Post by Autonomy Institute

We’re still installing horse-hitching posts for a digital world. In the early 1900s, as automobiles began to appear, most cities kept building what they knew: -- More hitching posts. -- Caliche roads for wagons. -- Stables for horses that would soon be obsolete. They paved a tiny fraction of streets for “horseless carriages,” but the real infrastructure never came. Not until Eisenhower and the Interstate Highway System. Today, we’re doing the same thing with 21st-century infrastructure. We deploy fiber here, a 5G small cell there, a traffic lidar, an EV charger, an edge node – all separate, proprietary, uncoordinated. Each with its own power, permitting, pole, and price tag. Turning our cities and communities into blight-ridden third-world countries. That’s the modern equivalent of a hitching post. We can’t keep bolting intelligent gear onto 20th-century poles and cabinets. Besides transportation, five other industries are racing to the edge with some type of device antenna or compute. That digital demand meets at the ITS cabinet on the side of the road. It’s a relic. Expensive to maintain. Insecure. Impossible to scale.