COOK Report for March - April 2015
Enabling the Network Commons
Guifi Net’s Singular Achievement and a Kansas City Jazz Postscript
The March April 2015 COOK Report is updates guifi net an offers final follow up to my June 2014 visit to Kansas City.
It offers an interview with Ramon Roca founder of guifi.net in which Ramon explains how the guifinet Foundation is now contracting with local guifinet "professionals" some of which are turnng into small ISPs to use guifinet infrastructure in common with their competitors. The most significant thing here is that they have developed a detailed form of cost accounting that enables conectivity providers in a given geographich area to measure their investment in the commons infrastructure and use of same. The contracts ensure that, if a provider under invests in infrastrucrure in proportion to usage, a settlement of the difference is paid to the Foundation to apportion among the other service providers. The 40 page aticle explains the governance system that relies on the principles of the late Nobel Prize winning economist Elinor Ostrom for the management of a common pool resource.
Meanwhile we finish up with Kansas City. With two interviews with Anita Dixon and one with William Wells of aSTEAM Village. William reached out to us to put his young and dynamic organization on our radar. We compare his ideas about entrepreneurship with those of MIT (favorable) and those of the Kauffman Foundation (unfavorable). We also decsribe Anita Dixon's visit to the Ben Webster Foundation in Copenhagen in September 2014 - a life changing experience for Anita. Finally we relay the outstanding news of the award to Anita on January 20, 2015 of a construction permit for a low power FM radio sation for the Mutual Musicians Foundation. This event has the potential to give the historic jazz community its own independent voice for the first time in 50 years.
Welcome to the Cook Report on Internet Protocol
A Practical Navigator for the Internet Economy
We re now in our twenty third year of publication. (Our first issue was April 1992.) We publish 6 times a year - long in depth reports on subjects of intense personal intertest. Meanwhile our most important revenue producing operation is the offering of a private subscription only forum now in its eleventh year. The Forum is a mail list called the Architecture and Economics of IP Networks. It is a community of interest where more than 100 members discuss issues and trade ideas. I do not screen posts in advance. Foir more informatrion see the menu item "Business Model and Mail List Policy."
Some of the topics we explore:
- economic framework for thinking about technology
- fiber as economic infrastructure
- change from PSTN to all IP over fiber
- business models- domestic and global
- green IT, mobility, wireless
- new carrier models
- community fiber
- enterprise fiber & NRENs
