[1st-mile-nm] The Economic Card

[peter]

One of the general points that I think is missed in the great technology 
push for connectivity period is " why are we doing this ' and generally 
the whole why is lost in the excitement of the whiz bang technology, we 
gotta have one of these .

Take for example the RFP coming out of Albuquerque, absolutely nowhere 
is the statement made about how broadband could improve city services 
and no due diligence has been done to cost effectively measure 
improvement alternative to cost at any speed let alone high speed 
digital. This could be of huge cost benefit to the city but its 
financial factors are ignored. Its also well known that efficient and 
government at any level constitute an oxymoron and that applies to a 
much larger sense overseas even in lesser developed ( ie: India ) were 
the telcom's are the flag carriers and as such totally protected.  
Locally this is the reason for the soon to be demise of Azulstar in one 
of the fastest growing areas of the state and its sister project in 
Sandoval.

I liked Andrew and Richards comments that the economics must drive the 
high speed connection and not vice versa but how many people in the 
political arena really believe that..

Its becoming apparent that the majority of users of many of the muni 
systems in the US are in fact government employees and this brings us 
right round in a circle as to "How well do you provide the current 
services " and if badly whats the point of doing something wrong faster. 
Just look at how well State and County and City governments use basic 
web sites and email and you will get the picture. The huge investigation 
in Santa Fe up at the legislative level at the moment is simply because 
SHARE bluntly does not, to anyone. Our schools are being connected with 
fiber but the programs to take advantage of the pipe are not on the 
horizon and thats without getting involved in advanced projects like 
SCADA which could save millions.

Recently i read an article about communicating with  US government  back 
in George Washington's  days when it took a whole year round trip to get 
messages to and from the system but they responded the same day, now we 
communicate instantly but the system still takes a year to get back with 
a response, so whats changed.

One of the best texts that I have ever read that examines this, is " The 
politics of Information Management " by Paul Strassmann

 http://www.amazon.com/Politics-Information-Management-Policy-Guidelines/dp/0962041343/ref=sr_1_4/102-4609236-7482553?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1180499205&sr=8-4

Carrol - you remember this lecture many moons ago based on what 
potential a German Telco saw in New Mexico.

http://www.ideapete.com/leapfrog.html

Its all about economics, REAL economics Milton Friedman type

( : ( : peter




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www2.dcn.org/pipermail/1st-mile-nm/attachments/20070529/6f08af3b/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: pete.vcf
Type: text/x-vcard
Size: 369 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://www2.dcn.org/pipermail/1st-mile-nm/attachments/20070529/6f08af3b/attachment.vcf>