There's a lot of blogbuzz at the moment about the recently passed bill to introduce compulsory ID cards in the UK. These are a terrible idea for many reasons you can read here. I apologise in advance for any future interruptions to service whilst I serve my jail term for refusing to have one.
I've got a better idea. In a sense it is like an automated notary public system. And, not surprisingly, it involves pushing intelligence (and data) to the edge of the network, whilst retaining the centralised trust that is essential for the system to have any use.
In Martin's ID system, there would still be ID cards, but no central database as such. You would take documents that establish your identity to an official government outlet. The key details of these would be recorded (e.g. name, place and time of birth from a birth certificate). The data would be stored on your smartcard. You might choose to submit to biometric scanning, and this data would be stored on your smartcard too. You might also choose to bring along some friends/witnesses (with their ID docs and cards) who can attest to you being who you say you are. The attesters' IDs get put onto the card.
Each entry on your card would be digitally signed by the government.
The identity of the goverment office and employee who authorised the record would also be encoded on the card. Got a string of fraud from one corrupt official? Then the third party reputation systems will put 1+1+1 together for you.
Anyone wanting your ID just asks you to to show them your card. (To protect you after a theft of your card the details might be released only in conjunction with a PIN. This would be the user's choice and risk). It would be up to the identity requestor as to what data they choose to trust and why.
There would be no central database providing a single point of tyranny. You might choose to centrally store operational statistics. You could even store hashes of the data from the smartcards as a secondary non-repudiation measure. Verifiers of the data can then do an online query and ask 'did you really see a birth certificate for HASH(fName => "J", sName => "Christ", dOB => "25/12/0000")?'
The system is much more secure than the current ID proposal. You only need to protect the government's root private key used for signing valid ID records. Much easier than protecting a zillion-record operational data store.
The users of the system get to choose how much data goes on the card. No compulsion. Government agencies would not be permitted to discriminate against people based on the card data they held; if necessary they can always turn up with original documents and friends to attest to who they are.
Funnily enough we're all staggering around (and given the time of year I choose my words carefully) with smart card-filled microprocessor-fueled devices today. They're called mobile phones. Perhaps the cellular operators would like to get into the ID business? Much better than trying to resolve the Paradox of the Best Network.
Of course, there is zero chance of this scheme ever happening. After all, why create a system that merely empowers the users at the expense of the core?
Happy holidays -- see you next year.
Problem: Incumbent operator dragging heels on local loop unbundling by making process manual, error-prone, slow and unscaleable.
Solution: Make them use their own unbundling process for every new customer they themselves acquire. Retail division should not be able to directly provision people to switches. Termination of an account should trigger a physical disconnect of the line from the switch, so no smooth incumbent transitions by default. Now that's equivalence.
...and three piles of Christmas cards this year:
- "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year" to friends and family.
- "Happy Christmas and a Prosperous New Year" to acquaintances in industries that make the edge of the network work.
- "Get well soon" to everyone else at the telcos.
I'm a bit concerned about the last one. I'm afraid they might take it in a literal, rather than ironic, sense.
There's a ton of stuff I want to write about, but pay-the-bills work calls at the moment, followed by 2 weeks here. Normal service will be resumed in mid-January.
If BT is going to become a consumer electronics company, shouldn't their shareholders be told?
If this ever gets beyond a warmfuzzy PR release, then I'm watching how they manage to leverage pipe ownership or the PSTN to give themselves an unfair competetive advantage. Remember, telecom is to the information age as mud wrestling is to competitive sport.
I've upgraded the site to the latest version of Movable Type, and to also use a MySQL back end. Please let me know if you find anything that is broken (apart from the sorry drivel that gets posted here).
UPDATE: While I'm on the admin stuff, I'm expecting to be in the Los Angeles area the end of Jan/start of Feb. If anyone wants to meet up, drop me a line.
You can't understand the proposed Sprint-Nextel merger without the Paradox of the Best Network as your context.
Nextel have been doing successful trials of Flarion's FLASH-OFDM technology. As I've said before this changes the rules of wireless. But Nextel then have to work out how to monetise the thing: either you run the network as a user utopia and struggle to make a profit, or as a totalitarian thugocracy where you monitor every move and punish the slightest deviance. Neither is attractive.
So Nextel's stock is probably about as far as it's going to go. A merger reduces the amount of market competition and hence gives everyone a good stock uplift instead. Oh, and all the execs get to cash out. (Remember stock prices fundamenally reflect profit, not revenue: a small increase in prices results in a much larger increase in profit and stock price. And if you think these corporations are run for the primary benefit of stockholders, you need to read this.)
Sprint has a local wireline footprint of only 5% of the US market. But that's the bit of the company that pays the bills. It's a free-rider on the lobbying excellence of the Baby Bells, and is amazingly profitable. The rest of Sprint would probably kick out unglamorous unionised and regulated local part if it wasn't for the fact that investment decisions would then all need external capital and justification.
Between Nextel and Sprint they control 90% of the 2.6GHz MMDS spectrum in the US. They've dithered for years over what to do with this, and written down the asset by the odd billion or two over the same period. The synergy of this deal is not that they will deploy in this area because of their combined footprint, but that they won't. My guess is that the MMDS spectrum will be kept in the cupboard behind the stationery supplies in HQ for the forseeable future.
The combined entity will end up on Qualcomm's EV-DO path because it's laggy and the reverse link sucks. Forget one-off examples of doing VoIP on 1xRTT or EV-DO. If all your friends, colleagues and neighbours do it too you'll only get to talk at 3am standing right under the cell tower. The lack of scaleability for VoIP self-limits the stupid network threat.
The danger is anyone actually deploying a nationwide wireless stupid network. Then everyone else would have to follow, and into the abyss we all go.
You should take all my 20:20 hindsight with a cellar of salt, as I sold out at 19, and the stock's now almost 25 (although the dollar's down 10% too, which is in my favour).
From a purely tactical viewpoint it will be interesting to see how Verizon and Vodafone act. An attempt by Verizon to buy Sprint or Nextel won't get past the regulatory hudles, but then maybe that's the point -- just bid up the deal cost and at worst have to pay a few hundred million to keep the lawyers busy for a year or two with no real danger of having to follow through. And if a raider was going to buy and dismember Sprint they should have done it a year or more ago while the stock was down.
An astute reader points me in the direction of The Future ... Faster!. Wow, what a beautiful sight -- a gorgeous US grassroots campaign for better connectivity. Just drool:
The Future…Faster supports up-to-date government policies that promote market-based competition, because when companies compete, you win.
That's right! You're a winner! I'm a winner! Whoopee!
This looks like a great place to participate, I mean I can sign their petition, tell my story, tell my friends, and register to keep up to date. I wonder what sort of position they take on the key issues?
Internet Tax Victory Close at Hand!
Thanks to those of you who took action to support a tax-free Internet, a bill that would extend the ban on Internet access taxation for four additional years is now on the President's desk for final approval! [...]
This is a tremendous victory for Americans across the country, and we thank Future…Faster members for your substantial efforts toward achieving tax-free Internet access. Together, we will continue to realize free-market reforms that will benefit consumers and reinvigorate our economy!
Oh, wow -- these are my type of guys. And look at all those testimonials from grandmothers, widows, sick people, and public service workers.
I wonder what else they're into. Hmm. Must deregulate local telecom ... local telecom is not a monopoly ... only deregulation lowered long distance prices, let's do the same for local telecom, local telcos are hard done by with the current regulations. Seems a bit preoccupied with the local loop, don't they?
Oooh! Look! Let's click on About us to find out more...
The Future…Faster effort is building a broad coalition of communications and high-tech industry leaders, civic groups and other associations, as well as individual Americans who share our belief that in today's choice-filled communications world, consumers, the economy and American innovation are best served by market-driven competition.
Phew -- that's a relief to know. And what's more American than innovation and competition? Hurrah! And someone's generously decided to pay all their web hosting fees...
The Future…Faster effort is organized by the U.S. Telecom Association
Hmmm -- aren't they the mouthpiece of the LECs? Let's do a quick whois query on the domain...
Registrant:
DEMOCRACY DATA & COMMUNICATIONS, LLC
Never heard of them -- over to Google?
DDC. Your voice. Amplified.
A strong voice in the policymaking process is essential in today's competitive political environment. DDC can help you achieve your legislative and regulatory goals through result-focused strategy, industry-leading technology, and full-service communications and campaign-execution capabilitied.
Well, I'll be durned. They're a bunch of PR flunkeys and lobbyists.
And they said the Internet wasn't safe for our kids. Too damn right, with the telcos in town.
PS -- I get a lot of email from PR flacks. They think it's cool to randomly add me to their mailing list. Even if we've never had an exchange or me having shown an interest in the product being pushed. In case you lot are reading, I run my own email server. Your address just gets added to the permant reject list. Don't bother. You don't even make it to the spam filter.
PPS -- I hate telephones. At the in-laws, just put baby to sleep. Wife is, um, in the bathroom doing whatever mysterious thing women do in there for ages. Someone rings, I have to answer to stop the noise. They speak Lithuanian, I don't. There's no Accept-Language capability in the handset or the good 'ol phone network. Baby wakes up and cries, wife has to rush out, answer phone, attend to now wailing child. Why on earth do we still install these damnable machines in our homes?
Take a quick look at this article by economist Arnold Kling. He suggests US healthcare regulation be altered so that the regulatory regime of service provision remains delegated to states. However, consumers can select a care plan from a provider in any state and be subject to the regulations of that state. This provides competition among regulatory regimes.
Now substitute "telecom" for "healthcare".
For Discussion. Does this work for connectivity as well as application services (e.g. VoIP)?
Via Stuart Henshall comes news of StumbleUpon. This is a bookmark-cum-clippings social network service. So unlike, say, blogdex or del.icio.us, it's as much about who the bookmarks come from as what they are.
My farewell patent frenzy at Sprint led to a filing along these lines. I won't disclose the details -- you'll have to wait for it to get published via the usual channels. But I'll give you some clues. There's a hidden power in the dark heart of the smart network traditional telco. A central aggregation point of all traffic -- voice, email, IM, or SMS -- gives one entity a complete view of who talks to whom, for how long, who ends the conversation, who returns whose calls, and so on. In other words, there's a latent social network in there.
If you call me and we speak for an hour, that tells you something about or relationship. If a telemarketer makes thousands of calls and they typically last 10 seconds, and are terminated by the callee, that tells you something too.
Assume opt-in from users to overcome privacy concerns. What the telco is sitting on is potentially the biggest social networking goldmine east of the Yukon. As I've said before, the core asset of a telco is the data it acquires, not the network. Networks are loss leaders to create foot traffic and encourage people to engage in transactions.
Another consequence of StumbleUpon and its ilk is that social networking works best when it is achieved via recovery of the social pattern from an unrelated adjacent system. If I decide to take you off my buddy list, you might get offended. If I don't call you and the relationship fades away, nobody cares. These proxy social network systems are also very hard to game. Bill Gates isn't going to spend an hour on the phone to me no matter how many will-you-be-my-pal invites I send to his secretary.
For pure stupid network services, this type of latent social network analysis is tougher. The more decentralised the application's control mechanisms (e.g. users have a choice of browsers, or IM clients) the bigger the coordination problem in obtaining and aggregating the data in a central point.
Now, any ideas of how a low-profit VoIP service provider like Skype might turn a few cents from their virtual network...? I do!
I promise to stop soon, really. But one last BT article. Please?
The proposed OFCOM regulatory regime for BT of "equivalence" won't work. The concept is that the retail arm of BT will be treated the same as any other outlet by the wholesale arm that runs the network.
Chinese walls work in the financial industry -- for example between equity research and brokerage -- because what you're trying to prevent is time-sensitive operational data leaking across. You're trying to keep a secret. The CEO probably doesn't know or care about most of the secrets, and doesn't have to file half in her left brain and half in her right brain.
Telecom is about sinking capital and then trying to wring out the value of the bits that pass over the network. There aren't many operational secrets. So when BT Retail investment project A lands on the CEO's desk, and BT Wholesale project B gets dumped on top for approval, they can't be considered separately. The retail strategy will always be considered in the light of the wholesale one and vice versa. The retail arm will always have a head start on outsiders.
This approach from OFCOM will only serve to highlight BT's world-class abilities at regulatory capture. Real structural separation is needed. This may even go further than a two-way split. Why not create a scheme by which individuals or communities can effectively recapture control of their loops and exchanges with reasonable recompense to the BT shareholders?
While I'm busy knifing BT, here's another reason to be skeptical of the clarity of their vision:
... Verwaayen revealed BT will eventually have a portfolio of broadband products at speeds going up to 1Mbps, 3Mbps and higher but said: "All services, with the exception of live TV, are possible with 1.5 to 2Mbps."
He noted that Softbank, one of the largest providers of broadband in Japan, supplies connections of up to 45Mbps but when he asked them what different things this allows end users to do, he was told: "Nothing but it's great marketing."
-- BT CEO responds to 'UK worse than Japan' criticism, silicon.com, 1 March 2004
If Internet traffic continues doubling each year, where will the increases come from? ... Video is likely to play an increasing role, taking over as a major driver of traffic growth from music (which got a large boost from Napster). However, this video is likely to be in the form of file transfers, not streaming real time traffic. ... [T]he basic argument is that video will follow the example of Napster (or MP3, to be more precise), which is delivered primarily as files for local storage and replay, and not in streaming form. ... It also allows for faster than real time transmission when networks acquire sufficient bandwidth. (This will allow for sampling and for easy transfer to portable storage units.)
-- Internet TV: Implications for the long distance network, Andrew Odlyzko, 27 July 2001
Yep, when you're about to rush out of the house and realise you forgot to download the movie, that's when you want a gigabit connection.
Rhetorical reader survey: how much of your life has been spent watching a counter go from 0% to 100%?
I've written before how the end-to-end principle is as much as political statement as a network architecture blueprint. But I don't think I ever let that argument really run to its full conclusion.
Lemma: Assume for a minute that running a stupid network in a competetive market is inherently unprofitable. I don't believe this is completely true (another article, another midnight.) But it's a good approximation.
Hypothesis #1: Any supernormal profit for a commercial operator can only arise if politically mandated to exist.
That political mandate can take many forms: universal subsidy, sorry, service funds; artificial spectrum shortage; funny rules around rights-of-way; exclusive franchises; abrogation of normal competition law; etc.
Hence the core competence of all telcos over time becomes lobbying.
Hypothesis #2: As politics overtakes product, all telecom systems increasingly resemble political systems rather than businesses.
Anarchism, communism, fascism, theocracy, capitalism, cronyism, despotism, autarchy, oligarchy, democracy, you name it, someone's caught it. Neither an exhaustive not mutually exclusive list. But you might recognise some of them. Community Wi-Fi? Collectivism. Vodafone? Totalitarianism. And so on.
As soon as profit and prices are decided by means other than the open market, the only stand-in is politics: who you know, what you have, where you can influence.
Smart networks are like living under the La Cosa Nostra -- the Mafiosi need a legit economy to feed off, and ensure a well-regulated environment, even if land and building materials appear suspiciously expensive. But as your network becomes stupider, it may radically change in political appearance. The tame and docile incumbent carrier could turn into anything. It is quite possible for things to get worse instead of better (viz. Iran, Saudi, etc., etc., ad nauseam), both in terms of price and user power. Stupidity creates instability and uncertainty, and the mafia start to sound like a good deal to some people who value stability over freedom.
Hypothesis #3: Over time, the architecture of the telecom system will resemble the political system around it.
Here things get a bit less certain. But I suspect the agovernmental situation in Somalia doesn't lend itself to a rigorous line sharing regime. The supposed strength of the US political system is its bipartisan nature, where no small third party can capture the balance of power to push extremist policies. The result is that the "third party" vacuum is filled with corporate cash instead, and the political lobby is far stronger than elsewhere. France? "Paris says we will do Minitel!" "Paris says we will do unbundling!" Whatever the centre says, the edges to in bucket loads. But if it turns out you should have built World Wide Webs or fiber links, you're stuffed.
If I was braver I'd not list these as hypotheses, and would have created Geddes's 3 universal laws of telecom. But I think I'd rather gather the evidence first than the credit.
UPDATE:
Corollary #1: If you want a benign and stupid network, you need to get involved. Build one, or lobby for one.
Corollary #2: Stupid networks don't just happen, they are carefully planned. They need friends.
Corollary #3: You'll get the network you deserve.
We were round at the house of my brother-in-law today. They've got 3 kids, two around the age of my daughter. A total riot. My daughter disappeared into the playroom at one point to try on some of the boy's clothes. She hasn't quite mastered it yet. One leg into the trousers via the main entrance. One up the bottom of the other trouser leg.
I've been reading a bit recently about BT's "21st Century Network". My, if you thought my daughter was confused, you should try seeing BT put on its Internet robes. The good news: they're moving to an all-IP network. Yippee! And the bad news? They don't believe in the Internet, and you're going to be shephered onto their private, controlled and metered smart IP network. Oh, and two houses and a small shed in Milton Keynes are going to get fiber laid to them.
There are two possible reasons I can see for such a total repudiation of the stupid network. The obvious one is that BT folks can read, and have absorbed the Paradox of the Best Network, and have decided that a stupid network would be too good for the British public, and not good enought for BT's shareholders. Fairy nuff, I suppose.
The other one -- and the one I really fear -- is that BT believe that the Internet is such a cesspool of slime that only a private alternative can be decontaminated and made safe for public use. Although my really real fear is not that this is true, but that BT's entire marketing budget will be switched to portraying the Internet as an unsafe place to let your kids roam at night. (You should get them off the damned computer, send them outside for some healthy fresh air, and let them break into cars and sniff glue like all the other kids, I say.)
Now, BT might be right. The paradox of the paradox of the best network might mean that the abuse overwhelms the use. Probably not going to happen, for many reasons. But not a trivial thing either, and requires a ton of better governance and accountability. We're working on it.
(Incidentally, this is one reason why a low-latency MAC like Flarion's is utterly, totally, vital for wireless. That background packet radiation of the Internet must be delivered to the end point if we're to preserve the end-to-end principle. Yep, every port scan is vital, every probe is loved. And if you're like Qualcomm's CDMA 1xRTT network and take 10 seconds to set up a faux-circuit every time, you're dead.)
(Superincidentally, I muse whether we'll move to a socks-proxy style architecture for mobile, where your nominated wired packet relay station does any filtering you desire, including protecting your handset from denial of service attacks, and your carrier only relays packets from that one place, and you only listen to contacts from that one source. This highlights that the network edge begins where the paying customer starts, not where the last packet lands.)
Personally, this return to smart-network-but-on-IP looks suspiciously like the biggest destruction of shareholder capital since, oh, the last time the telecom industry undertook the biggest ever destruction of shareholder capital. If I were a BT investor, now would be a great time to flee in the opposite direction, quam celerrime, mea culpa. You've been sent a dinner invite in Hamburg for summer of 1943. Don't think about the taste of the food: the city's on fire!
Regardless, watching BT stagger around with its fly undone and shirt inside-out is a sight to behold.
By the way, did I ever tell you of my daughter's special trick? She loves to pillage her mother's underwear drawer, and put knickers round her neck like Hawaiian lei garlands. Now if only I were a cartoonist and could actually draw Ben Verwaayen ...
Here in Vilnius the snow is only a few inches deep, but the reflected light brightens up the dull northern European winter. (Many North Americans seemed surprised to learn that millions of Europeans live at the same latitude as Hudson Bay.) I've also just made a rather unusual phone call back to the UK that dispels some telecom gloom.
Naked DSL has yet to be forced onto BT by the UK regulator, so millions of people are paying about 10 quid a month for POTS service that they may or may not want. The UK has a very vigorous market in carrier pre-select and prefix dialling codes: I can call people in the US far cheaper than most US residents can call across their own state. UK national calls are as little as 1p (US$0.02), unmetered. We've already opted out of BT's usurious pricing plan for another pre-select operator.
(And if you want two more reasons who Vonage is ****** in the UK market, you've just got them. Throw in cheap cable triple play bundles and you've completed your trifecta. You have to make the IP services do something genuinely new to make money.)
BT has teamed up with Yahoo! to offer VoIP, semi-integrated with Yahoo's IM client. I can't say it's the most reliable product ever offered. It fumbles NAT and firewall traversal. It stumbles at start-up asking you to classify the speed of your broadband connection. It tumbles when the IP connection drops and restarts. But it more or less works, and the voice quality is superior to SkypeOut. Plus callers get to see your home phone number as caller ID, and there's no hassle in having the charged tacked onto your PSTN bill.
So I called my folks back in London. Spoke for ten minutes. Ended the call. (My parents' PC is knackered, hence the non-Skype nature of the call, for the astute among you wondering what I'm doing making regular landline calls.)
Nothing unusual there, you say. But wait a minute -- didn't I just opt out of BT's voice service with carrier pre-select? Only for circuit-switched calls made from my physical home line. VoIP does an end-run around all those regulations.
And quite rightly so, too. BT's only market power in VoIP is their billing capability for 20 million accounts. I'm better off having just made the call and not paid Lietuvos Telekomas their truly outrageous rates. BT's better off. And my carrier-preselect operator had every opportunity to capture the billable event, and declined to even try.
I wonder how long it will be until other utility companies catch on to the fact that their telecom asset is their billing capability. Why not tack VoIP calls onto your electricity bill?
Their disadvantage compared to BT is that BT knows for sure what my number is, and doesn't have to carry the costs of validating it (or the risk of spoofing the caller ID to whatever I tell them my number is.) So if you're a regulator worried about making rules on VoIP, how about starting with the ownership structure of phone numbers,? That would help to brighten up the competition.