Communications

Dung and other "traditional" fuels to power cell sites in India

VeerChand Bothra (Mobile Pundit) points to an article in India's Financial Express, Dung to power mobile technology in rural India.  I found this interesting as, on my last day at 3GSM in Barcelona, I spent a few minutes at Ericsson's display of the bio-diesel plant that is the subject of the Financial Express article.

There are other pictures (here & here) and an alternate picture in this article in Biodiesel Magazine.

What's not described in any of the coverage I've seen, is how these systems actually work.  According to the Ericsson fellow working the booth at 3GSM, the technology is already in service in several developing countries.  What's new its use to power mobile cell sites. 

Typically one biodiesel plant produces a lot more fuel than you need for a single cell site, so instead there's one plant for several dozen cell sites.  Peak production is 2500 liters of diesel every 10 hours.  In one approach, a farmer's co-op runs one of these plants and owns a (diesel-powered) tank truck.  They contract with the local mobile phone company to supply biodiesel to a group of cell sites, then deliver the fuel by truck to the various cell sites.

The point is to deal with locations where imported diesel is expensive and/or the supply is unreliable.

I'm speaking at VON Mexico this Wednesday

On Tuesday I'm flying to Mexico City for some customer calls and to speak at VON Mexico.  I'm in the session entitled Architecting Networks for Entertainment Services on Wednesday, February 28, 2007 from 12:30 to 2:00pm.  The session description is

The impact of convergence on the media, data communications and telecommunications industries is obvious. Triple play scenarios envision a simultaneous mix of multimedia content and communication, but the traffic patterns of the different media can be costly to the other. How do network operators support a world of broadcast, gaming and communication and where are the critical elements that have to be considered in the delivery of new services in the future? Is QoS the answer to the problem? How can a carrier be involved and still enable end to end solutions?

For this session, I have some specific comments on IMS as a possibly useful architecture, while the walled garden lasts.  But long term trends are against everything this session is about and I plan to point this out.  Among trends of relevance:

• Internet access speeds increasing ~50% / year
• User-created content
• Increasing access to other “long tail” content
• All content at consumer’s convenience, i.e. not live

which suggests VoIP and P2P TV over open Internet access will subsume telephony & IPTV, eventually.  The only question is how long the current situation will last.  That said, there is the issue of how operators maximize their near term returns while, hopefully, thinking about their long term strategy.  IMS is part of that story.

If you are in Mexico City and/or attending the show, I'll be there all day Wednesday and most of Thursday.  Send an email (rbt@nmss.com) if you'd like to meet.

Dealing with IMS —€” What an App Developer needs to know

As promised, the slides and recording of last Tuesday's webinar are up on the NMS website. 
Some of the key points: 

• There are strong business and service parallels between the Intelligent Network (IN) and the IP Multimedia Systems (IMS).
• IMS is only being used for new applications, and only a few at that, notably Push to Talk, Video Sharing, Fixed-Mobile Convergence and perhaps, Instant Messaging (although so far that's mostly talk).
• While there's work involved in integrating an application into an IMS network, it's no more complicated than integrating with IN — indeed, the larger issues are usually with OSS/BSS/NMS integration and they are relatively unaffected by IMS.
• Although it would appear that standard IMS infrastructure includes all the necessary components for application control (the Application Server), subscriber data (the Home Subscriber Server) and media processing (the Media Resource Function), most substantial applications end up shipping with their own additional application processors, databases and media resources.  These additional application-specific components need to connect via IMS standard interfaces, but need not (and generally do not) conform to IMS specifications internally.

Based on questions during the webinar, and by email afterward, I've hit on some of the practical issues developers are running into as they migrate existing applications to run in an IMS network.

FiOS over promises, under delivers

Conventional wisdom is one should under promise and then over deliver.  Verizon FiOS seems to have gotten this backward.  As I commented a few weeks ago, FiOS service was scheduled for a speed upgrade from 15/2 Mbps to 20/5 Mbps, so I've been running speed tests every week, and on February 3rd my download speed did go up from ~15 Mbps to ~20 Mbps, but not the upload speed, i.e. the speed from me to other Internet locations.

Two days ago, I got an email from Verizon.

Fantastic news! Your Verizon FiOS Internet Service speed was automatically upgraded.  Your current speed was changed from 15/2 to 20/5*.

Although your speed is increasing, your monthly billing will remain the same. If you receive a partial-month service charge on your bill for your new speed, it will be credited back to you on the same bill. If you have a router from Verizon for FiOS Internet Service, a new router is not required.

So the next evening at home (last night) I ran a series of tests.  Unfortunately, despite the upbeat email from Verizon, my capacity towards the Internet remains stuck below 3 Mbps.

These measurements were against servers on the US east coast (NYC or Wash DC) using three different speed test services.  Additional runs and use of other speed testers suggest the third result shown above is a bit of a fluke.  The most consistent results are just over 20 Mbps download and 2.3 Mbps to 2.8 Mbps upload.

If they had promised an upgrade from 15/2 to 20/3 I'd have been very happy, but having been promised 20/5, I feel cheated.  A cursory review of the FiOS overhead cabling in my neighborhood suggests there are only four other FiOS users close by.  I wonder where their problem is?

Cellphones & Development — Evidence, not anecdotes

There's plenty of anecdotes about mobile phones helping poor people in emerging markets.  There's also evidence that I've written about several times in the past.  Here's another piece of evidence.

Robert Jensen studied the adoption of cellphones by fishermen along the coast of India's Kerala state between 1997 and 2001 measuring the resulting impact on fish markets, prices, incomes and waste. Cellphone service became available in three distinct stages (January 1997, July 1998 and May 2000) for three distinct regions south to north along the coast.  This helped Jensen separate cell phone adoption from other effects.

His work was presented at the Seventh Annual NBER-NCAER Neemrana Conference at India's Neemrana Fort Palace Resort in Rajasthan over a year ago (January 15-17, 2006) but I only stumbled on it today, thanks to a reference by Ajay Shah which lead me to this Times of India story and then to Robert Jensen's actual slides from last year's conference.

The short summary — cellphones improve information flow, which makes markets work better and results in quantifiable benefits for all parties.  Waste (~6% of the fish were unsold before cell phones) has been eliminated. Fishermen profits are up 8% and consumer prices are down 4%, directly driving a 20 rupee/person/month consumer surplus, the equivalent of a 2% increase in per-capita GDP from this one market alone.

Here's are plots of daily fish prices at coastal markets spaced roughly 10 Km apart.  The three graphs cover markets in the three regions and give a good sense of both the impact and the speed of the transition.

Jensen concludes his talk by pointing out other impacts, beyond the price of fish.  The advent of cellphones also led to a 6% increase in educational enrollments and a 5% increase in the probability of using of healthcare when sick.  All this with no government programs, no new funding requirements.

IMS -- What's an App Developer Need to Know?

I'm presenting a webinar tomorrow at 11am Boston time (1600 hrs GMT) entitled IMS - What Does an Application Developer Need to Know?

Today there are some push-to-talk services based on IMS, but mobile voice telephony continues to be based on circuit switching, because operators are interested in new services, not in changing things that already work.  As it's early days for IMS, there are only a few actual IMS services in use or proposed today, but that number will grow.  At a minimum, every application provider needs a clear roadmap of how their application(s) will migrate to, and leverage, IMS infrastructure.

Surprisingly, despite all the IMS standards gobbledygook, only a few parts of the typical application platform have to change in order to convert an Intelligent Network application into an IMS application.

If this sounds interesting or relevant, listen in tomorrow.  Alternately, a few days after the webinar we will post the slide deck by itself and with a recording of my "insights," such as they are, in the NMS webinar archives.

3GSM Wrapup — Tons of opportunities & growth, but still focused on the walled garden

It’s been a busy week.  I had intended to post every day, but the level of activity was overwhelming, and minimum sleep flying to Europe followed by five hours of sleep per night while there just got to me.

In a business sense, this was a very good show, for NMS and seemingly for many others.  There’s tons of opportunity at many levels.

Taking the longer view, I worry.  Tim Berners-Lee, in his keynote address, beseeched the industry to “be a foundation, not a ceiling.”  He talked of the enormous opportunities that the open Internet has generating.  The walled gardens of the mobile industry are stifling this potential.

Of course they’re going to collapse.  Countries with mobile oligopolies may preserve their walled garden for years but, as serious 3G bandwidth and other sources of connectivity (WiMAX, WiFi) roll out in developed countries with real competition (3+ competitors making significant investments), the walls will collapse.  I’m talking 2–5 years.  Based just on anecdotal conversations, I think many of the operators realize this, but their whole structure and organization is such that all they can do is milk the current situation, leaving their future to be dealt with in the future.

Highlights:  Mobile communities, Mobile TV (& here), talk about mobile advertising (most of which I missed), Femtocells (also here), and WiMAX (which grates on 3GSM types), but not much progress on GSMA instant messaging (last year’s buzz).  Also, last year’s radio hype was HSDPA, so I expected hype for HSUPA this year, but evidently it’s not quite ready (or it’s too little and will be too late to counter WiMAX?). 

In any event the radio technology hype was diffuse, but included multiple announcements about 3GSM’s Long Term Evolution (LTE) from DoCoMo, Ericsson (and others I missed).  This is an obvious counter to the WiMAX crowd, but it’s a lame response, as LTE demos are a few years off with deployment still further.

Finally, the show was even bigger than last year — claims are between 57K & 60K people attended.

Here’s the NMS booth on opening day.

What was in it?  MyCaller ringback tones, of course.  We now have 27 operators who’ve deploy our system.  But we showed several new applications for the first time — Interactive 3G Mobile TV and Mobile Publishing, both based on 3G video calling technology.  And on the developer front we showed the first AdvancedTCA media blade, our MG 7000A and the latest release of our Vision VXML Server targeted at IVVR (interactive voice and video response). 

Our strategy is to foster a rich developer community and then partner with developers in that community to bring new applications to our operator footprint.  Thus the Vision VXML Server is the core of various IVVR (interactive voice and video response) platforms, including those that run Interactive 3G Mobile TV and Mobile Publishing.

I’m writing this on the plane (using BlogJet software) but I’m fading, so good night for now.

DoCoMo uses MIMO to achieve 50 bps/Hz

That's 50 bits per second per Hertz of radio spectrum.

Under the title NTT DoCoMo Achieves World's First 5Gbps Packet Transmission in 4G Field Experiment DoCoMo announced a new level of modulation efficiency.  Their title is flashy, but they were using 100MHz of spectrum.  To find that much spectrum you have to look to very high frequencies and thus short ranges with poor penetration of buildings (or trees and shrubs). 

The benchmark to follow is modulation efficiency — how many bps can you cram through a limited amount of spectrum.  Today commercially deployed systems tend to achieve less than 10 bps.  Here's an excerpt from a picture of their setup.

The full image with explanation is in this pdf file.

In some sense, this is a brute force expansion of earlier work with an increased number of antennas at slightly different positions being used to send different information on the same frequency simultaneously and multiple receiving antennas used to resolve the individual transmitted signals, i.e. multiple inputs and multiple outputs (MIMO).  It also builds on the most current modulation scheme which is orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), the modulation used in WiMAX.  None-the-less, it's an impressive achievement.  Thank you DoCoMo.

Everyone has heard of Moore's law describing the decades-long continuous exponential increase in performance of integrated circuit technology.  Fewer people comment on the continuous exponential increase in radio spectrum utilization that's been in progress for more than 100 years, i.e. since Marconi patented "resonant tuning" in 1900, showing how he could send multiple signals over the air at the same time (versus a single transmission in his initial system of 1896).

Social software, vblogging & miscellanea from Brave New Web conference

Just a few more notes on items that struck me in this afternoon's Social Software session and John Furrier's (PodTech.net) afternoon keynote at the MIT Enterprise Forum's Brave New Web conference.

There were several people in the audience who kept asking "where's the business model?" even though most of heard the obvious answer — if you have millions of users and tiny operating costs, it doesn't take many cents (or fractions of a cent) to produce a profit.  Advertising is the number one model, although premium or adjunct services (think posters and albums from you photos site) also helps.  I think they understand this is Silicon Valley, what's wrong with the New England crowd?

Rick Roth (of TnR Global) had a good question/ observation from the audience: Taking the information consumer's point of view, the big contribution of RSS has been help with content overload;  now, with a proliferation of specialty social networking sites, there's a problem of identity and linkages between communities.  Where is the single sign-on solution that works across all the social networking sites?  I didn't hear a good answer, but I certainly agree there's a problem here.

John Furrier's afternoon keynote was excellent, covering his career as a blogger, podcaster and vblogger, and explaining the industry in a fashion that matched my views. :-)   Best of all he showed a 5 minute clip of Jerry Zucker speaking at last November's Vloggie awards.  Very amusing.  Here's the YouTube version.

The summary, transcript and mp4 video version are available on the PodTech website here.

Besides the program, the event brought out an excellent cross section of the New England startup scene — old friends and new acquaintances.  Definitely worth the time!

New Media: Ads, tags and spam

I'm listening to the New Media panel at the MIT Enterprise Forum's Brave New Web conference in Boston with Laurie Baird (Turner Broadcasting), Jose Castillo (thinkjose.com), Alex Laats (PodZinger) and Andy Plesser (Beet.TV).  I'm not that good at blogging live, but I've been noting a variety of interesting snippets. 

I was particularly struck by Podzinger's media searching capabilities, not so much to index audio and video media, although that's useful.  More interesting is the idea of detecting and avoiding spam in tags, thumbnails and so forth.  One of the critical things Google does in evaluating the importance of web pages is evaluate the value of the incoming links.  Today, content is being spammed by having every tag under the sun tied to one piece of content and by having deceptive thumbnails to lure people into (probably questionable) content.  So it's possible the value of audio and video search technology will be in evaluating whether the tags associated with a media clip are plausible.

Alex Laats stated the average length of audio clips on the net is 22 minutes, but the average listening time is 3 minutes.  Likewise, the average length of video clips is 7+ minutes while viewing times average 1 minute.  I can think of all sorts of potential problems with these averages (presumably they include people who listen to just a few seconds and quit as well as people who listen to the whole thing).  I need to catch up with Alex on where he got his data.  Intuitively, there would appear to be value in being able to find just what you want within a media clip.

A common thread was that advertising will be the dominate model.  Laurie Baird went further to project that, by 2010, 50% of the ad revenue would come from the 80% of less popular individual pieces of content.  Along these lines, the best statement (I'm not sure who made it) was "copyright problems will be solved with new business models" — presumably advertising-based models.

Jeremy Allaire on video & startups at Brave New Web conference

I'm at the MIT Enterprise Forum's Brave New Web conference in Boston where the keynote speaker was Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Brightcove.  While he had a series of interesting observations on start ups and entrepreneurship, they were familiar topics.  For example, "pursue thought leadership, not marketing" matches my long held view that PR is vastly more valuable than advertising.  His observations on video were what resonated with me.  Among other things...

The total video industry including film, TV, production, etc. is about $350B globally, but Internet video represents less than 0.1% of that today.  To that I would add, mobile video (my interest) is a small fraction of Internet video — tiny, but that's an enormous opportunity!

The technology isn't quite here yet, but it's coming rapidly.  There is a massive proliferation of cameras getting into the hands of consumers — unstated, but obviously mobile phone cameras will dominate very shortly.

Today, YouTube provides marginal resolution and quality, but it's ubiquitous.  That's about to change.  TV quality video is becoming feasible and due to break out on the web in the very near future.  From my mobile-centric perspective, our camera phones will be able to capture TV quality video, but playback on the tiny screen will still require special content — tighter views on people's faces, shorter clips to match brief viewing moments.

Creating good video is still hard and expensive, but it's becoming cheap and easy.  The transition will not be abrupt, but that merely means there is a decade or more of opportunity ahead.

Advertising supported video content is in very early days, but this is the high growth opportunity.  Pay for media, subscription or otherwise, has had very limited success.

All and all a very interesting talk.  Then in a subsequent discussion, I heard reference to Hamlet on the Holodeck by Janet Murray which I haven't read.  The observation was that in every media transition the first wave duplicates what went before, only later do people figure out what can be done with the new media — example:  early TV duplicated vaudeville. Looks like a book I'll have to check out.

Meeting at 3GSM

I'll be in Barcelona for all of next week, arriving Saturday afternoon the 10th.  We have the same booth location as last year, i.e. 1D07 — on the left side of the main aisle as you enter Hall 1.  In addition to our MyCaller ringback tone application (currently the #1 deployed ringback solution), we'll be showing a highly interactive Mobile TV application (one second channel changing!), a mobile publishing platform and application, our Vision VXML server and our new AdvancedTCA media blade.

While most of my time is committed to NMS specific business, I'm interested in meeting friends and making the acquaintance of anyone who reads my blog.  Email me (rbt@nmss.com) if you're interested in meeting.

Verizon FiOS ups the speed

This Verizon press release raised my hopes that my 15/2 Mbps FiOS Internet access service here in Massachusetts was about to be increased to 20/5 Mbps (as happened for New York, New Jersey and Connecticut last year).  So I've been testing things at least once a week.  But until today, it's remained about 15 Mbps coming my way and 1.7 Mbps going out to the Internet.  Finally, this evening my "download" speed hit 20 Mbps, but unfortunately I only saw part of the promised increase in upstream speeds.

Hopefully, this is a work in progress and the next few days will bring the promised 5 Mbps upload.  For me, the upload, i.e. outbound speed, (or lack thereof) is still quite noticeable when I send emails with large attachments — something I seem to do frequently.

By the way, this particular speed test is from the Communications Workers of America website "Speed Matters."  The test button is on the right when you hit their home page.  I like it for the international comparisons.  :-)  Thanks to David Isenberg for pointing it out.  On the other hand, there are many other speed tests that don't require you to enter both your ZIP code and your email address!