ActivityStream.Silverton.Palo-Alto.CA.us

Welcome to the Google | Fiberhood Network.

ROTFLMAO. Well, at least we had the privilege of Sergey personally dissing us back when we originally built out this concept, long before Google was THE Google. So, how best to respond, when the realization of the dream you evangelized and built over a decade's sustained effort, against all odds, finally becomes real?

Maybe I should stand outside the GooglePlex on the corner of Landings Drive with a cardboard sign around my neck that reads: Will (Continue To) Work for Ubiquitous Massive Symmetric Bandwidth for All. I've been doing that in one form or another since 1991 anyway, no reason to stop now, I suppose. Or maybe just, "Okay, Sergey, you were right, the timing was wrong (well, it wasn't wrong, Sand Hill got it wrong, but still), that was no reason to single you out. I could never apologize enough."

In my wildest dreams, maybe The Google could finally bring me in house, now that I'm way better house trained than I was back then. I was so driven. So focused. So lost in the part. So probably not; but hey, if you don't ask Eywa, how can you ever know?

Or maybe it's time to come to terms with being the Ted Nelson of bandwidth. I've done all the damage I can; now, only the community can determine my ultimate fate. At least I'm finally at a point where I'm totally okay with that, regardless. Truth be told, in the end, that's the most important aftermath of failing forward.

Parenthetically, I suppose it's one measure of our effectiveness at disrupting the status quo from 1999 to 2002 to observe the domain name defacement that someone actually took the time and money to conduct with the domain long after we let it go. Wow.

Now where did I see that Craigslist posting from Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf for an FTTH Ethernet Everywhere Bandwidth Evangelist / Advisor / Ambassador, Sidekick, and General Whipping Boy again? I know the bookmark is here somewhere. ;-)



P.S. For real wayback history buffs, nineteen years ago I submitted the first business plan to build neighborhood fiber optic LAN's -- initially to connect homes and schools for education (hence, EdCom International 1994 | 1997 ) -- using an obscure, native internet technology called Ethernet. I was promptly referred to psychological counseling for proposing such a clearly unhinged plan and asked if I'd like a small business loan to build a BBS. Um, no. Apparently you didn't hear what I was saying. This isn't an optional, proposed future. This is the future we are building.

Instead, I focused intensely for ten years to bring just one thing forward from the realm of the possible to IRL; to build the world's first field operational, fiber optic ETTH network. By the time we got it done, there was even this new whizbang radio standard called 802.11 that would extend the edges of ETTH into thin air. Ethernet Everywhere and beyond was not only possible, we could have it all done by 2008. Future: built. Sort of.

Yet, even by the end of the 1990's, none of the Silicon Valley royalty would approve of the venture. Even the envisioneers of Coyote Hill Road at Pake Auditorium laughed me out the door with jeers of "56K is more than sufficient for residential users into the most distant foreseeable future." Apparently, I was seeing a different future; the one I'd written about at Stanford in 1997; namely, Information Superdriveway: Social Informatics of Deploying Residential Community Fiber Optic Computer Networks; the bandwidth-defined future we're living in, today.

Honestly, at this point I couldn't be more thrilled about the whole meandering road. So let's redouble our efforts and git 'er done. Feel free to Buzz me, @Sergey Brinn, if you agree that we may finally have all the pieces in place to pick up right up where we left off our last conversation. Onward!

FidoNet:michael_silverton@f1802.n202.z1.fidonet.org