Look to History, See the Future of Telecommunications

Aspects of the future are already visible as we prepare for a new year.

by Ken DiPietro and Alex Goldman [December 30, 2005]

Ken DiPietro and his wife Dawn became involved in the ISP world due to the frustration of being connected to the second to the last telephone pole in the universe. In late 1999, after two years of research, New-ISP was launched, providing broadband service utilizing Fixed Wireless and SDSL technologies. Today, Ken has left the WISP field to join CONXX, a wireless company that he insists in not a WISP but is instead a Wireless ILEC Replacement (WIR?). Alex Goldman is the Managing Editor of this website.

From our modern vantage point, it is hard to even imagine a time when telecommunications didn't exist. It is so ingrained in our lives that we now take it for granted. Between telephone, cell phone, internet, and many of the more passive ways we gather and exchange information, our ability to communicate has become one of the most important aspects of our lives. The products of telecommunications innovation are as central to modern life as three ancient inventions were to ancient cities: the wheel, domestication of animals, and pottery.

Telecommunications did not exist in ancient times, but communications did exist in ancient times. It was word of mouth or word on tablet. Today, a tablet is a species of personal computer. It's no cylinder seal.

Modern telecommunications draw on inventions throughout the history of humanity, from cave paintings, cuneiform, papyrus, the Gutenberg press, to the astounding array of devices we have come to accept today.

During the American Revolutionary War, the time required to get a message from England to America was measured in weeks. A century later, the telegraph enabled near instantaneous transmission of information wherever infrastructure was in place. In 1901, Marconi sent his first experimental wireless communication across the Atlantic Ocean and the world was changed forever.

Demand is human
One thing has remained a strict constant: people demand the ability to share ideas as immediately as possible and when this need is fulfilled, society tends to move forward at a measurably faster pace then when no such capability exists. In fact, if this technology were to disappear tomorrow, our civilization would cease to exist as we know it.

Francis McInerney, venture capitalist at New York-based North River Ventures, talks about a company's internal communications and measures its Velocity of Information in order to help investors decide whether or not to buy the company's stock.

He points out that information even replaces physical goods. McInerney notes: "Every time the cost of information falls, it can more easily be substituted for something else—be it labor, capital, or natural resources—than before." (p.24)

For example, a digital camera replaces film with data stored on a disk, and the PC becomes the darkroom, replacing vats of chemicals with data processing.

One of the books he co-authored, FutureWealth (see Book Review: FutureWealth), which explains how to make money in an intnernet world, is based on this idea: "Our premise is based on the falling cost of information, which we believe has been a driving force in history." (p.1)

It is one reason why the USSR collapsed: "Any system designed to maintain the high cost of information by force, supporting producers to the exclusion of consumers, will come under immense stress, and will collapse. That is what happened to the Soviet Union."

The Internet is often likened to the railways in its role in wealth creation. McInerney says the railways had a precursor: the Roman Empire:

"With its 53,000 miles of roads, Rome eliminated traditional dependence on water transportation and built an empire that lasted nearly two thousand years, spreading imperial administration from the North Sea to the Red Sea and beyond. Couriers of the Imperial Post could cover one hundred and fifty miles per day over the well-engineered (and safe) roads of the empire, reaching London from Rome in less than a week. This was a period of wealth creation on a scale that would not be seen again until railways were built across Europe and America." (p.19)

After the Roman Empire, McInerney cites the Gutenberg bible and the Reformation as a key change in the price of information:

"In the sixteenth century, information, and with it the immense power that resided in the church and state, moved suddenly into the hands of individuals. Everywhere that literacy moved, established institutions collapsed, often with frightening speed." (p.21)

Take note: we are not talking about a slow, evolutionary process. We are talking about equilibrium punctuated by revolutionary disruptions.

Dinosaurs rule, and then they die.