If anyone ever asks you “what on earth will people do with all that bandwidth?”, the answer is “go to bed earlier”.

My compass suggests the following developments.

1. The macro picture: growth switches from Internet services to location services to ‘situation’ services. This is stuff like QR codes, and being able to interact with the environment right around you. Why can’t you get the commentary in the museum by entering the exhibit number into your cellphone?

2. We see an ever-stronger shift to 2-sided business models. (Ad-funded is one example, but expect to see that deepen to a wider range of marketing services, and a broader range of business processes.)

3. Getting specific, I think video will grow fast, but only in certain segments, principally nomad workers and in-office.

4. Integration of Web and Telco is probably the Next Big Thing. The phone experience (address book, call logs, presence, voicemail, etc.) comes with you into the web sites you visit, and vice versa. Why can’t someone leave me a ‘Skype’ voicemail, but I collect it on my T-Mobile handset’s voicemail system? Bags of cash in getting this to work together, expect to see more 2-sided markets (check out voicemail example down the bottom).

5. The ‘user crisis’ is probably in-building coverage in the US, and presence and availability data both there and everywhere else. Something needs to let me know if you’re in a call before I press the green button, please. Or driving. Or in an unexpected time zone. We’re going to loosen up a bit when it comes to privacy.

6. All the ingredients are coming together (handsets, networks, UIs, services) for telco telephony to get some stiff competition over the next few years. Likely outcome: co-opetition, a-la Skypephone from 3/Qualcomm/Skype.

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.

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? ;)

“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?

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?

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.