For today’s little sermon, I though I’d remind everyone of the power of the end-to-end concept. Four times, now, we’ve seen a leap in the possibilities that the world’s most pervasive public network can offer, each time the innovation occuring at the end points, not in the middle. And which network is this hotbed of end-to-end innovation? The good old circuit-switched telephone network, of course!
This year, the answering machine celebrates its half-century since inception by Kazuo Hashimoto. All that was needed was a box that took the standard wires in a subscriber’s premises. No access to the central switching or routing capabilities of the network. And (technologically) no permission required from the carrier.
Of course, in the USA there were the later monumental battles on the consumer’s right to attach such “unapproved” devices. This culminated in the Carterphone decision of 1968, establishing the user’s right to add any equipment that passed a non-discriminatory safety test. These battles raged elsewhere too, which takes us to our next example of end-to-end innovation.
I remember in the 1980s seeing endless adverts in the UK computer press for discount modems. These always bore underneath a red triangle sticker saying that they were prohibited for use on the public network. I guess the restrictive testing requirements at the time of the British Approvals Board of Telecommunications were keeping products from reaching the market at an affordable price — drop me a line if you’re an old timer who knows the full story. Anyway, the modem again squeezed extra functionality out of the network. In principle, the telcos could have come up with a low-bandwidth packet data solution at a reasonable price. ISDN (“It Still Does Nothing”) might have been that technology, except for endless deployment and marketing snafus. So the public by-passed all that telco mess in most of the world, and we waited another two decades for always-on packet data connectivity in the home. A few islands like Germany were exceptions.
The fax machine has deep roots in Victorian technology. Interestingly, part of its development did indeed occur with the help of AT&T. But the explosion in popularity didn’t occur until electronics and printers improved sufficiently for a smaller version, free of telco interference, was available to the general public. As usual, there was a lot of shennanigans by the telcos to try to force people to “upgrade” their lines to fax quality, because of the bridges, splices and filters that had been patched on the network in the meantime.
Voicemail, our final example, came about fairly recently. Gordon Mathews came up with the idea in the late 1970s. The beauty of the system? No absolute need to interface to the carrier’s SS7 signalling network to be able to route incoming calls to voicemail. Of course, smarter systems came along later, and cellular voicemail today is 100% network-based. But the telcos were forced to open up to the market, because the customer were going there regardsless.
So, it’s not just those nice, sexy modern communications services — e-mail, IM, the Web, wikis, etc. — that did not come out of the carriers. The old innovations came from outside the system too.
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KPN (Netherlands), the former state telco, is a perfect example of Triassic Telecom. In all fairness, they've become more customer friendly since they became a publicly traded company. However, this was not the case when I came to Amsterdam at the end of 1994 (that's 1994, not 1894). I visited the local PTT (that's what KPN was called back then) and asked for call waiting to be added to my Dutch husband's phone service (he had never heard of it so he told ME to go down to the PTT office and ask). "What's that?", the PTT salesperson asked. I was shocked but then recovered and said, "You know, where if someone is calling you while you are on the other line, you hear a beep and you can switch calls." Blank expression from PTT worker. I asked one more time and then he got really angry and told me I was being silly because THERE WAS NO SUCH THING. Now, I had call waiting in the States for years and I told him that I was not making this up. He refused to believe me. Two years ago, I finally got call waiting.
Posted by: at January 27, 2004 02:41 PM