Communications

Wideband audio makes for great mobile telephony

At the VON conference last week I had an interesting conversation with Karine Lachapelle of VoiceAge.  Beside her interest in the status of my ride-on model railroad :-), we discussed our mutual interest in wideband speech coding and Karine mentioned a trial of wideband audio on mobile phones in Germany last spring. 

I had completely missed this, but luckily she sent me some references which I read on the plane flying back from CTIA.

Background (skip this if you’re already up on wideband audio)

From it’s 19th century beginnings, telephony has provided a very limited representation of human speech.  For the first 80+ years, the main problem was affordable microphone technology.  Today, relatively high quality microphones can be included in consumer products at little cost.  Unfortunately, digital telephony standards (basic coding and 64 Kbps circuits), were frozen in the 1960s, based on the voice quality of 1920s microphones.  As a result, traditional telephony doesn’t pass sounds above 3.2 KHz, making it hard to distinguish “s” or “z” sounds (which contain energy up to 6 KHz and beyond) or tell letters like “c”, “d”, “e”, “g” apart.

The advent of VoIP brought the potential for dramatic improvements in voice quality, and indeed, I spoke repeatedly about wideband audio at early VON conferences, but to no avail.  Early VoIP companies tried to duplicate “toll quality” telephone speech, rather than leapfrogging the telecom industry.  That finally changed with the advent of Skype, where PC-to-PC calls can sound like you’re in the same room.  And, with Skype's growing adoption, more and more people are realizing how good voice communications can be.

Mobile Voice Quality

With the advent of mobile telephony, radio capacity was a bottleneck so mobile systems used aggressive speech compression, even at some sacrifice in voice quality.  Consumers put up with this as mobility was such an advantage.  With 3G, radio capacity is still an issue, however advertised data capacities significantly exceed what’s required for voice, so there is new flexibility to consider better quality speech coding.  Further more, speech coding algorithms have improved to the point where wideband audio requires only a little more radio capacity than today’s narrowband coders.

But while mobile telephony uses (potentially variable rate) packet transmissions on the radio links, calls are still switched using 64 Kbps circuits.  To the extent mobile operators are trialing, or even deploying, IMS technology, it’s for new applications.  No mobile operator has converted their basic voice telephony to IMS yet.

Luckily there’s a kludge that’s been standardized for several years, is available and is at least partially deployed.  It’s called TFO, tandem free operation.  TFO provides a way to tunnel lower rate signals through traditional 64 Kbps circuit switches.  Indeed, TFO provides a viable way to connect two mobile handsets anywhere in the world provided the handsets use the same speech coder and the networks support TFO.

Ericsson’s trial with T-Mobile in Germany

The most interesting article Karine pointed out is by Berkehammar et. al. in the Ericsson Review No. 3, 2006.  The article describes a consumer trial (150 users) on the T-Mobile network in Germany in April and May 2006.  The trial used AMR-WB (Adaptive Multi-Rate, WideBand) speech coding (versus the normal or “narrowband” AMR-NB used in most GSM networks today).

The short summary: 

More than 70% of the users perceived a distinct improvement in voice quality — they found that they could more easily place and complete calls in noisy environments, and reported that the improved voice quality created a greater sense of privacy, discretion and comfort.

If you add in those that merely found it good or “nice to have,” approval ratings were over 90%.

When do we get it?

The limiting factor for deployment will be handsets.  Wideband mobile connections only work if both parties have wideband handsets, otherwise the call reverts to traditional mobile performance.  Ericsson claims their "terminal platform" will support AMR-WB in 1Q07, however that's Ericsson, not Sony-Ericsson — the people who actually make handsets commercially.

So the good news is Ericsson is promoting wideband telephony and T-Mobile Germany has seen it's positive impact on the subscriber experience.  But there is no committed date for commercial handsets or commercial service.  It seems service providers continue to rely on mobility to make up for marginal voice quality, at least for the immediate future.

Feel free to talk this up with anyone who'll listen.  Voice may not be "sexy" but wideband would do more for most mobile subscribers than any of the new "data" services getting all the attention.

Your mobile is your wallet in Japan

I'm at CTIA.  It's an excellent place to hold meetings with anyone in the mobile industry in North America (and  many from Latin America), but I keep hearing people talk about how cutting edge everything is and I have to wonder at their insularity.  Don't they know anything about mobile phones in Europe, or better, in Asia?  So the most interesting thing in this morning's flood of info was not CTIA related, but this, from Eurotechnology Japan K. K.

The last time I was in Japan, I noticed people wave their mobile phone near the subway turnstile to enter.  That looked like a technology I would really like to have at hand. Indeed, it's not just for subway tickets, but also serves the functions of credit cards, house keys, and company access control cards.  Very, very convenient!

I'm not alone in finding this incredibly attractive.  Adoption in Japan has been extremely rapid, heading towards 30 million by the end of 2007 and a projected 50 million by 2010 (in a population of 127 million).

Now when will we see this in the US?

Another weather transition

Orlando, Florida
82° F  |  60° F
28° C | 16° C

Boston, Massachusetts
56° F  |  36° F
13° C | 2° C

Off to attend CTIA in Orlando

I'm off to attend the CTIA conference in Orlando Florida.  Unlike our fairly broad exhibit at VON, CTIA is a very focused show for NMS — focused on our applications for mobile operators.  As a result, our primary presence is two meeting rooms, which our sales and business development folks have booked up for pre-arranged meetings.

We do have one exhibit, in the TI booth ( Hall B1, Booth 2335), where we're showing our MyCommunity video sharing client and our IMS client software, which happen to run on a TI OMAP processor (among others).  Our video sharing client is part of a GSMA-compliant, “see-what-I-see” application that allows people to share video in real-time while maintaining an existing voice call.  The user is able to switch the video share feature on and off during a call and our application supports pause and resume, as well as store and forward when it front ends our Mobile Publishing capability.

If you will be at CTIA and want to meet, email me (rbt@nmss.com) or call me (+1 617 285 0433).  I have a lot of commitments, but not 100 %.

VON: Cook's BOF - small, but fascinating

Corrected Javad Boroumand 27 March 2007 - rbt

Wednesday afternoon, in the 'VON Theatre' on the show floor, Gordon Cook ran a session entitled Special Cook Report BOF: What does it mean to be an Internet Company? with Javad Boroumand from Cisco, Roxanne Googin, Publisher, High Tech Observer and John Waclawsky, Chief Software Architect, Motorola.

It was relatively small, in a noisy location and didn't answer the question posed, but it was the most interesting session I attended, in part because of a 20 minute discussion with Roxanne and Gordon afterwards.

Javad spoke first explaining what National LambdaRail is, and CAIDA's Commons Project.  The key difference between National LambdaRail (NLR) and Internet2 is that NLR owns their own dark fiber whereas Internet2 is paying for backbone services. This gives NLR enormous flexibility in trying new technology at layers one and two, i.e. below IP.  The Commons project is an attempt to combine the NLR backbone with community and municipal networks that are willing to participate in CAIDA measurement programs, thus getting low level data on Internet performance that supports basic research and lower costs for muni networks.

John went second, speaking about the evolution of edge devices in an open network.  I've heard John speak on this subject and I've talked to him in the past (most recently at F2C), so this was interesting, but not new to me.

Last up, before open discussion, was Roxanne with the financial picture, in part based on her 'Paradox of the Best Network,' i.e. competitive IP networks are not a good investment (capital repellent, in her words) but monopolies (or duopolies) won't give us the broadband access we want and need for economic growth. Unfortunately, she ended by posing the problem but not suggesting a solution or giving any call to action - thus my comments during the BOF and in our discussion afterward.

Responding to questions, Roxanne made it clear she was advocating unfetter municipal experimentation by any of the 22,000 municipalities in the US and/or interested community groups.  I couldn't agree more.  Yes, there will be a lot of mistakes, but to the extent we foster widespread experimentation, workable models will emerge.  Unfortunately, municipalities in many states have been slowed or completely blocked by state legislation and/or state and national regulation, mostly the result of highly effective lobbying efforts by incumbent operators (ILEC and CableCos).

I was struck by the combination of NLR purchasing their own dark fiber and Roxanne's advocacy for municipal experimentation, but I didn't get to push my thoughts until our post session discussion.  My points:

• It takes decades to make fundamental changes in laws or regulatory regimes.
• The right-of-way in front of my home or business is the fundamental access bottleneck.  Conduits and poles in that right-of-way have useful lives of 30-100 years.  Dark fiber has a useful life of 20-30 years or more.  All these align with legal and regulatory timeframes.
• Anything electronic (to light that fiber) is functionally obsolete within 2-3 years.

This suggests the best focus for municipal activities is point-to-point (home run) dark fiber from each business and residence to a central aggregation point where enough other fibers come together that  multiple competitive ISPs (and other service providers) are attracted. Then individuals get to pick which ISP they want to light their fiber.

Of course while my idea of what a municipality should do is right :-), it would be a terrible idea to impose it, nationally or otherwise.  Roxanne is completely correct that we need to give our 22K municipalities permission to do whatever they want and then see what emerges.

VON: more on AT&T's new network plan

Yesterday I posted a gut reaction to Siroos Afshar's talk on AT&T's new network plans.  Looking at the rest of my notes and surfing the (real) Internet today, I find there are zero hits for 'Common Architecture for Real-Time   Services' or 'AT&T CARTS' i.e. the name and acronym he used for their planned network.  So public presentation of CARTS must be relatively new!

Indeed, inquiry among some friends suggests there is a 180-page specification being circulated to major equipment providers under NDA.  I haven't seen it, so I can't give first party confirmation.  Also, while many VON presentations are available to registered conference attendees here, Afshar's is not.  Perhaps the little additional information in this post will be of use to someone.

CARTS seeks to decouple services from the various access networks and position their middleware to handle service logic, for all their services, using network databases of user preferences (including complete description of user devices) and user availability (presence).  His point about IMS was that it handled part of their requirements (centered on connection control) but was incomplete for AT&T's purposes.  He had a slide with a list of all the extra capabilities they needed, beyond IMS.  I wish I had transcribed that one (or photographed it), but no such luck.  I'll keep checking the PulverMedia site in case his presentation appears, but since it was on a Pulver server at the show yesterday and it's not already available to attendees, I'm not hopeful.

VON: Tony Bates of Cisco promotes more intellegence in the network

Listening to Siroos Afshar talk this morning makes me think of yesterday’s talk by Tony Bates.  I took some notes at that time, which I’ll include below.  While much more broadly focused than Siroos, Tony also promotes intelligence in the network — makes sense given much of Cisco’s revenue comes from the likes of AT&T. 

When pressed by Brad Templeton during Q&A, about the focus on intelligence into the network, Tony agrees the more distributed you are, the better you can scale.  But then he goes on to discuss his personal experiences at MCI(?) where it appears he needed MPLS to manage his IP core network.  [Note to self:  should write a post on using MPLS to manage IP networks, why it’s needed and how it differs from DiffServ or IMS approaches to QoS. ]

Notes on Tony Bates’s talk at Spring VON

Projects household requirements by 2010 — 1x HDTV + 1x SDTV + 2x PVRs + 1x VoIP phone + 1 HS Data (20–50 Mbps)

Assumes switched video (unicast) not broadcast…,  assumes triple-play drives ARPU and thus drives investment (some cable companies are getting $200+ per month because of additional services PPV etc.), expects most people’s usage to still be asymmetric…

Tony’s view of the evolution of TV (beyond analog broadcast):  1. 800 channels and nothing on.  2.  DVDs let you get what you want at better quality.  3) HD & DVRs fix quality and convenience.  4.  Internet-based delivery (more of what I want when I want it;  UGC;  users sync there watching experiences so they can IM about it)

Path to NGN is clear, driven by HDTV and IPTV — affects complete architecture.

1 Mbps to 10GE access in 2010 time frame.  Wants IT class services for managing child access.  Wants differential services. 

Contrasts Google with AT&T, BT, NTT but claims they have the same issues.

• ARPU ($ per search)
• Capex per user
• Cost of user acquisition
• Opex per user
• % churn

Note, he doesn’t mention the dramatically lower costs that Google has for acquisition and for opex per user…

Service providers should charge for QoS and compete on performance.  After all, Google positions advertisers on the search page (sponsored links and their position) and competes on performance.

For Internet access, QoS is needed to provide high bandwidth, high priority access to 20–30 apps including advanced security and policy.

Implies we need service enablement (service control) going well beyond IMS — need Identity, Policy & Billing in the service layer and an intelligent edge with a multiservice core in the network layer.  Calls this the IP NGN Architecture which starts with policy management and security management.  DPI, SBC, NAT, Security, Video acceleration, subscriber management…  Claims this is required to delver consumer services…

Pushes network convergence on IP-MPLS over Ethernet;  with QoS everywhere, virtualization, …

Also comments about many different edges.  CableCo’s view set top boxes as part of their network.

VON: Siroos Afshar on AT&T's view of IMS

This talk is the best example I’ve seen yet of the total disconnect between the “Internet” crowd and today’s communications operators!

The opening session at Spring VON this morning was “Communications Networks of the Future and the Role of IMS” by Siroos Afshar, Network Architect, AT&T.  Siroos provided a view completely at odds with any of the Internet folk I know.  Indeed, he started by warning that by ‘network’ he does not mean the ‘Internet’ but rather the network of an operator who is offering services.

He said his first diagram was so high level there should be no controversy, and indeed, it has users, user devices, access technology, service middleware and service.  And yet it doesn’t mention “Internet Access” as a service I might want!!!  He does have a circle labeled “Your App.”  Later he says the Internet is just another access technology to reach his Network.

In fact, it appears in later diagrams that his 'Internet access' means Cable or DSL networks that reach his middleware, not the ability to send IP packets to any other public IP address in the world.  His functional units diagram includes “Peering with other networks” but only talks about IMS and VoIP peering, not IP transit.  This is incredible!  The words that go with this diagram are focused on services delivered by AT&T, not including access to what I know as the Internet.

IMS facts of interest (at least to me): 

• He’s focused on IMS release 7 which makes sense, as release 5 was incomplete and probably would never have worked. Also IMS release 7 is the first version that actually merges the work of TISPAN with that of 3GPP.
• He recognizes that IMS only handles connection control and gives a large list (which I wasn’t able to copy in time) of other capabilities that AT&T requires.  At a minimum, he calls out service creation environments as a big issue and, even larger, the operations, management and billing infrastructure which is needed beyond IMS.

The second question in the Q&A asked, “what if I want a service from somewhere else on the Internet?”  His answer, “If you want to access other services elsewhere on the Internet, that’s fine.  I was only talking about how AT&T plans to deliver AT&T services.”

Fair enough, but it was a surreal experience to hear this particular talk at VON.

 

VON: Video Conferencing: Now or Never?

One of the speakers at Spring VON this morning was Zohar Zisapel, Chairman of the Board of RAD Datacom talking about video conferencing.  Since NMS Communications is heavily involved in mobile video and we sometimes see RADVision as a competitor, I had to attend.  Also I see video conferencing as the least important of the many uses of video, so I was curious if he was still wedded to conventional video conferencing.  Apparently yes ...

So what were his points?  Early in the presentation he admitted “Traditional room meeting video conferencing is a mediocre compromise.”  He discussed telepresence and admitted that, while it was a bit better, it was extremely expensive.  And at one point point he said "voice is the main event, but video helps..."

He also had a side rave on voice quality, asking "why don't 3G operators use their new networks to improve the quality of voice?"  I couldn't agree more.

But having said all that, he went on to claim that mobile video conferencing (i.e. two-way video conversation) was going to be important — the "limitations," i.e. price, bandwidth, complexity, proliferation of standards, were fading away.

He had only a passing allusion to YouTube and user created content, and no focus on the one form of live video that seems to matter to most people.  I refer of course to video sharing — see-what-I-see video using two-way audio and one-way video.  This is the most popular use for mobile video telephony.  Whether there is a two-way video stream or not, what counts is a one-way video stream from someone actively wielding a camera on behalf of one or more observers — "Look mom, I'm climbing Mt. Fuji" or "Look Grandma, Susie's starting to walk."  If it's not viewed live, we call it user created content.  Either way, this is the big opportunity in mobile video.

Even with mobile camera phones, conventional "video conferencing" is still a mediocre compromise and likely to remain so until such time as we get 3D holographic virtual presence (perhaps 2015? or 2018?).  :-)

Top ten emerging markets by mobile subscriber growth

An interesting article from Light Reading begins, “Developing countries now account for more than half of mobile subscriber growth worldwide, with the top 10 adding around 285 million new subscribers in 2006 alone.”

As this is an area where I’ve accumulated quite a bit of data, I thought I’d augment their table…

Country	2006 subscriber additions (millions)	Total subscribers Dec 2006 (millions)	Increase over Dec 2005	Teledensity (/100 pop.) Dec 2006	Population (millions) July 2006	Median age
India	73.6	149.5	97%	13.6	1,095.4	24.9
China	67.7	461.1	17%	35.1	1,314.0	32.7
Pakistan	28.9	48.3	147%	29.1	165.8	19.8
Russia	26.1	151.9	21%	106.3	142.9	38.4
Indonesia	23.0	65.0	38%	26.5	245.5	26.8
Ukraine	19.0	49.2	63%	105.4	46.7	39.2
Brazil	13.7	99.9	16%	53.1	188.1	28.2
Bangladesh	12.0	21.8	135%	14.8	147.4	22.2
Nigeria	11.4	30.0	38%	22.7	131.9	18.7
Vietnam	10.0	22.5	80%	26.7	84.4	25.9
US	23.0	216.7	14%	72.6	298.4	36.5
EU	52.9	486.8	12%	98.7	493.0	38.5

The first three columns are from Light Reading, at least for the 10 emerging markets.  Teledensity is computed from the population data (from the CIA World Factbook).  The US & EU numbers are from Yankee Group, unfortunately for the 12 months ending Q306, not Dec 06, as that’s what I have on my laptop as I write this.

Of course India and China are way ahead — not a total surprise given their populations — followed by the EU — not a surprise given it’s population.  But next is Pakistan(!) — 29 million new subscribers in a population of only 166 million — ahead of Russia, Indonesia and the US.  Given new mobile phones do more for the economic growth of emerging countries than practically any other investment, the rest of the world would do well to look at what’s gone on in Pakistan.

Bangladesh has been paying attention, albeit in fits and starts.  A 2005 tax on SIM cards reduced mobile subscriber growth rates, but after extensive protest, it was substantially reduced in August 2006.  Meanwhile other deregulation and fairly open market has attracted major foreign investments over the past few years.  There are now five mobile operators in Bangladesh with a sixth (Warid Telecom) due to launch service in the near future.

Vietnam’s another country that’s seen the light.  Since regulations were relaxed in 2005, mobile investment and mobile subscribers have soared.  Vietnam had four mobile operators for most of 2006 and is currently headed towards seven mobile operators.  Expect rampant subscriber growth for 2007!

 

At VON Next Week

Next week I'll be attending and speaking at Spring VON 2007 in San Jose.  If you'd like to connect, send me an email (rbt@nmss.com) or IM me on Skype (brough).  I'm arriving Monday afternoon and leaving Thursday mid-day.

I'm speaking on Tuesday afternoon (3:15pm) on the panel, Lessons Learned in Implementing IMS.  While our implementation is not complete, I'll be talking about what we've learned so far as we adapt our MyCaller Ringback Tone service to fit an IMS environment.

NMS is also exhibiting at VON (Booth 1019) focusing on our developer products including:

• Vision Media Gateway with Signaling, a complete, scalable, highly available solution for connecting IP-based value-added services to legacy PSTN networks, just being introduced at VON,
• Vision VoiceXML Server, unique as an integrated video and voice server for rapid deployment of IVR and IVVR systems,
• AdvancedTCA media solutions, i.e. our MG 7000A media blade.

In addition, we have a pod devoted to video development platforms as video is a big part of this show and NMS has a significant presence in mobile video.  Among other things, I'm hoping we'll be able to approximate the Mobile TV demo we routinely run in Europe and Asia based on the live service on the Hong Kong CSL network.  In Barcelona last month we were directly calling a backdoor number in Hong Kong (I still haven't seen the roaming bills for that week!).  Unfortunately in the US, the only 3GSM, i.e. UMTS, network is Cingular's and, so far, Cingular is the first and only 3GSM network in the world to roll out 3G without support for 3G-324M mobile video telephony.  So if we get the demo running in time, it will be running on mobile handsets using WiFi.

It's sad that the US is so far behind the rest of the world in mobile features, especially as we lead in minutes of use (i.e. talking)!

See you in San Jose next week.

F2C: Susan Crawford

I wrote about one of Susan Crawford's papers last week, so it's a pleasure to see her live.  David Isenberg has called this panel the once and future FCC chairman.  Since Reed Hunt was an FCC chairman, that's a strong endorsement for Susan.  Susan went first with a presentation entitled Journey, discussing how her thinking has evolved over the past two years.  Key thoughts

• Internet is not a supply chain
• Communications regulation should be about optimizing human communications
• "Deregulation" today is about increasing incumbents profits

Discussion today is short sighted.  Need long term view:

• Economic growth comes from new ideas
• The Internet - a source of new ideas; group forming attributes

Pictures will help -- shows some interesting graphs, especially ones suggesting that the US economy is falling behind China and India.  If the rate of economic growth in the US were increased by 0.5% over the next 45 years, it would solve all problems with baby boomers retirement.

Policy outcomes:

• Emphasis on universal service
• Big issues of competition (lack thereof)
• Divestiture?

What to do:

• We need pictures to make our argument (control freaks & law enforcement are supported by movies like Sandra Bullock in The Net)
• Serious leadership gap need people who are well-informed, deeply committed, visionary, able to convey hope)

F2C: Adam Thierer on media regulation

Adam D. Thierer, Senior Fellow and Director, Center for Digital Media Freedom is giving a talk on regulation of "speech" and expression in the media.

Scarcity is no longer a rational for regulating speech in the media.  Even the FCC has acknowledged this in a March 2005 paper. Yet there are numerous bills in the works to regulate on-line speech.

His particular issues are data retention (mandates that ISPs keep all data about customers and their activities for several years) and age verification (mandates that specific sites, probably including MySpace, must have an age verification process).  A thirty page paper is due out shortly...  I guess I need to check back in a month or so.

F2C: Swire with qualifications on Benkler's Wealth of Networks

Peter Swire, Professor of Law at the Ohio State, gave a presentation "Consumers as Producers" attempting to take a more economics-based view of the ideas in Benkler's Wealth of Networks.

His critiques:

Shift to non-market is not proven, likely far overstated

• Open source is shifting to market-based companies
• Social and hobbyist evolve to market functions (Jon Postel to ICANN; Web 2.0 - target of ads & PR; and the Internet itself has evolved from non-commercial to commercial)
• Economist would agree with the decline in cost of producing information goods and services, but that just shifts the supply curve way out -- we will get more production from factory owners or their equivalent. This may or may not
• Occam's razor.  Markets will likely explain it all in time, not requiring a radical shift to non-market relationships.

Pragmatic reasons to deploy the economics-based approach to consumers & producers

• Need to persuade policymakers and business people to achieve our broadband Internet goals.

Benkler's rebuttal:  Market production is considered desirable policy.  Is your claim the result of our policies?

My take:  Since Paul Romer, economics now takes ideas into account (as opposed to treating them as external (exogenous). I'm not an economist, but I suspect these two should put their arguments in the context of new economic theory, rather than markets as understood by Adam Smith.

F2C : Day 2 demos

Yuval Klein of Plymedia gave a cool demo.  Plymedia allows you to annotate any video on the net.  It works by providing an overlay, not by modifying the original video.  In that sense it's rather like the Chinese service Mojiti.  I assume there are others doing this as well, but I can't guess which will succeed.  In any event, the Plymedia demo is very cute. ),  It's based on Flash.

F2C: CEO of Tropos introduces FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein

Ron Sege, CEO of Tropos Networks (which co-sponsors F2C), made comments on the customer support problems that some communities are having when they install municipal broadband and chose to run it themselves.  It was brief and there was no specific suggestions (like running open networks and letting ISPs provide the service).  He then went on to introduce the FCC Commissioner.

Commissioner Adelstein started with praise for the e-Rate program and what a success it's been -- strange as it's a program that forces schools to buy services from the ILECs and forbids them from buying their own infrastructure!

He then went on to talk about his program for broadband in the US which included a laundry list of subjects like:

• Increase the speeds that are defined as broadband (agrees that 200 Kbps is ludicrous)
• Better data on what services are actually being deployed - finer grain than per ZIP code
• Promote serious competition - acknowledges duopoly is not competition
• Tax breaks like revised depreciation, other government programs (many mentioned...)
• Creative and flexible in our approaches
• Seems to be promoting Universal Services programs (a proven bad idea)
• Worried about delivery of video services. New entrants need access to programming and current rules are due to expire.

Looks for wireless to be a third pipe into the home.  Talks about spectrum reform, but it's not clear what he's advocating.  "Do whatever we can to promote access to new or unused spectrum." 

• Big focus on getting owners of 2.5 GHz spectrum to make use of their spectrum.
• Touting his review of the AT&T - Bellsouth merger and his merger considerations (like their divestiture of 2.5 GHz spectrum).
• Creative management of 3650 MHz spectrum (licensed but not exclusive).
• and so on and so on...

Says he wants to make unused spectrum available but didn't mention cognitive radio until I asked him about it as a question.  He referred me the FCC website here.

All and all, it's frustrating to realize what a gap there is between current laws and policy, and what might make sense in the Internet age.

F2C: Community Networks panel

Good stuff from multiple people at this session of Freedom to Connect.

Sascha Meinrath had a good illustration of the middle mile problem.  He quoted prices for 1 Mbps of "IP Transit," i.e. 1 Mbps continuous symmetric traffic, in various cities: San Francisco $10/month; Chicago $80/month (that surprises me); and then two locations downstate, the second of which was Greenough(?), IL where the price was several hundred dollars.

Becca Vargo Daggett made an appeal for local decisions and local management.  One think I picked up was her desire for user control of their local fiber, whether it's owned by local public bodies or local fiber condominiums.

Jim Snider made a strong appeal for spectrum reform, following up an excellent question he had put to Governor Douglas yesterday.  Why are more people complaining about the Federal restrictions on the use of completely empty spectrum.  Yesterday, Governor Douglas basically said it was too hard an issue for the Governor's council to tackle.  Jim pressed the point that federal restrictions on spectrum that is completely unused in rural areas is a major impediment to local broadband rollout.

Becca came back to press that federal policy to prevent states from preempting localities and federal policy to free up spectrum, but any other federal policy is likely to screw up local activities and needs to be avoided at all costs.

In the Q&A, it became clear that one can't talk about Mbps of IP Transit because even in a sophisticated audience like this, there is confusion with consumer access bandwidth, i.e. confusion between statistically multiplexed access feeds (none of which is using X Mbps continuously) and wholesale continuous Mbps at a network exchange.  Clearly Mbps for IP Transit may be precise, but it is misunderstood by the majority.  No one had another name to suggest.

F2C: Freedom to Connect Day One Highlights

Here are some notes from the first day at F2C: Freedom to Connect.  I was unable to blog live as the network in the conference facility was having problems providing HTTP access.

First up was Tom Evslin introducing Vermont Governor Jim Douglas.  Since I read Tom’s blog, I was aware of the e-State initiative they are discussing in VT, so there wasn’t a lot new to me.  But one comment struck me about investing government money (long term bonds) in infrastructure that had long term value (towers, conduits, fiber) while leaving electronics to private investment.  I don’t expect to see politicians who get that level of detail.

Yochai Benkler gave an excellent talk on the Wealth of Networks but it was almost exactly the talk I heard at Harvard last April, so no new insights.  I still enjoyed it!

This was followed by a panel with Benkler, kc claffy, Mark Cooper and Elliot Maxwell.  I was particularly struck by kc claffy’s comments on the fact that we have little (she would say no) measurement data on what’s really happening within the Internet (in terms of traffic, routing protocol behavior, etc.).  This is a subject I’m interested in as I’ve read a lot of Tom Vest’s publications.  I’m not sure what she was advocating as a solution and I didn’t find out more in the brief discussion we had after her talk.

Just after lunch, there were demos and talks by David Smith on Qwaq, about their virtual world has evolved from Croquet.  It links a series of personal spaces between machines using peer-to-peer technology.  This talk and demo was followed by Cory Ondrejka of Second Life who had tons of interesting information. I don’t have good note, but if you get an opportunity to hear him speak, try to attend.

The next panel was on Enabling Technologies and included James Salter of Atlantic Engineering.  One interesting comment he made was reference to a 100% FTTH build in a southeastern US city which cost $1250 per home.  Who says this stuff has to be expensive.  I have a friend who’s town put in sewers and charged individual homeowners $13,000 each to connect.  Salter was followed by John Waclawsky of Motorola.  John’s presentation has a certain professional glitz but his sub-text was that the edge will win and core can be relevant to the extent it supports letting people at the edge do what they want.

The final enabling technology panelist was Sanjit Biswas of Meraki.net, a spin-out of MIT’s Roofnet project.  They have a $50 wireless mesh router that’s been on the market for nine months.  It’s now in use around the world.  A typical mesh has one to N Internet feeds.  They are experimenting with organic, community evolved networks by giving communities a few free DSL connections and a bunch of routers and watching what happens. There are case studies here.

The panel on Network Enabled Government had several interesting points, especially the comment from Fred Hassani.

   Rep. Steve Urquhart (Politicopia) Utah congressman (from Zion National Park area). Politics is not neutral – puts up wiki pages (per issue) with a very short “neutral” statement of the issue followed by Pro and Con sections.  People seem to respect these different parts of the pages.

   Fred Hassani (Intellipedia) Read disclaimer, then talked about intelligence communities use of Wikis, JWICS (Top Secret), SIPRNet (Secret), Intelink-U (Intranet) all launched with no management or plan.  9000 users on top secret and 300 edits per day – when small plane crashed in Manhattan there were 9 agencies that made 80 edits to a newly created page within 2 hrs.  National Intelligence estimate on infectious and chronic disease mercyhurst project as a college class.  Good understanding that you draw people in by providing something that is useful to them (perhaps to organize their data).

    Micah Sifry (Sunlight Foundation) putting up pages on things like congresspedia with public info but in a fashion that encourages individuals to add information or do research or do manual work to

This panel was moderated by Allison Fine who is the author of Momentum.  I got an autographed copy afterwards, but haven’t read it yet.

The final two speakers of the day each got a bit of a hard time from the audience.  First up was Sean Moss-Pultz of OpenMoko.  His points:  We shouldn’t be trying to recreate the PC on the phone.  OpenMoko has an open source mobile handset (a GSM phone).  Unfortunately, he spent his first ten minutes setting the stage saying things that everyone already knew and getting some of the specifics wrong!  E.G, his phones timeline was wrong (GSM in 1980).  He was railing against the US practice of operators controlling handset sales, but he didn’t seem to have done the research on what is possible.  Internet timeline also full of bogus dates (Skype in 1999);  never mentioned an end-user benefit.  I felt sorry for him.  He should have attended in the morning to understand the crowd he was addressing.

Sean was followed by Jeff Chester on Digital Destiny — It was a strong anti-advertising pitch, but there was extensive questioning of his position on the back channel.  I even dropped in a comment myself based on something I’d read from Douglas Galbi but which I paraphrased as I didn’t have web access to be sure of the actual quote and attribution.  It was this from Wikipedia

Advertising spending relative to GDP has changed little across large changes in media. For example, in the U.S. in 1925, the main advertising media were newspapers, magazines, signs on streetcars, and outdoor posters. Advertising spending as a share of GDP was about 2.6%. By 1998, television and radio had become major advertising media. Nonetheless, advertising spending as a share of GDP was slightly lower -- about 2.4%.

summarizing Galbi’s points here.

The day ended with some book pitches by Allison Fine, Jochai Benkler and Reed Hunt (whose book In China’s Shadow is very concerned about China’s impact on the US economy.  At first is sounded like he was advocating some kind of protectionism, but then it became clear he was advocating a broadband economy and a resurgence of entrepreneurship.

Nice reception (and book signing) at a nearby restaurant.  Plenty of interesting people to talk to!  Well worth the trip.

 

Attending F2C in Washington DC on Monday

Next Monday and Tuesday (March 5th and 6th) I'll be at David Isenberg's Freedom to Connect conference in Silver Springs Maryland.  There are a ton of interesting people on the schedule and, based on last year's conference, there will be plenty of interesting people in the audience as well. 

This is a US-centric conference, driven by frustrations with US policy and the fact that, while US broadband adoption has been fast (even more rapid than cell phone adoption), the US is still falling behind other nations in broadband connections, connection speeds and costs.

I'll try to blog interesting things as we go, but likely there will be others more proficient at blogging a conference live.

Additional invitations for Joost beta

I have another two invitations to join the Joost (formerly The Venice Project) peer-to-peer TV beta program.  Send me an email (rbt@nmss.com) if you'd like one.  Of course there are plenty of other P2P TV projects in development and several in China that have been in operation for more than two years but I haven't the time to really investigate the field.  [ I have enjoyed the Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons on Joost.  :-) ]

Excellent perspective on FTTH from French regulator

Gabrielle Gauthey, membre du collège de l’Autorité de Régulation des Télécommunications, i.e. member of the board of the French Telecoms regulator, makes some excellent comments in this interview pointed out by Dirk van der Woude and translated, with comments, by Bill St. Arnaud.  I don’t normally just repost other material, but this is highly relevant to my most recent comments.

Passive infrastructure accounts for the bulk - 70% to 80% - of network deployment costs. Civil engineering costs are particularly onerous - more than 50% in urban areas... <…>

Sharing passive infrastructure appears to be the key to removing entry barriers and favoring an economical deployment of high-speed broadband.  <…>

In one model, the operator is vertically integrated and installs a closed network, or a slightly open network with only resale offers. This is the preferred model of incumbents in the US.

In another model, long-term investors, which are associated if necessary with local governments, adopt an open-access model from the start, selling passive network capacity without necessarily becoming themselves operators. The passive network is made available to operators that want to sell very high-speed services. These operators install their active equipment upstream just as operators did with unbundled copper networks to deliver DSL services. This model is used in northern Europe and also by some local government projects in the US.

If only there were politicians and/or regulators in the US who understood things to this extent and were willing to speak out.

 

Wonderful paper by Prof. Susan Crawford on Internet/Communications Law

On the plane to Mexico I had a chance to catch up on some reading, including Susan Crawford’s most recent paper, The Internet and the Project of Communications Law. ~50 pages, but excellent!, well worth the time.

Part one is a comprehensive history of Internet related communications law and scholarship, with footnotes that include all the interesting papers and commentary I’m aware of, plus many more I now need to pursue.

In part two she argues that current communications law theory and discussions fail to capture what is really valuable about the Internet.  To explain that real value, she first provides a tutorial on Paul Romer and economic growth theory, thus hitting on another interest of mine.  :-)

Romer gets credit for bringing ideas into mainstream economic models.  Historically, economists focused on physical goods, leaving ideas as exogenous factors, i.e. fudge factors outside their models.  But ideas are the root of economic growth and need to be incorporated into economic models.  Importantly, ideas are fundamentally different from physical goods, as ideas can be used by multiple people without reducing their value.  It’s the difference between bits and atoms.  Bits can be copied, almost for free while atoms can only be moved around, combined and separated, bought and sold.  Yet the real value of my laptop is the information on its hard drive (the ideas, held as bits), not the physical device itself.

Susan’s central point is

given that economic growth is created by the emergence of new ideas, the proper role of government should be to support the diversity of complex social interactions online.  Scholars who argue about wealth effects on telecommunications providers of particular regimes are focused on a small subset of the story.  It is the large and diverse online world of interactions and ideas out there that matters …

What matters are communications themselves and the increasingly diverse and valuable ideas they produce.

I love this.  In my view, the value of the Internet is in (eventually) allowing connections between the 6.5 billion minds on the planet.  In this, the Internet is the fourth notable breakthrough in the history of mankind — the earlier ones being speech, writing and printing.  But I’ve only bandied around grand statements without articulating the justification for those statements.  Thank you Professor Crawford!

Where my views diverge, at least a bit, is in some of her “implications for policy.” 

Universal Service.  We agree that universal service fund (USF) in the US is a completely broken program that is pursuing the wrong goal (telephone service rather than Internet connectivity).  But I can’t agree that replacing today’s USF with an Internet focused USF would work. 

• Globally, there are many different USF efforts attempting to bring telephone service to remote areas.  With the possible exception of Uganda, they are utter failures that are delaying the advent of telephone service, not fostering it.  Without understanding these failures it’s hard to see using USF ideas to foster Internet connectivity.
• USF includes the word “service” but what we seek is connectivity.  I could see a government program to subsidize rural co-ops purchasing and operating infrastructure that connects them to a legitimate Internet exchange (one where 3 or more Internet “service” providers are present).  But any program where government money goes for the purchase of services is just a gift to the incumbents.

Divestiture.  We agree on the need, but perhaps not on exactly what is to be divested.  In the end, I don’t want a government run, or regulated, IP service.  IP (and the routers and electronics it’s built upon) is too complex and too rapidly evolving for any government program. To explain my rational, it’s necessary to back up a few steps…  Consider the service life of various elements. 

• Dark fiber (and dark copper and dark coax), 20+ years.  Poles and conduits, 20–50 years.  Electromagnetic spectrum, decades to indefinite.  Rights-of-way, centuries to indefinite.
• Electronics to light fiber, modems to power copper or coax, and radios to light portions of the spectrum — all become obsolete within 2–5 years.

Now consider the life of telecom legislation.

• Roughly 15 years between major telecom laws
• Similar gaps between major FCC rulings (Computer I, II, …).
• Significant course change take longer — Ronald Coase and Leo Herzel proposed spectrum auctions in 1959 leading to the first auction in 1994 (35 years).

The fundamental reason we’re having any of this discussion is that there’s limited right-of-way for first mile access. Given the useful life of conduits and poles and of dark fiber (or dark copper or dark coax), it’s practical to manage these via government processes.  But government involvement in anything above the dark fiber should be viewed as tactical, not strategic.  I spoke of this at Spring VON a year ago.

Stockholm is an example of government processes working extremely well.  The government has funded a company, Stokab AB, to install dark fiber.  Stokab is restricted from offering any services above dark fiber, they are allowed to use long term (20 year?) accounting, and they have to break even.  Within those constraints they endevour to install at much fiber as possible and offer that fiber equally to all comers.  The result has been vibrant competition above the dark fiber layer.  No, Stockholm does not yet have universal, very high speed (100 Mbps or more) access, but they are so far ahead of New York City that there is no comparison.

I don’t have pat answers, but there are plenty of international examples to study.  Bill St. Arnaud has published extensively, runs an email list and blogs on dark fiber.  When he ran Stokab, Anders Comstedt spoke widely (ppt) on the subject.

Network Neutrality.  Here we have less agreement.  I’d really like to see a national strategy to get as much of the population on dark fiber as possible.  If that fiber is user-owned (perhaps through condominiums) or owned by local governments or co-ops, but there is competition above, then network neutrality is moot.  In places where the long term strategy hasn’t been or can’t be realized, then some concept of network neutrality or common carriage is essential.  What about tying it to significant market power (SMP) a current EU focus for regulation?  Again, I don’t have a pat answer, but I know the current network neutrality discussion is distracting us from our strategic interests, i.e. user-owned or controlled fiber, with rampant competition at all higher levels.