Communications

Time off, heading to Moscow

My wife and I are setting off for 11 days in Moscow and a brief stop in London.  Blogging may be even more sparse than usual, likewise for responses to email.  In any event I'll be back in the office on August 9th and will probably be posting pictures on Flickr during our trip.

Regulatory Agencies and the Stockholm Syndrome

Dr. Michael J. Marcus has a website full of interesting information on spectrum policy.  I only regret that I hadn't visited his site in several years but I've been back today as I stumbled on a talk Dr. Marcus gave, in the Netherlands in May, on the history of the civilian use spread spectrum communications at the 10th Economics of Infrastructures Conference at Delft University of Technology.

If you are interested in how today's WiFi came about, look at his history page.  It's best such history I'm aware of — no surprise as Dr. Marcus was at the FCC and participated in the early work that set the stage for today's WiFi industry.

But if you have the time, listen to the his presentation for a real flavor of what went on, and for its implications for spectrum regulation today.

Finally, to justify the title of this post, here's one great slide from the presentation:

(Note:  Dr. M. J. Marcus is not to be confused with J. Scott Marcus whose work on communications policy I have also quoted in the past.)

Not Megabits, but 40 Gigabits per second FTTH

Here's an interesting article in the The Local, Sweden's News in English. 

Sigbritt Löthberg, a 75 year old woman from  Karlstad in central Sweden now has the fastest residential Internet connection in history.  Of course it's stunt...

Sigbritt Löthberg's home has been supplied with a blistering 40 Gigabits per second connection, many thousands of times faster than the average residential link and the first time ever that a home user has experienced such a high speed.

... Sigbritt, who had never had a computer until now, is no ordinary 75 year old. She is the mother of Swedish internet legend Peter Löthberg who, along with Karlstad Stadsnät, the local council's network arm, has arranged the connection.

But it reinforces the point that, if dark fiber is available, people can light it with anything they want or can afford.  And, with the rapidly declining costs of electronics, some very interesting options become available for those that are willing to pay a little extra in one-time costs.

Yet another rumor of mobile wideband audio...

One by product of my recent sweep across Europe was another (independent) claim that we are about to see wideband audio capabilities on mobile phones.  This rumor was specifically that SFR (mobile operator in France) will be promoting wideband audio mobile services in 2008.  I reported an earlier rumor of forthcoming wideband mobile handsets here.

As a long term proponent of wideband audio, perhaps I'm grasping at straws, but this is the most significant potential service increment on the table today as it would dramatically improve the most important mobile service — voice telephony.

Today’s mobile infrastructure is capable of supporting handset-to-handset wideband audio, at a minimum, by using a protocol called transcoder free operation (TFO).  Most infrastructure installed in the past 5–8 years can support TFO.  The appropriate configuration bits may not be turned on, but the capability is in the network.  The remaining obstacle is lack of handsets, and here the extra complexity and extra drain on battery life is very small — trivial compared to the improvement in service.

Here's hoping the rumors come true and we actually see mobile wideband audio introduced in 2008.

London, Munich & Paris next week

Just as I made a tour through Asia four weeks ago to discuss AdvancedTCA, I'll be in the UK, Germany and France this coming week meeting with specific customers, partners and prospects.  We've had prototypes and customer-specific ATCA media blades at ATCA interoperability workshops since 2003, but special order only — no products that were generally available.  We finally productized and released the industry's first ATCA media blade, the MG 7000A, late last year.  Now we're out seeking feedback on our ATCA product strategy.

So in quick succession, I'll be in London on Monday evening and all day Tuesday, in Munich Tuesday night and all day Wednesday, and then in Paris late Wednesday through Friday morning.

African Mobile phone adoption surging

I haven't had new data on African mobile phone usage in some time, so I was pleased to see the July 5th issues of a friend's subscription to Africa & Middle East Telecom Weekly which presented complete mobile subscriber numbers from Blycroft Ltd, by country, for 1Q06 and 1Q07.

In March, I commented on some data from Light Reading which included Nigeria in the top ten countries globally, for absolute mobile subscriber growth numbers.  Of course it helps that Nigeria has a fairly large population (135 million) so their rapid subscriber growth rate (> 50%) produces a large absolute number of new subscribers.  There is no other country in Africa with a population as large as Nigeria's.  The next largest is Egypt (80 million) and then the Democratic Republic of the Congo (66 million). By global standards, Africa has many countries with relatively small populations, so perhaps I can be forgiven for missing the bigger picture. 

According to Blycroft estimates, there were 215 million mobile subscribers in Africa at the end of 1Q07, up from 128 million at the end of 1Q06.  That's 46% growth year over year and puts African mobile teledensity at 23 subscriptions per 100 people at the end of March.  Very impressive, especially that growth rate.

That led me to wonder about growth rates of specific countries in Africa.  Here are the top 14 countries with populations over 3 million and teledensity over 20, ranked by their mobile subscriber growth rates for the 12 months ending March 2007, using mobile data from Blycroft and June 2007 population data from the CIA World Factbook.

Libya's population is only 6 million, but at the end of 1Q07 they had 2.7 million mobile subscribers, up 135% from 12 months earlier.  Also while Egypt' population is only 60% that of Nigeria, they are ahead of Nigeria in both growth rate and teledensity.

Mobile teledensity for the African continent as a whole, is higher than that of India, at least for now.  And, while Africa's mobile growth rate is quite not as high as that of India, it is fair to say, mobile is booming in Africa.

Bell System reincarnated — Sprint's complaint over AT&T "transit fees"

Last week Sprint-Nextel filed a complaint with the FCC over a new AT&T interconnection policy.  There is a lot more detail in this article in Billing World & OSS Today magazine, but in summary:

The policy states that any new interconnections between Sprint Nextel and AT&T Mobility, formerly Cingular, will now have to be connected through AT&T's ILEC tandem. Under the new terms, Sprint Nextel will now have to pay transit fees to send its wireless traffic to Cingular subscribers.

So the re-integrated AT&T gets to use it's position as the monopoly LEC to shift the playing field for its wireless carrier, Cingular — excuse me, AT&T Mobility.  Depressing..., but this does prompt another line of thought.

Bill and Keep

It's interesting that the prior interconnect model between Cingular and Sprint was wholesale bill and keep.  In fact, interconnection between wireless carriers in the US was never regulated and somehow most of the market settled on bill and keep.  Bill and keep is also the model that emerged for the Internet backbone when the Internet went commercial.  At least in these two cases, where interconnect models were not predetermined by regulators, the market rapidly settled on bill and keep.   There are also extensive theoretical studies (for example these two by FCC economists) that suggest bill and keep is far preferable to the current US inter-carrier compensation schemes (which apply to traffic that terminates on wireline networks).

In the two unregulated situations I'm aware of, i.e., US mobile-to-mobile traffic and the Internet backbone, bill and keep emerged as the defacto business practice.  This new policy by AT&T distorts the competitive playing field between AT&T Mobility and Sprint-Nextel.  It doesn't sound fair.  It seems likely to increase costs for the US consumer.  But let's hope the policy folks do the minimum to reign in AT&T.  It would be unfortunate if this incident led to more regulation of wireless to wireless interconnections.