Let's ignore the fact for a moment that the new guy in the White House in 2009 -- Republican or Democrat -- is going to have a serious challenge digging up $100 billion to throw into a glorified public works project that (under some proposals) would do nothing more than recreate the glory days of the old Bell System in fiber, except with Net Neutrality provisions for access (Maybe).

Let's also ignore the fact that, quite on their own, the cable companies and the telcos are leapfrogging their way up to 100 Mbps (and higher) speeds on their existing customer bases. (Hello! Verizon can deliver 100 Mbps tomorrow if they just got the product marketing people out of the way, Hello!) You'll see cable companies talk about DOCSIS 3.0 and that's good for around 160 Mbps or so per household.

So, without spending a dime of (your) tax money, there are a bunch of market and competitive issues that will bring faster speeds to many households in the next few years and bring us up on the too-often-quoted World Per Person Broadband speed indexes, so we can start catching up to South Korea, Japan, and the others ahead of us.

We need to take a page from the (so called) developing world - wireless. There are three (3) issues that are interlinked here: one technology, one economic, and one social.

TECHNOLOGY: LTE is king of the hill. AT&T has decided to join the LTE bandwagon, joining Verizon Wireless and the rest of the GSM world, so we have a growth path for a world-wide cellular high-speed broadband technology. First generation LTE is promising speeds of at least 100 Mbps to handsets/users and there's already some lab testing for using more channels and 4 MIMO-linked antennas to do 300 Mbps.

The WiMAX crowd is not standing still; they realize LTE is coming to gun for them, so you'll likely see a rapid push in IEEE world to get a 2nd generation WiMAX standard refined, defined, and out the door. How fast will 2nd gen WiMAX be? Likely fast enough to be put side by side LTE in (so called) developing world countries and be a good deal.

ECONOMIC: Digging trenches is expensive. Bless the guys at Verizon for biting the bullet and pulling fiber to the home in order to put the sweats on cable (and to find new revenue streams as people disconnect their second lines for cell phones and DSL for cable modems). But, still, it's expensive, it is disruptive, and it is man-power intensive. Requires a lot of infrastructure.

Now the (so called) developing world doesn't have the institutional biases or legacy infrastructure/mindset having wires everywhere. Yes, this is a contrary view, but stick with me. You put up the cell tower. To go faster, you upgrade the handsets and upgrade the electronics on the cell tower. And that's it. No truck rolls. No trenches. No guy symbolically cutting your copper...

SOCIAL: Let's face facts -- Many people under the age of don't have home landline phones. It's the cell phone. In Sweden, DSL sales are down, reason being that people are electing to get their broadband connectivity through (wireless) HSPA. Mobility and convenience trumps being tethered to the wall.

It would not surprise me if today's toddlers grow up to consider wall-based broadband connectivity (cable or fiber) as "quaint" and something that Grandpa had back in his day to send text-based e-mail...

If you already can get 100 Mbps out of your cell phone, why are you going to pay more money for a landline connection (Maybe as a way to feed the femtocell or get pay-per-view on the big screen).

My meta point here is that people have been pimping the idea of 100 Mbps fiber to the home for almost a decade in some form or another and wireless is going to blow straight by it in terms of technology, economics, and social use.

Of course, there's probably some not-so-minor details about spectrum that I'm glossing over, but LTE and WiMAX usage over the next few years will only drive competing companies into pestering regulatory agencies (here in the States, the FCC) to free up more spectrum.

Information, not oil, is the rising coin of power for many nations. Bahrain, UAE, Qatar and Kuwait easily have the cash to spend to upgrade redundancies in their telecommunications infrastructure, and they are likely to want to move fast to get more capacity in.

Will India benefit from this building boom? Interesting question. If you want redundant connections out of the region to the East, certainly they would pass through/by India.

In an ideal world, the Gulf states would be able to pull fiber to their west than north through Iraq, then go across Turkey into Europe. But....

Who knows? I wouldn't put it past some daring(crazy) company to 1) Cut a deal with the Iraqi for a right-of-way through the country and 2) Figure out a way to keep things stable enough to lay fiber up to some connection point in Turkey. Plus 3) Pull fiber over the mountains of Turkey...

Supposedly the deal could bring in funding from Intel (knew it!), Google (OK) and Best Buy (Hmmm) to help lower the price tag of the buildout.

Right now, allegedly Sprint and Clearwire are in "serious talks" on a plan to spin off Sprint's WiMAX unit and merge it with Clearwire... which would leave Sprint with... what? And Clearwire hasn't exactly been a cash cow, if you know what I mean.

Or at least he's doing a lot of TEASING about his technology company, popping up at different events, dropping some hints, doing pics with fawning journalists, then quietly riding off into the sunset.

"Are you OK?"

But seriously, I was hanging out in the press room at CES when a small crowd of people started swarming around an interview room and ta-da, David Caruso started walking around. I gawked for about two seconds, then went up to him and asked who he was promoting...

"I'm here promoting my company," says he, reaching into his portfolo and smoothly handing me an over-sized postcard with a stylized rendering of himself on one side, and his signature on the other side.

"Visit the website, it has a video on it," Caruso explains. "We came out here two weeks ago to make it, I think you'll like it."

He doesn't say anything else, so I ask his companions, Nils Lahr and Frank Nein for more information. Lahr was CTO and co-founder of iBeam broadcasting and before that was a senior developer at Microsoft when VXstreme was bought my MS.

Back in the dot.com day, iBEAM and SkyCache/Cidera went head-to-head in the ISP space deploying satellite dishes and servers on the "edge" of the edge of the network. (See, my sordid past!). So, Nils was basically The Enemy, but I hung out at iBEAM parties and smoked cigars while they came to our parties and ate our great food at our great party locations.

It was a very cordial sort of competition.

ANYway, the third member of this trio is Frank H. Nein, tied to Nils through OrionsWave. Nils is the founder and COO of OrionsWave, and Frank is the "Digital Media, Industry & Technology Consultant/Analyst" there, started in January 2004.

Caruso's company is called Lexicon Digital Communications. The cryptic video and an underpolished website can be found at www.lexicondigital.tv. The probably spent more on renting the plane used in the video than they did on the website. There's a lot of sunglasses in the video. Judge for yourself.

Saturday is "CES Unveiled," the official table-top exhibit before-the-show event put on by conference organizers. Last year the food was bad and the exhibitors weren't showing anything exciting, holding back on the goodies until Sunday and Monday.

Sunday morning, bright and early, there's "Cherry Pickers" aka the Marty Winston show. Last year, Marty opened his event with a scantily clad girl who brought him a scotch and a cigar at 9 AM in the morning. There's always a couple of interesting gizmos at Marty's dog-and-pony shows; this year I might actually get a Medis fuel cell to take home from the gig.

Sunday evening is "Digital Experience," one of two tabletop evening events for the press. Eating standing up is not a treat.

Monday is full of meetings, with Ericsson, Microsoft, Motorola, On2, Nuance, and a bunch of others on the list. In the evening, there's ShowStoppers, the second eat-while-standing tabletop press event. The ShowStoppers people have always been friendly and without pretense.

Tuesday is more meetings, between the Sands and the LVCC. There's a Sprint WiMAX vendor panel event that should be interesting and revealing.

I'm still sorting through them all and trying to figure out what I use for "work" and what I use for "social" networking.

I'm not going to hesitate to LinkedIn (Link in?) with anyone I worked with during the Clone Wars, er, the DIGEX days. [Key phrase: "worked with"].

I'm not connecting with any random recruiter who is shotgun mailing me out of the blue. Some people are equating quantity with quality. Forget that.

Unfortunately (ARE YOU SOCIAL NETWORKING PEOPLE LISTENING), I don't have a way to label people to my internal/personal preferences between true friends, former colleagues, and current business relationships. Until the tools get better, I'm putting a group of people "on hold" because I don't think the current crop of business relationships wants to network/link in with my buds from the Clone Wars...but I want to be able to look at my friends from the Clone Wars and business relationships with one tool.

*sigh* I suppose I could create two different personas/profiles...

One of my companions out of the CloneWars, er, the early Internet days died suddenly on December 23, 2005. Two years after his passing, his LinkedIn profile is still active, still alive.

I'm not sure if there's a proper protocol for this sort of thing; be interesting to turn this over to Ms. Manners and see if her head started steaming a little. Do you note that the person has passed away? Who makes the notification or request? Do you leave it to the family or what? Does LinkedIn need a fax of a death certificate?

I don't want to push the matter, but leaving him "hanging" up in the Net as still living -- while potentially true -- at the same time smacks of the inadequacy of keeping information up to date on line.
I don't want to remove him as a "Friend" from my LinkedIn profile because I prefer to think of him as a friend (whatever THAT definition is in the era of Facebook and Jeff's 10,000 friends...). But I would like to see some sort of "note" on LinkedIn that indicates his status.

No easy answers on this one.

Like it or not, CES pulls so many companies selling so many things that there's overlap between the CES big universe and the various VON-ish things I cover. There are at least (so far) two VON-exhibiting companies that will be at CES that have asked for meetings and I expect to spend some quality time with at least one or two carriers while I'm out there.

So, I am (reluctantly, but necessarily) going out to CES to make the rounds of vendors selling IP communications solutions while always on the look out for new and cool things.

Will United show me any love at all because I booked my ticket early for an extra $100? I kinda doubt it. I'm already going to have to get up way too early on a chilly Saturday morning to get on the "cheapest" flight. About the only advantage in going so early is there's some slack time available in case of a weather disruption somewhere in the outbound leg.

That and if I'm lucky I get out there early enough for a late brunch...

First, Verizon Wireless announces that they're going open standards in 2008, allowing people to bring their own (tested and approved, however) devices to the network, and allow third-parties to deliver any apps they want over their network.

Then they wait twenty-four hours to let the "pundits" grumble and whine about how being open doesn't make a whole lotta sense because they have CDMA-blah-blah, CDMA-is-not-GSM-blah-blah, this is just a cynical ploy by The Man, blah-blah...

Today Verizon Wireless announces they're going with LTE, the broadband "open standard" successor to GSM, with trials starting in 2008 -- and every vendor under the sun agreeing to pump out LTE equipment in 2009.

LTE, on a good day, can deliver anywhere from 100 to 144 Mbps to a handset. TO A HANDSET! Currently, Verizon FiOS is "only" delivering 50 Mbps over fiber to the home (well, plus TV and voice, but voice is noise compared to the bandwidth you get from everything else).

(Of course, there's this little issue of writing off all that CDMA/EVDO equipment and running two networks in parallel, but that's not my problem :)

Yes, I will be more than happy to carry around another phone on a "trial," if it is a Verizon Wireless LTE phone... (Hint-hint)

Basically, you drop the robot into where you want to clean, then remote control it back and forth along the length of your gutter. There's a hard plastic spinning "auger" to throw out big junk and smaller brushes to get rid of dirt and other stuff.

About the only drawback I can see is the NiCad battery. Takes 15 hours to charge for about 30 to 45 minutes of run time. Of course, that's 30 to 45 minutes not spent moving and standing on top of ladders, so I think I might be seeing if this turns up at Home Depot or under the tree...

But seriously, CES is one of the few shows where room rates in LostWages go UP during the week. During normal not-you-and-120,000-new-friends time, hotel room rates go down from Sunday-Thursday, go up on Friday and Saturday...

Instead, room rates get jacked across town during the week. This despite the fact that net-net at least 5,000 or so rooms per year get added onto the Vegas Strip alone (even after they blow one up...). In a normal supply-and-demand situation, there should be enough additional new hotel rooms ultimately added onto the strip to see prices go down. But (of course, duh) Vegas isn't normal.

Don't get me wrong. I love the Sahara hotel for what it gets me. It's cheap, it's got the most convenient monorail stop of any of the Strip Hotels (well, with the exception of the Hilton...), the morning buffet is adequate and no-frills.

The Sahara has one other thing going for it: Location, location, location. When (not if) the lines to the monorail backup, I can walk from the LVCC back to my hotel room.

Now, my next tough decision for CES: Do I rent a car, or not?

Sprint is providing "Whispernet" to deliver e-books from Amazon's servers to the 10.3 ounce eInk reader via EVDO. Amazon must be writing some interesting checks to Sprint, since newspaper subscriptions come with a free 2 week trial and there's also free access to Wikipedia through the device.

It's the combination of form factor and connectivity that has me jazzed. I already use Sprint's EVDO service whenever I'm on the road, preferring it over the headaches of Wi-Fi.

Kindle has a keyboard. It would be interesting to see a derivative of Kindle as a web/e-mail reading device...I can only hope either Amazon or Sprint takes the logical step.

And I suspect that Kindle's WiMAX brother is already waiting in the wings... unless they've managed to sneak a WiMAX chip in there without telling anyone. Sound too far fetched? Well, up until this morning, the rumormill had Wi-Fi as the baseline connectivity with some sort of connectivity option through Sprint.

Those guys at Amazon, they know how to keep a secret...

Murdoch's announcement is "old beer" to the NY Times, according to press reports. The Times had tried to wall off their columnists in a subscription format, only to find out that their columnists were getting much less exposure and therefore lower ad clickthrough rates. Or something like that.

Exciting eh?

On the other hand, we're also starting to see a lot of non-traditional printed media migrate to the web. Marvel has opened up "Digital Comics Unlimited" up, so for $9.99 per month (and hey, I know people who used to *ahem* pay more than that for hardcopy back in the day), you get full access to thousands and thousands of classic and new titles... ahhh....

*ahem*

And if that wasn't enough fun for one day, on Monday Amazon will take its crack at the e-book reader market. Will people pay $399 for a single-function device to lug around to read both books and newspapers? Will it have a better showing than the Sony reader? Kindle will have WiFi and perhaps an option for Sprint EvDO service.

Now if I can only get rid of the Compaq laptop...

The New York Post has suggested that cable companies -- which have no wireless play to speak of -- might be Sprint's "white knight" in a nationwide WiMAX build. May happen, but Sprint may decide to just go-slow on its WiMAX deployment until the Wall Street harpies quiet down a bit.

There's also Intel looming in the works. Intel pumped $600 million into Clearwire (good news). Clearwire has lost a lot of money this quarter (Bad news). Regardless of how Clearwire does, Intel has a vested interest in the form of more chip sales to see that Sprint's WiMAX efforts don't hit a brick wall.