It is not uncommon to find small towns and jurisdictions that have decided to take their power needs “in house” and run their own power plants and maintain their own infrastructure. In many cases this proves to be very beneficial to the local residents as overall costs are often lower and service is local and friendly instead of being handled by some far away corporation. It can also generate local jobs that are stable and reliable. Local power plants are generally not able to take advantage of hydroelectric or nuclear power, however, so they are not always the best option. But the potential is there and with new wind and solar technologies today there could be more potential for this in the future. We must be aware, though, that one of the cost saving measures in small town power management often comes from having no research and development whatsoever which will produce short term gains at long term expense. Large electric companies spend a lot of money making sure that they power is safe, cheap and reliable for a long time to come.

As we move towards newer and more “technology” focused services we move farther and farther away from a general understanding from the overall populace and we also move farther away from municipalities feeling that they should bring these services “in house.” This feeling, I believe, comes from three primary issues. The first is that telephone and cable are massively more complex than even electric generation which causes municipalities to need more extensively trained, and therefore paid, staff for a rather small-scale deployment. The second is that these services are newer and have a greater sense of being “optional” rather than “required” services like water, sewer or electric. The third is that these system inherently must connect to the outside world or they have no meaning. Other key services can, under ideal circumstances, exist completely within the borders of the jurisdiction and operate quite satisfactorily.

Telephone and cable services fall prey to the same issues affecting our other infrastructure components. Even though it is feasible to bring two sets of telephones lines and two sets of cable lines through a town this results in a conflict for right-of-way access which is a complex issue, it creates an unsightly mess in many areas and it decreases revenue potential for all businesses involved which is fine in urban areas but would result in a complete loss of service in rural areas.

The current telephony monopoly situation originated when AT&T was given an almost total monopoly but was required to provide the same service at approximately the same cost to its urban and rural customers. Urban customers in areas with high telephone termination density would pay slightly more than the service would be expected to cost and rural customers would pay the same. But AT&T took a loss on rural telephone terminations under this system making up the cost in their guaranteed urban profit centers. If telephone providers were forced to compete in the urban areas they would be under no obligation to provide service to “profit loss” centers and would not choose to do so.

Some municipalities have decided to compete with the incumbent local carriers and have provided their own telephone and cable services. These services generally are technological dinosaurs, however, and roll out at very high cost with very few features. Few local regions have the capability to supply these services at a level competitive with large technology companies that service the major markets. This situation is likely to change over time as the technologies involved become increasingly commonplace and as convergence removes the need for as many overlapping services.

In today’s Internet dominated communications world we actually have arrived at a situation with far more choice than we have had for the past several generations. Because both the traditional telephone infrastructure as well as the cable television infrastructures and even to some degree the cellular phone infrastructure can carry Internet access to our homes we have, for the first time, have the ability to choose between competitors for a core infrastructure service. These competition is simply the result of redundant legacy technologies being replaced with a converged modern technology. If the Internet had come first there would never have been two separate telephone and cable television systems and all of those services would have been delivered over a single Internet access line and people today would be furious at the thought of stringing another entire set of cables up in the sky overhead. But those decisions were made long ago in a different era.

This competition of services has proved to be very good for us today and not only gives us the opportunity to choose and change Internet access suppliers but also to purchase duplicate services providing ourselves with a degree of reliability that did not exist for either service individually. In some rare areas Internet access is even available or has been proposed to be made available through the electrical power distribution system providing a third vector for access to our homes. Multi-service Internet access is now commonplace enough that major vendors such as Netgear now sell home router/firewall units that are designed to aggregate service across dual connections to provide better speed and reliability simply and automatically.

So the unfortunate situation that we find ourselves in is that there is no good answer for infrastructure services.  We must either submit to socialized control of these services by municipalities and regional authorities which leaves us with generally lower prices as the cost of development, advancement and options or we can allow private corporations to run these utilities where we are “forced” to hand over monopolistic controls in the hopes that regulations will keep prices and services in line.  The risk of either approach, of course, is that our access to critical services and, in some cases, information and our view of the outside world is controlled by agencies and companies for whom there is no true competition.

As technology service become more commonplace I believe that we have a great opportunity for convergence and socialization again.  As some rare regions have done, telephone and cable infrastructure can be brought “in house” through heavy investment in fiber optic networking allowing all services of this nature to be delivered with higher service levels, greater safety and at lower long-term cost through a single, small cable.  Municipalities that choose to go this integrated services route will find that they can leverage scale for cost effective Internet access through a few competitive long-haul carriers, allow residents to choose “telephone” services from Internet VoIP carriers that must compete on price and service, lower the power requirements providing additional cost savings and safety and greatly reduce the number of cables that must be strung through their regions.

For a relatively small investment a village, for example, could make Gigabit speed fiber optic connections available to every single resident of the village for a fixed fee and allow competing “cable television” companies to house their distribution systems within the village’s cabling hub giving residents the right to choose which television provider to choose or to choose none at all.  Telephone service could be purchased from a large number of carriers or residents could build their own telephony systems and even bypass those competitive carriers.  Only the core Internet access service – the base on which all else is derived – would be “owned” and management by the community providing a minimum amount of infrastructure for a maximum amount of services.