Milo Medin, the VP of Access Services at Google (responsible for the Kansas City deployment) gave a 40 minute presentation discussing important changes in the Internet. We should be moving from an age of scarcity to abundance, if the big cable companies will stop hindering that change. The slides from his presentation are available here.

You are surrounded by the radio waves of local television signals. They are available to you for free if you put up an antenna, but there was no easy way to take that free signal and then stream it to all your digital devices. Now there is. Aereo, available only in New York presently, combines an antenna with broadband to transmit television wherever you want it.

Ryan Kim provides the details in a February GigaOm article:

The system works by creating an array of hundreds of thousands of tiny TV antennas the size of a thumbnail and housing them in one data center in a market. When users hook up to Aereo, they take command of an antenna, renting it to get local broadcast channels such as ABC, CBS, Fox and others. They also have access to a cloud-based dual tuner DVR that allows them to initially record up to 40 hours of content.

Customers can view the content on iPads, iPhones, AppleTV, and Roku devices via the web. Rates vary from $1/day to $80/year. The company, backed in part by IAC, aspires to expand nationally.

This is an approach local community networks should follow, particularly those who want to build broadband networks but don't want to get lost in the mind-numbing details of offering a television package.

Needless to say, major broadcasters have gone to the court to stop the ambitious start-up. FOX, the Tribune Company, PBS, Univision, and others, lost their July bid for a preliminary injunction to stop Aereo from rebroadcasting their programming over the Internet. The plaintiffs argued that Aereo violated copyright protections, but Aereo's method does not amount to a copyright infringement according to the court. The individual control over each antenna does not allow sharing of content and does not amount to infringement through public performance.

Staci D. Kramer, from paidContent summed up the judge's rationale for denying the injunction:

Before the economic downturn, a typical small video service provider could expect between $1.25 and $2.00 a month per subscriber in ad revenues, noted Walter P. Staniszewski, president of Prime Media Productions – a company that sells advertising for small video service provider clients. Since the downturn, the numbers are more like $1.00 to $1.50.

“If you study the cable industry, even the big guys didn’t have their own sales force until they developed some real scale,” said Staniszewski. He cautioned operators with systems with fewer than 5,000 or 6,000 subscribers against hiring their own sales force.

On Friday, July 13, I was a guest on TWiT Specials on the This Week in Tech Network, discussing bandwidth caps with Dane Jasper, Reid Fishler, and Benoit Felten. Hosted by Tom Merritt. It was a very good discussion over the course of one hour.

The video can be viewed here.

We have followed events in Opelika's network project for almost two years. In addition to creating a smart-grid for its municipal electric utility, the City plans to offer triple-play services. We previously covered Charter Cable's astroturf campaign to oppose the network and how the campaign failed when Opelikans passed the referendum.

This week, the 27,000 residents of Opelika saw their efforts begin to materialize at a ground breaking ceremony at the site of the new Opelika Power Services Facility. Chris Anthony, of the Opelika-Auburn News covered the story:

Site work is well under way on the $3.7 million facility, which leaders say will be an integral part of the fiber-optic network being built throughout the city. In addition to housing the administrative office and warehouse, the facility will also be the home of Opelika Power Services’ fiber hub.

Mayor Gary Fuller notes how the people of Opelika entered the business of municipal utilities over one hundred years ago, when the community purchased the then-private electric utility. He spoke about how the people of Opelika carry on that self-reliant streak with their new fiber network.

According to, Beth Ringley, Interim Director of Opelika Power, 90% of the fiber is installed underground throughout the city and should be nearly completed by the end of the summer. The $41 million project is scheduled for completion in the spring of 2013 and the first customers are expected to connect at that time.

“It’s a big, big day for the city of Opelika,” Mayor Gary Fuller said. “It’s important for our future.”

To support her thesis, Crawford presented some stunning numbers. In the last two years, Comcast market share has grown from 16.3 million subscribers to 18.5, a 14 percent growth. Time Warner Cable has grown 10 percent, from 9.2 to 10.7 million customers. Meanwhile, DSL subscribers have plummeted: AT&T and Verizon market share is down 22 and 21 percent respectively. So, while it's good to be Comcast, it's not good to be an American citizen. Without competition, there's no drive to improve the service. The average speed of an Internet connection in the United States is around 5Mbit/s. An astoundingly low number if you look at other western countries. South Korea, for example, has an average of 50Mbit/s. And faster connections are starting to be implemented around the world.

During 2011, nineteen million miles of fiber optic cable were installed in the United States, according to CRU Group, a global research firm. That means all the fiber that was laid in the U.S. last year could be wrapped around the equator 763 times. It was the largest installation since the boom year of 2000. And the reason has a lot to do with wireless services.

When using 4G on that new mobile phone, your connection is mostly wired. It is wireless from the tower to your hand -- a distance of anywhere from a few thousand feet to a few miles. But probably for hundreds of miles, that connection is on fiber-optic lines.

Before a tower can offer 4G services, it needs a fiber cable, and that is driving a boom in connecting towers. In our recent case studies on Chattanooga, Lafayette, and Bristol, we noted that both Bristol and Chattanooga have connected towers with fiber optics for 4G wireless service from major carriers.

The boom in 2000 was famously short sighted, in part because it was almost all located in major corridors with other fiber cables -- no one was making the last mile connections to residents and local businesses.

Regardless of how much fiber optic lays out there unused, we need more -- but in the right places. A Wall Street Journal article by Anton Troianovski recently discussed the boom in new fiber investment, quoting Hunter Newby, Chief Executive of Allied Fiber:

"The notion there is a fiber glut is not true," Mr. Newby says, arguing that much of the fiber-optic cable that is available is simply not in the right place - not at suburban office parks and cellphone towers that need it.

Allied Fiber is building its own network between New York and Chicago with the intention of offering alternatives to established carriers, including Verizon and AT&T. Newby and Allied believe that other Internet companies, wireless carriers, hospitals, and possible anchor institutions will want the choices they don't have now. By extending their network to the right places, Allied sees opportunity.