News roundup: Transatlantic Internet, autonomous pizza delivery, distressed cities
IBM’s take on this week in news
This week:
- Get your binge on: Microsoft and Facebook’s giant cable across the Atlantic
- Knock, knock. Who’s there? An autonomous car
- America’s distressed cities
By the numbers:
Microsoft and Facebook just laid 4,100 miles of trans-Atlantic cable
The two companies announced this week they’d finished placing 4,100 miles of cable across the Atlantic’s roiling depths. The Marea cable (Spanish for ‘tide’) can transmit the equivalent of streaming 71 million HD videos at the same time.[1] That’s a lot of binge watching.
Why would Microsoft and Facebook undertake such a huge investment, instead of joining an existing telecom consortium? They want to control the flow of data of all those videos, movies, applications and pictures straining networks. The tech giants need to quickly move massive amounts of data from all that content around the world, so want to ensure their content is prioritized.
The Marea cable is designed to “meet today’s demand and evolve with the progress of tomorrow,” said Microsoft.[2] Cross-border internet traffic is expected to increase eightfold by 2025, with a large part of the growth — the “next billion internet users” — coming from Africa, Middle East and Asia.[3] The need to meet growing demand for digital services and cloud computing is real.
The Angle: It’s becoming increasingly common for giant tech companies to build their own private networks, which means they’re assuming a role typically played by telecom companies. How will that impact the global telecom industry? At the moment, it isn’t robbing telecom companies of existing business, but according to Wired [4], it will take potential business.
Knock, knock. Who’s there? An autonomous car
The pizza delivery guy of the future might not be a human. It might be a car. And customers might prefer it that way.
That’s a theory Ford and Domino’s started testing recently when the companies sent out self-driving Ford Fusion Hybrid sedans to deliver hot Domino’s pies to customers in a section of Ann Arbor, Michigan.[5] Customers who agree to participate in the research trial enter the last four digits of their phone number on their delivery car’s touch screen to unlock a heated compartment big enough to hold as many as five pizzas and four side orders.[6]
The technology is still in development and for now Ford safety engineers are actually driving the vehicles, making the trial a simulation of an autonomous delivery system. But the companies believe the test will yield valuable information about how customers respond to autonomous vehicles.[7]
The Angle: Much of the buzz about autonomous driving technology has focused on how it can transport people. But Amazon is exploring driverless technology[8] and at the same time, moving ever more aggressively into the restaurant delivery business[9]. As the autonomous future approaches, restaurateurs and other food retailers need to start thinking about the implications for their brand experience and how they’ll adapt to shifting customer expectations.
American cities’ lopsided recovery
A new report illuminates just how stark economic inequality is between distressed and prosperous communities in the United States.[10] Tracking data from more than 26,000 ZIP codes, the Economic Innovation Group’s 2017 Distressed Communities Index ranked cities based on seven criteria: housing vacancy rate, adult unemployment, the poverty rate, median income ratio, change in employment and change in business establishments.
The report shines a light on the country’s widening growth gap. More than half of the post-Great Recession growth was in prosperous communities, while already vulnerable communities missed out on the upturn and even had declining business and employment growth. Since 2008, almost 100 percent of new jobs went to workers with some college education. In the Northeast, distress is concentrated in urban areas such as Cleveland or Detroit, while in the South, that same elevated rate of economic depression is concentrated in rural areas. The age of a city’s infrastructure is also a good predictor of economic health.
The Angle: That’s a lot of data to process, but with the right tools government agencies can use it to better understand citizens and communities. By harnessing the power of AI and IoT, agencies can derive insights that help them provide essential services to eventually close the growth gap.
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[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/25/16359966/microsoft-facebook-transatlantic-cable-160-terabits-a-second
[2] https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2017/09/21/celebrating-completion-advanced-subsea-cable-across-atlantic/
[3] https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/25/16359966/microsoft-facebook-transatlantic-cable-160-terabits-a-second
[4] https://www.wired.com/2016/05/facebook-microsoft-laying-giant-cable-across-atlantic/
[5] https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/29/ford-and-dominos-to-deliver-pizza-using-self-driving-cars-in-new-test/
[7] https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/29/16213544/dominos-ford-pizza-self-driving-car
[8] http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-is-exploring-self-driving-technology-2017-4
[9] https://www.bustle.com/p/what-fast-food-brands-will-amazon-deliver-chipotle-shake-shack-are-likely-contenders-with-this-new-partnership-2439919
[10] http://eig.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/2017-Distressed-Communities-Index.pdf
