Communications

Jason Devitt's most compelling argument for open access regulation

Thanks to James Salmon for pointing to this.  I'm leery of regulation, however well intentioned, as it's difficult to anticipate all consequences and hard to change direction once (the inevitable) vested interests are established.  And it's unfortunate that Jason subscribes to the (historically legitimate but no longer valid) idea of spectrum as a limited resource.

None-the-less, this six minute video of Jason testifying before the (US Congress) House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet last July is one of the most compelling performances I've seen.  Jason's blog is here.

I wouldn't be surprised to see Jason running for office at some point in his career.

Good News: Pan-African Roaming following US not EU model

Last year Celtel launched a multinational mobile phone service for Celtel subscribers in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda under the name One Network which

"allows customers to move freely across geographic borders without roaming call surcharges and without having to pay to receive incoming calls."

Now I see they've extended the service to include twelve countries. This is very good news, as there are many tribal and cultural groups in Africa that span national borders.

So it's encouraging to see Africa following a path that should lead to roaming competition and long term consumer benefit.  To understand what's at stake here, let me refer to an excellent paper by Scott Marcus on Europe's "New regulatory framework" which compares the US & EU regulatory approaches to roaming.

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

Scott compares this with the US where AT&T Wireless's introduction of Digital One Rate service led to a wave of mergers, alliances and joint ventures as competitors were forced to respond.  Because of that competition, US mobile subscribers now get large buckets of low cost minutes for which there are no long distance and no roaming charges.  As a result, US average minutes-per-subscriber-per-month is four times that of Europe.

Both the US and the EU have well intentioned regulator's, but as far as I know, neither can claim credit for understanding what they were doing or not doing.  Luckily in Africa, there doesn't appear to be an African regulator with any interest in pan-African roaming, so hopefully African roaming will follow the path of competition.  The initial signs are positive.

Communications' Exponential Growth Rates

Everyone in high tech is familiar with Moore's Law and most are aware that similar exponential growth occurs in many other measures of digital technology, for example disk storage.  What about communications?

Gordon Moore referred to the number of transistors that could be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit.  The Wikipedia entry for Moore's Law mentions other measures that are increasing at exponential rates as alternate "formulations" of Moore's Law, e.g., computing power, hard disk capacity and pixels per dollar.  Unfortunately, Wikipedia (at least so far) doesn't have accurate doubling rates or supporting data for these other measures and they present little on the area that most interests me -— communications.

Why care?  Different rates of exponential growth can cause substantial shifts in the technology landscape, some of which I'll discuss in subsequent posts.

Here are the doubling rates for some measures I'm interested in:

Note 1:  Density at minimum cost per transistor, see the Wikipedia article on Moore's Law.

Note 2:  12-24 months depending on how computation is being measured.  See, for example, the arguments here.

Note 3:  Since the mid-1990s, disk capacity has doubled  every 12 months.  In earlier decades, it was more like 15 months (based on calculations from this data), but since 1995 (through today) the 12 month rule has held.

Note 4:  Based on these data points:

Note 5:  The classic reference is Odlyzko & Coffman (2001) (also 1998).

Note 6:  My personal Internet connectivity is documented here (for data to me).  For data rates from me to the Internet, the Feb 2007 value is 2.7 Mbps, which implies a 26 month doubling period (versus 20 months for data rates to me).

What the iPhone needs: a mirror!

This would never have occurred to me, but then I'm a guy.  In the past 48 hours I've heard directly and indirectly from three completely unrelated women that they want a mirror for the back of their iPhone.  By this I gather they mean a "pocket mirror" or "purse mirror", not the quarter inch reflective dot on the back of some camera phones and not the synchronization software of the same name.

There's certainly plenty of space, assuming you don't mind covering the Apple logo.

All you have to do is avoid the camera lens in the upper left corner.  I'm surprised the 3rd party market hasn't jumped on this.

Google bypasses Sun's Java licensing -- Dalvik VM

Perhaps the most significant feature of Google's Android open source handset software is the way they've finessed the Java problem.  So far, Sun has totally controlled the Java ME code base.  Yes, they've offered Java source code under the GPL, but not the complete source code for Java ME.  Instead they offer PhoneME as an open source subset, ostensibly because Java ME incorporates components which Sun cannot provide under GPL.  Then there's the question of the rate at which the Java Community Process advances...

Google has bypassed all this by releasing the Google-created Dalvik Virtual Machine under the Apache license.  From ONLamp:

The development process is a standard one for Java developers: Java code is compiled into .JAR and .CLASS files. Google built a custom virtual machine to run these programs; it is called DALVIK (after one engineer's favorite location in Iceland.) The DALVIK VM is designed especially for Android to run on embedded systems and work well in low power situations; it's also tuned to the CPU attributes. The DALVIK VM creates a special file format (.DEX) that is created through build time post processing. The DEX files can be downloaded onto the mobile handsets and run.

Talk about energizing the Java community.  This one component may have more impact than anything else in the Android stack.

UPDATE (20 minutes later):  I just found this by Stefano Mazzocchi which describes Dalvik in more detail and, talk about energizing the developer community, just look at his last paragraph!

Making a significant contribution -- Hamming's career advice

While following an entirely different thread, I stumbled on a blog post by Giacomo 'Peldi' Guilizzoni which lead me to the transcript of this really significant talk that Richard Hamming gave in March 1986.  I printed it out a few weeks ago and just read it today. 

Wow!

His title is "You and Your Research" and he discusses what it takes to do really great work and what are the differences, among otherwise smart people, that cause some to do great work and others to be forgotten.  Hamming was a mathematician (familiar to EEs for Hamming codes and to DSP engineers for Hamming windows) and this talk is about what he saw among scientific colleagues at Los Alamos, Bell Labs and the Navel Post Graduate School.  However, what he says is broadly applicable to any field of endeavor.

Read "You and Your Research."

Community goes mobile, when? how?

Some notes from the first after lunch session at Connect 2007 in Madrid yesterday, entitled Community Goes Mobile.  Dave Penny (VP Biz Dev at NMS) moderated, with panelists:

• David Springall, CTO, Yospace
• Stuart O'Brien, Editor, Mobile Entertainment Magazine , Intent Media
• Gerrit-Jan Konijnenberg, CEO, Comsys
• Peter Karney, Senior Technical Marketing Manager, NEC

The first key point is communities don't align with operators.  The lead example in every market is SMS.  Until there was universal connectivity, SMS never took off.  David is particularly vocal that social networks have to span multiple operators to succeed.  This is interesting as Yospace currently runs SeeMeTV for 3 in the UK and Look At Me for O2 in the UK and a similar service for 10 other operators in various countries.

Big discussion of charging models.  If Facebook is free on the Internet, why pay for mobile access.  Conclusion, you'll never get someone to pay per transaction, but you might get someone to pay an Internet access fee, especially a fixed known flat rate fee (like x per day for all day and y max for all month Internet access).

Another interesting point is that mobile operators are doing deals with Internet brands (like Vodafone UK with MySpace) because the Internet brand has more recognition than the mobile brand.

Of course there are no operator representatives on this panel to hold up their end...  :-)

Dean Bubley moderating a panel on mobile users

Interesting tidbits from yesterday's panel at Connect 2007 in Madrid entitled: The User?  It was led by moderator Dean Bubley of Disruptive Analysis, with panelists:

• Piotr Cofta, Ph.D., Chief Researcher, Security and Trust, BT
• Matt Millar, Director, Mobile and Devices, Adobe Systems
• Pierfranco Rodi, Senior Researcher, Telecom Italia Innovation Laboratories

Dean did a quick survey of the audience which showed most people were carrying 3 or 4 devices, i.e. one or two mobile phones, one PC, a camera and/or a blackberry.  There is no convergence of devices.  People use specific devices for specific purposes.

Piotr (who was the star of this panel) points out the dynamic process of deciding what devices you might use and how it's frequently related to your identity position.  Example:  your CEO just got a Blackberry, so you'd like one also.  Alternately, you are a photographer, you need something more than a camera phone.

Matt says consumers are very smart.  They know what they want and what they like and they are unique, each making different choices between convenience & mobility or content at different price points.

Pierfranco mentions blurring of mobile and PC, also the idea of discovery – point phone at an item and get Internet info about that item.  On another note, in Italy, you can tell pre-paid from post-paid by the number – that makes your number a status symbol.  80% of Italian subscribers are on pre-paid but post-paid can be a status symbol.

Piotr points out many mobile operators know little of their customers because their customers use multiple pre-paid SIM cards.  Some pay higher per-minutes costs to preserve their anonymity, but many just do it to minimize roaming expense.  Pierfranco counters that this depends upon the country.  In Italy, the operator knows the identity of prepaid subscribers.  Also, in Italy prepaid users are not all at the low end – there are more subscribers with 300+ Euro handsets in Italy than anywhere else in Europe.

Piotr describes iPhone as a new walled garden.  Matt is actually using an iPhone and views it as a poor phone but a breakthrough media device and a breakthrough way to access to the real Internet.  Matt lists browsers as the key interface to access diverse information, but we still need multiple UIs.    People choose the user experience to solve specific problems.  Matt uses Google, Yahoo messenger, a TV, a PC and a Mac.  Dean counters that the MS Windows consistency drove the PC's success.  Point by audience member that the fragmentation of the mobile world holds back innovation.

I personally expect Google's Open Handset Alliance to go a long way to solving handset fragmentation, but only over a 5+ year time frame.  But I was in audience and the time was up before I got a chance to chime in.

Mobile application innovation in EU

The second session at Connect 2007 in Madrid is Application Innovation with John Orlando, NMS CMO moderating and panelists:

• Gianluca Ferranti, Director of Marketing, Reitek S.p.A.
• David Springall, CTO, Yospace
• Colm Healy, CEO, XIAM
• Anssi Tauriainen, CEO, Aito Technologies

This panel is slide presentations and covers material that's interesting, but mostly already familiar to me.  So my comments will be brief...  (sorry).

Gianluca's focused on video infotainment which appears to be taking off in Italy.  While he's active in some really cool stuff, today's talk covered market statistics and more conventional applications.

Yospace has their "SeeMeTV" service running on 12 operators now, but David comments that it's been a struggle compared to launching a service on the Internet.  If you're not familiar with SeeMeTV, it's a service that allows subscribers to upload cameraphone videos via MMS.  Others can browse content that people have uploaded.  It costs 30 pence or more to download a clip.  The original contributor gets money everytime someone watches their clip.  The revenue share is 10%.  The SeeMeTV service bridges 12 operators, so contributors get cash back from users across multiple operators.  Paybacks to contributors are via PayPal, not the operator.  All-in-all, it's a mobile service which could be run over-the-top but, based on David's comments, they only work through operators because operator endorsed (on-deck) is the only viable approach today.  Even so, they don't get customer demographics from the operators, just billing and an on deck position.

Colm from Xiam is focused on mobile advertising.  Xiam's edge is in automated analysis of subscriber demographics so it's possible to target content to users when the price points is 30 cents or 1-2 Euros.  On the Internet, Amazon can show dozens of potential offers, but on the mobile phone there is only space and time to make a very few offers.  Currently they get 3X click through by targeted offers on mobile phones at Orange UK.

Anssi is founder and CEO at Aito is focused on providing customer analytics to mobile operators.  Their software mines the operator's data to figure out the services individual customers use and the constraints and problems they encounter.  The goal is to figure out specific problems that need to be fixed, both technical issues and communication issues.

Interesting, but running over slightly which killed the Q&A which would have been the best part.

...

Connect 2007 Madrid opens with panel on the mobile industry

The session was entirely Q&A (no slides) which resulted in a great discussion – broad ranging and much better than talking heads reading slides!  Luca has already written up his reactions.

I'm writing this after the fact as, at the last minute, I was tagged to participate, filling in for Vincenz Wagner of Jamba who's arrival has been delayed.  The opening session at Connect 2007 in Madrid was entitled "Industry Overview" with Joel Hughes, VP & GM of our Mobile Applications business moderating.  In the end the panelists were:

• Philip Kelley, Director, Mobile TV Standardization, Alcatel-Lucent
• Kari Lahtinen, Business Development Manager, Elisa Corporation
• Peter Karney, Senior Technical Marketing Manager, NEC
• Brough Turner, i.e. yours truly :-)

Since I was participating, I have only a few interesting items (at least interesting to me) that I noted during this discussion:

Philip commented that the predominate use of 3G is to connect PCs to the Internet, i.e. dumb pipe mobile Internet access.  Philip also mentioned Triple Play, which seems old hat to me, as innovative in (parts of) Europe.  I argued that this was marketing innovation (bundling), not really a new service.  We agreed the innovation was in cost and convenience of the services.

Several panelists seem to think that innovation would come by porting Internet applications to the mobile space.  I argued that was currently true, but only because the Internet was open and mobile was still closed.  There are many characteristics of mobile (like mobility and intimacy) that will foster new applications but we don't yet have the open environment that allows zillions of developers to experiment.

At one point, I made a derogatory comment about most VoIP being just digital POTS.  The ensuing discussion brought out the parallel between Skype (which combines voice and IM) with what's happened in mobile telephony, i.e. the combination of voice and SMS to achieve the same objectives.  Either way, people want to determine the actual availability of the person they are about to call and people need a way to communicate when they can't talk.

Watching the leaks about Google's Open Handset Alliance

11:15am EST and the Open Handset Alliance website is (finally) live.

I'm subject to an NDA, so I've just watched the leaks without comment.  The Wall Street Journal carried the first news almost a week in advance, but without any mention of the name Open Handset Alliance.

I began intermittently checking the results of a Google search on the complete phrase "Open Handset Alliance" in anticipation of leaks in advance of the actual announcement.  Up through Friday, there were zero hits.  Likewise on Saturday morning, at least for a web search, but a Google news search returned the first hit.  It was this from CNET News at 6:25pm Pacific time on Friday evening.  From the text, they may have gotten their information from someone in Japan.

By Sunday midday, the conventional Google web search was returning this one article from Friday midnight (Pacific time) which credited the CNET News story from earlier that evening.  However, a Google news search gave the CNET article directly (as the 3rd item) with two more recent articles above it.  This situation remained stable through Sunday evening (eastern US time).  But by Sunday evening, there were 24 blog posts tagged "Open Handset Alliance" on Technorati.  They all traced back to the CNET News or an alternate copy of the same story.  Finally, sometime between 7pm and 9pm Sunday evening, Google must have updated their database as suddenly they were reporting 14,900 hits for the complete phrase "Open Handset Alliance."  By Monday morning this was 31,200.

Sunday also saw a New York Times background article – an in depth article about Andy Rubin (the lead for the OHA software project) that had obviously been set up with cooperation from Google.   As a cooperative venture, this article did not mention the term "Open Handset Alliance."

So across all the noise, it appears there were only two significant leaks:

1. On Tuesday the 30th, the Wall Street Journal said the announcement would come within two weeks and gave quite a few details.  Then on Thursday the 1st, they pinned it down to Monday the 5th.
2. On Friday the 2nd, CNET News broke the name "Open Handset Alliance."

Rather impressive secrecy for an effort involving more than 30 companies.

Off to Madrid for Connect 2007 Europe

The third and final Connect conference of 2007 is taking place in Madrid on Wednesday and Thursday, November 7th and 8th and I'll be there.  My blog comments on earlier conferences are here (& 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8).

Day One has a heavy focus on mobile industry issues and mobile applications. And, it's conducted as panel discussions with few or no slides.  Perhaps this only works because there are good speakers, chosen to promote controversy and discussion, but it really works!  In both 2006 and so far in 2007, the nature of the discussion has been much, much better than at a typical industry show.  The session descriptions for November 7th are here and the speaker bios are here.  If you can be in Madrid on Wednesday, you should attend.

Day Two is a more traditional developers conference focusing on NMS technology and products that are used to create many of the applications discussed by the Day One executives.  Check out the Day Two program.

Belated Notes from VON

I'm an articles guy not a news blogger, so I didn't even try to compete with the numerous people blogging last week's VON conference.  In any event, I was double booked much of the time. The best part of VON is the people I meet and the one-on-one discussions but let me mention a few impressions of note:

• Social networking was everywhere, and not just because of Jeff's interest and/or the focus on Facebook in his kickoff speech.  Every combination and permutation is being tried, especially through Facebook applications.  I can't point to one application that's going to revolutionize IP communications in the sense Skype did, but I'm still hopeful.  At least these apps are a step forward from the digital POTS VoIP services like Vonage, AT&T CallVantage and the various cable VoIP offers.

• The convergence of Mobile and VoIP continues to be via work-around.  We're still a few years from true over-the-top IP communications on mobile, as today there's not enough upstream bandwidth, latencies for IP data are really something and, of course, there are mobile operator restrictions on VoIP over their networks.  Of course mobile voice telephony is still so expensive, especially internationally, that workarounds will abound.  But true mobile IP communications will be delayed a bit more...

One interesting tidbit:  I finally got to hear from ooma and get the answers to two questions that had plagued me about their distributed termination approach.  Distributed termination means calls, carried long distances by VoIP, can terminate in a remote city using another subscriber's local line.  My issues:

1. How do you handle the caller ID which will point to the local subscriber's line, not the original caller's line?  Answer:  they suppress CallerID, i.e. there is no caller ID.  That's not great, as I know my wife won't answer such a call.
2. What about people listening in on calls that are terminated through their local service?  Answer: the ooma equipment senses extensions going off hook and avoids routing calls through subscribers whose lines have a history of people listening in.  Well, that's certainly a partial answer.  It's easy to detect extensions going off hook as an extension telephone puts an additional load on the line.  But there are plenty of high impedance listening devices that don't load the line and can't be detected in any easy fashion.  Again, it's an answer, but not a great one...

The conference itself felt a little smaller than last year in Boston or last spring in San Jose, but booth traffic appeared to be good.  Also, there were more sessions and more tracks and more experimentation, as PulverMedia is obviously trying to reinvent itself and the show.  I have some specific suggestions which I will offer to Carl Ford, but it may be another week or two before I get a free moment to write them out.

Here's a photo of the show floor on Tuesday at lunch time.