The BITS are FREE once you have paid for the PIECES

I mentioned last week that I had been to see Malcolm Matson speak. He is a founder of an organisation called the OPLAN Foundation and OPLAN stands for “The Open Public Local Access Network” which he describes as a 4th utility for the information age. This disruptive concept blows the incumbent Telcos out of the water & they don’t like it up ‘em, Mr. Mannering…

I have been in dialogue with him sporadically since last summer and he recently gave me the password to get into www.oplan.org, which I won’t divulge although Malcolm will presumably let you have it if you email him (I assume they are limited in bandwidth). In this site there a fascinating document, which is creative commons public domain. I can’t justify putting it up in my own webspace at the moment as it is over a Meg of pdf but it makes most of the points of his roadshow elegantly and with a lot of humour.

One eye opener is the concept that if the canal owners had been put in charge of the railways they would have introduced the tracks alongside the towpaths in order to pull the narrowboats along. In many ways this is currently being repeated with the idea of 21st century Networks which are replicating the PSTN rather than being genuinely disruptive.

There is a very similar document to his current one on a Danish site called Citynet, which has a lot of useful information about Municipal networks (a lot in Dutch, however). You can find the OPLAN document at the bottom of this page.

Footnote on Tory Boys- it has been pointed out to me that I am confusing my camp comedians. “Shut that door!” was of course Larry Grayson. John Inman’s catchprase was “I’m freeeeeee…..” and he is also remembered for having very little interest in Mrs. Slocombe’s pussy.