As originally posted on Blandin Foundation’s eNews…
After 12 years in business as a consultant, I have managed to fill two four-drawer filing cabinets with paper. In anticipation of installation of a new floor in my home office, I am doing some office cleaning and paper management. I am managing to recycle about three-quarters of the paper in the cabinets. Luckily my garbage guys have mechanical devices on their trucks! I am stunned to think that I could be storing all of this information on a couple of flash drives.
My initial community technology assessments found that dial-up was standard for homes and ISDN and frame relay were used by schools and hospitals. DSL was an emerging technology. Dedicated video conference networks were state of the art with 384k connections. My reports focus on the emergence of the Internet as a critical tool for community development. An advanced website had five or six pages and we encouraged page owners to update them once a quarter for freshness.
Today, Gig networks connect many school systems and many rural farms and lake cabins have FTTH connectivity. Wow, that is progress! Today, many businesses and organizations have online strategies that combine web pages, blogs and social media tools like Facebook and Twitter. Again, wow!! Mobile devices are a common way to connect with texts, tweets, maps, apps and more. Wow, wow and wow!!
While there has been great progress in connectivity, the flip side is that many still lack connectivity that meets state broadband standards. For those with dial-up or slow DSL the gap is even more pronounced and its impact is greater. For those who did not have home broadband Internet in 2000, it was considered an inconvenience. Today, it means less access to critical information and a lack of ability to communicate fully with the world around. The connectivity gap for residents using dial-up compared to early DSL was 200 Kbps; today the gap is from somewhere under 56 kbps to 10 Mb to 50 Mb to 1 Gb depending on where you live and your ability to pay. The gap for schools and health care facilities has grown from a 56 k frame relay connection or a T1 (1.54 Mbps) to many 1 Gb school or health care networks. And yes, in the past week I met with a clinic that cannot get more than one T1 from their incumbent telco.
On the applications side, we know that barely a majority of small businesses have a website, fewer have claimed their Google Places and that many have not jumped into the social media game. We know that many small businesses are resistant to change and are slow to adapt. From my perspective, they can choose to adopt and compete, or not.
I do have significant concerns for those who cannot connect due to lack of availability and affordability. With changes in education and health care coming full speed down the applications track, the inability to connect will mean limited access to these critical services and an inability to fully participate in today’s society. Their lack of access will translate into a lack of services for them and unrealized human potential. It will also mean higher costs for society as duplicative and inefficient service delivery mechanisms will need to be maintained with tax dollars.
Lots of work yet to do in the broadband world. And on my filing system!