A Barking Dog

One thing I’ve noticed spending so much time outside the country, is that in many places it seems to be easier to locate public, if not free access outside the US. Last week I returned from a trip to Jacksonville and due to the ground transport arrangements, I had almost a couple of hours to kill. It’s bad enough the concessions were nearly non existent at the gate, but there was no Internet to be found. Contrast that to the hotel which not only offered free WiFi, but free ethernet connectivity as well. Pretty much most of the hotels I’m in these days have some sort of broadband, (airports too) though the fancy hotels still want 10 bucks a day and some of the more modest hotels are including it gratis.

At one point last year even though we had a production we were flying from date to date (which is a whole other story in itself…) and throughout much of Europe, even in the smallest Italian and Spanish airports, there was WiFi. Not always free, but generally always available. Even the tour of Mexico I was on 18 months ago it was pretty easy to get broadband, or at least an Internet cafe or hotel business center with good access.

Seems as though my feeling “the rest of the world is better connected than us” is at least somewhat justified. In a report issued last September, the US has fallen to 13th place in the per capita penetration of broadband Internet connectivity. Noted technorati Om Malik is trying to put a spin on this in that our percentage of penetration is low, but the raw numbers are high. He notes that “It’s easy to wire a country the size of say Florida, but it’s darn hard to wire-up a continent.” One flaw in that reasoning is that the US doesn’t have a national program to deploy and develop connectivity offers. In the States each area is controlled and limited by ILECs and local cable providers. The CLECs have mostly checked out after the bubble and still use the wire and infratructure of ILECs anyway and don’t have access to the cable networks. Could these other countries be gaining faster because they aren’t burdened by disparate standards by monopolistic incombants and outdated Federal laws? Could it be that they just have abetter handle on it than we do? Companies like Orange and Vodaphone are quick to adapt offerings and deploy new technologies whereas over here companies like Verizon, Qwest and Comcast have death grips on the technology and have been slow to invest and deploy the technology.

Although they haven’t blown networking like they did with wireless service. Well, not yet anyway though they seem to be trying…

I pulled my rented Ford Explorer in front of the non descript building on Main St in Whitinsville, MA just after 9:00 AM on a cold winter morning in November. It had been more than two months since the deal to sell the Live-Audio_Board had been sealed. During that time I’d been searching for office and data center space in Seattle, though later I was told the offices would be located in Whitinsville. I’d found world-class data center space in Seattle, we just needed to seal the deal. At the time, the LAB was running from a managed colo space at Rackspace.com in San Antonio, Texas.

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It was a typical late summer night, the Thursday prior to Labor Day in the year 2000. I was sitting in a suite in the Wall Center Tower Two. thirty floors above downtown Vancouver. The two “special friends” that I had met earlier that night at the club in the Cecil Hotel had already showered, packed and headed back to the club. It was still early, just after midnight. On what should have been one of the happiest days of my life, tears filled my eyes. Earlier that day I’d just sealed the biggest deal of my life. I’d sold the Live-Audio_Board site and secured a rather well paying job after several weeks of negociations. As my normal custom over Labor Day for the last few years, I made the trip to Vancouver for the Molson Indy Vancouver race. I knew things were going to change, little did I know how much. I was in for the ride of my life, I just hoped I could hold on.

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