Michael P Totten

Founder & CEO, AssetsforLife.net

T: 303-974-8676 E: totten.michael@gmail.com

COINing ASSETs 1

Smartphoning our way to emission free cities & countrysides

Seeding Regenerative Communities through AR/VR Actionable Visions

SUMMARY

Energy emissions have become a long-term peril to human health and well-being --
estimated to trigger multi-hundred trillion dollar losses in economic value this century.
There is a universal desire to rid our communities of pollution and emissions in an
economically positive and financially attractive manner. This has been easier said than
done, given that fossil fuels permeate every facet of economic activity. Emissions
continue to steadily grow - estimated to be equivalent to the emissions released by the
destructive 1992 Mount Pinatubo volcanic explosion, recurring every 10 hours; or the
equivalent of more than 28,000 “volcanic eruptions” this century given “business-as-usual.”

Incredibly, taxpayers are unknowingly paying hard-earned money promoting emissions.

The IMF calculates the fossil fuel industry receives several trillion dollars per year
worldwide in tax subsidies. The industry also avoids paying $4 trillion in damaging,
unpriced and unregulated externalities).2

Equally insidious are the countless cryptic (hidden, arcane, obscure), highly favorable
policies, rules, regulations, codes, laws, subventions, and bureaucratic procedures that
bolster and foster continuing dependency on combustion-emitting fuels. These legislated
and mandated support functions slowly accreted over 150 years with the good intentions
of expanding the economy.

Despite half a century of efforts to eliminate these subsidies and cryptic promoters of
combusted emissions and replace them with incentives, policies, regs, codes and
procedures fostering emission-free energy options, progress remains staggeringly small. A
veritable Gordian knot of innumerable transaction costs curtails and restrains superseding
this damaging energy system with emission-free options.

However, all of this could change, and rapidly, by leveraging the combination of two
proven, powerful Internet-based engines of wealth generation to unleash an “Alexandrian
Solution” that undoes the transaction costs and enable communities, campuses,
companies and citizens to flourish. The needed change can be catalyzed through the
power of a COIN infused with ASSETs.

1. COIN is the technical acronym for web-based “COllaboration Innovation Networks” or

“Collective Intelligence Networks” - broadly defined as a voluntary, self-organized
network of self-motivated individuals, geographically dispersed, joined in the pursuit of a
focused and well-defined mission, target or goal. Wikipedia, the world’s largest and
fastest growing encyclopedia, is the premier example to date, one of the top 5 Internet
sites in the world, and there are thousands of open source COINs currently operating.3
2. ASSETs is the acronym for “Apps for Spurring Solar & Efficiency Tech-knowledge” --
purposely meant to prompt multiple financial connotations (e.g., human, social, civic and
intelligence capital). It literally refers to the knowledge applications (many already
accessible) that can be created, shared, used and communicated through a COIN with
the focused mission of accelerating and scaling city and countryside transitions to
emission-free landscapes.

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In plain language, the COIN and ASSETs “reside on” and are accessed through an open
source Internet platform network that is globally available 24/7 by any person with access
to a smartphone or other computer device (over 4 billion now, and nearly all people
worldwide within the decade).

Citizens anywhere on the planet can interact and participate in adding to, improving upon,
sharing and translating, as well as locally using and applying the expanding pool of
knowledge resources and tools to accelerate emissions-free delivered energy services (as
well as other resource services like water, sanitation, food).

Over time, the continuous iterative process of globally sharing local outcomes and
accomplishments (and overcoming barriers and impasses) leads to raising the bar or
benchmark of what is being achieved more rapidly and at lower and lower cost and risk.

No other mechanism currently exists in such a promising integrated mode, which is highly
adaptable to integrating new, better and more important knowledge, evidence and
empirical results at less and less cost.

In addition, this participant-based, voluntary driven process has not been adequately
accomplished by either government or business, or even by both in co-partnership, for a
number of implacable reasons. This is due in part to a strong distrust of both sectors by
large percentages of the populace, who doubt they are receiving accurate and trustworthy
information.

Even more egregiously, is the multi-billion dollar disinformation campaign funded by the
fossil fuel industry to infect the media, poison political debate, and contaminate public
understanding with specious, erroneous and endlessly fallacious and fraudulent
distortions.

Spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to sow dis-information and public

confusion is extremely cheap for an industry with $5+ trillion per year in “welfare
advantages” at risk, a veritable locked-in, path-dependent monopoly on a global energy
market that consumes nearly 10 percent of the $70 trillion annual Gross World Product,
and faces upwards of $100 trillion in potential stranded fossil fuel assets.

How Dies it Work?

The COINing ASSETs platform network initiative is a form of bricolage innovation.4 The
key is the assembly of proven components; there is no need to prove any technical
elements or components, whether platforms or applications.

Many platforms are available, with a substantial pool of expertise and accumulated
experience as to what constitutes a robustly designed, constructed and operated platform
that scales (e.g., http://www.smartearth.co/). Highly successful platform networks offer an
ecosystem of apps for performing essential tasks and catalyzing the growth of interactions
and transactions.

There are three interacting parts comprising the COINing ASSETs process:

Totten.michael@gmail.com 3
1. Geospatial Visual Mapping

Examples:

• visually mapping all solar capable rooftops and ground spots in any city (e.g.,
http://en.mapdwell.com/solarsystem/cambridge )

• visually mapping optimum wind farm sites (e.g., http://www.awsopenwind.org/),

• visually mapping high-performance, energy efficient buildings (e.g.,

http://openstudio.nrel.gov/)

• visually mapping urban shade trees, and lighter colored rooftops and roads, for
reducing urban heat island costs (e.g., http://urbanforestmap.org/ or
http://www.azavea.com/products/opentreemap/ , and http://www.globalcoolcities.org/)5

• mapping complete streets (pedestrian and bicycle-friendly) policy atlas

(http://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/complete-streets/changing-policy/complete-
streets-atlas )6

• visually mapping soils and land area available for growing local foods (e.g., NYC,
https://www.grownyc.org/gardens/mapping, Chicago,
http://news.aces.illinois.edu/news/finding-chicago%E2%80%99s-food-gardens-google-
earth, Cambridge, MA,
https://cambridgegis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapTour/index.html?appid=ea8811a8d8c
b4df49b807915300d5ccb)

source: SmartEarth web platform , http://www.smartearth.co/, by Earthvisionz, Boulder, CO

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 source: H. Akbari et al., The long-term effect of increasing the albedo of urban areas, Environmental
Research Letters, 7, April 2012, http://stacks.iop.org/ERL/7/024004

http://en.mapdwell.com/solarsystem/cambridge

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 source: GIS mapping of Cambridge Community Gardens,
https://cambridgegis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapTour/index.html?appid=ea8811a8d8cb4df49b807915300d5
ccb

2. Road-map creation from Tech-knowledge Leveraging Local Assets

Geospatial visual mapping of the key ways to deliver emission-free energy services are
powerful for communicating opportunities for harnessing any city’s solar and efficiency
resource assets. But for greater value, these mappings can be further integrated with
other key apps and algorithms for performing critical analyses of:

• How much energy is available hourly, daily and seasonally7

• Economic assessment of the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) of solar and efficiency
opportunities compared to fossil fuels, including monetization of externalities and price
volatilities (e.g., fuels, water, emissions, pollution), and use of “value of solar” tariff
methodologies (http://www.cleanpower.com/)

• Financial engineering calculations selected from a number of available financing

options (e.g., 1-2% interest rate Program Related Investments/PRIs, 2.5% rural federal
financing, 3-4% sustainable energy bonds, 5% REITs and commercial PACE, 8%
Feed-in Tariffs/FITs, 10% Pay-on-the-Bill, Power Purchasing Agreements/PPAs,)

• Priority ranking a city’s solar and efficiency opportunities for implementation over time
(NREL estimates ~15% of existing urban land area covered in solar PV systems could
provide 100% of total power and fuel needs)

• Accessing the wealth of knowledge and evidence on best-in-play policies, codes,

regulations aligned to reduce the time, cost and risk of getting these opportunities
implemented
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• In-depth details and multimedia presentations (e.g., YouTube videos, Flickr visuals,
RSA-type animations) of successful case studies, skills development, capacity
building, technical training, and other learning tools.
This extensive, richly-textured, dynamically growing body of knowledge in greater breadth
and depth, capable of being accessed by neophyte, specialist and polymath through
relevant hyper-links, coupled with the geospatial visual mapping, are absolutely necessary,
but certainly not sufficient.

This initiative goes light-years beyond the pervasive passive, static, and often difficult-to-
locate web sites with patches of this diverse information. The object of this initiative is to
continuously generate and seamlessly exchange a wealth of knowledge assets that can be
applied to harnessing local natural assets (solar and efficiency), steadily and cumulatively.
Action mapping facilitates this roadmap process.

3. Action Mapping - Getting it Accomplished

Action Mapping is all about pursuing the goal - emission free localities. The previous two
COIN functions, accumulating geospatial visualization and road-mapping from tech-
knowledge, serve as the effective information for identifying what needs doing, and the
actions people can undertake to complete the series of actions.
The action map adapts and evolves as valuable new knowledge is continuously fed back
into the COIN indicating new and better opportunities. Intrinsic to the collaborative sharing
design process is to encourage and capture the ongoing innovation of “appcessories” by
users. These are directly relevant and useful for developing, refining, maintaining, and
advocating the myriad of implementations that go into a customized, locally relevant action
roadmap for becoming emission free (counter-intuitively drawing upon a global network of
expertise, tools and resources).

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A Platform is a Platform is NOT a Platform

Having described multiple functions of an Internet platform, it is important to note that the
word platform has become, much like sustainability, an over-used word admitting of so
many loose interpretations that it is causing considerable confusion and misunderstanding.

Platform strategist Sangeet Paul Choudary, co-chair of the MIT Platform Strategy Summit,
author of Platform Scale, and co-author of Platform Revolution, has provided exquisite
explications of key structure and function essential to and vital for growing a high-
performance Internet platform network. Among the salient features necessary for enabling
effective scaling, include three key roles of the platform enterprise model:1

1. Architecting incentives that repeatedly pull participants to the platform,

2. Providing a central infrastructure on which participants create and exchange
value,
3. Matching participants with each other and with content/goods/services created
on the platform.

Moreover, platforms have three indispensable layers, or what Choudary emphasizes

calling the Platform Stack:

The emphasis is for clarification: “The reason I propose the Platform Stack is to highlight
that we’re increasingly not talking about different families of platforms. It’s not one vs. the
other. Development platforms are building out marketplaces. Marketplaces are opening up
APIs for platform extension. We are talking about different configurations of one stack.”2
Many platforms missing one or more layers typically fail to persist in scaling, ending up in
the long-tail of niche apps.

Colleges as anchors, Cities as Hubs

In kick-starting the initiative, the intention is to leverage those campuses and cities already
committed to transitioning to emission-free landscapes; they will be engaged as anchors
and hubs, respectively. There are 700+ college and university Presidents who are

1 Choudary, Sangeet Paul (2015) The Platform Stack: For everyone building a platform… and for everyone
else, Pipelines to Platforms, http://platformed.info/platform-stack/.
2 Ibid.

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signatories to the climate commitment of pursuing emission-free campuses (ACUPCC,
Assoc. of College & University Presidents Climate Commitment).8
The object is to tap the campuses’ pools of human, intellectual, civic and social capital.
They have clusters of passionate faculty and students with diverse skills, talents and
interests (web and app programmers, mechanical-electrical-civil-computer engineering
adepts, savvy communication and media curators, civic-political leaders and aspirants,
designers and media content producers, and other resources).
It also involves harnessing & leveraging the physical and financial capital overseen by
administrators and boards in pursuit of the emission-free goal. For example, the 30+%
average ROIs from energy efficiency projects by more than 50 college Green Revolving
Funds, which are superior to the financial returns from school endowments (10-year
averages of 5% annual ROI for public and 8% ROI for private schools), offer direct means
of financing a significant percentage of the goal to become an emission-free campus.
Nearly all of these campuses are anchored in cities committed to reducing emissions.
There are now 1100+ signatory cities to the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate
Declaration, comprising three-fourths of all cities with 30,000 citizens or more. There is a
powerful synergism to leverage between a school’s learning curve on reducing emissions
spilling over in furthering the city’s transition. Students actually create the applied
knowledge conditions and work positions essential for the local transition through their
learning-by-doing processes.
The multiple-purpose Internet platform network helps facilitate multi-modal and multi-
media venues (e.g., peer-to-peer, MOOCs, apps, webinars, audiocasts, AR and VR) for
learning and applying new skills, abilities, knowledge, competencies, training, practice,
capabilities, experience, mastery, expertise, along with re-tooling and superseding
outmoded ones.

Budgeting: 60-month Rapid Protoype startup and expansion

While the backbone of the platform is composed of self-motivated volunteers, there is the
cost of setting up and maintaining the platform, software installation and operation, and
core staff. An initial budget has been assembled, which requires a due-diligence review
for ensuring adequacy and completeness.
What are the steps in getting COINing ASSETs to a self-organizing level of interactivity?
The core activities are designing, building, launching, operating and continuously
promoting ASSETs as a user-built and expanded COIN.
This involves rapid prototyping the concept design, while soliciting immediate and ongoing
user feedback on what works, what doesn’t, and other helpful usability and user
experience suggestions, so that adaptive management practices can be applied to make
COINing ASSETS increasingly effective, efficient, desirable and usable.
1) The rapid prototype involves four primary activities:
(1) Internet interface design and user-friendly functionality for new and repeat
users relying on smartphones or computers, as well as accommodating the
myriad types of users, be they neophytes, autodidacts, specialists, trans-
disciplinarians, or polymaths, with myriad interests or needs ranging over the
near-encyclopedic range of technical, economic, financial, policy, regulatory
topics and knowledge resources;
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 (2) Technically assembling and operating the dynamic Internet engine, “collective
intelligence” algorithms, and integrated content management systems, along
with web analytics to help discern how to improve user experience;
(3) Seeding ASSETs with existing content and apps through continuous
networking with a large pool of diverse experts and groups of expertise
(thousands of whom are colleagues from decades of networking); and
(4) Persuading curious citizens and assemblages of city-based groups to actively
engage in building and using COINing ASSETs, done through daily
distribution of video and audio blogs, combined with touring key cities and
campuses providing live presentations (simultaneously webcast).
2) Phase 1 - Long-term Revenue Stream Options Strategy
An immediate action component during the rapid prototype testing phase will be to
develop a strategy, or portfolio of real options, of available paths for securing a
sustained source of long-term revenues. Those to be examined, along with others
that become known during the process, include:
1. Advertising - for example, showcasing purchasable items of the Top 10 most
energy and water efficient products (integrated with epinions by purchasers)
2. Purchase fulfillment and large-scale procurement facilitation - - for example,
partnering to fulfill large-scale orders of Top 10 most energy and water
efficient products -- the primary focus on large-scale procurement would be
for institutions like colleges, government agencies and companies
3. User Donations (Wikipedia ad-free model, which annually raises $30 million)
4. Crowd-sourcing fund-raising (reportedly grew to more than $5 billion
worldwide in 2013)
5. Foundation support -
6. Philanthropist support -
7. Business enterprise Spin-off model - such as premium information service for

large-scale institutions
Fast-Tracking Emission-free Cities
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Three classes of emission-free assets make up ASSETs:
1) Efficiency gains, including a shift from combustion to electrification technologies
(accruing an intrinsic 35 percent gain), in delivering utility, mobility and energy
required economic services, which typically accrue monetary savings plus among
a dozen ancillary benefits9 -- detailed assessments indicate efficiency gains can
deliver more than half of the projected energy services this century, accruing
multi-trillion dollar savings per decade while cumulatively preventing a trillion tons
of CO2 emissions cost-free this century10;
2) Solar Power, which the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) calculates could
provide total U.S. energy consumption (utility, mobility, industrial), sited on 10 to
20 percent of existing urban land (including 40% on existing solar-capable
rooftops). It is also far more cost-effective in developing nations where 80% of
new construction and city infrastructure are occurring in the next four decades, by
which time 70% of humanity will be living in cities; and,
3) Wind Farms, now the least-cost-and-risk utility supply option, which NREL
calculates could provide total U.S. energy consumption on roughly 3% of the
Great Plains landscape, and most remarkably, could generate twice the revenues
for farmers and ranchers, whose farms and ranches now cover 75% of Great
Plains while generating just 5% of the region’s total revenues! The Great Plains
wind resources are estimated to be 16 times total current U.S. power
consumption.

Why these 3 classes of emission-free assets in particular?

3.
1) Smallest composite “footprint impacts” -- unlike coal, oil, natural gas, large-
scale biomass plantations, or nuclear fission, the delivered services from
efficiency, solar PV and wind power require no shipments of fuel, create no
emissions, air and water pollution, ocean spills, marine acidification, particulates,
mercury, heavy metals, radioactive contaminants, waste ponds or tailings, use
95% less water to generate a kiloWatt-hour (kWh) than the others, and require no
new land (efficiency and solar) or fraction of land (e.g., wind requires 30 times
less land area than biomass for same energy services);
2) Least Risk to price volatility - the small footprint translates into bottom line
insurance against lifecycle cost disruptions that all the other options are
vulnerable to incurring (i.e., from dependency on fuel, water and emissions);
3) Can generate 90% of global energy needs -- half a dozen independent detailed
assessments all indicate the combination of these three options are so abundant
and economically attractive worldwide they can satisfy current and future growth
demand;
4) Poverty elimination strategic component - the end-use-orientation of delivering
highly efficient energy services at the point of use, combined with the scalability of
onsite and distributed solar (and/or wind and biowastes), has three decades of

Totten.michael@gmail.com 11
 accumulating evidence that it offers one of the fastest and least-cost ways of
transitioning impoverished people into sustainable livelihoods reliant on cleantech;
5) Largest job creation -- per unit of investment, these three options generate
several factor to an order of magnitude more employment than other energy
options, while also providing higher local economic multipliers by keeping more
energy dollars circulating in the local and regional economy;
6) Most Secure and Safest -- if they fail, they fail gracefully, not catastrophically
(like Fukushima, Chernobyl, Gulf oil blowout), and are uninteresting targets for
terrorists. ASSETs is anchored in leveraging the US Military’s energy resilience
mandate that military bases and facilities be renovated to operate on microgrids
capable of islanding (i.e., operational even when the macro-grid goes down from
climate disasters, cyber-attacks, human error or technological malfunction).
7) Innovation Potential -- a veritable flood of scientific advancements and technical
breakthroughs are occurring in the inter-disciplinary R&D pipelines of solid-state
electronics, space-age materials, physical chemistry, materials science, nano-
engineering, with impressive commercial gains for increasing the experience and
learning curves and effectiveness of efficiency, solar and wind with declining
lifecycle costs and risks -- to a much greater degree than for fossil and nuclear
options.
8) Preferred energy options by public - surveys consistently show very high
support for these three options over fossil or nuclear energy across the political
and cultural spectrums. This stands in inverse proportion to ill-conceived
practices by congressional elected officials who are pushing fossil and nuclear
subsidies while curtailing and eliminating efficiency, solar and wind incentives.
9) Least Cost lifecycle options -- transparently detailed, rigorous assessments
performed independently by a number of public and private organizations indicate
the integration of efficiency, solar and wind options costs far less than fossil fuels
and nuclear power, when adding up outlays by consumers, ratepayers, taxpayers
and monetized externalities.

Why is COINing ASSETs essential?

4.
1) Scientific evidence is overwhelmingly compelling that humanity’s combustion-
driven global economy is unwittingly accelerating the biosphere towards
catastrophic disruption, while humanity’s responses to this unprecedented level of
risk remain negligible;
2) Mega-lost opportunities are mounting (McKinsey estimates half the pool of
available efficiency gains will be lost in a decade due to misallocations of public
and private finance in high-emission investments);
✴ LOST Opportunity - "By 2030, a staggering 900 billion sq. feet of new and
rebuilt buildings will be constructed in cities worldwide – an area equal to
more than 3 times the total building stock of the United States. We have a
choice. We can plan, design and build sustainably, or accelerate
environmental degradation and increase human suffering." – Edward
Mazria, founder, Architecture 2030
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 3) Threat of irreversible tipping points is steadily rising (e.g., three most likely are
vast release of methane from rapid melting of permafrost, collapse of Amazon
rainforest into scrubland, and ocean acidification-triggered die-off of most coral
reefs and top marine species);
4) Preventing a biological meltdown of marine, freshwater and terrestrial species
and destruction of ecosystem services and desertification of vast areas of
agriculture lands, as well as radical curtailment of economic growth (already more
than $4 trillion per year in losses), and displacement of hundreds of millions of
people (already climate-induced extreme weather events displaced 30 million
people in 2012), requires fossil fuels be phased down to zero, within the next
several decades, along with halting all burning down of tropical forests, according
to marine scientists. This means leaving 80% of the fossil fuel reserves now
registered in international stock exchanges in the ground and un-combusted.
5) Society’s major institutions are dysfunctional, failing to act timely or
responsibly, and often worsening the problem -- governments, religions,
businesses and academia are mostly lethargic, unable or unwilling to awake from
their dogmatic slumbers, bureaucratic inertia, motivated aversions and willful
ignorance, whereas COINs are, by definition, unhindered by institutional
constraints and restraints, proving in practice what many believe is not possible in
theory;
6) Harnessing and leveraging Internet speed, smartphones & tablets, for
accruing increasing returns from human, social and informational capital of
the networked world -- half of humanity is already networking through mobile
handheld devices - smart phones, tablets and notebooks, and virtually all of
humanity will be participating by the end of this decade.
★ Tapping the deep well of human “cognitive surplus” (as NYU Professor Clay
Shirky describes in his TED talks and book by the same name,
http://www.ted.com/speakers/clay_shirky.html) is how COINs get organized
and sustained to carrying out their specific goals. Wikipedia, for example,
took 100 million hours to build and operate, or about the same amount of time
Americans watch TV ads each weekend! People with Internet access
worldwide watch more than 1 trillion hours of TV a year -- that’s the immense
pool of cognitive surplus to draw from.
★ Adopted protocols can enhance and sustain robust quantity and quality
results, even when taking into account such factors as the 80-20 rule (the law
of the vital few, or Pareto principle) and Sturgeon’s Law ("ninety percent of
everything is crap").
7) Growing learning-by-doing opportunities; Creating professions and trade
skills - the next 17 years will produce more college graduates than in all of
previous history (UNESCO), even as most college graduates are unable to find
work (70% of Chinese graduates in 2012 could not find employment) and swell
the ranks of the unemployed, which reached 200 million worldwide in 2012 (ILO).
Prolonged periods of high-level un- and under-employed disaffected and
disenfranchised citizens strongly correlate with rising social conflicts (vice, victims,
vengeance) and vicious cycles of community and national destabilization --
unfortunately profitable conditions for pirates, police, prisons, mercenaries and
military.

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 8) Creating Public Goods is Great for Communities, Markets & Business -- as
Peter Drucker foresaw and described decades ago, along with the two dominant
modes of economic influence and control, government and markets/business, the
civic sphere has emerged as another major mode, accelerated by Internet-
accessible smart phones and computers.
1) Notwithstanding the pernicious and malicious uses of the Internet, one of the
most promising applications gaining recognition is to harness human and civic
capital assets with networked information capital assets to remove and
supersede the multitude of barriers that currently impede or block timely
development of the emission-free energy assets of efficiency, solar and wind.
2) Many policy, regulatory, technical and financial barriers that were once
important for scaling smokestack industries of past centuries are now proving
maladaptive and obsolete.
3) It is too costly and time-consuming for most firms to tackle the myriad of
barriers that surface throughout the process of getting products to market --
outdated local codes and standards, sub-optimal state utility, air quality, land-
use, and other environmental regulations and agency mandates, bloated
federal agency reviews and guidelines, ineffectual stakeholder engagements,
needlessly lengthy delays, cumbersome paperwork in permitting processes,
etc.
4) A COIN, harnessing as it does the voluntary time, talents, and commitment of
self-motivated individuals (rather than paid professionals), can take on and
address these myriad transaction costs, using the network resources to
promote local changes that are in alignment with, rather than barriers to,
efficiency, solar and wind growth.
This is greatly facilitated and accelerated by the intrinsic networking that
enables users to secure solutions to the myriad barriers being faced, as well
as rapidly querying for solutions already proven effective by other locations
somewhere in the world.
5) The bottom like is that a COINs for ASSETs web platform can play a pivotal
role in nurturing and galvanizing receptive markets for businesses promoting
efficiency, solar and wind power -- essentially a cost-free and cost-saving
service to businesses and customers alike.

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White paper
Smart
Cisco public Phones, Really?
5.
Yes, seriously. But obviously including other handheld devices (tablets, notebooks) and
the existing stock of desktop computers, as well as integration of the knowledge gains
from distributed, wireless smart sensor networks.

TopMobile
Global Mobile
devices Networking
are rapidly Trends
growing and surpassing
11
stationary devices, as indicated in
Cisco’s 2019 Global Visual Networking Index:
The sections that follow identify 7 major trends contributing to the growth of mobile data traffic.
The Mobile Network in 2017
1. Evolving toward Smarter Mobile Devices
Global mobile data traffic grew 71 percent in 2017. Global mobile data traffic reached 11.5
2. Definingexabytes
Cell Network Advances—2G,
per month at the end3G,of4G and up
2017, 5G from
Projections
6.7 exabytes per month at the end of 2016.
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(One IoT Adoption—M2M
exabyte is equivalent toand
oneEmerging Wearables
billion gigabytes, and one thousand petabytes.)
4. Analyzing the Expanding
Mobile Rolehas
data traffic andgrown
Coverage of Wi-Fi
17-fold over the past 5 years. Mobile networks carried 686
5. Identifying New Mobile
petabytes Applications
per month and Requirements
in 2012.
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Fourth-generation Improvements
(4G) traffic accounted for 72% of mobile traffic in 2017. Although 4G
connections
7. Reviewing represented only
Tiered Pricing—Unlimited 35and
Data percent ofPlans
Shared mobile connections in 2017, they already
accounted for 72 percent of mobile data traffic, while 3G connections represented 30 percent of
Trend 1: Evolving toward Smarter Mobile Devices
mobile connections and 21 percent of the traffic. In 2017, a 4G connection generated nearly
three times more traffic on average than a 3G connection.
The ever changing mix and growth of wireless devices that are accessing mobile networks worldwide is one of the
Mobile offload exceeded cellular traffic by a significant margin in 2017. Fifty-four percent
primary contributors to global mobile traffic growth. Each year several new devices in different form factors and
of total mobile data traffic was offloaded onto the fixed network through Wi-Fi or femtocell in
increased capabilities and intelligence are introduced in the market. In the last couple of years, we have seen a rise
of phablets2017. In total,
and more 13.4 we
recently exabytes of mobile
have seen dataM2M
many new traffic were offloaded
connections onto
coming intothe
the fixed network
mix. More thaneach
600 million
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(648 million) mobile devices and connections were added in 2017. In 2017, global mobile devices and connections
grew to 8.6 billion,Six
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hundred and in 2016.
fifty Globally,
million mobile
mobile devicesand
devices andconnections
connections will
weregrow to 12.3
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mobile devices and connections in 2017 grew to 8.6 billion, up from 7.9 billion in
2016.will be 8.4 billion handheld or personal mobile-ready devices and 3.9 billion M2M connections
By 2022, there
(e.g., GPSGlobally,
systems in cars, devices
smart asset tracking systems53
represented in percent
shippingofand
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connections in
making patient records and health status more readily available, et al.). Regionally, North America
2017; they accounted for 92 percent of the mobile data traffic. (For the purposes of this and Western
study,Europe
are going to have devices”
“smart the fastestrefers
growthto in mobileconnections
mobile devices and that
connections with 16 percent
have advanced and 12 percent CAGR from
multimedia/computing
2017 to 2022, respectively.
capabilities with a minimum of 3G connectivity.) In 2017, on an average, a smart device
Figure 4. Global Mobile Devices
generated 10 timesandmore
Connections
traffic Growth
than a nonsmart device.
7% CAGR
2017-2022

14

12

10

8
Billions of
Devices 6

0
2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022
Smartphones (42%, 44%) M2M (11%, 31 %)
Phablets (8%, 10%) Nonsmartphones (34%, 10%)
Tablets (2%, 3%) PCs (2%, 1%)
Other Portable Devices (0.1%, 0.0%)

Note: Figures in parentheses refer to 2017, 2022 device share.

Source:Totten.michael@gmail.com
Cisco VNI Mobile, 2019. 15
© 2019 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
 1 The following text represents highlights of the complete COINing ASSETs presentation.
2 Facts and figures cited in this proposal are documented in Michael P Totten, GreenATP: APPortunities to
catalyze local to global positive tipping points through collaborative innovation networks, Wiley series on
energy and climate security, August 2012.
3 The non-profit, ad-free Wikipedia ranks 2nd in monthly Internet traffic in the U.S. (1.2 billion visits), and
consistently in the top 10 worldwide.
4 Brian Arthur has an admirable description of this process in his 2011 book, The Nature of Technology:
What It Is and How It Evolves.
5 See the outstanding YouTube-posted webinar on Exploring Collaborative Tree Inventory with
OpenTreeMap, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayb0-T8ORrA as well as the wonderful videos on local
citizen actions at http://whiteroofproject.org/
6 See the outstanding web app on mapping bicycle path rides with videos at Cyclodeo
(http://www.cyclodeo.com/Cyclodeo.jsp)
7 For several outstanding illustrative examples at the state and regional level see: “Cost-minimized
combinations of wind power, solar power and electrochemical storage, powering the grid up to 99.9% of
the time,” Budishak et al., Journal of Power Sources 225 (2013) 60-74; and, Mark Jacobson et al., The
Solutions Project, 50 States, 50 Plans, 100% Renewable Energy Benefits, http://thesolutionsproject.org/.
8 There is an immense pool of human capital potentially available to tap. By 2020, China expects to have
nearly 200 million community college and university graduates, and roughly 120 million in the USA.
9 More than 200 benefits and values of distributed energy services are described in Amory Lovins et al,
Small is Profitable, 2001, available for download at http://www.rmi.org/Knowledge-Center/Library/U01-
13_SmallIsProfitable.
10 A trillion tons of avoided CO2 emissions would avoid incurring a social cost of carbon of $100 trillion, based
on estimates by Frank Ackerman and Elizabeth Stanton, Climate Risks and Carbon Prices: Revising the
Social Cost of Carbon, 2012, Economics e-journal, http://frankackerman.com/publications/climate-change-
and-energy/.
11 Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2017–2022, February, 2019,
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/service-provider/visual-networking-index-
vni/index.html?dtid=osscdc000283#~mobile-forecast.

Totten.michael@gmail.com 16