Smarten Up!: Create a Smart Community

By Dr. S. Albert

Smarten Up is a guide for communities who need to understand how to take advantage of the new online economy. It provides the reader with a clearer understanding of telecommunication infrastructure, online applications, strategies for implementation, and the regulatory environment. It is a guide written in easy to understand terminology for new leaders of telecommunication or networking projects, municipal councils, stakeholders in the education and healthcare fields, economic development practitioners, libraries, social service organizations, or students of community development strategic planning. Smarten Up explains how communities can create partnerships between public and private sector organizations to improve local or regional telecommunication infrastructure, develop new online applications that can improve quality of life and create synergy between organizations, and develop a business plan for creating a smart community.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Oct 20, 2003
• ISBN: 9781412214094

Dr. S. Albert

Dr. Sylvie Albert is the owner of Planned Approach Inc., a management-consulting firm in Ontario (Canada) specializing in smart community projects. Ms. Albert has worked on telecommunication projects across Canada, completed a doctoral dissertation on smart community development, published articles, and has been presenting at a number of conferences on this topic. She spent five years as a Director of economic development and served on two provincial committees on innovation and technology.

Book preview

Smarten Up!

‘How to create a smart community’

by

Dr. S. Albert

Published by

fàrringtonmedia

In co-operation with

TRAFFORD

© Copyright 2003 S. Albert. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Albert, S.

Smarten up : a guide to creating a smart community / S. Albert. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-4120-0667-8

ISBN 978-1-4122-1409-4 (ebook)

1. Electronic commerce. 2. Telecommunication—Technological innovations. 3. Information technology—Economic aspects. I. Title. HF5548.32.A43 2003 658.8 72 028546 C2003-903568-9

TRAFFORD

This book was published on-demand in cooperation with Trafford Publishing. On-demand publishing is a unique process and service of making a book available for retail sale to the public taking advantage of on-demand manufacturing and Internet marketing. On-demand publishing includes promotions, retail sales, manufacturing, order fulfilment, accounting and collecting royalties on behalf of the author.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3:

CHAPTER 4:

CHAPTER 5:

CHAPTER 6:

CHAPTER 7:

APPENDIX A:

APPENDIX B:

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge and thank François Ménard for his contribution to this book. François provided much of the information in Chapter 7, on the regulatory environment. John Farrington, my editor and friend, who encouraged me and provided invaluable information on the publishing industry. Also, David Sutherland and Jamie Lim, for reading and providing important feedback on the content of the book.

Publication design

Joe Dunning, Toronto

Cover design

Carla Piccotti, Timmins

Published by

farringtonmedia

2007 Erika Court Oakville, Ontario, Canada, L6M 4R4 Tel: [phone] Fax: [phone] email: john @farringtonmedia.com http://www.farringtonmedia.com

in co-operation with

Trafford Publishing 2333 Government St. Suite 6E Victoria, B.C., Canada, V8T 4P4 http://www.trafford.com

PREFACE

Many visionary books have been written foretelling the advent of the telecommunication age and how it will change the economic fabric of communities. Little has been written about how to do it, and this new ‘era’ has brought forward many new terms which are difficult to understand and require their own explanation. The purpose of this book is to provide guidance to those who want to learn how telecommunications infrastructure will affect communities and economic development. There will be guideposts along the way and hopefully, by recognizing them early, you will be better prepared to deal with them when the time comes.

First, I should say that I am a non-technical person who has had to navigate through an entirely new dictionary of terms in order to understand the prescription assigned to answer my need for an application. Approximately 10 years ago, I wanted a university to offer courses in a remote area of Northern Ontario, Canada. In order to achieve this, a professor at Laurentian University (Ontario, Canada) told me that we had to come up with a distance solution, one where the instructor would not have to travel the four hours to the students, much longer in the winter snow storms, ice storms, and temperatures dipping to—40F. We started investigating solutions, which meant learning the various telecommunication options available. During this exploratory journey, I caught the bug (or the virus) and wanted to learn more! I developed a love for looking at ways to solve problems using telecommunication infrastructures. Telecommunication is ideally suited to areas of health, education, business, government, and all sorts of ways to improve quality of life for more remote communities. I am writing this book for the inexperienced, or for the new Smart Community, sharing what I learned and at the same time writing it in such a way that the ‘non-techie’ will understand.

The book is divided into seven sections. It begins with some descriptions and definitions of key telecommunications terminology. A boring way to start a book, but nevertheless, a necessary step in order to better understand the technologies and applications-and grasp why certain types of technologies work better in certain conditions, and how technologies can be viewed as short or long term solutions.

The second section delves into the background on community-based networks and provides examples of virtual or Smart Communities. Chapter 2 explains some of the Smart Community models and provides the reasons why a community would want to get involved. It is a bit of an aggregation of ideas with more details provided in future chapters.

The third section explains start-up considerations, because communities need to understand the 10 factors that will either promote, or challenge, the development of smart projects, or the development of community-based infrastructure. It is a ‘how and why it gets started,’ which should assist planners and leaders in ensuring that they have the key success tools to get a project off-the-ground.

The fourth section explains the opportunities, and the applications that can run on a community network. It will provide some examples of what is possible, although many more opportunities exist because technology is a constant state of flux and provides unimaginable opportunities.

The fifth section discusses the various types of technologies, or in short, the ‘how to build’ a Smart Community network. Again, technologies do change over time, however, it should give a perspective on how to analyze and view various technologies. There is no doubt that new inventions will change technologies and what may appear as an unmanageable technology today, could be improved substantially in the future. A review of the regulatory environment in Canada and the U.S. is offered at this stage, however, the reader will need to check for changes that may have occurred since the printing of this book.

The sixth chapter discusses financing and operating considerations. What are the tools available to finance these projects? What steps should we take to ensure a proper start-up from a policy perspective? This chapter will get into some of details that communities need to learn and plan for.

The seventh chapter was written primarily by Francois Menard, a Project Manager at XIT Telecom, an engineering firm located in Quebec (Canada). This chapter provides a brief overview of the regulatory environment in Canada and the U.S., and I say brief because it is in a constant state of change and communities will need to review laws and regulations of the day.

In appendix, there is a compendium of definitions, and some case examples are offered of telecommunication networks, smart community networks, and sectoral strategies. This may assist the new smart community planner in benchmarking their project, as well as provide innovative solutions to community challenges.

CHAPTER 1

Key terms & definitions

Before we begin with the bits and bytes explanations, you should understand that telecommunications networks are an infrastructure similar to roads, sewers, or water pipes. Much like the rail system was very important at the turn of the last century for getting people and supplies to more remote locations of our country, telecommunication is the remote access vehicle of the 21st century. When our governments decided to build roads across this country, where would we be today if the train moguls would have convinced them not to bother because the trains could move goods and people more efficiently and conveniently. The same can be said of today’s telecommunication system. It is the new way to move goods and people services. It does not move them physically, but it moves all of the information about goods and people around the world. Communities cannot afford not to have this important infrastructure, just as they could not afford not to have good roads. People demanded good roads and they are beginning to demand and expect good telecommunication infrastructure.

The hard infrastructure, that’s the wires and the equipment, are only one part of the puzzle. There is no reason to build a broadband network if there are no applications, or if people will not use it. Developing a Smart Community means having the right tools to import and export knowledge around the world. Tools as you will discover, include infrastructure, people, and applications.

There is no reason to build a broadband network if there are no applications, or if people will not use it.

Later in this book, you will find some more detailed descriptions of the various types of technologies that can be built, or that are required to run certain types of applications. Applications are activities that you can do on a telecommunication infrastructure, and it includes speaking on a telephone, receiving films, videoconferencing and much more. The intent is to explain in plain English, what all of these fancy telecommunications terms mean. The first step is to describe what

we mean by infrastructure. Infrastructure is the physical presence of cables from point A to point B, often referred to as wireline, or the connectivity of point A to point B without wires, which is referred to as wireless. But the installation could also be hybrid, meaning a combination of the two.

Most readers can easily understand wireless infrastructure because they have used cellular telephones and know that by some miracle, you can talk to a little handheld machine and your conversation is beamed to the right person anywhere in the world. This is a wireless infrastructure. This is also an example of ‘send and receive’ infrastructure-two way, or what telecommunications specialists call ‘symmetric’ communication, which means that it goes both ways at the same speed. Another example of wireless is satellite, where a person can receive a television show that comes into an antenna installed on the roof of your house. This is an example of ‘one way’ technology-which means that communication goes one way very fast, but only one way. This is not to say that satellite technology can only be used one way. You can upload and download information from a satellite, if the right equipment is installed. Most of the time, you can receive information much faster than you can send information. This is called ‘asymmetric’ service because it is not the same quality of service or speed both ways. If you are a regular user of the Internet, downloading a lot of information, but seldom sending large files to others, then asymmetric service is acceptable. However, if you are running a business and frequently sending large files, or if you are an avid game user playing sophisticated games with other international players, then asymmetric service is less acceptable. The more files you send with picture or rich media (information with a lot of pictures, action, visuals), the less likely you will want an asymmetric system. There are many other wireless technologies and some of them are explained in the chapter on technology, such as microwave, satellite, and more than a dozen others in licensed and unlicensed frequencies.

The difference between these technologies is in the frequency it operates. Some air frequencies are regulated, which means that an operator needs a special license from the government. Another difference is in the number of towers or antennae the technology requires to operate within a region, which has an effect on cost. The most relevant factor is that wireless technologies have limited bandwidth. This means that they can offer a maximum speed, unlike other technologies such as fibre, which can be expanded almost limitlessly. Speed has an impact on the amount of information that can be sent from any given point. Although there are

more compression techniques that allow a service provider to better utilize their bandwidth, there will be more applications that require more bandwidth and so, a community must be sensitive to its future bandwidth requirements.

Land-based or hardwired or wireline technologies are often more difficult to understand because there is a little bit of disinformation going on. The disinformation happens because researchers are continually finding new ways to use and upgrade existing technologies and it confuses the consumer as to what is actually good or bad, or what types of technologies will be utilized and needed in the future. In fact, there is no right nor wrong in technology, just good planning for future growth. The types of infrastructure that should be installed are those that will meet the needs of the community, including the budgetary constraints that always exist in any region.

There are two types of wireline technologies: copper-based and fibre-based. Copper based technologies are what most consumers have in their homes. It is the technology which has provided you with a telephone signal and a cable television signal for many years. Sometimes copper cables are twisted which means that the copper is weaved (gives more resilience to interferences which is necessary for sending large files) and gives the telephone company an opportunity to divide or split the cable to offer Internet and telephone at the same time. Sometimes it is coaxial, a shielded copper cable utilized by cable companies. The difference between the two is that the copper cable is encased differently and the way coaxial cable is made allows it to hold more bandwidth. Both types of copper cables have the capacity of sending and receiving (asymmetric or symmetric), but the cable TV and telephone companies must install equipment at their end for you to send anything.

When you send information from your computer, you are sending a digital signal. It is a binary signal of ones and zeroes. This is different from a telephone signal which is still analog - if you hook a speaker to the wire, you can hear the conversation. In order for a cable or telephone company to offer Internet, the signal must be digital. So for it to be moved on an analog system, it must have equipment that can encode and decode to and from digital coding. Many movie companies are digitizing their films because they can send this information faster and with a higher quality than the old analog system. Televisions are becoming digital, although for a period of time, older television sets will need a decoder to receive both

digital and analog signals. Cellular phones are quickly going digital because it makes more efficient use of the set of frequencies reserved for cell phone use, and people are becoming more concerned over the confidentiality of their conversations.

Copper technologies work with electricity. An electrical impulse is sent and if the cable is too long (more than 8-10 kilometers or three to four miles for ADSL Internet service), then the electrical impulse must be repeated or amplified using equipment positioned along the way. This is in contrast to fibre optic technology which sends information using light. Copper is subject to interference (crosstalk) and is limited in the frequencies that can be used, which results in distance and speed capacities that are shorter and slower than optical fibre. This is the largest problem of copper technologies and the reason why copper will have great difficulty becoming the technology of the future.

Fibre optic technology uses glass and light. The cables are constructed of tiny glass wires which can carry light at great distances (more than 150 kilometres or 100+ miles before the light signal needs to be enhanced). Each strand is the width of a hair and and a cable can hold several dozens of pairs. Each fibre strand can be subdivided in waves to carry many different colours of light. Using today’s technology, each time a specific colour is flashed through the glass, it can send approximately 10 gigabits of information using very basic and inexpensive equipment. Laboratories have demonstrated that more than 1,000 colours can be sent at the same time, each carrying its own package of information which can be video, voice, or data. This means that very small cables are required to distribute very large amounts of information. In fact, the Internet traffic of the planet could be passed through a few fibre strands.

What are gigabits, megabits, and Kilobits? This is always a difficult concept to explain because it is a relative weight, much like the difference between grams and kilograms or cups versus gallons. Kilo stands for thousand, mega stands for million, and giga stands for billion. In telecommunication, speed is a function of the amount of bits that can be sent within a certain amount of time, which is why there is a measurement in Kilobits per second (Kbps), megabits per second (Mbps), and gigabits per second (Gbps). Your computer stores information digitally and each word or picture takes a certain amount of space measured in number of bits or bytes (both words are used, but represent a slightly different measure, a byte is 8 bits). All communication, whether you are making a

telephone call, receiving a video from your cable or satellite company, or sending an e-mail, requires a certain speed to send and receive information. You can operate with low speeds for many applications, but you need the patience to wait… and wait… and wait.

A computer accesses the Internet either through making a telephone call using a modem (dial-up system), or through an ‘always-on’ technology offered by a telephone or cable company called a digital subscriber line (DSL) modem or a cable modem. The dial-up system uses modems that translate the information from your computer and prepares it for transmission at speeds of12 to 56 Kilobits per second. This means 12,000 to 56,000 bits every second is sent from your computer through a telephone line to its destination. Although this is the speed of your modem, it does not mean that the transmission happens this fast. In fact, usually you can expect transmissions to happen at half the prescribed speed because of ineffectiveness in the technology and the network it passes through, and because part of this bandwidth is needed by your system and the network to manage the transmission. This sounds like a lot of bits, but when you consider that an average Powerpoint presentation (computer overhead slides for a presentation, which will contain pictures, designs, and words) is anywhere from 800 Kilobits to several megabits of information, it can take several seconds to several hours to send a document to someone depending on the amount of design, maps, and pictures included in the presentation. If you are in business, you know the value of time and will not want to waste precious minutes or hours to wait for a document to download or upload.

If you want to play in the big leagues and want to communicate in megabits per second, then you need a high speed modem which is usually DSL technology offered by a telephone company or cable modem technology offered by a cable company. These are ‘always on’ technologies because you do not need to dial-up to the Internet. The cable is always on and ready to send and receive information. Your telephone or cable line is sitting ready and able to distribute information at anytime. Continually passing information is more effective for telecommunication companies because it means that not all communication will happen at 5:15 p.m. when you arrive home and are logging onto your Internet connection. If someone is sending you information during the day, when you arrive home it is already there. It also means that people can come into your computer and view your information unless you install devices to protect your privacy.

The service that is most popular currently is 1 to 1.5 megabits per second (Mbps) or 1.5 million bits per second. This is approximately 27 times faster than the 56 Kilobits per second (Kpbs) dial-up modem in relative terms. I say relative terms because there is always a catch. First, when you subscribe to an ADSL service from the telephone company, you can receive faster than you can send. It is usually an asymmetric service, meaning that you may get up to 1.5 Mbps download speeds, but you will get approximately 1/10 of this speed when you are sending information. Also, remember that there are inefficiencies in systems and that it is difficult to get the speeds that are promised; therefore, sometimes you may get close to one or 1.5 Mbps, but most times you will get only a fraction of this speed due to these inefficiencies. One of the largest problems of DSL service is that you must be located within five to eight kilometers (three to four miles) of a central office (the location where the telephone company has equipment