On Monday, the FCC announced its new broadband initiative for the next decade. That got me to thinking, because didn’t we have a broadband initiative back in the 90s? I could have sworn I remember seeing pictures of then-Vice President Al Gore installing fiber optic cables in schools when I was in middle school.

Telecom Again?

Actually, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 did create a broadband policy and most states paid a total of $320 billion to have a few companies (most notably, AT&T and Verizon) replace old copper wiring with new fiber-optic cables throughout the US. The idea was to then have “open access policies” which would allow other companies to come in and use the infrastructure laid down to foster a competitive marketplace, eventually lowering costs for consumers.

Thanks to some lobbying, that never happened. Look around today, and what you see in almost every major market is not a competitive environment, but rather, a duopoly. The fiber optic cables have not fully been installed as promised and America is 15th in the world when it comes to broadband connectivity.

Who Wants the Competition?

The complexities about how this happened (including lobbying from the telecom industry and former telecom employees being appointed to the FCC) go back more than a decade and are a bit deeper than can be detailed here, but basically, what we now have is a murky area where a public utility (which is to be available statewide) is more or less controlled by a few private companies. Companies that don’t want competition.

No Clicks For the Sticks

While this certainly is a concern, what’s most alarming is that, unless there’s a profit margin to be met, broadband will not be available to communities that are too small or too spread out, even though taxpayers paid AT&T and Verizon billions of dollars to upgrade the Public Switched Telephone Networks, a public utility.

Yet, there are stories of rural communities still using dial-up who have approached AT&T and Verizon and have offered to pay them to tap into their broadband lines to bring high-speed internet to rural communities, only to be denied access.

Verizon has even threatened to stop adding fiber optic cables unless legislation is changed in their favor, a sort of broadband blackmail. And, if you happen to be in a town with limited options and choose AT&T as your provider, they’ll suspend your connection if you happen to blog bad things about them. Of course, this is after they increase your rates and before they limit your usage.

Searching For Competition

But there may be some help on the horizon. Last month, Google announced plans to select one city to test its new ISP. Creating an ISP is expensive (hence the open access policies other countries use); while it may fail miserably, but we need competition injected into the telecom industry, or America will continue to pay for sub-par broadband.

Otherwise, we’ll have to continue our surrender to the few gatekeepers of the Internet.

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Consider this: Slovakia is ahead of the United States. South Korea is also ahead of the United States. Oh don’t worry, we still have the bigger military and more cup holders in our cars, but America lags behind these two countries – and 13 others – in terms of Internet speed. Currently, the average download speeds of the Internet within the United States range between 3.9Mbps (Megabits per second) and 5.1Mbps, whereas South Korea leads with average download speeds ranging from 14.6Mbps to 20.4Mbps. That places the United States in 15th place, although even those numbers vary – some say it’s as high as 28th. Either way, we’re nowhere near the top ten, which is where we were (at 10th place) six years ago when President Bush declared that “Tenth is ten spots too low”.

There are multiple reasons for the discrepancy – South Korea is about the size of Indiana and has a greater population density. But Russia is nearly twice as large as the US and has less of a population density and they have speeds faster than America.

The most frustrating part? Americans are paying more for less. In fact, right now, many in South Korea can subscribe to a 100Mbps internet connection for a more expensive $50 a month fee (most average fees are around $20). That’s right – 100Mbps – 20 times faster than the speeds available here in America. By 2012, Koreans will receive 1Gbps broadband connections, a full 100x faster than what we currently have.

This is interesting considering that the FCC announced yesterday its 100 Squared Initiative – 100Mbps for 100 million households…by 2020. Get that?  Ten years from now, the country that invented the Internet will be where other countries are today.

You may be saying to yourself, who cares? I can watch Hulu just fine. And you’re right- most broadband in America today can easily view streaming videos. But, considering that the computer, telephone, and TV are all merging, the current broadband America has won’t be able to compete with the rest of the world, who are able to upload large files within minutes versus hours.

So, just how did America get stuck in the slow lane on the Information Superhighway? I’ll dive into that tomorrow.

Take a think of this: unemployment has been hovering around 10% (underemployment has been even higher – around 17%) for a while. Now, imagine you are either unemployed or underemployed. How would you go about looking for a job? Would you ask your family and friends or perhaps take a look at the local classifieds in the morning paper?

Or, if you’re like most of us, would you hop onto your computer and head over to monster.com or careerbuilder.com?

But what if you didn’t have access to the Internet?

Last Tuesday, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan discussed the importance of broadband access for all. Arguing that Internet access in the 21st Century should be approached the same way as highways in the 1950s, he recommended bringing broadband to federally-assisted housing. Currently, 77% of the country has access to the Internet, which seems like a lot, until you realize that 87% of South Koreans have access to the Internet. And, like most countries, their speeds are faster.

I for one applaud the effort, but there are naysayers who disagree and think that the Internet is only a toy and not a necessity. But this same argument – that any new technology is not an entitlement – was made about electricity, telephones, and even running water. Would anyone really be willing to say that electricity is not a necessity in a modern American home?

What do you think? Is broadband access a modern necessity?

This week I’ve been talking a lot about connectivity; about how everyone finds themselves placing everything they encounter into its own little jar and slapping a label on it. And how, as we start to organize our cupboards, we begin to realize that it’s not as easy as it seems.

Here we’ve been distilling and dividing, separating and sifting, only to find that there were no jars.

Because we finally realize that everything is connected.

And it sounds very Woodstocky, doesn’t it? But I don’t mean connected just in the Avatar Na’vi , kumbaya sense, but in the real, actual trying-to-divide-water kind of sense.

Take technology, for instance.

Years ago, sending something between a Mac and a Windows machine was next to impossible. The “I’m a Mac and I’m a PC” ads want you to believe that it’s still a hassle, but, while some incompatibility still exists, there has been one great equalizer: the Internet.

Windows would love it if the only browser you used was Internet Explorer, and Apple would want you to search the web with Safari. But users are trending towards catch-all browsers like Firefox and Chrome for their ‘Net fix.

Likewise, it used to be that you needed a Walkman for your music, a printer to view documents, and your Zack Morris, Gordon Gecko mobile phone to talk while on the go. Once again, the Internet – and the smart phones that were borne of it – made all of these disparate technologies obsolete. The Internet not only connected people, it also connected the technologies people used.

Even the Internet itself can’t keep its own websites divorced: Facebook is connected with Twitter, which is connected to YouTube, which is linked to your own blog. And soon, even your computer’s hard drive will be impossible to separate from the ether.

Technology is starting to mirror biology – everything feeds off of everything else.

Of course, here at DotLoop, we understand this connection, and by bringing a holistic approach to online transaction management, we are able to seamlessly blend together online forms, electronic signatures, and a custom CRM tool into one secure domain. Everything works together, no jars or cupboards needed.

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On Tuesday, I had an opportunity to listen to Brad Nix speak on blogtalkradio.com and he had this to say about my personal favorite day of the week: “Nothing defines your local community better than what people do on Saturday.”

He continued:

“Saturday’s the only day where you don’t have to work, and you don’t have to work the next day.  Whether it’s going to little league or grilling out with your friends or taking your wife or girlfriend out on a date, that’s what really goes on in your community.”

My Saturday includes volunteering at InkTank, a local no-profit and attending a friend’s birthday party.  Taking a look at what is going on here in Cincinnati  in a few days – music, parades, art, food, and wine – I have to smile.  Looks like I live in a pretty eclectic and cool community.  So, to paraphrase Mr. Nix, what are you doing Saturday?

I had planned on writing a bit more on connectivity today, but I found this video created last summer and thought it was amazing enough of an idea to share.  Luckily, it deals with the connectivity between nature and cities, so it seems appropriate.  I think this is riveting, although maybe I’m just a sucker for English accents.  If you haven’t been to ted.com, I’d recommend taking a look – there are some brilliant ideas out there.  Of course, I’d like to think that DotLoop is just one of them. 

DotLoop is growing and, with growth comes departments and teams. We have the forms team and the sales team and the marketing team. Each has its own function, of course, but we all work together quite seamlessly, kind of like DotLoop itself.

It’s working great here at DotLoop, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how erroneously compartmentalized we have made our world. As a news junkie, I stop by all kinds of news sites and see the same separating tabs: politics, business, entertainment, science and technology, health. Of course lately, everyone – even those not within the industry – are clicking on that other tab: real estate.

But after reading about the TARPs and the DOWs and the NASDAQS, I’m starting to see how silly all of these little categories are. After all, it only took one tab – real estate – to affect every other tab in one way or another.

And now that the housing bubble has burst, it seems more and more clear how interconnected everything really is. The effects of one thing collapsing can and do resonate throughout the rest of the economy not only here in America, but all over the world. A defaulted mortgage in Iowa can cause a farmer in Taiwan to lose his job. Not only are you and your neighbor Jim feeling the effects of this crash, but so are Otto in Germany and Kim-Ly in Vietnam.

If we have learned anything from this financial crisis we’ve all been trudging through, I hope it’s this. Everything is connected. Your loss is your neighbor’s loss is the world’s loss.

While I understand that this need to categorize and separate is a natural thing to do, I feel that we’ve gone overboard. We’re suffering from separation anxiety, that is, our need to separate and categorize is making us crazy.

So I am calling an end to all of this distilling and dividing. Get rid of the marker that draws lines around us. Pop those barrier bubbles faster than that housing bubble. After all, most times, it’s not about black and white, wrong and right, or day and night. It’s about the dusk that connects all of us.

Can I get a little kumbaya here?

DotLoop will be heading to Austin, Texas this weekend for the 2010 Prudential Real Estate Affiliates, Inc. annual conference.

“With more than 62,000 agents, Prudential is a monster, and the exact type of player we’re looking for on our team. Their brand, professionalism and legacy is timeless,” says G. Austin Allison, the co-founder and CEO.

“Most companies, if they haven’t yet incorporated an online sales system into their business plan, are in the process of doing so. Agents today are too mobile, manipulating too much information on their hand-held devices, to not have access to a system like DotLoop,” said Anthony de Movellan, a Lexington broker who is a DotLoop client.

Mr. de Movellan runs Prudential A.S. de Movellan, and is the President of the Lexington-Bluegrass Association of Realtors.

“DotLoop fits right in there with the obvious need to migrate these contracts to the web,” de Movellan said.

“It’s simple, and it works,” he continued. “We envision DotLoop working for our entire membership. They need it, and they need to use it with each other.

“It only makes sense, from an association perspective, that we offer it to all of our agents. They all use the same paper contracts, they all should use the same online contracts.”

As it turns out, not only are humans hardwired to run on a 25-hour day, but with last week’s earthquake, we lost even more time. It seems the Chilean earthquake threw off the earth’s axis just enough to shorten our day by 0.00000126 seconds. Granted, it will take approximately 2100 years before a one-second delay kicks in, but if you’re feeling more harried than usual this week, at least now you know why.

Of course, by using DotLoop instead of running around town gathering signatures and idling in traffic, you could more than easily make up that lost time.

Here in DotLoop’s home city of Cincinnati, we’re having a bit of our own housing crisis. Last week, it was announced that the Gamble House, so named because it was owned by the co-founder of Proctor & Gamble, is about to be razed, because it’s cheaper to get rid of it than to spend money on repairs and restoration. The house is a local landmark, with gorgeous 19th-Century architecture. As the old adage says, “they don’t make ‘em like that anymore.” But it is in disrepair and is in desperate need of a doctor for Gamble.

But is it really cheaper to raze it than to restore it? Yes and no.

In the short-run, it probably is cheaper to raze than restore. It’s the easy and convenient way to do things. In the long-run, though, it will cost more to raze the property than to restore it, and not just financially.

Keeping and restoring an old home as opposed to just destroying it also benefits the community, many of whom have fond memories of it from their childhood. It also helps preserve a piece of history for the city, allowing us to have a benchmark to show where what we once were so that we can see how far we’ve come (or haven’t, so that we can adjust our sails).

Luckily, the community here can see this and are trying to prevent the house from becoming just another empty lot. They see the value of this house beyond the cost of new shingles and elbow grease. I hope that their efforts pay off.

As I’ve touched upon before, a building – whether it be a home or a commercial property – is more than just an ATM, it’s a part of a community. Place matters and buildings most certainly affect how we feel about a place. That’s the beauty of architecture.

The owners have every right to raze the house if they want to, but I hope they reconsider. Costs other than financial are at stake. Restoring and re-purposing the Gamble House is one gamble that will pay off for the entire community.

Photo courtesy of cincinnati.com.