To generate a map for an average speed threshold of your own choosing, click on "city" under "every" on the left of the Needle page.  Then click on ">>" on the table heading, just to the right of "every     city."   Then click on "keep only those where...", and then click on "ave speed."  Ave speed jumps to the top of the list and a drop-down selection box appears.   Select "is less than," and enter a figure (kbit/s) in the box to the right.   Then click on next.  The screen will change slightly to reflect your choice, and a "done" button will appear.  Click on the "done" button.   You'll then see a list of the relevant cites.  On the upper right, change the drop-down selector from "table" to "map."  You'll then see a map with markers for states that contain cities that satisfy your selection criterion.  If you change the "group by" drop-down selector from "state" to "city," the map will change to include markers for each city that satisfies your selection criterion.  You can similarly map state average speeds by clicking on "state" rather than "city" in the first step.  To change your selection criterion, you must start by clicking on "city" or "state" on the left and redo the steps above.

Related post: dispersion of Internet download speeds

Telephone companies face serious business problems.   Broadband Internet connectivity can support telephone service as just one app among many apps.   For example, Google voice is just one feature among the many that Gmail offers.   Texting is already competing with telephoning, and video communicating is likely also to do so in the future.  Providing network connectivity squeezes the telephone business from below, and a multitude of new communications apps squeezes telephone service from above.  Vertical disintegration of the telephone business seems inevitable.   Yet vertically disintegrated communications services may fall far short of generating as much revenue as did the historical telephone business.

Martin Geddes, a thought leader on telephone company business transformation, believes that telephone companies' future is in serving enterprises' commerce with customers.  He calls this business framework "connect-interact-transact."[*]   In place of traditional media for companies' advertising,  companies can reach out to connect directly with customers through their own custom-generated content.  Companies' relations with their customers can become more ongoing and more interactive, and customer-relation management now includes managing relations among customers, i.e. distribution of information and recommendations across social networks.  Communications services like those built into PayPal and Amazon OneClick can contribute significantly to enabling and facilitating purchases.   Offering enterprises advantageous trans-organizational communications networks  is a promising future that Geddes sees for telephone companies.

That future makes telephone companies into new media companies.  Corporate advertising dollars have funded traditional media's mass-market distribution networks.  Those print and television networks lack the cost advantages and capabilities of Internet-based networks.   Telephone companies as new media companies would have a business position similar to that of traditional newspaper companies and television networks, but with a better cost structure, greater technological capabilities, and a wider array of business services.

Peter Csathy, Sorenson Media CEO, offers a similar view on the video business.  He argues that video monetization through ads, download sales, and subscriptions is only a small part of a much bigger business field:

While [video monetization's] certainly important for media companies and other content providers, that narrow definition of video monetization has little to no resonance with the other 95 percent of businesses online who can benefit in a big way by harnessing the unique power of video to better monetize their businesses themselves — that is, by using quality video to better market their goods and services, engage with customers and potential customers, train their staffs, share best-practices and maximize overall revenues.

The development of the Internet has unleashed wide-ranging business warfare.  In these circumstances, selling communications weapons to all sides seems like a propitious business strategy.

Media businesses involve considerable political engagement and significant political exposure.  For example, telephone companies that market business communications advantages need to avoid net-neutrality blow-ups.  From the personal vanity of business leaders in boardroom strategizing to the intensely mediated theater of national politics, media businesses involve much more than calculations of business profits.  Media businesses can be highly lucrative, but also politically complicated.

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[*]  See also Martin Geddes, "Connect, Interact, Transact: a paradigm shift in the business model of communications service providers" (Aug. 2010), available from Geddes.

• In the U.S., a large number of lawyers, the FCC, and federal courts have spent years arguing about the use of f**k and similar words on broadcast television.  Those words are regularly used on cable television.  Why is the use of f**k and similar words on broadcast television so much more publicly significant that the use of those words on cable television?
• Craigslist has been forced to shut down its adult services section in the U.S.  What effect will this have on buying and selling sex and the many possible forms of sexual exploitation?
• Comments on a recent TechCrunch post concerning Topix display outrage at Topix's comment moderation policies.  What happens when more people learn that anyone, anywhere in the world, can post anything on the Internet without any moderation whatsoever?

Unexpected dispersion in Internet download speeds appears in other Akamai data.  Looking at the distribution of download speeds across IP addresses within states, Washington state, which includes the headquarters of Microsoft and other high-tech companies, has among the lowest shares of IP addresses downloading at faster than 768 kbits/s.    That share for Washington is 77%.   Nevada and Maine, in comparison, have 98% and 96%, respectively, of IP addresses downloading at faster than 768 kbits/s.[1]   Looking at download speeds by cities, the city with the highest average download speed is Sandy City, Utah, and the next highest, Norman, Oklahoma.[2]   Most persons have never heard of either.

Dispersion in Internet download speeds suggests that idiosyncratic organizational factors greatly affect Internet connectivity.[3]   Technology for providing relatively high-speed Internet access is well understood and widely available.   But Internet connectivity impinges on a vast array of organizational activities and interests.  That's a real Internet congestion problem.

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Data: Internet download speeds across U.S. states and cities, as measured by Akamai (Excel version)

Notes:

[1]  For the U.S. as a whole, the FCC's OBI Technical Paper No. 4, Broadband Performance, shows that 88% of U.S. Internet users have actual download speeds greater than 1 Mbps.  See Exhibit 18, which is based on comScore data for the first half of 2009.   Few comScore data are publicly available and little is know about the specifics of comScore's measurements.  See Steve Bauer, David Clark, and William Lehr, "Understanding Broadband Speed Measurements," pp. 16-7.   In the UK in May, 2010, about 92% of residential broadband connections had actual average download speeds greater than 4 Mbps.  See UK Broadband Speeds 2010.  Estimate based on Figures 4.2 and 4.5.

[2]  The set of cities considered are the top-ten cities by IP address density in each state.  See Akamai, "Observed Average Internet Speeds for U.S. Network Connections," p. 2.

[3] This dispersion does not particularly characterize the U.S.  Considering mobile broadband world-wide in 1Q 2010, Akamai observed:

we see that there is an extremely wide range in average connection speeds – oddly enough, the highest (7175 Kbps) and the lowest (105 Kbps) were both seen on providers in Slovakia.

See Akamai, State of the Internet, 1st Quarter, 2010 Report, p. 25.

Under a promise of anonymity, I interviewed this unusual, technologically backward Internet user to try to understand why he doesn't upgrade to faster Internet connectivity.   Here's a lightly edited transcript of that interview:

Why don't you upgrade to a faster Internet connection?

Because I'm cheap and lazy.  What I have is good enough.

What do you pay per month for Internet connectivity?

I pay $23.99 per month for Verizon's "Internet 768/128" service.   Plus they tack on about $10 a month worth of incomprehensible charges.  Maybe those are for Internet, too, although I think I paid them even when I just had phone service.

How much would it cost you to get faster Internet connectivity?

I don't know.  Every month I get several offers in the mail.  They don't make it easy to figure out how much in total the new service actually costs and how much faster it is.    So I just throw the offers out.   I'm lazy.

Don't you want faster connectivity?

Sure.  But I'm cheap and I'm lazy.

But with faster connectivity you'd save time.

I do my laundry in a laundry room in the basement of my four-story apartment building.  I've got to walk up and down four flights of stairs to do my laundry.  That wastes more time than my slow Internet connection.

With faster connectivity you could watch more video on the Internet.

I watch the videos that are worth watching.  Watching more wastes time.

What about online virtual worlds?  Every heard of World of Warcraft?

Yup.  When I'm old and bedridden, I'll play that.  And I'll read the newspaper, if it's still around.

What about video conferencing?

With prostitutes?

No, I mean for meetings and stuff.

I prefer to meet in the flesh.

You have no idea of all the great things you can do with high-speed Internet connectivity.

How am I supposed to find out? Verizon keeps raising its rate for my slow connection.   If I sign up for high-speed Internet, they'll just get me faster.

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What that guy said reminds me of what an old farmer said.   See the video below.   They seem related.   Just goes to show why making progress in the communications industry is so difficult.

La Meurte de un burócrata, which was made in 1966 by the Cuban Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and which is transliterated into English as The Death of a Bureaucrat, is an important film for viewers to view so that by that means the viewer will come to appreciate the importance of following appropriate procedures when engaged in burying a dead person when a claim for a pension is to be filed, so that the claim can be processed without unnecessary delay.  The length of the film is 85 minutes.  The format of the film is black and white.  The language of the film is Spanish.  The sound mix of the film is mono. It is recommended that this film be shown in schools, where the ages of the pupils are 15 to 18 years old, so that they do not misinterpret the meaning of the film, which should be preceded by a Powerpoint presentation outlining the key points.  In accordance with the results-based viewing standards established under LT-156/C, the standard evaluation form WTF-71 should be distributed after the showing.  Viewers should not be allowed to leave the cinema until the completed form is handed in to Evaluation Coordinator, who should ensure that the cinema doors are securely locked after the film begins and until such time as the Projection Director certifies that the viewing has impacted the viewers.

This month's other bureaucratic issues:

We note Paul Day's list of  "12 ways to design bureaucracy-free organizations."  This list is no cause for concern.   Eliminating bureaucracy from an organization will leave only entrepreneurs.  Then the organization will completely cease functioning and die.  Darwinian survival of the survivalists continually reproduces bureaucracy.

Bureaucrats in Berlin reported for duty despite 37-degree Celsius heat.  The workers went home only when management ordered them to do so.

Svetlana Gladkova at profy reports that a social network has been set up to serve Russian bureaucrats.  She is concerned that, given the crushing burden of work that they face, Russian bureaucrats lack time to participate in a social network.   The obvious answer is to hire more bureaucrats so that all necessary tasks can be completed.

According to John M. Glionna at the Los Angeles Times, some China officials are urging Chinese government bureaucrats to work less in giving speeches.  Those officials are lazy and foolish.  A woman outside a Beijing coffee shop noted:

This is just the way all Chinese express themselves in public. It's in our heritage and goes back to the way old Chinese poems were constructed.

The Chinese Ministry of Planning Production Affairs should hire this woman into a senior position.

James Otteson at Pileus laments that New Jersey officials did not correctly fill out a federal form and hence lost a $400 million grant.  This story shows that the federal government has greater bureaucratic competence than does the New Jersey government.  New Jersey should commission a task force to create a report on how to improve New Jersey's bureaucratic competence.

That's all for this month's Carnival of Bureaucrats. Enjoy previous bureaucratic carnivals here. Nominations of posts to be considered for inclusion in next month's carnival should be submitted using Form 376: Application for Bureaucratic Recognition.

In a nineteenth century dataset, cabinets group birds at a high level of similarity.  Each cabinet contains stuffed and mounted birds, arranged roughly in a grid.  On the top row of this cabinet are three flycatchers followed by three kingbirds.  On the second row are two kingbirds follwed by four flycatchers.  The next row displays a flycather, three phoebe's, and then three flycatchers.   The bottom row has an Eastern Pewee, a Western Pewee, three flycatchers, and then a Rose-Throated Becard.

The colored poster-board tags next to each bird provide textual information grouped into three fields.  The top textual field contains the common name.  The middle textual field contains genus followed by species.   The lowest textual field records unstructured information about the bird's geographic distribution, habitat, breeding, and other characteristics.

If you want to query this database, you have to go to the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and search among the birds in the cabinets.  Databases like this represented the leading edge of knowledge about a century and a half ago.

At the leading edge of knowledge today are database tools like Needle.  Needle organizes a database as a graph of data nodes (pictures, names, text), so that types of information can easily have a wide variety of relationships.  Needle provides a powerful query language that can quickly produce much different views of data.  Needle makes a database live, active, and accessible anywhere through the Internet.

A knowledge revolution has occurred.  The challenge is to bring it to good practice.