OK, I can’t resist posting. I’ve been a good boy, done my day’s alloted work (OK, I should have phoned the VAT man, maybe tomorrow). The kids are asleep for their afternoon naps.

The News Du Jour is that a company called FON are starting a “user-sponsored” public WiFi network. I saw their pitch at the ETel conference, and you have to be impressed by their passion, if nothing else.

There’s plenty of places to go read the PR blurb and the blogospheric commentary.

First, the good news. This aligns with what I’ve been saying for a long time, namely that the locus of innovation in telecom will move to how networks are priced and financed. When the user and owner interests align (because in some respect they’re the same folk), nobody cares any more about capturing the consumer surplus of the stupid network.

Now the bad news. I think they’ve started with the hardest case first, which is consumers. The highest possible cost per added node, the lowest revenue per user. A more promising start might be enabling public-service workers to roam among localities, or companies to have reciprocal rights in business parks.

Sadly, it also highlights a screw-up in how almost all corporates set up their networks. Somehow, physical connectivity within the building is seen as a great way to ensure secure access to networks. (Hey, all the contract cleaners are trustworthy, aren’t they?) The sensible alternative would be Internet access everywhere in the building, and get people to VPN in. If you find that VPNs are too expensive, you’re buying your networking gear from the wrong vendor. This also avoid the frequent and ridiculous situation of visitors being unable to get Net access. Some of those folk are $’000s per day consultants you’re working hard to prevent from being productive. Anyhow, FON isn’t easy to do for corporated because they’ve embedded security policy in the access network, the exact opposite of what the end-to-end principle tells you.

So FON is a very risky venture, where unless they find some seed markets onto which to condense a critical mass of connectivity, you’re just left with isolated islands too disparate to justify the effort of membership. After all, our friendly open networks “Linksys” and “default” are pretty ubiquitous, too. I want them to succeed, but it looks like the kind of venture that you need to bung $1bn at to get it started. But as a way of Google kicking sand in the face of some telcos, maybe that’s an affordable budget.

PS - it’s cold enough here in Vilnius that the snow is just precipitating out of the air near the freezing ground — blue sky above! Was -19C when I arrived last night, and felt it too.

Martin makes trouble at Telepocalyse

Taipei (臺北市) put its RFP for a citywide wireless broadband network out to bid in July 2005. 20,000 access points later, and they are set to officially launch 20 December. The mayor of Taipei, Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), is ending his second term with a technical demonstration. He will use Skype to talk the mayor of Tao Yuan, at the other end of the country, showing how the city's wifi service is not just for e-government but for everyday phone calls too. They'll be using the free-1 USB phone (which is Mac compatible) and the Ipevo view-1 video camera from Taiwan's own Ipevo.

What would it take for Skype to become the defaul telephone system for all of Taiwan? Will muni wifi help Ma Ying-jeou run for president in 2008? If you're there, please post photos to flickr, and tag them Skype.

By Torben Nyhuus, Aalborg, Denmark

The contest to acquire market shares on the growing VoIP market is at full pace. The market is;

• the VoIP calls,
• the internet access,
• the devices.

VoIP calls:

Skype is reaching out to new customer segments. With Jubii and Skype in new cooperation!

(Jubii was the first and is the most successful web portal in Denmark, visited by 2.5 mill users monthly. DK has 5 million inhabitants.)

The Danish internet portal Jubii has commenced a cooperation with the world's most popular provider of IP-telephony, Skype. The new cooperation is a cobranding strategy, which shall broaden the knowledge of Skype in Denmark, and in return be a new source of income to Jubii.

The idea is to get Skype out to Ms. and Mr. Smith, using Jubii to reach them and fight the somewhat nerdish stamp on Skype. Skype can now be downloaded from on Jubii and Skype is expecting a Danish success making telephony free. In return for this exposure Jubii gets a part of the SkypeOut revenue generated.

Microsoft building our VoIP backbone!

Microsoft bought Teleo and is now co-operating with MCI to let users, as a start, make calls from PC to fixed line and the mobile/cellular net.

Google, Yahoo, and AOL have been on VoIP for a while.

Access:

Old and now privatised Telco’s: Broadband access is still being sold at too high prices; you still must pay for a phone line to be 'allowed' to pay for ADSL/DSL, that’s even with a three-party ISP, double charging. The privatised Telco’s and governments are still happily milking the cow together! Did they make a secret agreement? For how long? Was this international, European/EU wide? The necessary legislation is postponed (Government/MP’s claim further examination needed) to the fourth quarter 2006 in Denmark, this on an already five year old issue. No wonder that TDC can keep a 70% market share on broadband.

Mobile prices:
Are mobile prices being squished from 3G (UMTS) and the lowered fixed line prices?

In the mobile area, discount sales of cards are now starting in the Aldi shops in Germany. Aldi is a low price supermarket chain spread out over Europe with 4000+ shops alone in Germany. This is a big stick in TDC’s discount EasyMobile (purely internet based), launched 4 months ago, gaining 15,000 customers. EasyMobile has already lowered their price from 16 -14 € cent as a response to Aldi's 15 € cent.

Deutsche Telekom, Europe's largest telephony company, responded with a full page ad to counter Aldi, which began its service on Thursday. … T-Mobile will have to provide something to keep customers. Aldi has been one of the driving forces behind retail change in Europe's largest economy.

by TMCnet

Aldi is also selling IT hardware, recently a Wi-Fi SIP phone (200+ €) for Hotspots and your other access points.

Devices:

Kirk and RTX companies are joining up to get global market shares together on both Wi-Fi and DECT.

Kirk Telecom, who already has an 8% market share in North America on 2.4/5 GHz DECT products and a 100+ years of telephony history behind it is being sold to US SpectraLink, known for its Wi-Fi Netlink products.

RTX and Kirk Telecom are long term co-operators, both Danish companies. All three are VoIP ‘players’, more on this Monday.

And when are we going to see new Skype devices? The long promised Wi-Fi phone is not yet seen. Accton and Skype and their WIFI phone -Skype Journal.

The WiFi phone prototype. Share Skype, the Skype blog, lists 34 preferred partners but Accton is not among them!?

RTX is soon launching a VoIP standalone SIP phone before a Skype one. Is the eBay takeover delaying Skype getting the certification process going on new (kind of) products and making better room for non-Skype ones? Is Skype on public Wi-Fi hotspots not significant?

Which new players will join in, will they be late? Will even new IP markets be opening during the next year?

Share.Skype reports an update for the Skype Pocket PC. While this doesn't bring you the same level of features as Skype 2.0 for Windows, Skype improved reliablity (long list of bug fixes), performance (two versions, each optimized for different speed CPUs), compatibility, and functionality (voice mail). Download it, discuss it in the forums, check the change log for details. Caveat Beta and let us know what you think.

Vonage is launching a Wi-Fi phone so you can now use your Vonage account anywhere you can find a Wi-Fi connection. There's a $50 rebate on it... for a price of $79.99 and a minimum 3 month contract. There will be an early cancellation fee too. This is a substantial price break from the retail price I see elsewhere for the UTStarcom F1000. It almost suggests they are dumping it on unsuspecting consumers. Engadget described this as for the hard core only. Still it's a new market and the features you will be getting soon on these Wi-Fi phones will push the mobile operators. The Starcom can be purchased as a stand alone Vonage solution. Thus you no longer need an ATA / Vonage box to participate. Will Vonage offer a Softphone next for free?

The UTStarcom F1000 Wi-Fi Phone is a pocket-sized, wireless Internet phone that uses Vonage service by connecting to wireless Internet access points worldwide, also known as Wi-Fi hotspots. It's an easy way to bring your Vonage service anywhere. Vonage - The Broadband Phone Company

I presume the Starcom is locked to Vonage although I can't be sure. I doubt you can just buy it from Vonage and transfer it to another SIP provider at a later date. I'm tempted to try one. I'd like to hook it up to the PhoneGnome I'm using currently.

Brightcove will serve video from commercial producers. Facebridge will let users distribute their own videos. 2006 will be the year that Skype turns millions of Skypers into podcasters, vloggers, and videographers. Who at Skype is working on vid distribution alliances? The long tail of edge created content will dominate in time but there is still good money in Skype as a TV and movie player for the next few years.

Rich Tehrani has a timely riff on mashing up Service Oriented Architecture with VoIP. Bringing voice into enterprise app development.

Another Niklas-is-cool profile. Muesli for breakfast! Niklas is still hard at work with Skype: “My ambition is to make Skype into the world’s largest online communication company. That’s the driver. Financial gain is secondary.”

Google tests phone-enabling AdWords. Long-established technology, but never deployed at global scale. Dear eBay, Skype could design this in one day, prototype in three days, cut deals for the backend in one week, be serving US customers before Christmas. By eBay calling both parties, they (a) preserve caller/called anonymity, (b) match calls to the auction/sale, (c) improve the sale of lucrative but challenging product categories, and (d) charge sellers a small fee to more-than-cover costs. The faq.

cnskyper's Q-Face plug-in. Delightful creative art for your Skype profile.

Dan Gillmor in FT: Rise up against US oppressors. A defense of Internet application providers like Skype against SBC/AT&T and their congressional henchmen.

A Skype Equivalent Without "Big Brother"? (Slashdot). The meme continues to spread that an American Skype will be compromised worldwide by US police, military, and intelligence.

While Internet phone services are catching on rapidly, quality and reliability are still suspect (BusinessWeek). As prices fall, sound and consistency become competitive differentiators.

BT will offer free mobile phone service (TheBusinessOnline). BT’s new service will combine its existing Openzone wi-fi hotspots with a patchwork of new wi-max networks to compete with mobile operators and Skype.

Thanks to Rick Hultz and Jirong Zhou 周继荣 for the tips.

Guest blogger: Jan Geirnaert.

I wonder when I will be able to get it in South-East-Asia. Emerging markets, yet, but no place to get it here.

I want to buy a wifi-phone that supports other software too. I want it to have a phone number too. I want it to have preloaded credit too, and I need it to have a cd-rom in a pouch with all that software on it. Then also I want to be able to get drawn back to the store to top up my credit. Therefore the store will have to provide me with a phone with a built in account.

Why else would I go back ?

see also:

• Accton Teams with Skype to Make Internet Free Calling Even More Accessible - news release announcing Accton phones bundled with Skype
• Accton VM1188T 802.11b/g VoWifi Phone

by Lee Dryburgh.

I took some pictures of the Skype marketing team in action near Torrington Place, London.

One of their flyers reads "Death to the don't-make -me-open-it phone bill", "...you can say goodbye to phone bills that would scare a small island nation".

Another piece of marketing literature they were handing out included marketing for the 6000 UK WiFi hotspots from The Cloud. This was interesting for me because it was what I would term co-branded. For those interested, a photo of the offer is here.

I can not help but wonder if Skype somehow plan to tackle Google in the access market by partnering up with ever more WiFi providers. Such a competition between two huge providers of free telephony combined with WiFi access could make very interesting play.

Here are their future dates (two days in each location) that the Skype marketing team will be visiting:

• Hertfordshire 17th Nov
• UCE Birmingham 21st Nov
• Derby 23rd Nov
• Nottingham Trent 25th Nov
• Leeds Metropolitan 29th Nov

• Manchester Metropolitan 1st Dec
• Liverpool John Moores 5th Dec
• Liverpool 7th Dec
• Central Lancashire 7th Dec
• Northumbria Newcastle 13th Dec
• Newcastle Upon Tyne 15th Dec

Somehow seeing "Skype people" on the streets was somehow good and somehow something of a concern. On one hand it was amazing to watch demographic sectors (primarily old ladies) that I believe would not even try Skype if you informed them taking the free packages away with a degree of excitement at the prospect of free calls.

But on the other hand it made Skype feel somehow like a cheap call provider such as OneTel. I just hope that instead it is being used to spread the word, get people on board using what they understand (simple telephone calls) and at the same time kick in more exciting services and business propositions to the end user.

If a picture can speak a thousand words, take a look at the picture of the phone booth outside the building that housed the Skype marketing lot. In all the years I have watched the booths, I have only saw one person use the Internet booth. I guess it was yet another telco mistake to roll such booths out across the UK.

Lee Dryburgh is a hands-on telco engineer who also dreams about the future of telephony as part of a doctorate at the University College London. He looks for others' thoughts on the future of telephony at MyDoctorate.com.

Will mesh networks necessarily evolve in an ‘open’ direction? I see this as an assumption, and one which is not necessarily true.

We’re seeing a progression in the nature of tele/com over a 50+ year period. Pre-Carterphone and the deregulation process, you owned nothing. You might even have been forced to rent your CPE from a limited telco-controlled selection.

30 years from now, we anticipate a complete reversal. The users, directly or indirectly, come to own the network. That could be via direct ownership, such as mesh or customer-built fiber; indirect, via some co-operative, housing or municipal association; or “reversed” where the other “end” of the end-to-end stupid network is someone like Google who subsidises connectivity. In any case, the telco has no more say over the transport than the company who laid and maintains the road outside your house has over where you drive.

We’re just in a messy middle transition phase with some unfortunate path-dependent detours.

The physics suggest a very large future for mesh networks. We can make up for hard Shannon limits by substituting computational effort in the devices. This computational effort is currently limited by our technology and imagination rather than physics, and seems set to remain so for several decades to come.

Now for the hard question: will the co-operative, open model of the IETF/IEEE necessarily triumph in implementation of mesh networks?

Future A: We end up with self-configuring, open, abuse-resistant mesh networks that easily attach themselves at suitable points to open Internet long-distance backhaul. The problem is mainly one of technical co-ordination (e.g. as the Wi-Fi alliance does for 802.11 interoperability).

Future B: We end up with closed mesh networks “owned” by those with the greatest distribution muscle. These need not be telcos; indeed, MotoNet and NokiaConnect are just as likely. The problem becomes one of economic co-ordination. For example, Nokia mesh devices are more attractive because Nokia has negotiated a broader coverage of back-haul provisioning and interconnect agreements; and Nokia’s 30% global market share gives it a decisive distribution advantage in attaining a critical mass of devices.

(If you’re a long-dated bond holder of a mobile operator’s debt, you’re excused now if you need to make a quick trip to the barf room, since neither scenario seems to play well for you.)

I find it really hard to discriminate between these futures. Are closed networks like Skype an inevitible short-term solution to integration issues of new technology, with the long-term always the property of open networks?

Sticking with the app layer as an example, will Skype prosper because it’s “cost of entry” is zero, unlike the prior closed e-mail operators like Compuserve? What are the real determinants of whether networked systems become ‘open’ or ‘closed’? Do those terms really have meaning?

Open for comments!

via Telepocalypse.

There’s been a lot of press in the last year or so about port blocking, open access, Net Freedoms, and so on. I won’t provide the links, you go find ‘em. Every forum, mailing list, conference, and discussion panel seems to have a lot of heated opinion about it. Although I couldn’t attend the VON sessions, there was heated debate there between the “Freeloader!” and the “Freedom fighter!” factions.

But why should I, emotively, care at all?

Stop for a moment. Why do you, personally, care about this issue? Telecom isn’t the only industry with distribution bottlenecks, significant market power, and cross-subsidy between the stages of production. Just look at how baked beans are positioned in supermarket shelves. Manufacturers in the UK pay the supermarkets to buy prime positions. Yet telecom incites such great passion in intelligent people. Baked beans don’t. What’s going on?

I think I’ve finally worked out why. It’s David Isenberg’s elephant in the corner — what he ambiguously calls Freedom to Connect. Most of these arguments attempt to build a logical economic thesis about why we do or don’t have the correct balance between price discrimination, competition and common carriage. But it increasingly misses the point. We sense there’s a deeper, more troubling, aspect to getting cut off from part of the conversation.

Whilst nebulous and fluffy, it’s all about democracy. The rest is post hoc rationalization of our more fundamental beliefs about how a 21st century society needs to be wired up to work. And my thesis is that we are underestimating the importance of this political (as opposed to economic) side of the debate.

The sense of indignation you feel inside you when you hear about port blocking is because you sense the loss that those customer are enduring. You and I have come to realize that if you don’t have access, you aren’t able to fully participate in society any more in some non-trivial way. You can still do the old analogue things, have a protest at the street corner. But the crowds have moved online. Nobody can hear you.

Not only that, but when someone else gets the chop, you’ve lost a member of the demos from your democracy. Your conversation is impaired by others no longer being able to participate.

Why don’t we feel so upset about the closed, walled gardens of wireless networks? There are several reasons, I believe. Firstly, the very nature of the medium lends itself to competition (through multiple overlapping networks), which ensures some degree of openness. The low cost of wireless telephony is also in itself a great democratising force. Going from zero phones to one closed one is a great step forward. Participation is everything. We also have lower expectations based on the natural capacity limits the technology has had until recently. Our tolerance of “co-operative bottlenecks” has been greater in order to share the resource better.

On the other hand, when someone’s Net connections to their home come under pressure of restriction, we react differently. I think this is partly a psychological issue of how we view these spaces differently. We are defensive of our homes. Somewhat tenuously, the family still is the organising unit of society. We aspire for every household to have at least some form of unfettered access to all forms of information discourse. That’s why it hurts when we fall short.

Which brings me to my real point. This conversational chatty democracy stuff all sounds fine. But that’s hardly going to energize society into fits of fiber laying and open access regulation. Where’s the beef? Well, here’s my outrageous suggestion:

The ability to access Internet content and services is the new Right to Bear Arms.

Wow. I’ve said it. So what does it mean? The founders of the United States of America in their wisdom saw the seizure of excessive power by government as a central risk. To counteract this, they ensured the general populace would always be sufficiently armed. This gives any putative dictator or tyrant pause for thought before exercising the machinery of government violence for undemocratic ends. The price is a certain undercurrent of everyday violence, but the experiment has by and large succeeded. The USA is one of the longest-standing constitutional democracies, and has withstood extraordinary change in demographics and fortune during that period.

We’re moving from a society where physical force was the prime means of coercion to one where ideas have ascendancy. Physical force doesn’t scale well as a means of subjugation. It’s one thing to take a man’s posessions; quite another to persuade him to make your dinner every night for nothing. The hardest part of the civil rights movement wasn’t undoing the yoke of the white man, but persuading the everyday black man that it was his inalienable right to have that yoke removed. Once that was achieved, the outcome was largely a foregone conclusion.

Building tyranny is harder when the populace is armed with good information. It’s not impossible; indeed, a tyranny of the majority is still a major risk. But when I can have a cheap encrypted Skype conversation with Iranians, Syrians, and Mexicans, something qualitative has changed. For example, when I visited Syria a few years ago, we went to Hama. This town was largely razed in 1982 (with the loss of tens of thousands of lives) when its own army shelled the city to put down an Islamic uprising against the Baathist government. I pass no comment on the politics of it, but merely note that this is a little-known episode of history. You certainly don’t see it mentioned on the official tourist website. Can you imagine keeping such news under wraps in the era of video cameraphones, satellite Internet and Skype?

Consider a populace that wants to rise up against its political masters. We’re already at the point where the government response isn’t to take away the populace’s arms, but to take away its means of communication. Militias don’t congregate in the woods and more, they start their own Yahoo! group and MoveOn and Meetup from there.

There’s no point in demanding universal access if you don’t have the economic means to deliver. Much of the debate is about means, not ends. But those ends deserve greater exposure and reflection. If we are serious about transformation of society through information technology it means sweeping away many of the special protections the telecom industry has managed to accrue, enforcement of competition law, and greater collective effort to deploy connectivity and open up wireless and fixed rights of way.

There’s more at stake here than cheap phone calls and unlimited TV channels. Cheap airlines have done more for European cohesion and understanding than decades of political exhortation. Cheap, ubiquitous and unfiltered communications are becoming a prerequisite of a pluralist participative democracy. Societies that fail to encourage the free flow of information will suffer because ingrained interest groups will ensure the rules are set up to perpetuate their privileges. When you can’t make a Skype call, you’re losing something more than money.

You might believe that your political system is a stable one delivering endless contended freedom and openness. But your average American feels a lot more secure in that knowledge with a rifle in the basement. I’d want the same feeling of security, just with symmetric gigabit fibre so I can host my own subversive content if necessary.

Next time someone is vigorously defending the existence of filters on the Net, dig deeper. Don’t ask them for the logic of their argument. Rather, try to find out why it excites them so much. Perhaps they aren’t aware of what animates their own passions.

Don't get me wrong...

I don’t want anyone to think I’m about to become a crypto-socialist, so a quick clarification. The correlation between “network freedom” and the right to bear arms is only a partial one.

Taking up arms is something that can be done unilaterally. A network is by its definition a collective effort, even if an emergent rather than centrally co-ordinated one. So it cannot be purely a personal “freedom”.

The right to bear arms is equally re-stated as a right not to have your arms taken away from you. It doesn’t mean anyone has to provide you with a gun. Network access is a positive outcome of economic activity over which there are rivalrous claims to finite resources, like network engineers. But you don’t (yet) own the network, so there’s no corresponding right not to be deprived of the use of your possessions. Bearing arms is really a negative freedom (something bad that won’t be done to you), whereas Net access is a positive freedom. Freedom doesn’t do free lunches.

As I have said before, price discrimination in competitive markets is your friend. Filtering can be used for price discrimination. Filtering is a symptom of how well the system is performing. In a mature telecommunications sector, such as wireline, it is a symptom of ill-health. In a nascent one, such as cellular access in the developing world, being only able to access closed phone and SMS service is a vital part of the pricing regime that makes the network possible. The existence of network filtering is an output, not an input; a symptom, not a cause.

You do not automatically make your society freer and healthier by outlawing all network filtering. Indeed, you might achieve the exact opposite result.

Guns don’t come with enforceable end user license agreements that say “For shooting small furry animals only”. But we do distinguish between bunny-hunting guns and machine guns. We discriminate based on lethality. We don’t expect unlimited freedom to bear arms. A farmer wanting to blow some cute crop-nibblers to kingdom come is given carte blanche to blast away. Walk into a bank carring the same hardware, and expect trouble. We might likewise expect some boundaries to our communications freedom.

So I would caution people from taking the analogy too literally. The right to bear arms is also a means to an end — a populace willing and able to resist attempts to capture the machinery of state to perpetuate undemocratic activity. Unfettered and affordable network access is correspondingly essential to the operation of a free and dynamic post-industrial society.

So I’ll say it again, differently. Rules against network filtering are one way of dealing with significant market power in a vertically integrated part of the market where someone has significant market power in the access layer. It isn’t necessarily the best way of doing it, but it’s one way. In all other cases, it’s likely to be harmful. You should use the existence of such activities as a yardstick for the development and maturity of the industry. Expect new technologies and markets to be full of filtering, which slowly recedes over time as competition heats up. Meanwhile, municipal networks and other co-operative of user-owned connectivity systems should aim for more opennness that simple economics suggests, because the benefits are hidden in the political layer.

I alluded to the special privileges and protections that exist in telecom. I guess I ought to enumerate a few to back up such a claim in what is becoming sometimes a suicidally competitive environment.

The US is the easiest example of how barriers to entry are built via co-option of the regulatory infrastructure, but examples about all over. Tariff sheets and their attendant cost of lawyers to issue, public utility comissions stuffed with friendly faces, exclusionary numbering schemes, sweetheart deals on rights of way, spectrum auctions that have singularly failed to recover the maximum public benefit, suspicious tax rebates, opaque pricing schemes that fail to come under scrutiny, faux taxes; the list goes on and on. Mostly it’s just a matter of not having to comply with normal competition and cross-subsidy rules and establishing your own parallel (and captive) regulatory environment, plus special deals on costs on inputs and prices of outputs. Check out the usual places for more data.

UPDATE: Susan Crawford has some thoughts along similar lines, with the money quote being:

I’m trying to create a normative map that will help reveal the assumptions at the heart of the network providers’ arguments. The key issue should be: is access to the internet a public goods problem, for which incentives are necessary to ensure buildout and maintenance? or — Is access to the internet a monopoly problem, for which you have to find ways to ensure frictionless competition?

Right now, we can’t tell what the right answer is.

My hunch is that we’ve not found ways for the invisible hand to operate that also allows collective action by users, groups of users, communities and regional government. It’s an “economics technology” problem, not a “technology technology” problem.

David Weinberger documents Tim Wu’s similar analysis of how the world is divinding into “openists” and “deregulationists”, where a confused cross-purposes of terminology, worldviews and methods collide.

via Martin Geddes' Telepocalypse.

Are you a Skype user in New York City? Well today's election day is half over and you've probably not voted in this piddling election. Skype Journal stays out of partisan politics, and that's not changing today. But Andrew Raciej, running for NYC Public Advocate has a platform that promises free or cheap bandwidth, bandwidth for every New Yorker, bandwidth in subways and skyscrapers and tenements and schools, bandwidth for disaster preparedness, bandwidth for citizen participation in local government, bandwidth everywhere.

He makes the case that a universal Wi-Fi system is needed for economic development. That it fuels better government, better public education, economic mobility, attracts business, help bus and train riders commute. He says Wi-Fi bridges what he calls three digital divides:

First, New York City as first among American Cities. I love that he raises the spectre of Philadelphia having better municipal connectivity. You can hear New Yorkers growl at that.

Second, NYC competing with foreign cities for capital, talent, culture, and industry. The most wired cities have an unnatural advantage.

Third, high-speed haves and have-nots. "Having broadband access without affordability is like having a highway without a car: you can’t go anywhere." It's not enough, he says, to offer dial-up to the poor in a broadband world. Universal access creates opportunity and a level playing field for individuals and for small businesses.

These arguments apply to any metro. To Oakland, California, (are you listening Mayor Brown?). To a recovered New Orleans. To Mumbai and Beijing. New York has a slight edge: lots of dark fiber to create the muni backbone.

I met Andrew at the first Web 2.0 conference just before he launched the Personal Democracy Forum online magazine in Fall 2004. He's smart, professional, cooler than me, and eager to make a difference. Now I don't know him well enough to give him a character reference. And since I haven't looked at the other candidates and no longer live in New York I'm unable to endorse him. But his ideas, his platform, merit every civic minded voter's consideration, wherever you live.