Communications

Caller Pays as a mobile payment model

A few days ago I posted some thoughts on telecom regulation, EU Roaming Regulation: Be careful what you wish for, prompted by recent calls for regulation of international mobile roaming rates within the EU.  I wasn't advocating a specific policy, merely suggesting caution and pointing out earlier mobile telephone regulatory actions that have had unexpected consequences. After discussing my main idea, I briefly mentioned, in the last paragraph, that I considered Europe's adoption of "caller pays" "questionable."

That paragraph caused Tomi Ahonen to write a very detailed comment in defense of "caller pays."

Tomi has written a number of books on mobile services and mobile marketing, and has obviously thought about this issue at length. I very much appreciate him taking time to comment and I own everyone an apology for not elaborating in the original post. Let me do so here.

Typically, telecommunications regulators define how operators exchange traffic and thus determine the billing model for mobile phone services.  What's at issue is who pays for incoming traffic to the mobile phone.  In the US, the cost of the radio link in either direction (incoming & outgoing) is born by the mobile subscriber.  Most of the rest of the world has adopted "caller pays."  In this case a mobile subscriber only pays for the cost of placing calls - incoming calls are free. Because there is extra cost for mobile airtime, in "caller pays" countries, mobile phones typically have distinct dialing codes and callers, whether fixed or mobile, local or international, know (or should know) that the rates to call a mobile phone are different, typically higher.

Tomi and I agree the caller pays model facilitates rapid adoption of mobile phone service, and I'm sure we both agree caller pays is the best possible policy for developing countries. However, in markets like the US and the EU with highly developed, monopoly fixed-line telephone networks, I see both advantages and disadvantages.  Tomi lists advantages in his comment.

I broached the subject of disadvantages in my original post:

... caller-pays transfers the cost of fixed-to-mobile calls from the competitive mobile sector to the non-competitive fixed-line sector. The US did not adopt caller pays. The result: today, US fixed line subscribers see no difference when calling mobile subscribers and mobile subscribers pay with their previously mentioned large buckets of minutes at low fixed cost.  Meanwhile, fixed-line callers pay 10-20 cents or more per minute to call European mobile subscribers.

Let me illustrate the cost of calling a mobile subscriber in various places by referring to current SkypeOut rates.  The cost of calling any subscriber - fixed or mobile - in the US is € 0.017 ($ 0.021) per minute.  Similarly the cost of calling any fixed-line subscriber in western Europe is € 0.017.  However, the cost of calling a mobile subscriber is much higher:

France - mobile	€ 0.164
Germany - mobile	€ 0.200
United Kingdom - mobile	€ 0.205

Calling a mobile subscriber in the EU is roughly 10x the cost of calling a fixed-line subscriber.  There are exceptions.  If you are a mobile subscriber on the same operator's network, there can be dramatic savings.  But for the general case, calling a mobile subscriber is ludicrously expensive.

This expense has other implications. In the US, and in individual countries in the EU, there are 3 or more mobile operators per market and mobile service is highly competitive. This has driven down mobile calling costs everywhere, and in the US, it has driven down prices for mobile termination.  As a result, US mobile subscribers use their mobile phones more often and for longer calls.  The comparison is "minutes of use."  In the US, the average subscriber uses their mobile phone nearly 600 minutes per month versus EU mobile subscribers who average 142 minutes per month.

I don't want to argue whether caller pays is better or worse.  Certainly, adoption of mobile phones in the EU has run 3-4 years ahead of adoption in the US, and caller pays is at least one factor contributing to that difference.  On the other hand, US mobile phone utilization is way ahead of the EU and the costs to call US mobile subscribers are very low. Correlation doesn't prove causation, but the facts do suggest there are unanticipated consequences to any regulatory approach.

First Anniversary of the Communications Blog - Some Statistics

First Anniversary

April 25th was the first anniversary of this blog, but I was too busy to post. This morning I got a moment to look at the statistics. I've written 109 posts, the majority of which are mini-articles. The subjects were all over the telecom space, reflecting my personal interests, but true to my original idea and reflecting my passion for telecommunications.  If you're reading this, hopefully, there's some overlap in our interests.

Headlines that convey meaning

One thing I've figured out, from the 120-150 feeds that I typically follow, is the value of headlines that tell what the content is about. I follow RSS and email feeds using Bloglines, typically in headlines-only mode. If the headline doesn't describe what's in the post, I'm unlikely to open the post. A few months ago I noticed what I was doing and resolved to make the headlines in my own blog more informative. I hope that's working for you.

Statistics

More than 2/3rds of visits to this blog come, not from subscribers, but from search engines and other referrals.  Here's the breakdown of those referrals over the past 30 days. I was in India in February and since I've written several posts about the incredible growth of subscribers in Pakistan, so the high rank of Google India and Google Pakistan is no surprise.  Here are the numbers:

google.com	32.40%
google.co.in	6.30%
search.yahoo.com	5.00%
pulverblog.pulver.com	3.40%
google.co.uk	3.20%
search.msn.com	2.90%
google.com.pk	2.50%
google.ca	1.80%
nmscommunications.com	1.80%
bloglines.com	1.30%
telepocalypse.net	1.00%
google.de	0.80%
google.fr	0.80%
finance.messages.yahoo.com	0.80%
google.com.au	0.70%
google.com.sg	0.60%
blogs.nmss.com	0.50%
technorati.com	0.50%
blogsearch.google.com	0.40%

Until two months ago, I didn't pay much attention to blog statistics beyond the basic information provided by TypePad.  Two months ago I signed up for SiteMeter.  Their customer service is non-existent, even for paid subscribers.  However, their standard statistics package has all sorts of interesting items in it, and I expect to continue to use them.  Here's an interesting view on the browsers that people who read this blog are using:

If you click on the image you'll see that Microsoft Internet Explorer (all versions) at 66%, Firefox is at 28% and the various Firefox predecessors/ brethren (Mozilla & Netscape) have another 2.1%.

EU Roaming Regulation: Be careful what you wish for

In February, European telecommunications commissioner Viviane Reding spoke out on high international roaming charges within the EU and started a public consultation on what regulations might be needed to bring down these costs.

Be careful!  As I've commented before, the EU's current high costs for roaming are a direct result of anti-monopoly regulatory efforts beginning with the Vodafone-Mannesman merger in 2000. 

Scott Marcus discusses this in his paper on Europe's "New regulatory framework."

"In 2000, Vodafone Airtouch merged with Mannesman.  <EU> Commission competition authorities were concerned that the merged firm would be the only entity able to offer pan-European mobile telecommunication services...  The merging parties resolved competition concerns by agreeing to provide roaming tariffs to affiliated and unaffiliated mobile operators on a nondiscriminatory basis.  As a practical matter, this eliminated the merged entity's incentives to offer pan-European service packages..." 

Scott compares this with the US where AT&T Wireless's introduction of Digital One Rate service lead to a wave of mergers, alliances and joint ventures as competitors were forced to respond.  Today, most US mobile subscribers have large buckets of minutes for which there are no per-minute, no long distance and no roaming charges.  As a result, today's US average minutes-per-subscriber is four times that of Europe. European attempts to foster competition had the opposite effect.  Be careful what you ask for.

Another questionable European regulatory decision was the early choice to require "caller pays."  Caller pays works very well in emerging markets with few fixed lines.  But in Europe, caller-pays transfers the cost of fixed-to-mobile calls from the competitive mobile sector to the non-competitive fixed-line sector. The US did not adopt caller pays. The result: today, US fixed line subscribers see no difference when calling mobile subscribers and mobile subscribers pay with their previously mentioned large buckets of minutes at low fixed cost  Meanwhile, fixed-line callers pay 10-20 cents or more per minute to call European mobile subscribers.

 

Internet reaching rural India despite the bureaucrats

Sonesh Surana, writing on the email list at Berkeley's TIER project, points to this Rediff article on Reliance's rural Cellular strategy. Some key points:

• Reliance CDMA networks already covers 42% of the rural population and they expect to reach 50% (and 400,000 villages) by end of 2006.
• Reliance offers 144Kbps mobile connectivity (using CDMA2000 1x technology) in 3600 towns; GSM providers offer 56Kbps in just 25 towns.
• Rural subscribers in 1xRTT areas are using their cellphones to access Internet !
• Reliance is encouraging 2nd-hand sales to push data-enabled phones into the rural market.

This is fascinating.  The official government approach to rural connectivity has been a series of programs to foster village public telephones and encourage universal service (or at least collect taxes for a Universal Service Obligation Fund).  These programs have typically specified exactly what is to be done including the technology to use in exchange for subsidizes (to a single provider in each region).  Given rural teledensity, it's fair to say existing programs have failed.

Now along comes Reliance, with a service that not only doesn't get subsidies, but has pay taxes and make money, and they are succeeding despite being penalized by the government!

Note:  all Indian telecom operators are penalized with telecom-specific taxes at rates far about most other countries (e.g. 5x that of China).  Beyond that, technology-specific regulation grants less spectrum to CDMA operators like Reliance than to GSM operators, basically punishing them for being more efficient.

Benkler on IBM's revenue from IPR & Linux-related Services

Last night I heard Professor Yochai Benkler of Yale Law School speak at the Berkman Center at Harvard.  He was promoting his new book, The Wealth of Networks, which came out late last week. I've been following Prof. Benkler since reading his essay, Coase's Penguin, on the economics of open source and peer production, so I had already downloaded the pdf of his book and skimmed the introduction.

Since I have followed his work, there were many things is his talk which were familiar, for example the many proof points on the growth of open source software (Apache, Linux, etc.) and peer production of intellectual property (Wikipedia).  One interesting thing that I hadn't seen before was this diagram (also as Figure 2.1 on page 47 of the book):

IBM has traditionally been a patents power house.  And I was aware that IBM has a major push in support of Linux, but I'd never put it in perspective with their IPR programs.  Of course, $2B is less than 3% of their revenues, but this is an impressive graph none-the-less.

 

Presence, availability and context-aware communications

A recent discussion on the GoogleTalk blog highlights one of the annoying features of first generation instant messaging systems, notifications when buddies go on- and off-line. I typically run four instant messenger clients on my laptop in order to participate in my communities of interest. In each case I have turned off even silent notifications to minimize distractions.

Jon Perlow's post exposes part of the problem:

... we have this arbitrary distinction between being "idle" (you stepped away from your computer) and being "unavailable" (you shutdown chat or turned off your computer). It's problematic. Some people leave their computer on 24/7 and are always logged in. Their presence toggles between available and idle and I never get a notification when they become available. On the other side of the spectrum, there are people who are constantly moving their laptops from wireless network to wireless network and I will get notifications for them every time they reconnect. What I am getting at here is that there are flaws in our presence model ...

But he's only beginning to realize the issues and the motivations at work here.  You may have an immediate desire to communicate a specific thought with a specific person.  Or you have a thought you want to share with someone in a set of your friends depending upon who is "around" at the moment.  Or, you are lonely and just want to see who is "around."

Also, with IP communications, the word communicate can mean text, voice, video, cartoons or photos.  Pure IM or pure telephony are too limiting.  We're just beginning to see the new world with programs like Skype and GoogleTalk.  So yes, there are flaws in our presence model!

As I commented in my presentation at Spring VON, even the word presence is wrong.  I'm always present somewhere.  The question is, am I available? and am I available for the kind of communication you want to engage in, right now?  and if not, am I available for some other kind of communication?

If my communications client is a mobile device, it's always on, but the alerting function is in vibrate mode when I don't want audio disruptions.  That doesn't mean I can't received a text message or a picture or a video stream (from your see-what-I-see mobile webcam?).  So my availability needs to reflect my current context.

And, at a minimum, notification of changes in other people's contexts need to be filtered, based on what I'm trying to do at this moment.  If I want to talk with you the next time you are available for a conversation, then I'd like notifications about just you and your availability to talk.  If I have a thought I'd like to share with anyone in some set of buddies, then I'm interested in notifications for just that set of buddies.  And if I'm a teen desperate to connect with anyone who'll respect me, I want as much notification detail as my friends and associates are willing to share.

We're at the very early stages of figuring out availability for context-aware communications. Indeed, we've still focused on PCs even though the mobile phone is our primary communications device. But it's good that the folks at GoogleTalk are thinking about it from the user experience point of view.

Community Fiber - Read the fine Print

Housing developers are now advertising "state-of-the-art fiber-optic connectivity" for new condos and new housing, but one has to look carefully - fiber-optic connectivity comes in many forms and ownership models are as important as technology. 

This point was brought home to me last night as I skimmed the February issue of Broadband Properties magazine (which just arrived on my doorstep this week!). Two successive articles displayed two extremes in a range of home-owner control over fiber access.

The first article, Sunset Summits: Bringing Fiber to a South Carolina Greenfield, Q&A with Developer Jeff Hesla and Kent Brown of AFL Telecommunications, tells how developer Jeff Hesla installed dual point-to-point fiber pairs from every home to the community center at Sunset Summits in Spartanburg, South Carolina.  Unlike the passive optical networks (PON) being installed by Verizon for their FiOS service and by many other communities, point-to-point means every home has a direct fiber connection to a hub point. Thus electronics can be upgraded on a per-home basis at any time. In addition, since fibers are dedicated, the ultimate capacity is much larger than with PON.  At Sunset Summits they went further and put in two pairs of fiber per home - one for IP services (Internet connectivity) and the other for RF video, i.e. traditional cable TV technology.

Of course there is still a question of who owns the fiber - does each home owner have control of their fiber?  does the home owners association own all the fiber?  does the developer retain ownership? or has it been sold to a monopoly service provider.  Obviously home owner control, or at least control through the home owners association, is desirable.  It's what I'd want if I were purchasing a home in any such development.

The following article, The Law: Master Communications Easements in the Fiber Age, By Jeffry L. Hardin and James N. Moskowitz, Fleischman and Walsh, LLP, was the shocker for me.  I'm well aware of developers building fiber networks and then selling them off to the local monopolist, but this is the first time I've read a detailed article on how a developer can set up fiber ownership so as to maximize developer control and developer revenue, at the expense of the future home owners.

Among other things, the article describes ways to structure a master communications easement so the developer remains in control, even after the roads have been turned over to the local town government.  More than that, the article suggests a perimeter or "moat" easement around the inside boundary of the development to effectively seal off community residents from any service provider other than the developer or the developer's chosen partner.  Yes, such a moat could be defeated by a point-to-point optical or radio link, but what a hassle (and expense).

So, if you are thinking of buying a home in a new community and you're promised "state-of-the-art fiber-optic connectivity," read the fine print. 

Conversations at a football game - Open spectrum for laymen

I just found out about a wonderful explanation of open spectrum that Tim Shepard submitted to the FCC in 2002. When I explain what's possible in open spectrum I typically make analogies to human vision in the presence of sunlight.  Tim's explanation is in terms of sound and human hearing, in a football stadium!

What is Open Spectrum?

Every national government regulates the use of wireless spectrum - a result of interference problems that arose in the early decades of the 20th century. Since then, there's been enormous progress in wireless technology. Unfortunately we prohibit the use of this new technology in almost all of the spectrum. This has enormous cost for society. Consider where would our economy be if computers only used technology which existed in 1953 (the year current US color TV broadcasting standards were frozen)? Consider, under current regulations, most wireless spectrum is effectively empty most of the time, even in major cities like New York, London, Tokyo or Beijing.

Today, it's possible to design robust wireless systems that would function reliably even if there were no spectrum regulations at all. Unfortunately, currently deployed wireless systems (radio, TV, navigation, etc.) depend upon current regulations for their reliable operation so, as Tim Shepard puts it, "The path into the future will be tricky."

None-the-less, we owe it to ourselves to navigate that tricky path. If nothing else, we need spectrum to provide "broadband" in rural areas around the world, and to provide high capacity mobile connectivity in both urban and rural areas.

Other sources:

• Wikipedia
• Open Spectrum FAQ
• Open Spectrum: A Path to Ubiquitous Connectivity
• The Open Spectrum Foundation
• Radio Revolution, by Kevin Werbach

Mobile Telecom in Afghanistan

At CTIA this morning I got to hear a wonderful presentation by Karim Khoja, the CEO of Telecom Development Company Afghanistan Ltd, more commonly known by their wireless brand name Roshan Telecom.  Here are some of my notes:

Afghans:

• 25M population (up from 22M a year ago due to returning refugees) (this differs from the CIA's 31M).
• Per-capita GDP US $240 (the CIA uses purchasing price parity and lists US $800)
• Median age 17 years
• Life expectancy 43 years

Telecom in 2002:

• 20K fixed lines
• 30K mobile phones (in 4 cities only)
• 35K satellite phones

Telecom today:

• 2 mobile operators (3rd license just granted)
• > 1M mobile subscribers
• > 150 towns with coverage
• Teledensity is 4.2 and rising rapidly

Roshan:

• Service launched summer 2003.
• Now largest mobile operator in Afghanistan.
• Private company owned by an international consortium formed by the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development (AKFED),  Monaco Telecom International (MTI) and US-based MCT Corp.
• 700 direct employees, most of whom were living in refugee camps three years ago.  25% are women.
• 170 sales points;  >1500 dealers (selling phones, SIMs, scratch cards, etc.); 5000 distributors
• 99% of subscribers are pre-paid
• Recently opened a new call center that they expect to grow to 120 agents (5 languages)

Some of his anecdotes were amazing.  To build a typical cell site they first have to clear land mines and then build an access road.  Then they install redundant diesel generators and substantial fuel storage as there is no electric power grid. Today, Roshan's combined electrical generating capacity is the largest in Afghanistan.

Rural cell sites have armed guards to protect against theft of fuel. However, they've never had a cell site attacked - even when there is fighting nearby, all sides understand the benefit of communications.

They've had to train all of their staff from scratch. For example for engineers, they look for Afghans who can speak English and know how to turn on a PC, but they expect to teach everything else in their training program. It's similar for other positions. They've also developed their own network of health clinics for employees and their families.

Roshan has fostered the emergence of consumer marketing and advertising industries in Afghanistan.  Their name was selected via focus groups (it means "light" in the Pashtu and Dari languages and implies "hope" ). More recently they have established one of the most widely recognized (in Afghanistan) corporate slogans "Nazdik Shodan" ("bringing you closer").

The Roshan scratch card has become a third form of currency after the afghani (AFA) and the US dollar.

His top problems are corruption and security, but he is very optimistic for Afghanistan.

All in all, it's an impressive start and Karim Khoja's optimism was infectious.

F2C: Things that should had been better covered

Yes, I should have made more noise in the Q&A periods, but they were rather limited.

Applicability of Net Neutrality:  You already know I agree with Martin Geddes – Neutrality-Schmootrality.  But if we need a net neutrality law or regulation, shouldn’t it apply only to those with "significant market power?" 

Policy in the EU, Japan & Korea:  This was a very US-centric conference. But the term “significant market power” comes from EU regulators. And many speakers alluded to the US falling further and further behind the rest of the world in broadband access.  If so, shouldn’t we at least inquire about what others are doing?

Rights-of-Way & Dark Fiber:  Everyone recognizes the advantage of obtaining additional first mile connectivity options and the subject of spectrum came up repeatedly, but spectrum discussions have been brewing for more than a decade. Even congress has noticed the success of WiFi and is starting to make the connection. But I didn’t hear about pushing dark fiber into neighborhoods or getting easier access to first mile rights of way. 

The only fiber discussion came from James Salter and he described municipal projects that were complete networks, not dark fiber, i.e. one government-managed network as opposed to the rich set of competitors that dark fiber could support. (For example: Stokab’s dark fiber in Stockholm has fostered a range of competitive services).

There were a couple of mentions of Verizon ripping out copper when they install fiber. Yes, that makes sense – it’s they’re not going to want to maintain the old copper.  But what about selling over-lashing franchises to 4–6 companies and let them battle out how to maintain the guy wire that holds up the cable(s)?  Abandon the copper, but use it’s supports for shared access by community groups, local contractors or national companies that want to over-build a neighborhood.  Just a thought, but there was no Q&A to inject it into the discussion.

All & all I’m glad I attended.  I didn’t come away with a great “Ah ha” but I learned various tit bits, met some very interesting people (and some useful contacts), and spoke with various old friends and acquaintances.

 

F2C: Google has Bucket Trucks - Mountain View Municipal Wireless Network

Chris Sacca from Google gave an afternoon talk at Freedom to Connect. I’ve heard a number of presentations by folks from Google and they all start with some gee whiz material.  But this is the first I’d heard anything about the Mountain View wireless network beyond the original press release.

Chris is Head of Special Initiatives at Google and is the person in charge of the municipal wireless network in Mountain View, California.  The title of his presentation: Google has Bucket Trucks.  The first half was general Google stuff and the second half was about the Mountain View network. I don’t have the presentation, but here are my notes:

• The mission:  Organize the worlds info and make it accessible…
• Google's admonition to their staff: don't worry about CPU power, memory, monetization or partner concerns. Instead focus on user experience.
• There are ~5 million terabytes of information in the world.  So far, Google has only indexed ~170 TB - a long way to go.
• Google has 1950 projects running right now - Chris attributed this to their policy of encouraging engineers to spend 20% of their time on their own ideas... 
• Chris showed an interesting diagram about devices for communications – like a “long-tail” diagram only with a truncated tail, to emphasize we have relatively few devices, so far - someone needs to build the additional devices ( but this is not Google's expertise)
• Looking for a world with many, many networks, all interconnected - this is also not Google's expertise even though they are deploying a network in Mountain View).
• Chris says Google is good at:
  1.  Location-based apps that users want (e.g. google local mobile). So far they've had to do this w/o access to location information from any operator.   http://www.google.com/glm/
  2.  Making more money for network operators
  3.  Opening our mouths and convincing others
• To inspire change - just start building

Then Chris described the Mountain View network:

• They are using Tropos equipment.  In a private discussion before his presentation, Chris said they picked Tropos because their credentials included connecting to everything else needed to make the whole network.  He expects other vendors will match these soon.


• The Mount View Network is up for test purposes now.


• 330 radios to cover 11.5 sq miles


• His map showed 330 dots plus 16 larger green dots (mid-tier aggregation to Internet?)


• Three primary distribution points – subscriber gateway aggregation points – connected by point-to-point radio.  The northern most is at Google HQs where the whole system connects to the Internet.

During a very brief Q&A, Chris was asked about privacy.  His answer was fairly wide ranging – it even touched on their China policy.  As with every other Google employee I’ve heard present, or spoken with, there is a clear sense that “doing good” is taken seriously at every level in the company.

 

F2C: Municipal broadband

F2C:  Notes from the session: Muni Tsunami
• Jim Baller, Senior Principal, Baller Herbst Law Group
• (M) David Isenberg, Principal, Isen.com
• Ron Sege, CEO, Tropos
• James Salter, CEO, Atlantic Engineering Group
• Esme Vos, Founder, Muniwireless.com

These are just some interesting odds and ends. Both Ron Sege and James Salter had presentations with interesting content which I hope will be available on-line.

James Salter:  Of 11 recent municipal fiber projects, 9 were PON (passive optical networks), either B-PON or G-PON, and two were point-to-point Ethernet.  However, the percentage of requests for future deployments is shifting to point-to-point rather than PON.  James also has a wonderful revival-meeting presentation style and some very funny images and video clips in his presentation.  Highly recommended, if you get the chance to hear him speak.

Ron Sege:  Claims >20 Mbps shared per square mile versus EVDO or HSPDA which are, at best, migrating towards 10-14 Mbps.  While there are only 50,000 potential subscribers reached by current deployments, based on booked deals he expects to have 5M potential subscribers within reach of systems based on his technology by the end of 2006.

Jim Baller:  Jim has been leading efforts to hold back incumbent-sponsored legislation to make municipal broadband illegal or impractical.  Good info here.

Esme Vos:  Very articulate when she introduced herself, but didn't speak much thereafter.  Esme is the founder of muniwireless.com which I've visited many times for current info.

F2C: US now 19th for broadband penetration - About to be overtaken by Solvenia

Freedom to Connect has a side channel electronic chat where participants are sharing interesting comments about the speaker (and other asides). This update on global broadband penetration was one of the interesting URLs that people have posted.

Look a third of the way down the page to the chart titled

Top 20 Countries in Broadband Penetration (connections per 100 households)

The data comes from Telecom Paper, an analyst firm that follows broadband.

Notice the US in 19th position. Then look at Solvenia, currently in 20th position but growing faster than the US.

F2C: Dave Hughes & Wireless Internet in Nepal

The first speaker at Freedom to Connect this morning was Dave Hughes with some wonderful pictures of  a wireless ISP that he helped set up in the Myagdi district in Nepal, and then a live Skype connection with <Mahabir Pun in Nepal.  The ISP is Nepal Wireless and one of the primary motivations for the network is to facilitate education, i.e. to support things like the Himanchal Education Foundation.

The voice quality varied from excellent to marginal (it sounded like dropped packets to me) and there was substantial latency as the Internet link between the US and Nepal included at least two satellite hops and the serialization delay of 64 kbps connectivity on the second link.  But still, it was very good and the latency only affected the initial conversation between Dave and Mahabir.  When Mahabir was explaining his network to the F2C audience, latency didn't matter and the wideband audio of Skype made the voice quality better than one would get from a traditional telephone link.

The Internet Backbone is Different

At several points in the policy discussions at Freedom to Connect, it's struck me how little people understand the differences (business and regulatory) between the core of the Internet and the core of the PSTN. Yes, there are issues about connectivity (a.k.a. Internet access) in the first mile, but the US carriers are not on the verge of owning the Internet.

Unlike the PSTN, the backbone of the Internet is completely unregulated. Indeed, the Internet is global while regulation is local, national or (in the case of the EU) regional. And practically speaking, there is no government oversight of the business relationships between backbone service providers. There have been occasional attempts to apply anti-trust rules, but with hindsight, they have been largely irrelevant to the distribution of businesses that form the core of the Internet. In any event, no monopoly has emerged.

Data:  Over the years, the Cook Report on Internet has covered Internet backbone issues and Internet peering arrangements. This issue from 2002 includes articles suggesting Internet peering is broken and other articles about how some Tier 2 ISPs have built donuts around the original Tier 1 ISPs - that is they have made peering agreements with other Tier 2 ISPs so as to minimize the amount of "transit" service they need to purchase from the Tier 1 ISPs.

Recently, Ben Worthen published a detailed map of Internet backbone connectivity in the US and follow on commentary. There are eight Tier One ISPs and many, many Tier 2 ISPs.  I.e., in more than a decade - a decade that included both a boom and a bust but no regulation - there has been a proliferation of backbone ISPs, not a consolidation.

Is this stable? I don't know. But current US problems are strictly limited to the duopoly (or monopoly) in the first mile. No one (ISP or government) is on the verge of controlling the global Internet.

F2C Continues

Martin Geddes gave the best presentation of morning. He was speaking from notes and promised me he'd post a summary in his blog.  Meanwhile, here's something he wrote on the subject in early February.

Addendum:  Martin has just posted a summary of his speech at F2C.

F2C - First Impressions

I'm at Freedom to Connect (F2C) blogging live (a first for me!). It's in Washington DC area (well, Silver Springs MD) and it's very US-centric. One of my concerns in coming was that the conference would be buried in discussions of Network Neutrality - something I regard as a distraction - and other current discussions without consideration of long term issues.  If anything, political change takes time, frequently years, so one should really think about the long term.

Indeed, the first speaker was FCC Commissioner Michael Copps whose talk addressed Network Neutrality and the recent history of who did what to whom.

Luckily, in David Isenberg's opening talk, he emphasized that Network Neutrality is only a means to an end and probably not the most efficient means. More important are actions that could promote true competition in first mile connectivity.  He mentioned access to more wireless spectrum, for example, the unused or white space in the TV bands and open access to rights-of-way.  He even used my favorite term - Layer Zero Completion.  Thank you David.