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Emergence and Swarm Consciousness

As the honeybee swarming season is ending, I have been reflecting on the four swarms we have caught this season and the phenomenon that some call “swarm consciousness”. In researching more about the subject, I came across this short set of PBS videos describing a new way of thinking described as “emergence”. It not only describes the magic forces of nature that science somehow struggles with, it also gives a great explanation on how we learn. It is encouraging to hear that current computer design has a long way to go – and that the human brain still wins on its “connectedness”. Encouraging to think that swarm intelligence in humans is FAR greater than any political leader or dictator. Worth watching both clips and reflecting on them:

Part 1:

Part 2:

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Space: The Final Frontier

I live in the country. I live in the so-called Final Third. Ofcom call it a “Market 1” area – because BT is the only fixed-line service provider providing the physical lines that broadband and telephony run across.

This week, three different views hit me that have changed my whole view on how we roll out broadband to the final third. I expect many of my readers will have switched off by now – but bear with me – because I think it might interest you.

The first view was from Adrian Wooster’s blog – where he has produced a really interesting picture of what the spread of the UK’s broadband looks like by postcode – one image of which I have copied below:

Click on the image on Adrian’s blog site to see each scenario – it loops back at the end to highlight the gulf between where we’re starting from to where we need to get to.  Each spot of light represents a postcode.

At the moment the image only covers England and Wales – Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own statistical output area systems which individually need resolving to postcode level.

The interesting thing is that most of the “final third” remains in the dark – even at 95% coverage!

That got me thinking.  What will be available from WiFi/Mobile/Radio technologies by 2015?  Regular readers will know that I am interested in LightPeak – but there have been two other announcements this week that are very interesting and makes you think differently about broadband for the final third in 2015.

The first was from Alcatel Lucent – who have just announced the launch of the lightRadio cube which can be installed wherever there is electricity.

So this little device will dramatically reduce the costs of deploying mobile phone base stations – whilst allowing extended coverage of 3g networks to areas that are currently far too expensive to cover.

The second was from an In-Stat Report – stating that a new Wi-Fi technology standard called 802.11ac has been developed to provide Gigabit speeds across WiFi networks.  The report predicts 1bn devices shipped with this technology by 2015 – which will allow streaming of high quality video to the TV set – or downloads of BlueRay DVDs in 6 seconds.I expect that many, if not most, will be mobile devices of some sort.

Add these two developments together and you get a very interesting set of technologies that may be able to provide 1Gbps speeds (depending on availability of backhaul) to most households in the country that are not provided with a direct link – i.e those who are in the dark areas on the map.  That is 500 times faster than our current unambitious target for 2Mbps….and will require the cooperation of mobile operators and fixed-line operators who can provide much faster backahual speeds.

Exciting stuff – but I wonder if today’s #digitalbritain thinking is really embracing such ideas as these to create a truly competitive infrastructure for those in the power of the Dark Lord?  As these new technologies are enabled, the bottleneck may well move to the backhaul.  Which is why the current ideas around Fibre to the Community or “Digital Village Pumps” will become even more important.  Then again, I would prefer to redefine FTTH as Fibre to the Hamlet – like the one I live in – or Fibre to the Clachan – as they say in more Celtic countries!

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We All Live on (Almost) One Island!

Whilst researching the great Buckminster Fuller, I came across a different way of looking at the world – which is called the Fuller (or Dymaxion) Map.

For all of the separation and differences we tend to create in our world, it is sometimes encouraging for us to look at the world through a unifying lens to realise that not only do we live on one planet – but that also we all live on (almost) one island!  Makes you think….

More on this – as well as other pictures at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map

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Home Ownership in the Connected Kingdom

I got up yesterday morning questioning why it was that BT will take at least another five and possibly ten years to upgrade my broadband from 2MB to 10 or perhaps even 40 (on their current unpublished, un-thought-about plans).  I run an information intensive business from home and I need faster broadband – now.  And I am not alone!  Why should I wait?  And I thought who owns this problem anyway?

It triggered a thought.  A Thursday Thought!

In the early days of Telecoms deregulation, BT was forced to move the ownership of the (plain-old-bog-standard-you-can-have-it-in-any-colour-so-long-as-it-is-black) Telephone to the person owning the number.  Standards were created and innovation thrived with new types of telephone being connected to the network – so long as they conformed to standards.

When Openreach was created,  management of the equipment on the end of the line was handed over to other so-called “Service Providers” and (a little known fact), BT was forced to auction-off the actually ownership of about 60% of their lines – which were predominantly won by the French company, Orange.  However, for those in the Final Third, this line ownership trick is irrelevant.  We are still at the beck-and-call of BT Openreach’s exchange upgrade programme.

A few weeks ago I had lunch with the Chief Engineer at BT Openreach (George Williamson).  I asked him how it was possible to unlock BT’s investment bottleneck and accelerate the rollout of broadband to the final third.  But he simply said the current plans for upgrading would take all of BT’s resources in the next three years and that the programme put BT’s implementation teams at maximum stretch.  So there is an implementation capacity problem here too.  Which is why more local infrastructure building (with or without BT) looks interesting.  There is a market for it, if only BT Openreach were prepared to publish their plans of where (and where not) they intend to go.

So I thought, what about me owning my own line – like in the days when I ownership of the telephone passed from BT to the private sector?  What if I could then do a deal with BT (or another service provider) to pay them double to upgrade the line (rather than pay Sky to watch football).  What if I paid them treble (and not buy a new car)?  What if I bought new shares in a community bond scheme which would partner with BT (or another builder) to accelerate the rollout?  What if (like in some parts of Europe) a mortgage company will extend a mortgage to include the cost of a Next Generation connection?  What if there were people in my community who would underwrite the scheme?  What if….

So I leave the question hanging – why shouldn’t I be able to by and own my own line?  I don’t want it owned by some service provider or some company that themselves are totally dependent on a part of BT Group that is not the slightest bit interested in my line – until about 2108 if I am lucky!

Time to re-think “home ownership” and what a connected home really means in the connected kingdom!

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Great Inventor Dies

There are very, very few people who invent truly new shapes and ideas that come mainstream and change the way people think within their own lifetime.  However, Benoit Mandelbrot (who died last Thursday) can be said to be one of these very, very few.  He both named and created the field of fractal mathematics.

Whilst he didn’t discover the basic maths of fractals, he found an obscure, almost unknown concept of exploring the world between two dimensions and three dimensions and showed its fundamental role in the fabric of the universe.

Wikipedia has a great entry on what both fractals and Mandelbrot’s other work have done for mathematics.

Benoit Mandlebrot RIP

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Digital Scotland and The Royal Society of Edinburgh

Just returned from the Next Gen ’10 roadshow in Edinburgh.

The most interesting thing for me ( which I had compeletely missed before I went there) is that Scotland has approached this whole problem of upgrading the broadband network by commissioning the Royal Society of Edinburgh to look at the problem afresh.  Unlike The Royal Society (based in London), the RSE has maintained the “Scottish Generalist Tradition” and have brought an eclectic set of wise folk to apply new thought and rigour to working through the issue of broadband in Scotland so that it serves the wider context of society and the economy.  Technology is a means to a greater end, not an end in itself.

The Digital Scotland interim report can be found by first clicking on the RSE logo below and then clicking on the link right at the bottom of the page “Read Interim Report”:

Unlike the Digital Britain report which was written in the time of a dying administration by economist-politicians, bureaucrats and quangos, and then attacked by the new administration to become a nearly totally ineffective set of recommendations, Scotland has approached the problem with refreshing renaissance-style method that only a body like the RSE can do.  It is an elegant combination of mathematical logic combined with rounded, objective reasoning – and moves the debate forward so that Scotland might well take the thought-leadership position when it publishes its final report once the current comments have been digested.

One conclusion that I came away with is that the whole debate about where fibre goes should be re-focused around Fibre to the Community.  Many of the more rural areas in Scotland would benefit tremendously by digging a single fibre into the community.  The current ambitions of Jeremy Hunt and the Con-Lib coalition government for the UK to become the leader in Europe for broadband by 2015 – without any central government funding – becomes even more challenging when one compares us to Finland – which was very well articulated by Professor Michael Fourman in his detailed analysis backing up Digital Scotland at the conference.

One of the strange things is that the interim report talks of Fiber, not Fibre.  I am not sure how this American English has managed to get into a perfectly good Scottish-English Language document.  But Hey Ho – the world moves on!

The Scots, Edinburgh and the RSE have a long tradition of great invention and enlightened thinking.  This blog will keep a keen eye on developments North of the Border.

(P.S.  The talk that I gave on Sir Patrick Geddes will be put onto this post once I transcribe and edit it.)

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When it’s Time to Quit

This is the first of a new series of “Thursday Thoughts”.  Please do sign up for future editions by completing the form on the THURSDAY THOUGHTS? tab above and I will send you an email in the future every Thursday to stimulate your thoughts!

Having spent a few weeks struggling to master a state-of-the-art Web 2.0 marketing package costing me several hundred dollars in monthly service fees, I decided, this week, to stop the subscription, clear the decks and start again.

In the high-tech world, times like this are both scary and exciting.  You press the “delete button in the sky” and all the work you have put into the old system is gone.  This is particularly true with cloud-based applications – where you have not only put time into configuring – but much the more valuable time of actually learning the system.

The good news is that in the past 24 hours I have managed to re-create a much better integration with my existing website and blog than I ever managed to achieve with the old system – at about a tenth of the ongoing monthly expenses!

The buzz in the past few years might well be right concerning Cloud Services, Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, On Demand etc. etc. as being the next big thing.  But some things don’t change.  INTEGRATION is absolutely key to creating a smooth flow of work between the various application stacks in any company.  This is where the workarounds and exceptions and “knowledge of how things work” becomes the expensive items in any organisation – whether in the Business or IT.

The corageous pioneers of this new cloud-based world will make many mistakes in the early days when choosing which platforms and applications should (or should not run) their companies.  It smacks of the pre-ERP world where integrators made a lot of money from bonding “best of breed” packages.  It was only because of the high costs and failure of many of these projects did  the big ERP vendors like SAP and Oracle make the move to mop up by presenting pre-integrated suites of applications.

From my experience, in the early days of developing anything new, you have to keep it REALLY SIMPLE, find applications that are already well integrated with other things you use.  So often we are taken down a blind alley because some hype or salesman has schmoozed us about all the exciting features in XYZ application – many of which we will never use – however competent we become.

In the past 36 hours I have re-taught myself that when things are simply not going right, it is often a big relief to “call it quits”.  I was pleased that I could at least extract the latest data sets of customers and products that I had on the old system and make an elegant withdrawal from the complexity, confusion and cost that it had given me.  It strikes me that a lot of politicians and civil-servants must be thinking the same about whatever their particular problem is at the moment.

Finally, I always think that the basis of a good decision is whether, 24 hours later, you regret making the change or not.  I am glad to say that today I am very happy with my choice of simplifying and getting back to basics.  Interested to any of your thoughts or stories that support (or counter) this, the First Thursday Thought!

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