Broadband allows for the transmission of people’s thoughts, images, and voice, while transportation adds a physical presence. Obvious as this may be, it was the recent FCC filing by the United Spinal Association (U.S.A.) that made it clear how important broadband is in complementing the U.S. transportation system. Paraphrasing the U.S.A., broadband helps level the playing field for those who cannot drive.
Emergency Broadband Benefit Program – One Time or The Foundation for Something More Permanent?
As part of its $900B, December 2020 stimulus package, Congress allocated $3.2 Billion for the FCC to administer an Emergency Broadband Benefit Program (EBBP) to help connect those who are struggling financially. The U.S.A. response was one of 120+ thought-provoking replies to the FCC’s request for how to allocate this temporary funding. Whether this becomes a permanent program and how it should be funded long-term (a MAC-tax is once again suggested by this author) is just one of the many questions that ACA Connects Brian Hurley addresses in this ViodiTV interview.
Learn more about the EBBP at this Friday’s 2/12/21, FCC virtual roundtable
A Tipping Point or a Fork in the Road
The hypothesis behind the Smart Driving Car Summit panel, At the Tipping Point, is that that pandemic has forever changed the way we live, work, play, and, most importantly interact. Rutgers’ James Hughes set the stage by suggesting that the events of 2020 serve as an accelerant for Work from Home, E-Commerce and the continued carnage of bricks and mortar retail. He and other experts discuss the implications including the concept of Headquarters as Network and transportation networks that evolve away from star (suburb to city center) to more of a mesh (suburb-to-suburb configuration).
A Culture of Safety Is AV Table Stakes
Building a culture of safety is a prerequisite to building an autonomous vehicle. That’s one conclusion from the insightful Smart Driving Car Summit panel, Safe Enough in the Operational Design Domain. Another important conclusion is that connecting vehicles wirelessly is a nice-to-have, but not a must-have for safety considerations of autonomous vehicles. That is neither Waymo or Aurora’s (just announced a big partnership with Toyota) respective autonomous drivers are dependent upon external communications to operate.
Safety in the Showroom (The Dispatcher) #
When will we see a president delivered to the inauguration in an electric and/or autonomous vehicle, asked Sheldon Sandler, CEO of Bel Air Partners? Sandler, the moderator of a recent Smart Driving Car panel, noted that it was 35 years after the invention by Karl Benz before a car delivered a president (Warren Harding) to his inauguration. The panel he moderated focused on car safety features that are available today. One take-away from the panel and this isn’t a product endorsement, is that Subaru with its EyeSight feature seems to provide the best safety value for the money.
In that same panel, The Dispatcher’s Michael Sena asked the big picture question of whether subsidies for safety features would provide a greater benefit than the current subsidies for fleet electrification. That is, could the gains in lives saved/harm reduced be greater with the proliferation of wide-spread crash avoidance systems than the pollution reduction benefit of vehicle electrification? This sounds like it would be a good study for some of Professor Kornhauser’s students. Read Michael’s musings about this topic starting on page 18 of his latest Dispatcher.
Some Tweets and Short Thoughts
- @AutomotiveUX “The other, weirder possibility is that the remote-work revolution will eliminate the concept of a metro hub entirely, as companies embrace the reality of a permanently distributed workforce. What if the next Silicon Valley is nowhere—or, just as precisely, everywhere?”
- Clever 218 Relocate Telecommuter program as Paul Bunyan’s Gary Johnson explains, “Innovative new telecommuter recruitment program which leverages our many regional strengths including our expansive fiber gigabit infrastructure.”
- Wow, 1M passenger annual throughput for approx. $10M on <1.5-acres. This will be a new feeder for MCO and extend the reach of air travel to smaller communities in Florida. Another way to make it easier to enable remote work.
- Check out this week’s Smart Driving Car Summit at noon on Thursday. The session’s title sounds like a B movie from the 1970s, but it will have great content.
- And later that day, understand the American electorate and its impact on politicians in policy“at an ACA CONNECTS Members-Only discussion with national pollster and political expert Frank Luntz.
The Korner – Seizing a New Opportunity & Following His Students on the DARPA Challenge
It is clear from Dr. Alain Kornhauser’s actions that he lives by the late Everett Christensen’s postulate about learning from, but not living in the past. An example of that is how he and his company, ALK Technologies, created a new market after a behemoth-crushing experience in the retail space. In part 5 of this interview, he describes how his company developed the first turn-by-turn navigation system and, along the way, he became the first person tracked by GPS to run the New York City Marathon.
In part 6 of the interview, he explains how his students redirected his journey by convincing him to be their advisor for the 2005 Challenge DARPA challenge. Like earlier DARPA initiatives that begat the Internet, historians may look back at the 2004 and 2005 events as changing the course of humanity. It definitely changed the course for Kornhauser and his students.