The Net 2020 and Whither the Post Office?

It is pretty straight forward to understand why we have a postal system as the United States Constitution in Article 1, Section 8, in the enumeration of the Powers of Congress states “To establish Post Offices and Post Roads”. This first developed the Postal Department which eventually reorganized into the Postal Service we have today. For over 220 years, America has benefited from a well developed system of Postal delivery, which was critical for the development and expansion of the Republic.

More than providing an initial communications cohesion for a new country, the development of the Postal system became the foundation for several important legal processes and concepts:

• The use of the Postal system was universal. It was never limited to just to Citizens, or to economic groups, or bounded by race. If you could write and afford a stamp, the mail would go and it would get delivered even if you were a minority
• The Postal system provides First Class Mail which is mechanism for communication that is officially recognized by law. You can officially communicate with the government using mail, and optionally use Certified mail for proof of delivery for proof in legal proceedings
• The Postal system is protected by law, and has wide powers of enforcement. Tamper with a mailbox, whether at a residence or a pick-up mailbox on the street and it is a serious Federal crime and it will land you in jail. Moreover, mail fraud will also send you to a Federal Penitentiary. There are Postal Police and a Postal Inspector all to make this happen, and all well founded on the government executing its Constitutional requirement

So you say, what is going to happen to the Post office in 2020? Will it still be around in a form that we recognize today? Email and social networking computer services have all-but eliminated personal first-class mail use except when someone wants to send a message with special impact. Web-enabled bill-pay is available from virtually every bank (and from all the virtual banks!). The real issue is outside of the social communications arena, but squarely in the legal one. Will our method of communicating legal issues with the government or for business become completely divorced from government run Postal services? If so, how do we keep the official and legal aspects of the current system to support official government and legal system operations?

Clearly, much communication happens outside of the Postal system today and its impact on companies is dramatic. Due to Sarbanes-Oxley, as well as other requirements, companies keep and track essentially every communications both internally to a company as well as externally. This is in case of audits by government regulators or for discovery related to a legal proceeding.

This may work well, at a cost, for businesses, but what does it mean for communications with Citizens and residents either to the government or legal matters? How does this person ensure that delivery was made? How does this person know that the email message was not tampered during delivery? What is the person’s recourse if it gets lost in the email?

As we contemplate issues like Net Neutrality and subsidized Broadband Access, have we forgotten to update our concepts of mail fraud and wire-fraud to today’s email-box stuffing spamming and intentional sending of viruses and spyware? Are these not the analogues of fraudulent offers and items sent in the mail that could damage your home and cost money and time to repair? If we use email to communicate with our government, is causing the outage of an email service provider on the same level of hijacking a mail delivery truck?

I know that these are all questions and I have not provided any significant answers. However, the transition to electronic commerce and government continues and accelerates and we need to help our government find the right approach to replace some of the critical government and legal functions that our Postal Service provides today. Moreover, are these issues that Postmaster General should be addressing or will the Postal Service continue to whither away?

Getting Telelom Companies to Green

Normally, the improvement in the infrastructure of a company is done to improve the cost of providing a good or service in the marketplace. The Age of the Industrial Revolution is replete with stories of companies that would essentially lay off their entire workforce while re-tooling their factories to be more competitive. When a new and more efficient steel making process became available Andrew Carnegie furloughed his entire workforce while his steel mills were overhauled to ensure long-term competitiveness.

Are these economic considerations the only reasons to implement new and more efficient - that is in this case energy efficient - technologies? The normal economic force that causes replacing equipment in many industries does not always provide enough benefit to warrant new capital investments. Let's focus here on the telecommunications industry.

Today, most nationwide telecommunications carriers have depreciated virtually their entire infrastructure to zero. In short, the finance folk do not think it costs them more than the cost of maintenance, so spending millions in capital does not make sense to them merely to keep the revenue they already have. This has lead to telecom facilities that are chock full of older equipment providing less capability and capacity than systems that can be bought today – especially in terms of functionality per Watt. If companies held onto computer systems like telecom companies hold on to transport equipment and routers, then corporate data centers would have 100 MHz Pentiums floor to ceiling covering acres. Even the government replaces on a regular schedule supercomputers worth tens of millions of dollars to improve the ability to predict the weather and other critical modeling problems.

When it comes down to it, nationwide telecom companies are real estate companies. A typical carrier will have hundreds of points-of-presence (POPs) adding up to millions of square feet of space. So, would it not make sense to get the most use out of a limited space? Would it not make sense to make the most efficient use of the available power and cooling? Of course it does. Another way of putting this is why are telecom companies not starting in earnest to become as efficient as possible to reduce costs and to reduce their environmental impacts?

So what is the hold-up for telecom companies making the same rip-and-replace decisions that Andrew Carnegie and virtually every person that uses information technology? It is certainly not the technologists at telecom companies, nor is it the line operations staff that has to deal with older equipment and its attendant maintenance requirements and issues.

There are probably several aspects that have restrained changes:

• It is hard to justify replacing equipment that has no costs basis with new equipment only to keep the same revenue
• It is hard to quantify the dollar value of power and space costs savings of replacing equipmentIt is hard to quantify the reduction in operations staff and improvement in service deployment time that reduces costs and increases revenue
• There appears to be a brain-drain in the application of sciences, such as Operations Research, to the operation of telecom companies so understanding the real savings in technology changes cannot be developed with accuracy
• Executives are not measured on ensuring that their company is in good shape three years from now (because their network is more efficient and there is power and space to continue growth) but whether revenue or margin increased this year or even this quarter
• There are few external pressures such industry recognition or government regulation to make investments

So, what can be done? Somehow we need to find some way to make incentives to fix this problem. One possible solution is to extend the EPA Energy Star rating to services as well as products. Will consumers preferentially buy from a company that produces less pollution than a competitor company for a megabit of data transported? Is this also an ethical issue?

Clearly, bandwidth demands are going up and they are enabling applications that people demand and expect. It is hard to believe that reducing bandwidth demand (like reducing energy consumption) is a viable option. Especially if you believe that telecommunications services, enabling for example Cloud Computing, is the key technology to improve productivity and grow the economy in an environmentally sound manner.