Telepocalypse

Speaking of which, why...?

…don’t we automatically keep, transcribe and index our half of all the calls we make? After all, it’s our speech. No need to record what the other person said. Just don’t use a speakerphone!

Why do we insist on ‘all or nothing’?

Where’s the Gmail for phone calls? Something that lets me search my life history of chatter.

PS - Skype chat search is rubbish.

More media material

You can here me talk at a panel at eComm here answering What Will Drive Wireless Innovation?.

For those without an hour to spare, I’m also on the BBC News site here today.

UPDATE: My eComm keynote on re-thinking the phone company is here. But you’ve got work to do, no time to waste watching videos on the web, no? ;)

Cultural chasms

In case anyone doubts the UK and US are two nations divided by a common language, here’s what my mum phoned me to ask today when booking online a hotel in Las Vegas.

“Marts, between the boxes for first name and last name there’s a little box with ‘M’ and ‘I’ above. What does that mean?”

“Middle initial, mum.”

“And then at the end, there’s a box with ‘Sr’ and ‘Jr’. As we’re over 62, shouldn’t we put ‘Senior’ in case there’s a discount?”

Pause.

“No, mum.”

Oh, and the telco angle? Shouldn’t there be an API for the web site to collect this stuff from their ISP, with due permission etc.?

Anyhow, I wonder how many US websites find thousands of people come from the ‘state or region’ of Londonshire?

Network schmootrality

When a wee website gets pointed to by a big website, like Digg, it often falls over. That’s because it’s not in the host’s interest to pay a huge hosting bill just because everyone and his Internet dog would like a peek.

Now, who would disagree that a great improvement in the system would be for someone to be able to host their web site on, say, Amazon Web Services EC2/S3 platform, and set a limit on how much they were willing to pay out of their own pocket to host the site per month. Then, once they’ve hit that limit, the requesting ISP has to pay instead.

So now I can choose to subscribe to a ‘premium-enabled’ ISP, and get to see all that content that’s been Slashdotted, and get a monthly top-up bill for the pleasure.

Can someone who wants a network neutrality law please explain to me how they’re going to word it to avoid preventing such improvements to the Internet. Anyone?

Anything you say...

Here’s a regulation/law I want to see enacted.

Any time an IVR announces that your call may be recorded, without giving you any choice in the matter, you are also automatically entitled to record the call without asking.

And not only that, you’re allowed to publish it, too.

Sauce for the goose…

Goo Goo Goggles

Scott Cleland claims the open access rules on 700MHz spectrum triggered by Google’s bid fleeced the US taxpayer by $7bn.

I don’t buy it, even as a signed-up fully-paid network neutrality opponent.

Firstly, the numbers ignore economics. If the C block was encumbered, that would raise the prices of the A and B blocks. So you need to take a much smaller differential as to the cost of the encumbrance.

Look at it this way. Say you’re hungry, as is your friend, and there’s three fruit in the market. A tasty apple, a yummy banana, and a mouldy pear. You and your friend don’t want to eat fungus, so you each bid $1 for an apple and banana respectively in the fruit market.

Now imagine the pear was perfect. Supply goes up, demand remains constant, prices come down. You pay $0.80 for each fruit, for a total of $2.40. You won’t pay $3, because fruit isn’t so scarce any more, so you don’t need to bid so high. So the “loss” from the mould was $0.40, not $1.

The next problem is that it confuses the American taxpayer with the American public. That money not paid by telcos to the treasury can now be invested in networks, and lower prices. Some will go to shareholders, but not all.

OK, so what if there’s some residual, lower number, like $2bn? Well, it can still be a good deal.

We don’t really know what the best way of allocating spectrum is. The ISM bands that WiFi sits in have given us an unexpected bounty of goods. A lot of clever people have done all kinds of analysis on the matter, but I’m sure none would say that it’s a closed issue. That such uncertainty exists means there’s value in hedging it. The taxpayer has bought some option value in having a diversity of spectrum rules. Reasonable people could differ over the value of that option. But it’s not zero. Maybe it’s even more than $2bn. And possibly a lot more than $7bn.

We shall see.

Twatted

My twitter ID is martingeddes.

I’m still at the “why would I bother?” stage. Yet another noisy digital child needing care and feeding.

Sure, I can see the benefit in decoupling sending and receiving, cf being CC/BCC’d to death on email. It’s much lighter than blogging, more conversational.

But it’s all far too manual. I’m still refusing to ever, ever, ever have to describe my social network by hand.

AltaVista wanted you to put keywords into your web page to work out what it meant. Google just took what people were already doing and joined the dots.

I don’t want my social graph to be portable. I want it to be invisible.

Until someone can take my email, IM, phone, blog, comment data — stuff I already do — and work out who I care about right now, I’d feel a twat to be a twit.

UPDATE: The security model is broken too. Why on earth would I tell them my Gmail ID and login — the same credentials that let you buy stuff in my name using my Google Checkout? Thanks, but no thanks.

Sprion and Verizint

Since Sprint has lost an uncountably infinite number of dollars, I wonder if this could be a solution.

Sprint is crap at customer care, average at marketing, but good at wholesale (MVNOs, affiliate built-out, Xohm). Verizon is good at customer care, OK at marketing and doesn’t really do much in the way of wholesale.

So why not trade? Sprint offloads the retail customers to Verizon, and in return combines both CDMA networks and becomes a specialist wholesale carrier. Might as well merge with Level3 or GX while you’re at it.

Everyone comes away happy, particularly the investment bankers.

Pooper scooper

I’m just having some fun taking a Waitrose Colombian coffee flavoured milk drink break, reading David Reed’s submission to the recent FCC hearing. It’s all about Comcast’s approach to squishing BitTorrent traffic on its broadband network. (Sorry, no link, I’ve only got a copy via email.)

I’m not in favour of network neutrality regulations, and feel that Comcast did a Bad Thing™ that should be punishable under existing consumer protection, contract and tort law.

In his submission, David puts forward several ideas. The first says:

All it takes to be part of the Internet as an Autonomous System is to agree to participate according to the very simple ground rules of the Internet.

Bzzt. There is no social or legal contract to adhere to the IETF’s recommendations. To me this feels like communitarian nonsense (in the nicest possible way, separating the argument from the arguer). I think this confuses what should be (maximising total utility through co-operation) with what is (a prisoner’s dilemma-style game where cheating can be rewarded). This is entirely a private matter between Comcast and those other networks it interconnects with.

Somehow, the dignified manner in which IETF standards are arrived at is supposed to re-inforce this point of view.

These congestion control techniques can only work well if they are standardized across the entire Internet. New techniques are introduced carefully, typically orchestrated in the Internet Engineering Task Force, which is a collection of engineers and researchers who resolve these issues Internet-wide, independent of the vendors and operators, but taking their needs seriously.

No, I’m more than happy for ISPs to experiment with techniques that the IETF thoroughly disapproves of. Central planning, even that of benevolent technocrats, is fraught with danger.

A more convincing argument comes later:

Comcast used these non-standard mechanisms in an unexpected way, potentially disrupting systems and applications that are designed assuming the expected behavior of the Internet.

It’s not what you’d write in a public submission, but Comcast’s actions is a bit like a dog poo in the public park. Not only does it offend those who tread in it, but now everyone else has to expend time and energy looking for poo and telling their kids to keep away from the grass near the entrance. There’s an externality which is imposing costs on application and device designers everywhere. I’m happy for us to have regulations that manage pollution, but that carefully balance the true costs of the pollution against the immediate benefits of production. If in doubt, regulate less. Indeed, in this case, probably not at all, since if a legit P2P application was being messed up, Comcast customers would either churn or be willing to pay less.

And the real reason to be furious at Comcast comes at the end:

When Comcast or any Internet Access Provider claims to offer Internet Access, they implicitly agree to participate according to the standard practices of the Internet as a whole. Otherwise, all they may claim to offer their customers is “selective access to part of the Internet’s capabilities”.

Now, we might disagree what those “standard practices” are, but to me it’s limited to:

• social measures to manage traffic (pick up the phone and tell the customer they’re over their fair use limits), or
• applying traffic shaping to users with clearly defined and transparent policies and a system of individual notification of any special throttling,
• dropping packets until the pain to that user modifies their behavior.

Event if RST injection (i.e. automated lying) is superficially the most efficient way of damping the traffic, users will respond to less technically efficient (but more socially acceptable) incentives. Yes, DOCSIS cable networks have a whacky uplink architecture that makes them very sensitive to lots of TCP/IP sessions being started at once, such as BitTorrent attempts. Just start chucking away 99% of their packets, irrespective of protocol, to reflect the social cost to the other users of uplink congestion. They’ll soon get the message and change when their Web browsing slows to a crawl. At the very least send them an email saying you’re throttling them, and why.

Picking on specific protocols, without telling the user, and then denying it, just isn’t part of the game. Particularly protocols that compete with your own video distribution network. Time for the referee to call a foul, and Comcast to scrape the sh*t off everyone’s shoes.

UPDATE: Before anyone gets too excited that Martin’s gone all neutralist, the offence is one that’s of the poop in the park magnitude, not that of premeditated murder that some more hysterical accounts would have you believe. Antisocial, irresponsible, stupid — but not criminal.

Are your ecomming?

The new schedule for eComm is up and is frankly bloody amazing. It’s an utter “who’s who” in the emerging personal communications space. You’d be nuts not to go. I’m stocking up on a year’s blog idea fodder…

You could even combine it with VON the next week, so you can go shopping for IP telco equipment to execute the ideas from eComm.

I’m probably going to get out to San Francisco on Monday 10th March, so bid now for Tuesday meetings!

PS - I can still give you an eComm discount code, although you’ve missed the double early bird discount.

New news, no news, and tons of old news

Here’s a little observation. No, let’s make it a bonus double.

Wife calls, she’s away with the kids at the in-laws. She was unaware of the Heathrow plane crash, because she had only looked at the BBC News website on Thursday morning, and again this morning. So she’d missed the window during which it was a headline.

Second one. I get the Edinburgh Evening News by RSS into my feed reader. But I hardly ever read it, because there’s about 70 articles a day, and many are ‘national’ news that’s I’ve already read somewhere else, and the volume is way too high.

So, what’s the common thread? There’s the old cliche of putting the “me” back into “media”. This seems to have two distinct parts:

• Personalising the content to me.
• Personalising the presentation to me.

With the former, which is what most personalisation efforts concentrate on, you’re trying to pick the stories that fit the individual’s interest. This is hard, because it requires someone to crawl inside the head of the reader.

With the latter, all I want is “tell me the new news since the last time I checked”. But none of the news services do that. Each time I go back to the BBC News home page, I have to manually scan to see what “new news” there is. Don’t we have computers to take all this donkey work out for us? And how come none of the RSS readers seem to have the ability to summarise a thousand articles into the ten that really matter (with a “more…” button), based on actual reader activity?

Looks like an opportunity for someone…

EComm podcast

If you’ve ever wondered what I sound like, or want to hear me pontificate at length on the future of telecoms, you can go listen to me being interviewed by Lee Dryburgh over here, along with a transcript of the highlights.

It’s a prelude to my keynote at the upcoming EComm conference in San Francisco, 12-14 March 2008, for which Lee is the organiser. There’s an absolutely extraordinary who’s who of speakers lined up, so the only thing missing now is you.

Martin's career (a short history of the future)

Age 5: Discover reading. Lots of interesting books to read.
Age 10: Discover computers. Lots of interesting programming problems to solve.
Age 15: Discover all the interesting problems involving computers also involve real-world data, which is hard to get pre-Internet.
Age 20: Discover all the really interesting problems involving computers also involve humans, which isn’t what a theoretical maths & computer science degree is for.
Age 25: Discover all the very interesting problems involving computers also involve networks of other computers, and that this means the ability to create new business models.
Age 30: Discover all the extremely interesting problems involving computers also involve money, and for that to happen you need a fabric of trust for transactions to occur.
Age 35: Discover all the exceptionally interesting problems involving computers also involve human spirit, and that is something a commercial organisation can enable, but never own.

Think of it this way:

• Standing alone, away from city lights, under a starry sky, is an inspiring experience.
• Standing together, away from city lights, under a starry sky, is an awe inspiring experience.
• Knowing this, a telco will try to sell you a picture of the night sky, preferably with an 18 month contract for “sky support”.

I find the current generation of socnets, that suck you in and juice you for “user-generated content” and contextual advert fodder, somewhat scary. But we’ll grow up and mature, and these online spaces are becoming places that are about more than commerce. Places where human spirit blossoms — works of art are created, conflicts are waged, love is found and lost. Simply a place where we can play and explore and interact, on epic scales which the real-world environment cannot support.

The telco thing? Well, I think now more than ever it’s important for operators to open up their platform, because they have a great suite of under-used assets that outsiders can’t access and exploit. You’ll never be able to sell beauty, passion, or love. But you can do a lot more to act as an enabler and distributor for those who can and do.

Happy New Year, I’m off on hols for a week in rural mid-Wales.

EComm 2008 Calling

As I get older and more attached to my comforts, I’ve started to strongly dislike intercontinental business travel. So it’s going to be something special that makes me want to haul my ass over to San Francisco in sardine class without any client paying.

I’m going to be speaking at eComm 2008, which takes place on 12-14 March. Buddy Lee Dryburgh is behind it — and there’s a great backstory.

Miffed at the shelving of O’Reilly’s ETel, he pawned his kids’ XBoxes and soft toys to launch eComm in its place, and thus enable that unique community to continue to have a meeting space. You can go read the official blurb with the carefully crafted sales pitch, but what makes it special to me is:

• The people. There are very few places that the bellheads and netheads get to meet each other, apart from to trade insults. This is a constructive engagement and learning opportunity.
• The focus. Personal communications is where the money has always been. Telcos have been in the social networking business for over a hundred years, even if they don’t seem to know it. Web 2.0, welcome to the party. Content, please stand at the back of the queue and wait until called.
• The talks. Lots of cutting-edge ideas, in rapid fire, without long droning dull sponsor talks.
• The opportunity. Both the telecoms and IT/Web industries are in collision, but are also coming to slowly recognise the value of what the other side does. Without apps your network distribution is worthless; but without distribution, your app has nowhere to go. Every time one side tries to do the other, the outcome is a lot of pain. Or, to put it another way, the phone company still has your money, and the Web people have the ideas, so let’s trade.

If you’d like to join me there, then I’ve got triple good news. The cost of the conference is already low. (You’ve no idea how expensive it is to lay on one of these events until you do it!) Early bird registration is still in effect, for another $300 off. And if you email me, I’ll tell you how to do the special handshake and get another 15% off. You’ve got two weeks to register for the discount…

Boss won’t pay? Burn some frequent flyer miles, and invest in your own career future for once. You need to be there.

Quack, quack, BANG!

Andy ponders the consequences of Skype failng the 911/999 duck test.

My take: emergency calling is a property of the LINE and not the SERVICE. It’s the ISP who knows where you are. Pick up your Vonage or Skype phone, move next door to show your neighbours how cool it is, and you shouldn’t have to reregister your address if your host gets a dicky ticker.

In other words, why not make 10.9.1.1 always route to a SIP server which offers IP emergency calling?