GREAT OFFER FOR ALL TELEPOCALYPSE READERS!
Get a FREE! (YES, FREE!) new, shiny 3G Nokia phone from Carphone Warehouse. FREE 500 anytime minutes!! FREE 100 inclusive texts!!! And pay only £4.99 a month for the first 12 months!!!!
Of course, there's a catch...
You expect to have to pay extra after the 12 months, but what you don't expect is this:
People should be free to enter into whatever contracts they desire, but the headline price "with £4.99 line rental" just isn't true.
As carriers get desperate, it'll only get worse.
Just a short essay on one of the core principles of the Stupid Network.
Many of you will be familiar with the Paradox of the Best Network. In a nutshell, it states that the best network is a bit-moving commodity, since it has the highest option value to the user: yet it is the exact opposite of what a commercial network operator wants, since it inhibits the ability to do value-based price discrimination of network traffic.
This argument is incomplete, and here's why.
Price discrimination in communications can range over five axes: what was said; how much was said; who said it (and to whom); where it was said; and when it was said.
Obviously, "stupid" networks only directly inhibit the first of these -- the "what".
So on mobile networks, you only lost one of five means of sorting out willingness to pay. Your five-legged table became a four-legged one. (I guess telecom is a round table...). The ability to price disciminate the "who" is accentuated via handset cross-subsidy -- sophisticated users demanding smart handsets are shepherded to higher MRCs in return for larger subsidies. The "where" has powerful roaming and differential toll discriminators. The "when" of off-peak calling is standard accepted practice. The "how much" speaks for itself.
On fixed networks, the "where" is subject to physical constraints (it doesn't change over time) and political ones (i.e. no redlining), rendering it very weak as a price discriminator. And the other factors are not well exploited. You don't see metered broadband offerings that reward on-net use (i.e. ideal for P2P file transfer from nearby nodes); you don't see peak and off-peak tariffs. Mobile networks remain communication-centric and real-time (most traffic is still voice; I just read that <1% of Vodafone's network traffic is "data", if we ignore voice=bits=data.). Fixed networks are dominated by file-transfer, which can be time-shifted around time pricing barriers. Stupid networks really took us from four to three factors, but two of the legs turned out to be short. It's not a comfortable table to be sat at.
Thus we have seen a shift from fixed to mobile. The demand for mobility from users was matched with a viable supply-side economic model.
The Paradox of the Best Network tends to paint the situation as going from a one-legged table to a no-legged table. This is too extreme a vision; the industry wasn't that wobbly.
A better framing might be The Temptation of the Worse Network. By imagining you can capture the bit value telcos get distracted from more pressing strategic concerns. Example would be expanding connectivity coverage, radically lowering cost (e.g. via wireless local loops), easing provisioning (think: today's hopeless Wi-Fi roaming), opening up APIs to their data and business processes to participate in other forms of new value, and so on.
The Paradox turns out to be more of a Conundrum. A useful step to explaining industry dynamics, but insufficient on its own.
It had to happen some day. I've got my first Skype authorisation spam. I won't grace the perpetrator with publicising their ID or URL, but here's the text from their profile:
Build a profitable Online Business [sic] from home with the established brands from wellness, telecom and retail industry where the market is booming.
Not to be missed - Online shopping...
I guess they put it in their profile and leave the boilerplate authorisation message so the one-click home page link is active. (Links in authorisation messages aren't clickable, I assume.) Or maybe they rely on you just saying yes to anyone so they can spam you some more.
I wonder if the Skype API will make this problem worse? Much easier to build a spambot that way.
Time for Skype to "go social": friends-of-friends are allowed to send authorisation messages to me. People blocked by friends should have to have a SkypeIn or SkypeOut account to approach me. (Not willing to risk even €10 skin in the game when people are blocking you? Then piss off and don't bother me.) Strangers should, at the very least, have to solve a captcha to make this stuff scale badly for spammers. Expect all the usual blacklists, filters and stuff to apply.
Yawn -- here we go again.
I don't normally rave about new products, particularly ones I've never even used, but the new Nokia tablet just leaves me gobsmacked. Yes, it's just a cheap little computer in a pretty wrapper. But it seems to be almost exactly what I've been looking for.
There are many times and places where I don't want to take a laptop with me, but I need a subset of its functionality. A basic problem of laptops is that as the form factor becomes more portable the fragility and cost increase. I don't plan on going on a canoe trip with a laptop just in case I need to react to a client email. A cell phone is inadequate, though. I need to do more than just "communicate"; I need to be able to close a receive -- inform -- react -- express loop. Get a message; assemble the information I need to process it; formulate a response; and communicate that response. The cell phone only does #1 and #4 well.
In the home a laptop or PC isn't always the right thing. You just want a really quick piece of information; to check what time that flight is supposed to leave, etc. This is a "third place" device (after "home" and "work"), but that third place could be in the non-traditional parts of both home and work. Again, the cell phone or smart phone doesn't do a good job.
I could never persuade myself in the tax-free stores in the airports that I'd really be able to work with a tiny weeny PDA screen. (It doesn't do "inform" or "express" well enough.) A $50 backpack for my bulky laptop was a lot cheaper than a $3000 ultraportable notebook PC or a $750 PocketPC paperweight. So far I've been stuck with just one option.
The 770 is also significant because it partially separates connectivity from the hardware. Obviously, you need to provide your own Wi-Fi signal. You'll need to use a Bluetooth modem to work on a cellular system. But it springs Nokia free from the design and distribution constraints that the carriers usually impose. Or as El Reg puts it:
It's an open platform, and unlike its phone range, there's no built-in DRM or similar shenanigans to cripple the user experience. ... The 770 will be available through general electronics retailers or direct from Nokia's website.
These two things are not unconnected. The smartphone market is somewhat of a poisoned chalice to handset makers. The more features there are the greater the likelihood some meddlesome operator will want to break or customise them, ruining your already thin volumes and fragmenting your base for developers. The operator urge to make smart networks peppered with toll booths, and use device subsidy to push people towards higher-charging monthly plans, reduces the perceived value of the product to the public and re-allocates the profit pool towards the carrier.
The 770 is an attempt to break this cycle, and recapture the value of the "smarts" that a smartphone would offer, but in an enlarged form factor that is cheaper to make, better to use, and potentially offering high margins. I view the 770 as a "form factor buster". Instead of trying to expensively and badly cram functions into a smartphone, take a basic cellphone for voice and data connectivity, and then use an extension box for the extras that has the benefit of working in the home, too.
Constrain the handset innovation with a smart network and complex pricing and the innovation goes elsewhere. I look forward to more devices that signal to the market "this is what we can do when the handcuffs are taken off". Yes, this one's a niche product; but you can imagine plenty of other kiosk, point-of-sale and portable systems that don't fit into the handset mould appearing on the market.
How much value will be left in those expensive mobile carrier-owned retail stores if the best devices start being distributed via other channels? How come a hit personal, portable data and media-centric device like an iPod doesn't fit into the distribution network of a mobile carrier? The stores scream "we sell stuff that meets the sales needs of Vodafone and Cingular to pay for their network", rather than "we sell stuff that meets your user needs when you're out and about". Supplier-centric, not user-centric. Not an obvious model for retail success. Where's "The Mobility Store"?
The 770 does get it wrong in two areas. Firstly, the battery needs to last way longer if this is to work away from home as well as in it. If the device needs some extra bulk to do it, so be it. Secondly, the storage sucks. Bursting the cellphone limits at the very least means adding an SD or CompactFlash interface. Whacko memory card formats need not apply. Leaving high-capacity storage out of the base device is defensible; not having the option value of adding cheap mass storage is not. I also wonder about the tablet vs. clamshell. The nearest competitor is Sharp's C3000 Zaurus. Clamshells work better on the road; tablets in safe and secure environments.
That means the Mk. 1 product shouldn't be expected to be an immediate runaway success. Get some learning on what works and how people use it, ramp up the volumes, and a $200 Mk. 2 version is the one that will fly off the shelves.
I'd hope that the 770 works seamlessly with a Nokia phone, although experience of cullular genereally leads me to be less that optimistic. Cross-provisioning should be a trivial affair, with address books, photos, email addresses, etc. all shared with no user effort. A 770 owner should always be better off with a Nokia phone.
Bluetooth headset; Linux OS which already runs Skype -- it's a trivial port; great screen; adequate UI for "inform" and "react"; cell phone for backup voice calling and connectivity. Sounds like a winner to me. I'm ready to leave my laptop at home for everything except the composition-heavy tasks.
Gee, I want one.
Full disclosure: I have a financial interest as I have done consulting work for Nokia and hope to work with Nokia again in future. Nonetheless, these views are mine and aren't bought by anyone.
UPDATE: I wrote most of this article 2 days ago but was too busy to tidy up and post, and since then Om Malik and Russell Beattie have given their verdicts.
UPDATE: More here and here and here.
A completely random brain-dump of stuff I want Skype to do for me.
Some of this stuff may already be there and just hidden. (Took me ages to discover user drag and drop in Skype.) Perhaps we need a "tip of the day"? If any of this confuses the user interface or Joe Skyper then better to leave it out, or make an explicit upgrade to a (paid-for?) "advanced" edition or mode.
And yours?
Brough Turner notes that the most common usage of video phones is "see-what-I-see":
Note that "see-what-I-see" uses full-duplex voice, but usually only requires half-duplex video.
A common scenario for the business market is showing someone back at base info so they can add value to it and send directions for action out into the field.
Unfortunately, all the 3G networks are back-to-front because they make the downlink faster than the uplink (for technical as well as marketing reasons; the uplink is powered by a weeny battery and teeny DSP in a wobbly mobile box facing a number of difficult coding and timing problems I barely understand, whereas the downlink isn't).
Apparently you're supposed to be watching expensive football clips and not making your own videos.
At the risk of boring everyone to tears, some final thoughts on the emergency calling debate.
Firstly, who not just force telcos to unbundle 911 service? For those on DSL, they then pay $5 a month (or whatever) and the only number they can call is 911. The tricky bit is callback, but it doesn't seem beyond all technological possibility to tackle this. The price might even be zero; you can call for emergency service from any cell phone, even if no longer connected to a plan.
I'm wondering if this routing/location thing is being made harder than really necessary. I mean, how difficult is it to have a system that goes to a human and says "National emergency service centre. Which town or city are you calling from? And which service do you require? Thank you, I'm now putting you through." Yes, the caller might not know their exact location -- but at least it approaches parity with traditional cellular 911 service (i.e. pre-E911 location enhancements). Also, self-reporting of location, or defaulting to a known subscriber or billing address is still better than nothing.
You could also have a directory of ISP routers and their locations -- a less onerous task than listing sbscriber nodes. Geolocation services already have a lot of this sort of data. It'll be incomplete, but a traceroute to the user will reveal at least some information as to which PSAP to route to. The VoIP/PSTN service provider could use this data in the absence of anything better. "We are now routing you to the Arlington, VA support center. If this is not the right location, press '1' now for personal assistance."
The physical routing of emergency calls isn't as hard as is made out -- but only as long as you put some of the burden on the connectivity provider, who knows where the end point is, and not the VoIP service provider, who doesn't. For once, we can ignore the layered model and traditional good architecture practice and have as much layer bleed as we want. The whole source of the problem was the link layer, IP and session abstractions hiding essential physical information from the the application.
Why not just make every ISP route some fixed address like 8.5.12.16 (think about it!) to a public service gateway? Or since DNS is virtually always bundled with internet access, just make a local DNS record that points to the right place ("ENUM ultralite"). Yes, by traditional standards it's messy; but we don't care, as long as it works well enough. There's loads of ways of getting a connectivity provider to state somewhere the location information they know. (Some connectivity providers would have to confess to how poor a record they have of their plant and customer's locations, mind you.)
Connectivity providers not using wireless links should, if they've done their homework, know the definitive address they laid the access to. Their data quality should significantly exceed that of a pure VoIP service provider, who has to accept the customer's version.
The really big issue with nomadic IP emergency service is accountability. If voice calls become free, the service provider is cut out of the picture; at the most it's like Skype where's you're an anonymous person with a self-assigned ID. You need a service provider mediating the system in order to have some comeback on abusers. It's too hard to build a pure IP emergency calling system given the state of play with identity and reputation systems today. We don't have any means of socially regulating a native IP emergency service offered via open Wi-Fi hotspots. You might use DNS or routing tricks to allow people to contact emergency service, but the system collapses from misuse.
Nonetheless, doesn't anyone else find that an emergency service system that offers zero native interface to the Internet is, nonetheless, somewhat out of date?
UPDATE: See what I mean?
UPDATE: Looks like someone is already there.
UPDATE: Warning. This is a long rambling article and I come dangerously close to totally change my mind at the end. Several times.
UPDATE: And before you embark on the long, dull journey through my turgid prose on public service calling, remember that the only real solution is to put some onus back on the connectivity provider, because anything above the IP abstraction layer can't -- by definition -- locate itself reliably as long as the devices lack reliable internal location technology. Geography only exists at layer 0, so whoever does layer 1 is in the position to pass it on.
The debate rolls on...
A big problem with regulating 911 service is deciding who you are trying to protect. Is it the purchaser of the service, or the user of the emergency service? They are not the same, and this can lead to different answers.
If it is the user, then you have to focus on the external "implied semantics" of the device because that's all the babysitter has got to look at when little Johnny stops breathing and goes blue. She isn't going to boot your PC to see what telephony apps you have installed. At the very least she mustn't waste time attempting a VoIP 911 call when she should be rushing out to the neighbours or using her cell phone instead.
Now, whether homes should be mandated to provide 911 service when strangers are allowed in unsupervised is a different matter; it's similar to enforcing public liability insurance cover for corporations. If you took the "protect the public" argument to its logical conclusion, that's the result. Yet it is probably impractical and unenforceable.
If someone insists on putting a POTS look-alike SIP phone attached to FWD in their living room, and '911' is mapped as a short code to call Uncle Fred in Montana, and the babysitter gets confused, that's just tough. Before we installed Vonage we didn't have any landline-like phone in our apartment in Kansas City, and if we took both our cell phones with us, there was zero phone service beyond the PC and Net2Phone. (Then again, we didn't have a baby before we got Vonage, so I'd have been very alarmed to find a babysitter in my home.) Forcing people to get a phone line seems a bit rich; better to have the babysitter check the place out first before accepting the work.
You cannot rely on anything in the contract or at the point of sale for protecting third parties. [The babysitter example is slightly flawed because the baby is associated with the first party, and the third party babysitter isn't the one in distress. No matter, the principle is the same.] We're dealing with a market failure here; the in extremis nature of emergency calling means the market needs a minimum level of mandated functionality.
On the other hand, you could say you're trying to protect the buyer. This is very different, because then the whole consumer protection at the point of sale or activation comes into play. You could mandate that all PSTN-interconnected VoIP services simply play a "this system does not offer emergency calling" message prior to allowing the first call; the vocal equivalent of Skype's pop-up. This would answer the "well, what did you expect" problem of most of the calamities currently being bandied about.
Although consumer protection at the point of sale is clearly important, it doesn't lend itself to mandating 911 service. What if you just wanted a cheap second line without the expense of 911 service? The free market libertarian in me feels queasy at the though of such forced bundling. But E911 also forms an essential public good; you might call because you can see my house being burgled. I can also think of many examples where the buyer and user are not the same. Just think of shared households such as students, or landlords vs tenants, or temporary accommodation. So forced tying of 911 to PSTN calling isn't unreasonable, even if reasonable people could disagree.
Interestingly, in the above referenced letter from Skype's attorneys to the FCC they include both the marketing of the product as well as the existence of consumer premises equipment with dial tone. To me, you can only do the duck test by looking at the supposed telephone duck, and not the marketing river.
So, onwards to some concete examples...
Free World Dialup, as Aswath notes, doesn't use PSTN numbering/interconnect, so no issue.
Let's refine the duck test definition a bit. Perfection is the enemy of the good, and today we've got real bad in terms of the gap between public expectation and reality of what they're sold. Smallprint won't get you out of the semantic mess of expectations that words like "phone" induce. (Think: "The Broadband Phone Company" - ie Vonage - vs Skype which makes no tagline promises about telephony.) If someone sold you a "car" where some getout clause in the contract said "not suitable for use on public highways", you would expect to sue for false advertising.
If you can plug in a POTS phone into the "out of the box" configuration, and it uses PSTN interconnect, game over. E911 is mandatory. That covers 90%+ of the relevant market for the next two years. No definitional issues around the service or its marketing.
Next come devices which look like POTS phones but have extra smarts to enable them to make PSTN calls via non-PSTN means. Any PSTN interconnected service (outbound calling) requiring a user-owned input device whose sole or main function is telephony, offering a 0-9*# keypad (or equivalent numeric entry system), and providing dialtone, that's a duck. In other words, a different plug won't save you.
Now we get into a messier area where the bits are unbundled into different boxes. If the microphone and speaker come as accessories connected via dedicated inputs, it's a duck.
Skype in an ATA with SkypeOut is a duck, because you can plug a POTS phone in. (Do you need SkypeIn to offer call-back? No, the babysitter can't tell. But the PSAP needs to know there's no call-back and keep the caller connected.) Skype in a router isn't a duck, because it can be called via a PC. If the user conspires to add a string of adapters to use a POTS phone, that's their bad luck. Use of a POTS-alike phone has to be a requirement, not merely a possibility, for such a severe mandate to apply.
There's no need to define "PC", because you only define what is subject to E911. No need to regulate tin cans and string with a printed warning label "Danger: Not Suitable For Emergency Calling."
If you're in a grey area, and the court catches you out, tough luck. You needed to put clear blue water between yourself and the PSTN to avoid the PSTN regulatory tar pit. Life and death is too important.
UPDATE: Some more examples. What if company A sells a POTS phone, B sells an ATA, C sells a SIP-to-PSTN gateway service (little different from SkypeOut)? Is it a duck? Can we get away from how it is marketed -- in aggregate or individually? Ultimately you can't prevent people putting devices that look like PSTN phones in their home but don't do 911 calling. You can't make them have devices that ring, or have the volume unmuted, just so they can receive callbacks. It could just be a toy phone! The protection of third parties is always going to be incomplete. In this case I say it's not a duck. You can only work on enforcing consumer protection at the point of sale and/or activation of such a disaggregated product. There will be an increasing proliferation of ways of reaching the PSTN. It's impossible to control all of them.
What if Vonage enable you to make calls via their web site as well as via the ATA? Doesn't this dilute the "requirement" bit above? I should probably refine the definition to something like "offers at least one physical port/interface that requires a POTS-alike phone".
Maybe another difference is in that SIP gateway vs. Skype's closed protocol. Skype can control what gets interfaced, and can argue you can never acquire a device that could cause babysiter confusion. (I've not looked at the Skype-embedded products in detail, so can't say whether this currently holds true.) Thus they should not be mandated to include any form of 911, in addition to the practical reasons they list. The "open" SIP gateway that enables (but does not require) a POTS-alike device is one step closer to regulation.
Ultimately we have to go back to first principles and re-engineer the whole thing from the ground up. But it'll have to become a lot more broken first before the political pressure forces anything to happen. I wonder if private-sector response services will emerge to take advantage of the increasing gap between the possible and the actual? Emergency service calling is truly pathetic compared to what we can do or need. If I'd had an accident when I was in Italy, I don't need the nearest help point; I need the nearest one that has someone who speaks English. My cell phone's interface is set to "English". The potential is there.
Or is the co-ordination problem too large and the benefit too indirect and diffuse for a market soltion at all? This one will run and run.
UPDATE: You have to take a lot of this issue with a large anti-competitive dose of salt. Cell phones have got away for years with weak 911 serivce. Cordless phone makers don't have to shout about how your phone won't work when the power's out; they aren't all forced to work off rechargeable batteries. Telcos don't want to see 911 service suddenty start advancing by leaps and bounds on the stupid network, as it could, ahem, set a rather bad precedent. Regulatory spending massively outstrips R&D spending; after all, it's your core competence.
Just a few quick small thoughts on E911 service and the recent decrees issued in the US.
I think most observers are viewing this from their "inside the network" viewpoint -- the tech equivalent of "inside the beltway" DC myopia.
As far as the consumer is concerned the "looks like a duck, quacks like a duck" test is really simple. Can I plug my standard POTS phone into it? If so, and it uses a PSTN number, it's a duck. All the problems around Skype, Yahoo/Net2Phone el al just go away. PCs, iPaqs etc are not POTS terminals. People don't expect to use their PC to make emergency calls (even if they should!). Is it really so hard to spot an RJ45 jack and rule accordingly?
This would simply eliminate all the service-centric billable hour fodder for lawyers that any other approach is likely to generate. Services have a zillion variations; RJ45 connectors don't.
My opinion is that a better approach overall is to burden the connectivity provider, not the service provider, with the core problem of locating the user. Evolving my earlier thoughts, the connectivity provider knows roughly where the endpoint node is, even if the node does not.
Someone else (apologies, lost the link) suggested decomposing this into its atomic elements. For example, we simple extend DHCP, DNS or the IP assignment databases to make it easy to discover your location. We force service providers to co-operate to populate these databases. BT might supply me with unbundled copper loops, and Zen Internet, my retail ISP, will be responsible for populating the RIPE database with the right data, taken from BT on service provisioning.
Any VoIP service can then take this information and do the right thing. Even if you're roaming around on Wi-Fi, it still works.
The question is how much you put into the record, and who takes liability for it. Should there just be a location, or the SIP URI of an access gateway to the emergency service provider, or a full service provided by the connectivity provider? As usual, all the classic issues of which layer of the stack to work in, but complicated by the fact that emergencies are in physical places whereas the application layer is isolated from geography by many layers of interstitial abstraction.
There's also an issue of ensuring accountability. If you're roaming on a public open access point, how (if at all) do we deal with timewasting emergency calls when you don't need to authenticate yourself or your device?
One thing is certain: the current system sucks at many types of emergency. It doesn't handle wide-scale disasters well. It doesn't handle emergencies where a distributed, rather than centralised, response is appropriate. Sometimes you need the nearest person trained in CPR, not an ambulance. Is there a portable defibrillator in any nearby buildings? Who knows!
So a million bank account's have their details stolen by a fraudster (via).
At least we can all rest safe, knowing that our unencrypted public telephony calls are secure; we remain safe in the knowledge that even the least trustworthy person in the network ops centre is as saintly as Mother Teresa and Bono combined.
PS - The PSTN is unsuitable for business use by any business liable to industrial or government espionage. Talk safe -- use Skype. AES is your friend.
It's always a relief to get your presentation over and done with, and this time is no exception. You're always left with a nice high when it goes well. I managed to restrain myself to one diagram, and speak from notes; the feedback (from those who understood a word of what I said) seems positive.
Things I've learned so far:
I'm glad I've upset some people because they keep saying "unlike the previous speaker said, convergence/VoIP/triple play does exist". I wish James Enck was here to fire some stats about their business model meltdown in return.
I wouldn't say that Europe is particularly ahead or behind the US in its regulatory debate. There seem to be somewhat more nuanced proposals, particularly around copyright and regulation. The interface between the national and EU regulation seems to be just as chaotic as between US states and the Federal government. There's more technocratic discussion here. Some of the regulation seems excessive. Why on earth are we worried about competition reviews of sporting rights for 3G phones? It's just not an important public issue.
Delusions of voice service revenue and triple play persist. But the only content -- as the presenter admits -- that makes it compelling is exclusive sports rights. But that just makes footballers rich, not network owners.
The chief attorney of Verizon gave the lunch keynote, and pleaded for a competition law framework that instead of saying what is verboten instead focuses on what is always to be allowed. His proposal: freedom to lower prices, bundle, "innovate", etc. Actually, I'm largely in agreement, and that Verizon should be allowed to charge monopoly rents. Price signals are important, and it would take a lot of telecom out of the political economy.
Overall, there's a sense of unreality here. They just don't see that the world just moved on. Maybe their kids will tell them. The idea of content being king lingers on in Eurotelcoland.
I'm tired; up late preparing my presentation. Time for a nap.
I'm presenting to the International Bar Association's Communications and Competition Law conference in Madrid today.
There are around 170 attendees. I'm the only one with a laptop open. This is not my usual crowd. There are no seats near power sockets -- zero. But there is the general (and free!) hotel Wi-Fi. All praise the connectivity gods! Oh, and I might be the only person who isn't a lawyer or regulator. As I was invited to come after I'd left home for my holiday, I didn't bring my expensive consultant uniform. But I borrowed a tie from my Dad to make me look less conspicuous, so only my words and ideas should stand out from the crowd.
I'm curious to see how far away from reality the mindspace of this audience is. I'm going to present a short pitch that three of the words they use are in fact intellectually bankrupt, and should be avoided:
From what I'm hearing so far, this Eurotelco world is very different from the US one I'm more familiar with. Different jargon, outlook, structure.
More impressions later.
Friday: Had a 4-minute conversation with a business associate who was on his GSM cell phone in Hong Kong. Voice quality was terrible, and I really struggled to make out what he was saying.
Sunday: Had a 15-minute Skype conversation with a business associate who was on a plane somwhere half-way between Asia and Europe, using his Wi-Fi enabled iPaq. Even with the background rumble and crying babies, it was crystal clear; I didn't miss a word.
No further comment, m'lud.
I'm beginning to wonder if Skype made a mistake in the design of their client. They've built it around the legacy of telepony and IM. What they've missed is a middle space in between.
Skype's problem is that it is highly interruptive. Both IM and calls take away my attention without me having much say over it. This is expensive in terms of productivity. The whole point of the stupid network was to send signals that a smart network designer didn't think of to solve problems they weren't aware of. In this case, "I want to talk to you" hasn't been separated out as a different signal.
Now, don't get me wrong. The ability to see if someone's online, IM them first and ask if they're good to talk is a massive advance. But what I'd rather see is a little stack of names of people in the bottom right of my screen who want to talk to me. If they go offline, their entry fades out. Maybe the colour signifies the urgency of the request; a slowly draining sand timer icon indicates if this is a time-bound request.
In the ultimate "voice on the Net" experience, you would never be called at the wrong time, and would always be able to get through to people as quickly as is mutually convenient. Skype is a step in the right direction, by taking clicks and voicemail ping-pong out of the equiation. But it's not the whole journey.
Continuing the theme of pulling together related stuff from my grand RSS catch-up, here's a few nuggets of fools' gold.
Despite claims to the contrary, the wired world is not flat. It's kind of hilly, with lumps, drumlins, escarpments and dips. Here's some examples.
Aswath et al ponder the need for Skype to maintain supernodes in order that nodes behind a NAT router can participate in peer-to-peer networks. The issue is that this creates a cost on the sevice provider, and who will bear it. The obvious answer seems to be that if you refuse to become a true peer on the Internet, then it shouldn't come as a surprise if you start to have to pay someone to bridge the gap. The seams between private and public address spaces are ditches and dykes on our Internet landscape.
What's unresolved is whether this will be solved within each application (Skype does it's anti-NAT think, MS does it inside MSN messenger, etc.); or whether "stupid" general-purpose overlay networks will emerge that restore global public addressability.
This is at heart an economics problem, not a technical one. How to form a market between those in need of the overlay, and those providing it? If the only "payment" mechamism (bearing in mind not all payments are cash) is attached to an application like Skype, then the overlay will be owned by the application. On the other hand, we might see systems where I and a group of buddies agree to make our PCs into a community overlay/relay network. If I'm out and about, and stuck on a private address space on some hotel Wi-Fi network, I just VPN back into my private relay network -- possibly hosted on a friend's PC in his basement. Skype's model of seeding the market with some centralised supernodes isn't the only way of balancing supply and demand. Why can't my buddies volunteer to be my personal supernodes of default?
Moving up the stack to the application layer, we again see uneveness and wrinkly surfaces. I used to believe that the correct price for a phone call is zero. Now I believe that is only true within social or trust circles. When a communication crosses a social escarpment -- like from a business to a consumer -- or delves over a trust hollow -- like when strangers call you -- then money is likely to change hands.
A fascinating potential for this comes with the end-user adoption of revenue-share numbers in the UK. (See my earlier article for background on this.) In James's example, PSTN/VoIP users in the UK acquire 0844 numbers, and inbound calls generate cash. This cash is then used to fund outbound PSTN calls.
Now think about it. What if you do all your banking online, and hate receiving special credit card offers and mortgage refinancing pitches at 7pm? Just get yourself a premium-rate number, and make that into your virtual number for your bank to call you on. I'll gladly stand there and listen to a telemarketer for $2 a minute!
In other words, there's a brief temporal monopoly -- someone realy wants to contact someone else, and there's only one address to do it on -- which creates an economic opportunity.
Now you can start to see the sorts of business models that virtual operators like Skype might deploy. Their PC software client is fine for user-to-user calling, but not so great as an enterprise tool. What if you were encouraged (financially, if need be) to give a tokenised version of your Skype ID to companies (to protect your privacy), and they were then asked to use the billable Skype enterprise version to contact you?
Skype (or it's rivals -- it's just a shorthand) then becomes a distribution network. It could be for user attention, content, transactions, all kinds of stuff.
So to the extent that there exists market power, however limited in scope and time, between caller and callee, money will pass. That means I disagree with Richard when he says:
If finally there is only "free" IP-IP communication and no real "service", only an applications and products, there is not more business case for specific VoIP providers then for e-mail providers.
This is only true within the trust circles. Is my bank my buddy? Not in the same sense Richard is, and Richard isn't my buddy in the same sense my wife is. I spent 20 minutes yesterday fielding questions from a journalist. Is he my buddy? Answers on the back of a banknote, please.
In conclusion, these lumps and bumps exist, and often for good reason. People partition networks into private address spaces because they see more value in it than the loss of public addressability. People will pay to remain uncontactable by some parties; or will be forced to pay to contact other people. There's money to be made in putting bridges over the ditches and tunneling through the ridges. And it's a feature, not a bug.
UPDATE: Actually, when I was conceiving this article, I had another example in mind. With peer-to-peer networks, there could be an incentive to source content from an "on-net" local node.
If upstream capacity is limited, and -- a cruicial gating factor in future -- costs the user more than local on-net capacity, then you want to copy that file from someone else on your street. This is a problem, since today you don't have easy access to the subnet architecture topology, so it's only by trial-and-error you can guess who is local. Even worse, imagine you're on an ISP plan where upstream access is metered/capped, whereas on-net is not. Your P2P application that sees the world as flat won't work.
Your access provider is then in a uniquely privileged position to offer their own closed P2P distribution system for video and other large files, because only they have access to the unseen pricing and volume meters. Hence the access provider gets to reassert some control over their network, because the world isn't flat after all; IP just provides an illusion that it is.
This on-net/off-net issue is normal on voice plans today. How long before the same applies to data transport?
I reader points me to this quietly aging New York Times article on how the phone as Swiss army knife isn't playing out too well. In talking about how data plans are badly priced, there's a great laugh-aloud quote (my italics):
Many industry analysts blame the wireless carriers for clinging to confusing, and often costly, metered payment plans on their networks, including some by-the-megabyte pricing plans for pictures. "Consumers don't know megabytes from dog bites," said Delly Tamer, chief executive of LetsTalk.com, an online cellphone store. "Complexity is a huge bottleneck."
I've been hunting for a cellular plan with reasonable GPRS roaming rates, as I wanted to be in touch with my email while on holiday but the expense was just outrageous on a pre-paid mobile. The operators seem determined to neither tell you the price of data, nor sell a plan suitable to my needs, so for the time being they can get lost and I'll find other ways of managing.
Many data products appear to be mispriced. Take MMS. The purpose of MMS isn't to send pictures. It's to share experiences with people who aren't there. When we go to the zoo and want granny to share our day out, a dozen MMS messages would cost as much as the zoo entrance. That's just crazy -- a scarcity business model in a world of increasing abundance. A better pricing model would be for the first message in a day to cost you two dollars, but the rest are free. People are willing to pay a premium for predictable pricing and unlimited usage.
Sprint has done a good job of this in the US, by eschewing metered usage and shepherding people onto bundled monthly plans with uncapped usage. They haven't cracked the initial jump from casual usage rates to a daily impulse-buy bundle. And this doesn't help you in the long run solve the move to a world of stupid networks, since your carrier-offered services become of decreasing relevance.
Likewise GPRS is competing against dial-up and Wi-Fi hotspots. Charging by the megabyte is dumb. A better model would be a daily charge. I paid €5 for Wi-Fi access, and only used 20 minutes of the 5 hours of credit, but felt I got value for money. The total uncertainty of a GPRS bill (as well as the slow data rates) makes it a non-starter. But I'd gladly pay a fixed fee for unlimited access during my holiday, and it's a lot more money that the operator would have seen otherwise.
It's fun catching up with a few thousand unread messages in your RSS feed reader. Really. By processing a ton at once, you tend to see more dots to be joined.
Ben Hyde comments on how markets are likely to form around achieving just the right level of interruption by our communications tools.
Zimran Ahmed suggests that personal productivity (the real thing, not a marketing pitch) is the Next Big Thing. (This one is also worth reading.)
All this leads me to think that we do indeed face a gaping hole in the level of sophistication of our communications tools. For instance, none of my online tools can currently detect I'm writing a blog entry; Windows lacks an API for the application to declare some meta-data about what the user is doing and how interruptible they might be. We're still doing good imitations of telephony, rather than re-working things from the ground up. Why can't I talk dispersed friends and family through the pictures I took on holiday, and then have anyone who couldn't make the show come back and flip through the picture album, synced in with the audio track?
By having a broad portfolio of online productivity and data management tools, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft have a fighting chance of creating this next level of presence and interruption management. But it only works as long as you stay within the walled garden. It's a plausible story, if not a very exciting one. Instead of hundreds of millions of Skypers, we get more of the same plodding progress out of the IM networks.
Skype is dependent on getting embedded in other people's contexts and acting as a presence broker between them. The API offers more flexibility than the monumental offerings of the older IM nets. For instance, I just signed up to a trial account at the Ecademy social networking service, and it would be nice to be able to "click to Skype" without having to add people into my buddy list, yet whilst also retaining the functionality of both Skype and Ecademy. So don't let people hassle me when I'm busy, but if I'm just cruising Boing Boing, fire away. (Your traditional "Click to IM me" presence-colored Yahoo web icon doesn't cut it, as I can't express a preference for "reject calls from all strangers except Ecademy users".) You can cut a bizdev deal with the IM nets to do a lot of this stuff, but the API just makes getting permission to tinker a whole lot simpler.
One reason I'm increasingly using IM is that it doesn't leave the "faux to-do" trail of email; I don't need to delete/file messages as if each is potentially an action item. This is a genuine increase in productivity. Many people use Skype because they are bound to a laptop yet are very mobile, and it just self-configures to every network environment. It's more productive than Ye Olde IM, which tried to inherit too much configuration from your web browser, or was static and required change every time you flipped from being at work to being at home or in the coffee shop.
But we're still aeons away from realising the full potential of integrating personal communications and personal productivity. Our next step in our onward march to cyborgdom awaits!
As is usual on my travels, I spotted a few newspaper cuttings to share. Since I'm at my parents' house, I can't scan them in for your delight and amusement.
Both are BT adverts, from The Times and The Sunday Times respectively. The former is for their BT Privacy Online product that prevents fraudulent premium-rate diallers from PCs. The other is from BT's enterprise solutions division, offering security services: "Safeguard your reputation by securing your data with BT's networked IT services."
The pattern is that BT's value comes from preventing certain messages from getting through. A similar pattern showed up a while back in AT&T's (who are they? Ed.) R&D pronouncements. I suspect what we'll see is a repositioning of telcos to focus on how well their networks hinder the propagation of unwanted messages, rather than how they add value to wanted ones.
There are plenty of precedents for the "edge" to define solutions to abuse, from the numerous spam blacklists to the collaborative blacklists for weblog trackback spam. Nonetheless, the network core is well placed to spot dispersed trends and stem denial of service attacks; problems where individual nodes might struggle to co-ordinate in finding a solution. Consider it the Rise of the Smart Anti-Network. I'm unsure as to how this will play out. Is it possible to capture the option value of the stupid network without all the costs of complete openness? Is the Net really so unsafe?
For store-and-forward services it seems more likely that the edge will win out over centralised network provider solutions to abuse. You've got time to ponder and consult other nodes for advice. For real-time systems, we may simply see a diversion into private closed worlds like Skype or AOL IM. I can't say that as a refuge for aging telcos it looks very attractive. When wanted calls are free, but unwanted ones cause you ten dollars-worth of nuisance, there's clearly a business to be made. But the very fact that the applications and their modes of abuse evolve very quickly argues for an edge-based solution. "Core" solutions are only likely to work for a narrow set of stable and defined (anti-)social problems, mostly at lower layers of the network stack.
While I'm on BT's tail, for once I'd like to say something nice. Their online bill viewing system is good. Really good. I think they've taken it for an extensive work-out in the usability labs. It even looks pretty. Compared to the obfuscation of their old printed bills, it's quite a delight. Now if only they could work some more magic and actually deliver some meaningful connectivity to my home...
I'd like to pretend that a week in Sardinia was deeply culturally enriching. What is clear, however, is that a week of all-you-can-eat Italian buffets and bistros enriches the waistline rather considerably.
I'm sure you'll appreciate the irony in being a telecom consultant, travelling with a 21 month old daughter, and my first action when entering a hotel room is to disconnect the phone from the wall. Little madam likes to pick up the handset, dial a few buttons, and blurt out some orders. "Want apple! Want biscuit!". Best not to disturb the receptionist in these circumstances.
I also had to explain to her that the reason she can't use the cell phone to call Nana and Grandad is that it's gone bad and can't make Skype calls. She seemed to accept that in preference to a discussion on roaming rates and her personal spending allowance.
In the whirlwind before going away I didn't get a chance to comment on the Peripheral Visionaries conference in Washington DC where I was on a panel. It was a good show, and got an unusual blend of people together in the same room. That said, I winced a few times as I could hear the technologists and lawyers talking mutually incomprehensible dialects. For example, Mark Spencer of Digium (purveyors of the open-source Asterisk PBX and pushers of Dundi rendezvous technology) needed a translator. On the other hand, many of the traditional regulatorium representatives seemed unperturbed by Skype, BitTorrent et al. When the namespace comes from another continent, or the technology from another country, petitioning your congressperson doesn't make sense any more.
One of the questions on my panel was to name a company you would invest in if you had to only own one stock in your portfolio, and had to keep it. I have to admit that a blog name like Telepocalypse doesn't exactly lend itself to a bullish industry outlook. I picked Quova, a mid-size privately-held company.
I probably didn't make a great job of explaining why in the panel -- there just isn't space -- so I'll try to make a better go of it now.
What Quova does is compiles databases mapping IP addresses to positions on the physical surface of the earth. I don't know much about how they do it -- whether it's via semi-public databases of IP address blocks like RIPE and ARIN, or pinging nodes and triangulating based on the speed of light, I don't care. The data is used by a number of industries to tailor their output to the user, or for fraud detection.
Why do I like them? Firstly, I appreciate the "make the best of what you have" approach. The "telco way" would be to have a massive standards committee, tons of use cases, partners who have their own agendas, and massive delay. The result would be horribly expensive, over-engineered, under-deployed, and unlikely to be much actual use. Instead, Quova did the "revolution from the edge" approach. They don't control the networks, but they suck in what information they can and assemble the best picture possible with the data they have.
I like the way they link the physical and virtual worlds. These sorts of business models tend to have legs. Pure virtual businesses were tried in the .com boom and largely found lacking. IP address to lat/long is as clear a crossover as you can hope for.
They're also pretty atomic. Do one small thing unbelievably well. I think they'll build up expertise that is hard for others to reproduce. (Disclaimer: I'm not an expert in geolocation, and don't know how well the competition stacks up, or if there is any.) They fit very nicely into a web services world. Even with the rise of technologies like IPv6 where the address space is given a good shaking up and becomes harder to map, they will be the distribution network of choice for what geolocation data exists.
And best of all is that being a private company they don't have a stock ticker you can use to disprove my hypotheses! The perfect pundit punt.
James spots the increasing price of football TV rights as new IP-based entrants appear on the content distribution market.
It's easy to explain. Real-time programming can't be BitTorrented (or copied using your mate's DVD writer). Yet. The supply of "famous" real-time events is fairly fixed. The demand is going up as there are more buyers who are more desperate. Expect to see the price of "now" to rise, and the price of "then" to fall.
Telepocalypse is on vacation for the next week. Have a nice time at work, everyone!
I should have taken a picture, as the story isn’t so good in words.
When I checked into a motel last week somewhere in the midwest of the USA they handed you a form to sign. They had used a highlighter pen to draw attention to a load of things like the times of the exercise room, that they had an honour system for buying snacks, etc.
Down the bottom was “International calls will be charged at $9.95 for the first minute, and $4.95 for all subsequent minutes”.
Then below…
“Free Wi-Fi is provided in all guest rooms.”
Need I say more?
My old headset was quietly disintegrating, so Mrs G treated me to a new one for my birthday. I'd been recommended the spiffy Plantronics headset, so decided to give it a try.
I don't have a camera with me, but you can take a look at it here.
Key features:
What I like about it:
What I don't like about it:
What could be done better elsewhere:
Would I buy it again? Yes, desipte all the drawbacks, it's the best thing on the market so far that I've seen. But there's room for a better product.
Perusing my backlogged morning BoingBoing fix I see a Florida tiff where a criminal background checking company wishes to force all on-line dating agencies to put their customers through a check. (It's always nice if your product is mandatory by law.)
The obvious effect of such a change would be to make people use dating sites not affiliated with Florida in any way.
A hop, skip and intellectual jump later, and we see the same issues with VoIP. The question "should we regulate VoIP?" should meet the retort "can you regulate VoIP?"
I have heard it argued that it is essential to get a single set of federal/EU/world/glactic rules so companies don't have the costs of dealing with a zillion local sets of rules. But we can solve the problem by making two simple rules. Firstly, the laws of where the service provider has nexus apply, not where the customer may happen to be. This reflects the geographically untethered nature of the Internet. Secondly, the regulatory district needs to be clearly and prominently displayed to the user. If we're playing Skype by Luxembourg rules, we ought to know without having to grep the whole contract.
We don't need to get into contortions about defining layers so this only applies to the application layer. Connectivity is local (with the exception of satellite), so the moment you deploy a local lineman or have someone on standby to maintain a central office you gain nexus and local rules apply.
Where a service provider has nexus in several locations, you'll have to come up with tiebreaker rules to decide who gets to choose which apply. I'll leave that one to the lawyers to argue over.
For pure connectivity or service I can't think of why this scheme shouldn't work. This scheme wouldn't, however, have fixed the problems I saw at Sprint, where California rules on "billing on behalf of" (BOBO) contaminate the whole country. (BOBO is where your "information service" ringtone is charged on your "telephone service" cellular bill.) Who knows whether the customer has a second home in California and sorta-counts as a resident? Just slap California rules on everyone.
This is a cross-over example: putting application-layer billable items on a connectivity-layer bill. On the other hand, maybe this is exactly the result we want: people who try to mix connectivity and service will face high costs of delivery and compliance; those whose services are purely virtual can pick and choose their regulatorium.