The 2012 Fiber-to-the-Home Conference is underway now in Dallas, and Todd Marriott, UTOPIA Executive Director, is presenting tomorrow morning. His topic is “Next Generation Application Deployment: Cracking the Municipal Fiber Nut.” Todd prepped a white paper on the subject, which is available here.

It’s a good-size paper, but if you have interest in the technical side of high broadband networks and where trends are leading, you’ll definitely enjoy it.

This is from the conclusion:

Throughout history, “technology” (as a generic term) has never been static. Advances in agriculture, tools, ship making, navigation, armaments, engineering, architecture, art, science, medicine, printing, communications and more have spread from thousands of demographic pockets to thousands of new tribes and nations, creating millions of innovations and, yes, applications. Our time is no different. Consider how far we’ve come since the dawn of the “commercial” Internet in 1994 with the introduction of the first Netscape browser: From basic HTML to frames, Flash, CSS, the so-called “Web 2.0” and full HD video. So much of our “on-line” life now resides in apps rather than “on the web,” and this will become more and more commonplace. The way we interact with these connectivity apps is evolving apace, as the traditional desktop and laptop computers are increasingly supplanted by tablets, smart phones, and other connected devices.