Technology Intelligence Group

Emerging Technology - Adoption (One of Three in the series)

On Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, I had the honor of participating on the 'Blogs, Wikis, and Virtual Realities' panel at The Nature Conservancy's ConEx conference in Vancouver.  I presented virtually, and received some excellent questions from the professionals at the conference.

One question forwarded by Jonathon Colman, TNC's panel moderator, associate director of digital marketing for TNC, and all around great conservationist, was 'What is the big thing coming down the technology pipeline that will change everything?'.  This is a frequent question I receive from clients, venture capital firms, and about every seat-mate on international flights.  Unfortunately, the answer is not an easy one.

As is the case with picking the best wine, emerging technology is entirely a subjective experience.  What works best for you may not be the thing that works best for other people.  Just as each fingerprint is unique, so is each individuals or organizations interaction with technology.

The path this leads you down is that technology innovation is an iterative process.  Sometimes the innovations and inventions are small (the new Apple laptops come to mind), and rarely they are a giant leap ahead.  The interesting bit is that the degree of invention or innovation is most often not the determinant factor, but rather the ability of companies, people, and governments to integrate these technologies into the existing system of technology that they use.

An example: I will sell you a device today for your enterprise that will provide relevant and timely data to your employees in the areas they are working in, like personalized business intelligence.  This would save your staff from 'Search', a tool that was useful when there were scarce assets on the Internet but provides less utility with each additional piece of data we add to the Internet or enterprise.  Your employees will have the data they need to make important decisions BEFORE they even realize they need it. Sounds pretty good, right?

Now, go tell your existing database teams that you are going to upend their query structure and processes.  Tell your corporate business intelligence people that you are democratizing BI for the masses.  Listen as all of the infrastructure component teams (SharePoint, Unified Comms, Infosec) tell you how the new tool doesn't integrate with the legacy systems and that they will not support your purchase request. 

So much for that idea.

I've written in the past about technologies like VRML (which suffered from lack of an ecosystem of hardware and network bandwidth to reach critical mass) and Broadband over Powerlines (which suffered/suffers from a dysfunctional regulatory regime for electricity delivery worldwide, as well as the occasional complacent risk-averse utility).  These technologies were independently viable, however were not viable when transplanted into the real world.  Like a body rejecting an organ transplant, the rest of the environment was hostile to the innovation.

What can you do?

As a vendor of emerging technologies, you can understand your customers business processes, and tailor your offering for their environment (integration with legacy tools is a painful but necessary boat-anchor).  You can try a Trojan Horse approach of offering a reasonable degree of incremental functionality to get your foot in the door, then expand your offering greatly to allow your risk-friendly customer an excuse to provide to the inevitable organizational immune-response.  Or, you can relegate yourself to the small but vibrant community of early-adopter customers that thrive on disruption and new technology opportunities.

You can read more about the broader framework in each of the Technology Intelligence Group's analysis reports, in addition to the focus on a particular technology.  The technology AND the environment need to be ready for these technologies to be viable.

Adoption and diffusion of innovation is one piece of the emerging technology puzzle.  The other two are combinatorial innovation and the broader global framework of economics and demographics.  We'll be writing about these other two pieces of the puzzle next week.

Emerging Technology Watch- BPL = Innovative Broadband?

There are a large number of emerging technologies, some of which have been in the category 'Emerging' for decades, in the alternative Internet broadband access market. These technologies leverage recent advancements in DSP and Optical laser technologies in tandem with legacy infrastructure and technologies to result in some pretty amazing alternative access methods.

Although, as a consumer, you would typically think of Internet access from a last-mile perspective, there is a thriving industry in the wholesale Internet backhaul business just behind it.  Your neighborhood Starbucks may use T-Mobile or AT&T WiFi, tied into a local DSL connection from the Local Exchange Carrier (LEC) which goes to a DSL Aggregation Module (DSLAM) located in a nearby Central Office, which in turn feeds downstream to greater and greater aggregation points for the Internet (POPs, CoLos, etc.).  Eventually you reach the large fiber-optic skeleton criss-crossing the planet carrying terabits of data.  It resembles, in many ways, your circulatory system.  What you can see is just the small capillaries at the end of your fingers, whereas most of the action and activity is in the femoral artery and jugular vein.

This is why new advancements in last-mile broadband to end consumers are typically limited to resale of existing conduits into your home (telephone, cable television) or municipal WiFi if you are in an urban area.  If you consider all of the extremities on the Internet, be they homes, office buildings, or cell towers, you end up with an expensive proposition to move those from their existing telephone-wire-based-DSL or other dedicated circuit such as Cable Television, as it is really really expensive from a Operational Expense perspective (OpEx) to trench up the roads to everyone's businesses and homes.  The cost of the actual fiber optic cable being laid by the expensive labor and it's termination equipment, the CapEx, is almost insignificant in these equations.

Where does this leave us, if the only people who actually stand a chance of profiting on new broadband deployments are most likely the people who bought the assets of the owners (for $0.05 on the $1.00) who had also bought the assets from the original investors for the same exchange rate?

Well, what other choices are there when it comes to access into your home and business?  We don't want to electrify the water or sewage (insert noxious joke here), or the natural gas (if applicable), so that leaves the only other set of wires that is nearly guaranteed to come into your building, the electric wires.

There have been operational powerline communications schemes in use decades, primarily used for signaling information utilized by SCADA systems (which are the management systems for the power grid, to horribly over-simplify).  These were narrow-band at best, until DSP innovations of late made it reasonable to revisit using unused spectrum on electric wires to transmit broadband signals.  This is a devilishly tricky space, as powerlines are very noisy from an EMI perspective, and then there is the issue of step-down transformers which act like big signal filters all along the path.  This is why your friendly neighborhood nuclear power plant can't insert an OC-3 (155Mbps) worth of Internet bandwidth onto the power grid delivered directly to your wall outlet.  Oh, and the topology of the electric grid is notoriously non-linear (analagous to our planet's geography) so each installation is completely custom by definition. Pretty much a technical nightmare in the making.

Just because you can't insert at the point of generation of electricity and have it propagate through to the end consumer doesn't mean that Broadband over Power Lines (BPL) isn't viable as another tool in the overall toolbox.   You can insert at the point of transmission (where the Generating Company (GenCo) meets the Distribution company (DisCo), to over-simplify again) and then go wireless from the local step-down transformer in your neighborhood, ending up with a similar topology to DSL with the last mile being WiFi or WiMax instead of copper wires.  You could alternately feed fiber to substations (in the US, there are substations as aggregation points for electricity similar to the Central Offices used by telephone companies with DSLAMs), and try to sneak signals in the spectrum unfiltered by the step-down transformers direct to a piece of consumer premises equipment that would receive those signals and distribute them around your home.

There have been a number of attempts at doing this over the last ten years specifically, with some semi-infamous trials in the UK in the mid-90s, successful concluded field trials in France, Spain and Italy, and trials by Current Communications (a Google portfolio-company) in Texas with TXU.  The problem in hitting the J-curve of mainstream adoption stems from the speed in which electric utilities adopt new technologies ('glacial' is a word that immediately pops to mind) versus the capital burn rate of the startup with the newest/bestest BPL technology.  Usually A<B so the startup dies from capital starvation while the utility leisurely takes it's time in field trials.  Hopefully, companies like Current, leveraging investors like Google, will have the staying power to make it through the desert of trials with TXU and come out alive in production, providing a cowbell for fast-following utilities around the world.

One other gating item, probably the most threatening to the nascent BPL market, is the completely byzantine regulatory patchwork surrounding electric power in the US and elsewhere.  Electricity arrived on the scene long before we had the wisdom to regulate it's distribution and use properly, if we have actually achieved that wisdom yet at all.  In order to provide broadband signal from Northern California to Southern California, utilizing powerlines where the rights-of-way are legally allocated, you'd still need to get approvals from >5 regulatory bodies and possibly have to renegotiate the existing ROWs for additional use.  This makes the cost of doing business, and the pain for a utility to provide these services, much greater.  What is unknown is if the profits from providing these services outweigh those costs and pain.

The WIIFY (What's In It For You) with BPL is, as was the case when wireless and cable companies began to compete with ILECs to provide you Internet, telephone and other services into your home, the result was competion and a better selection of services.  Imagine what would happen if the current two-party system between Cable and DSL, where they fight over single digit marketshare numbers, was radically disrupted by a third (well-heeled) market entrant with a pervasive footprint.

In the next post on Innovative Broadband- we'll look at Free-Space-Optics, another technology that has been used by the military for point-to-point high-speed communications for decades but is finally finding it's way into civilian applications.