February 1996. A half-ton bomb planted in a small truck near South Quay Station close to the recently renovated commercial district of Canary Wharf. The bomb detonated around 1900 hours, bringing down a six story building, and severely shaking Canary Wharf  Tower and other buildings around the Docklands area. The area, home to much of the telecommunications interconnection capacity connecting the UK and Europe to the rest of the world, is severely damaged and all surrounding activity disrupted.

Today the Docklands area continues to support many important, high density communications interconnection points, including Telehouse Europe, the London Internet Exchange (LINX), and the London Network Access Point (LONAP) - in addition to individual nodes and facilities operated by European and other international telecommunications carriers.

This includes companies operating submarine fiber optic cable systems. These densely interconnected areas are referred to as telecommunications "SuperNodes," or if the facilities are located at individual facilities, "Carrier hotels."

The worst case scenario - a strong earthquake strikes California, disabling the carrier hotel at One Wilshire, disrupting operations at submarine cable landing stations in both the Los Angeles area and central California, with a resulting tsunami hitting Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Japan.

Communications are severed to most of the South Pacific, and severely degraded to allow for only emergency services and national defense usage within the west coast of the United States.  Financial and government communications are disrupted and severely limited into Japan, Hong Kong, and China.

Telecom carriers in Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, China, and Australia work frantically to restore cable, Internet, and telecom capacity from the Pacific submarine cable systems through the Indian Ocean to Europe and the US east coast.  Seattle and San Francisco still have some connectivity, however cable systems from Grover Beach to San Diego are inoperable, limiting connections to those which were designed with automatic rerouting through North Pacific cable systems.

Liu Chang from the China Ministry of Culture opened the China Game Forum in Los Angeles on Wednesday with encouraging words for both Chinese and foreign gaming companies.  "China will provide tax incentives for companies to develop gaming within China," said Chang, as well as promote funding for companies choosing to develop gaming with the country. 

Chang believes development of a gaming industry in China is yet one more indication that Chinese people are improving their quality of life by having access to new leisure activities, including gaming.

At the China Gaming Forum, sponsored by ChinaCache, around 40 executives from both China and the United States gathered to discuss the state of China's gaming industry, data centers, and the future of cloud computing within the gaming and social network community.

I drive a 2004 Ford Mustang with a little "6 Banger" giving me the illusion of driving a sports car. Using the Carbon Footprint Calculator my annual carbon footprint driving the Mustang at 15,000 miles is 6.99 tons. Having used (according to my SoCal Edison bill) 323kWh of electricity during the last billing period, I could be charged for an additional .09 tons of carbon. Looking at the footprint generating from a month of using Metro Rail to go to and from Long Beach to downtown Los Angeles the footprint adds, well it adds almost nothing.

Now I probably use a lot less electricity than the average person, so my electrical carbon load is not too bad. My Mustang is a pig, but not as big a pig as say, an Escalade, which would be almost twice as dirty as the Mustang. Versus a Prius, which would produce 3.2 tons of carbon, I don't fare so well.

Anyway you look at it, it is a lot of carbon, all finding its way into the environment, ozone, oceans - anyplace carbon can fly or die into the planet.

"If we look at cloud (service) in a global sense, not just as my service or your service, or my country or your country, then IPv6 is part of the future and the solution." (Bert Armijo, SVP 3tera)

IPv6 is hitting everybody in the Internet industry on a global scale. 3tera recognized early in the evolution of cloud products that IPv6 was critical for long term, and short term development of their AppLogic product within both public-facing Internet services, as well as cloud deployments within the enterprise. The need is real.

The IPv4 Reality 3tera Faced

So you have 20 years of engineering and business management experience under your belt. It is logical that you will have a level of tacit knowledge many companies will pay for.

In the years following the Dot COM meltdown I remember encountering many consultants. Guys we’d worked with for many years, and knew the Old Guy Working as Consultanttelecommunications business cold. Everybody thought when the Dot COM meltdown occurred, these guys would do great with their new consulting careers. I mean, with that amount of experience young companies should be throwing money at these guys with all the experience.

In a recent post on a cloud computing mailing list, an old timer from the telecom days admitted that for him “being an independent consultant means about the same things as “being unemployed.”

Sitting at a local coffee house wondering why the free wireless internet access is slow, it is easy to be indignant.  Indignant that the coffee house owner could possibly be so arrogant as to provide poor quality Internet access while I camp out with an hour old latte, updating important Facebook communities with my plans for watching television this evening.

How are we supposed to live like this?    Are we supposed to live like we are in a third world country while slurping our specialty coffee?

A third world country like Ghana, Vietnam, or Palestine?  If I was living in say, Somalia, I would be one of 1.14% of people within the country that have Internet access.  In fact, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), in all of Africa there was only 4.7% of the entire population with access to Internet-enabled infrastructure or technology.

Google's CEO Eric Schmidt refers to Twitter as a "poor man's email."  For millions of individuals, small business owners, and even emergency services organizations, Twitter is rapidly becoming an integral part of their business strategies and personal lives.

That fact is not lost on the private equity and investment communities.  Twitter confirmed a large investment on Friday, estimated at $100 million dollars, with a posting on their website:

"Yesterday we closed a significant round of funding with a group of investment firms that we're excited to publicly thank: Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, Institutional Venture Partners, Spark Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Morgan Stanley"

"More than 90% of startup companies around San Diego compensate the founders and senior staff with stock options, grants, or restricted stock" advises Mike Kinkelaar, Partner at Procopio, a San Diego Law Firm.

Mike joined three other panelists discussing "Sweat Equity" and senior management compensation at the San Diego Software Industry Council's Entrepreneur's Forum Thursday evening in San Diego (SDSIC).

Sweat equity refers to "the efforts of executives or other shareholders into a company. This does not include money that is put into a business, which is financial equity. It is the time and knowledge that an individual or a group of individuals put into a business to make a result." (BusinessFinance.Com)

"We cannot know what tomorrow holds on the Internet, except that it will be unexpected."

The new FCC Chairman, Juliius Genachowski, addressed a group of journalists and industry experts at the Brookings Institution on Sep 21^st, focusing his discussion on reigniting the topic of network neutrality and "Preserving a Free and Open Internet." 

Quoting early innovators and leaders of the Internet, including Tim Berners-Lee, Genachowski reinforced the idea the Internet is intended as a "Blank Canvas, allowing anyone to contribute and innovate without permission."  An exciting idea, and an exciting confirmation the US Government sees the Internet as infrastructure.  While carriers such as Verizon and AT&T should be able to add value to their customers, the basic premise of Internet access is one of an onramp to the rest of the Internet-enabled world.