Communications

Jim Crowe (Level 3) on Why Net Neutrality Legislation is a Bad Idea

Thanks to Gordon Cook for pointing out remarks Jim Crowe, CEO of Level 3, made at Level 3's Analyst Conference in New York City on March 14th of this year.  If you want to listen, it's under "Current Issues, Summary and Q&A" at the end of this audio presentation.  Here's my transcription:

... the reason that I’m effectively addressing the issue today, is a trend over the last year to propose federal legislation mandating that the FCC define, arbitrate and police net neutrality, and this we at Level 3 do believe is a very bad idea.

Those who own content generally have been pretty innovative and have effectively competed with the broadband access providers.  They have a broad range of content that is desired on the part of customers. They’ve done a good job of offering that content.

However it is the traditional Telcos, though, that really have the power if it moves to the FCC.  The’ve got 100 years of experience.  I've participated in a reasonable fraction of that period, competing with the RBOCs, and I can tell you, they have plenty of lawyers, plenty of lobbyists, and if you want to move to their turf, you want to give them an unfair advantage, let the FCC start to arbitrate net neutrality.

Far better to let the market sort through the issue, far better to let customer preference decide the issue. Today it’s becoming increasingly clear that it is socially unacceptable to differentiate between packets; let’s hope that remains the case. But if not, far better to have recourse to the anti-trust courts than to the FCC.

I'm not as confident about anti-trust, but I do expect public outcry should RBOCs begin packet discrimination on their Internet access services.

What to advocate?  David Isenberg, in an articulate pro-net neutrality letter, ends by suggesting structural separation.  Now that's an interesting idea — especially if separation takes into account the timescales represented in this diagram, with common carrier regulation applied to the lower layer and no telecom regulation applied above.

IMS deployments piecemeal until Release 7

Recently I was interviewed by James Tulloch of IMS Vision who proceeded to write this article quoting me extensively.  Very interesting (of course!).

My earlier comments on IMS realities are here and here.

Dopplr - I have 3 invitations

I travel a fair bit and, on occasion, run into people I know in airport lounges.  But how much easier if my travel plans were easily visible to friends, business associates, and bloggers & email correspondents I'd like to meet?  That's the promise of Dopplr and, now, my request to join has been granted, by Chris Herot.  Thank you Chris! 

Dopplr's premise is simple, plug in your travel schedule and a list of people you'd be happy to meet.  Get back info on who will overlap with you, when and where.  There are obvious issues of privacy, but they seem well handled and, anyway, I'm fairly promiscuous with my travel schedule.

The bigger issue is critical mass.  I joined yesterday and my internal ID is 993.  Chris Herot is 180, Dave Wienberger is 60.  I recognize Dopplr members who are well known in social networking circles, but fewer from the telecom blogsphere or other circles I travel in.

So to help build critical mass, especially among people I'm interested in meeting, I have three invitations to give out.  Readers of my blog sound like good candidates, so I offer these invitations to the first three people to write a comment below.

The Black Swan and the Fat Tail

I saw a Guardian Weekly review of The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb which mentioned Taleb's reverence of Mandelbrot, thus leading me to purchase and read the book — ok, I read some, I skimmed some.  :)

The central thesis is that wildly unexpected events occur, in finance and elsewhere, more frequently than suggested by a Gaussian or Normal distribution.  In fact markets and many other phenomena are better described by power laws.  Both Gaussian and Power Law distributions have long tails, but the tail of a power law distribution is fatter further out.  That's what makes sales of books and other media on "the long tail" so profitable for Amazon.

Here's a quote from the author:

 The Black Swan is about these unexpected events that end up controlling our lives, the world, the economy, history, everything. Before they happen we consider them close to impossible; after they happen we think that they were predictable and partake of a larger scheme. They are rare, but their impact is monstrous. My main problem is: Why we don't know that these events play such a large role. Why are we blind to them?

It's a book of anecdotes and we've all heard "the plural of anecdote is not data" but while a cute phrase, it's a faulty argument and furthermore there is data for financial markets and long tail markets.  For an accessible version of the mathematics, read the Mandelbrot book I discussed in this post.  But as a book of anecdotes, The Black Swan is a pleasant read and Taleb's primary point is well taken.

Shakespeare's Remix

Under today’s copyright regime, it’s extremely difficult to to build upon prior artistic works.  It was different in Shakespeare’s day.

Recently my wife was browsing an antiquarian bookstore and came across a ten volume set, “The Best of the World’s Classics,” Henry Cabot Lodge, Editor-in-Chief, published by Funk & Wagnalls in 1909.  These are beautiful little hardcover books (sextodecimo or 16mo format), full of wonderful, well, classics! — texts that I would know better if I hadn’t coasted through much of my early education.

From volume 1, page 190, the editor’s footnote 2,

From “The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans Compared together by that Grave, Learned Philosopher and Historiographer Plutarch of Chaeronea,” translated by Sir Thomas North.  North was born about 1535, his translation being first published in 1579.  Written throughout in the best prose of the Elizabethan period, North’s version will always have another and very special interest as the storehouse from which Shakespeare obtained his knowledge of antiquity.  It has been asserted that to this book we really owe the existence of “Julius Caesar,” “Coriolanus,” and “Anthony and Cleopatra.”  In “Coriolanus” whole speeches have be taken bodily from North, while in “Anthony and Cleopatra” North’s diction has been closely followed.

These plays were likely written in 1599-1606, more than two decades after North (1535? - 1601?) published his translation.  In the US, Congress has continually extended copyright terms (eleven times in the past forty years) so, if current US law applied, North’s copyright would have lasted until 1671, long after Shakespeare’s death.  Luckily for Shakespeare, copyrights didn’t emerge until long after his death.

 

Rumor mill — wideband voice on mobile handsets by Christmas

There are a variety of people and at least three companies (Mindspeed, Voice Age & GIPS) here at Communications Developer Conference that are involved with wideband voice codecs of one form or another, and at least one presentation discussed the 2006 Ericsson/ T-Mobile trial I've mentioned before.  So at every opportunity, I've asked people who might have inside knowledge why the 2006 trial hasn't been followed by the launch of mobile handsets with AMR-WB codecs.

While I've heard no good answer, one person who I regard as credible claimed we would see wideband mobile handsets by Christmas this year and at least one operator would be promoting them and supporting them.  He then insisted that he could say no more — NDAs, etc.

It's just a rumor, but after promoting the idea of wideband for more than ten years, I'm desperate enough to grasp at straws!

Packet-based processing -- DSP vendors still don't get it

I arrived at the Communications Developer Conference this afternoon in time to attend a talk by Dr. Huan-Yu Su of Mindspeed Technologies.  His talk had the curious title of Semiconductor Design Solutions for IMS and indeed it touched on multiple subjects and many layers, from IMS service objectives down to the evolution of semi-conductor processes.  But the interesting stuff was DSP related.  Mindspeed makes DSP chips and DSP software, which today might best be characterized as signal processing systems on silicon (SoC).

But, despite Powerpoint bullets about packet-based systems, when Dr. Su showed a timing diagram of how individual DSP cores were able to process multiple algorithms on many channels, he showed a TDM system.  Each media stream got a time slice in a 20 ms scheduling cycle.  This means each incoming flow has to hit a jitter buffer and be queued up for it's slice of the TDM cycle.  When I questioned this, Dr. Su replied that it was a hard problem and so far they had addressed it by shortening the 20 ms scheduling cycle to 5 ms.

None of this is to discredit Dr. Su who is a smart guy and gave an interesting presentation.  I have seen equivalent approaches from Texas Instruments and Freescale Semiconductor.  All of the DSP vendors are driven by the TDM-to-VoIP gateway application where 8 KHz (and 20 ms) operation is the norm and completely acceptable.  No one has addressed low latency packet processing.

It's not that hard — here is the answer!

Scheduling a DSP to handle packets, whose arrival is statistical in nature, with minimum latency while guaranteeing that all work gets done, is a lot like scheduling packet transmission over a fixed capacity link with QoS guarantees.  There was a ton of academic and practical work done on this subject as part of ATM switch development in the 90s.  Much of it is directly applicable to scheduling DSP processing.

Those who are really interested might read Leap Forward Virtual Clock: A New Fair Queuing Scheme with Guaranteed Delay and Throughput Fairness by Suri, Varghese and Chandranmenon in the proceedings of INFOCOM '97. Sixteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. This is not the only relevant paper but it is one I am familiar with in some detail.  Quoting from the abstract:

We describe an efficient fair queuing scheme, Leap Forward Virtual Clock, that provides end-to-end delay bounds similar to WFQ, along with throughput fairness. Our scheme can be implemented with a worst-case time O(log log N) per packet (inclusive of sorting costs), which improves upon all previously known schemes that guarantee delay and throughput fairness similar to WFQ.

At light load, packets are scheduled immediately and experience minimum latency.  Under heavy load, packets are queued but get processed in a time that matches their allocated average arrival rate.  So at heavy processor load, individual flows experience some additional delay but they also have their jitter smoothed out (thus minimizing the required depth of the jitter buffer at the ultimate destination).

Attending Communications Developer Conference this week

I'm leaving for the Communications Developer Conference (formerly VoIP Developers conference) early tomorrow morning and will be at the conference Tuesday afternoon and all day Wednesday.  It's a smaller show but very focused and thus a good venue for our developer platforms business.

On Wednesday morning, 8:30am - 9:15 am, I'll be giving a talk, Voice SMS - Merging VoIP & Mobile to Create A Compelling Service in the Wireless/Mobility track.  It's a subject I've written about before as, among other things, the two largest Voice SMS applications companies, Bubble Motion and Kirusa are both customers of NMS.

Then, on Wednesday afternoon, 4:00pm - 4:45pm, I'll be presenting Connecting Your SIP-Based Hosted Contact Center to the Rest of the World in the SIP Development track.  This is a bit more techie — Connecting IP-based three-tier IT architectures with the relatively monolithic PSTN in diverse parts of the world — SIP & ISUP, SIP & ISDN, high availability issues for SIP proxies and PSTN call routing, and so on...

NMS has Booth 119 (to the left as you enter the exhibit hall), where we'll be featuring our Vision VoiceXML Server and the MG 7000A AdvancedTCA media blade.  We'll also be promoting our ever popular AdvancedTCA Ecosystem poster, but you could get one by mail by registering here.  Tim Cook and Marcello Frederico will be manning the booth.

If you will be at Communications Developer 2007 and want to meet, drop me a line.

Speed: My personal connectivity history

I think of this as my 24 year history of Internet access, except in 1983, I was connecting between home and work with no access to any computer that was "on the Internet."  I used Compuserve for most of the 1980s only getting a permanent connection to the Internet, via world.std.com, in late 1991.

The overall trend is a doubling in speed every 20-21 months, but of course actual data points are highly individualistic.  Here's the raw data.

The junp to cable modem speeds was dramatic but thereafter the cable modem crowd focused on adding subscribers, not better service — seven years without a speed increase!  In my neighborhood, there was no effective competition, as DSL services were never able to match cable modem speeds and RCN, our local cable overbuilder, entered bankrupcy before it reached my block.  All that changed with the advent of Verizon FiOS.  Today, there is access speed competition between Verizon FiOS and both Comcast and RCN cable modem services.  Hopefully I can count on continuing speed increases for some years to come.

Mobile phones & economic growth

It's great to see something I'm interested in, and have written about, picked up by The Economist. 

Of course the question is, why did it take nearly 16 months from the Robert Jensen's presentation and Ajay Shah's write up, until it was picked up by The Economist?

It appears that's how long it's taken for Jensen's study to make it's way from a conference presentation (here are the original slides) to publication in a peer-reviewed journal, i.e. “The Digital Provide: Information (technology), market performance and welfare in the South Indian fisheries sector”, by Robert Jensen, to be published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, August 2007.

Not to boast, but the graphics in my original post beat the text in the Economist article although that text is good:

...starting in 1997 mobile phones were introduced in Kerala. Since coverage spread gradually, this provided an ideal way to gauge the effect of mobile phones on the fishermen's behaviour, the price of fish, and the amount of waste.

As phone coverage spread between 1997 and 2000, fishermen started to buy phones and use them to call coastal markets while still at sea. (The area of coverage reaches 20-25km off the coast.) Instead of selling their fish at beach auctions, the fishermen would call around to find the best price. Dividing the coast into three regions, Mr Jensen found that the proportion of fishermen who ventured beyond their home markets to sell their catches jumped from zero to around 35% as soon as coverage became available in each region. At that point, no fish were wasted and the variation in prices fell dramatically.

Missing from the Economist article were some significant results Jensen provided in his January 2006 talk.  At that time, he concluded by pointing out other impacts, beyond prices and reduced waste 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 and no new funding of existing programs.

Power laws - 63 words account for half of everything said on TV

More specifically, an analysis of word frequencies done on 29,213,800 words, taken from TV and Movie scripts and transcripts that were available on the Internet in February 2006, shows that just 63 words account for 50% of the 29,213,800 words collected.

That's amusing.  What's more interesting is my source, the article A practical model for analyzing long tails by Kalevi Kilkki, Principal Scientist, Nokia Siemens Networks, in the May issue of First Monday.

I'm a fan of Chris Anderson, have read his article, skimmed his book and I have commented on the subject before. Kilkki's article is less anecdotal and more mathematical grounded than Chris Anderson (without being inaccessible).

Plus Kalevi Kilkki's got tons of interesting graphs.  :-)

90% gross margin on FTTH services

Thanks to Benoît Felten for catching an interesting item in Monday's issue of Le Figaro Economie.  Here's Benoît's summary

< In > an article called Orange, Neuf Cegetel et Free cherchent de nouveaux revenus in Le Figaro Economie dated May 7th, 2007, new Free General Manager Maxime Lombardini indicates that FTTH customers will generate a 90% gross margin. This is to be compared with Free's current broadband ARPU of 33 EUR on which they generate a 20 EUR margin (approximately 61%) on fully unbundled customers... < i.e. ADSL customers >.

Coming from an equipment business with 60%-66% gross margins, 90% sounds rather nice to me.  Of course, that margin has to pay for the cost of capital to build the FTTH network, but at least I now understand why it's reasonable to simplify FTTH return-on-capital calculations.  Assuming all revenues are available to pay off the capital costs is not too far from the truth.

Useful life of various elements of FTTH

More Joost invitations available

The last time I posted this message, I had two and later five invitations to give out. I got dozens of requests before I posted a note that they were all gone.  Luca Filigheddu has seen this effect even more than I.

I appear to have received 999 invitations sometime yesterday!  I don't know how long this will last, but I've already sent out more than two dozen invitations to some of the people who responded to my earlier post. 

If you are interested, send me an email at rbt@nmss.com, listing your first name, last name and email address (that's what the current Joost invitiation form requires).  Assuming my 973 remaining invitations don't suddenly disappear, I will try and get you invited within a day or so of your email.

Telephony Web Services

I first mentioned telephony web services in a post I wrote after last fall's Connect 2006 conferences.  That post generated some comments and private email discussions that lead to an article in my monthly column in the March issue of Internet Telephony magazine.

As planning for Connect 2007 is well underway, I'm looking at telephony web services again and I realize I forgot to point to my article.  So, for those of you who don't read the hard copy magazine and don't scan the TMC website (they don't provide RSS) searching for my monthly column  :-),  it's here and still very relevant.  Some excerpts:

This is a nascent field. Traditional fixed and mobile operators still run highly constrained voice networks. Yes, you can have your computer place and receive calls, but if you want to overlay a private numbering scheme for use between phones in your far-flung offices (a voice VPN) — such services are only available from your operator. Likewise, if you want to integrate your customer care software with call center functionality, you start with PBX technology, as public networks are not open. Even access to your own call history requires scraping data from itemized bills.

Does the new world of VoIP do any better? Not much. Major VoIP operators, like Vonage, use VoIP to reproduce traditional fixed-line services — basically “digital POTS” — no open APIs there. Skype offers PC-based APIs for the Skype client and you could argue that’s all that makes sense for a peer-to-peer service. There are no central services to expose through web service APIs. But the test is what can you do with their APIs and the answer is client extensions. Since Skype clients run as a single instance per PC, you can’t easily implement a multi-channel back-to-back user agent (B2BUA) and a VPN.

There's a lot more in the article including mention of specific companies, LignUp Corporation, Abbeynet S.p.A., Ubiquity Software and Angel.com.

We should have meaningful updates at this fall's Connect 2007 conferences in a session tentatively titled "Mashups:  Web Meets Telco." 

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Connect 2007, hosted by NMS, is a series of global conferences that target key business and technical decision makers who are interested in learning about the vital drivers shaping the communications ecosystem — the business issues, the market drivers, the technology challenges, the compelling applications, and the end user demands. This year events take place in Boston, Madrid and Guilin, China.

Connect Americas	October 2–3	Boston, MA, USA
Connect Asia	October 17–18	Guilin, China
Connect EMEA	November 7–8	Madrid, Spain

Click here to sign up for future information updates on our 2007 Connect Conferences.

Lessons learned implementing IMS

Also, today's "IMS R4" — until now an industry secret.  Dean Bubley has already picked up on this thought.

At Spring VON, I gave a presentation on what we've learned, so far, in migrating our MyCaller ringback tones application from the Intelligent Network (IN) implementation in use by ~30 operators today, to an "IMS" version that can be deployed in networks that today are nominally based on the 3GPP's IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). Martin Geddes encouraged me to write up my talk. 

The full article is here.  For the impatient, here are the takeaways.    

1. It’s very early days for IMS. Today’s “IMS” networks are combinations of SIP infrastructure with 3GPP Release 4 softswitch-controlled voice service.           

2. IMS is about connection control, only. Only part of your application has to change. For MyCaller, ~90 percent of the software remains the same.           

3. IMS enables multimedia ringback, i.e. video! So there is significant new functionality, versus today’s audio-only ringback.           

4. Parallels with Intelligent Network are striking!           

5. Most application–specific data remains outside of IMS. In particular, operators do not want to add data fields to their Home Subscriber Server (HSS).           

6. Application–specific MRFs make sense. Operators tend to avoid sharing resources between diverse applications. And, for rich media, application–specific MRFs can be more cost-effective.

7. Operators await 3GPP Release 7.  At least anecdotally, several operators have suggested that 3GPP Release 7 is the first complete, stable, and consistent version they will fully deploy.

Again, the full article is here.