Communications

My coverage of HD Communcations Summit mostly on Twitter

My primary identity on Twitter is "brough" and that's where you'll find most of my comment stream for today's HD Communications Summit.  I also own the Twitter handle "HDVoice" which I started to use this morning, but then lapsed.  There are a few tweets there, but only a few.

I've gotten a number of insights from individual speakers and from discussions during breaks, so this has definitely been worth it.  On the other hand, one complaint is the preponderance of HD VoIP and the lack of coverage of mobile HD.  The most interesting speaker was Benoit de Boursetty, Director FTNA, at France Telecom a.k.a. Orange.  Benoit talked about Orange's fixed (BB VoIP) HD Voice service that was launched in France in 2006 (400K subscribers) and in Spain in 1Q09.

He also mentioned their plan to deploy HD Voice on mobile in Belgium and the UK before the end of 2009.  This is significant!  HD Voice on IP-PBXs is growing slowly because the decision makers are the IT directors and their primary focus is saving money.  Once mobile HD Voice has launched, the adoption decisions will be made by individuals.  Historically, consumers have bought voice quality.  Remember Sprint's "pin drop" or Verizon's "Can you hear me now?"

I'm at HD Comm 09 in New York

Took the early plane from Boston and thus arrived at the HD Communications Summit conference venue at 7:25am, before the registration booth is even open.  Luckily the coffee is out.

The focus is wideband telephony, a.k.a. HD Voice or HD VoIP.  It's a topic I've been promoting at least since the 1997.  Some earlier comments are here, here and here.  If you clicked the 3rd "here" you'll have seen how optimistic I've been at stages in the past.

Today HD Voice is finally getting traction, at least in the IP-PBX space, with actual telephone devices from at least a half dozen companies.

I'll be moderating a panel "HD Broadband Telco" at 2pm with

• Rich Buchanan, CMO, Ooma
• William Bumbernick, CEO, Alteva
• John Hendry, CTO, M5 Networks

More later...

Open Spectrum slide deck is now on-line

Here's the slide deck I used at last Thursday's meeting of the Boston section of the IEEE Communications Society.

Open Spectrum - Physics, Engineering, Commerce and Politics

View more presentations from Brough Turner.

Among other things, I debunk the following spectrum myths:

• Spectrum is scarce
• 4G is the future of wireless
• Auctions drive efficient use of spectrum
• Spectrum utilization requires massive investments
• TV spectrum is “beach front” property

The full write up from the IEEE announcement:

Communications Society

7:00 PM, Thursday, May 14

The Open Spectrum Potential for Evolutionary and Revolutionary Technology and Business Solutions

Brough Turner; Founder and CTO at Ashtonbrooke and Chief Strategy Officer at Dialogic

In November 2008, the FCC voted unanimously to permit unlicensed wireless devices that operate in the empty "white space" between TV channels. Their “TV White Spaces” decision was the culmination of many years of proceedings, but it's just one step in a much larger discussion, commonly referred to as “Open Spectrum.”

Our use of radio spectrum is regulated under principles that were established in the 1920s, when radio spectrum appeared to be a scarce resource and frequency was the only reasonable basis for allocation. Today’s wireless technology vastly exceeds anything imagined in the 1920s and from physical principles we know that many, many orders of magnitude further improvement are possible. Already the application of new approaches in just a few slivers of spectrum has fostered new industries – WiFi, Bluetooth and more.

The presentation discusses the predecessors, potentiality, and directions for Open Spectrum, including:

• A brief history spectrum regulation from before the Radio Act of 1927 to today.
• Results from measurements of actual spectrum utilization in New York and Washington DC.
• An overview of "Open Spectrum" experiments to date, including “license exempt sharing” in the 900 MHz, 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands and different forms of "secondary use" including UWB, 3650 MHz and now TV White Spaces.
• The physics of propagation and its impact on the range of White Spaces services vs. WiFi, WiMAX, 3GSM and LTE.
• IEEE 802.11y protocols and the prospects for expanding secondary use beyond TV White Spaces.

Brough Turner is founder and CTO at Ashtonbrooke and Chief Strategy Officer at Dialogic. Formerly he was founder and CTO at Natural MicroSystems and NMS Communications. He speaks and writes on a variety of communications topics including 3G and 4G wireless tutorials. He presented most recently at the 4G Wireless Evolution conference in February. Brough is an electrical engineering graduate of MIT and has 25 years experience in telecommunications.

Open Spectrum ― I'm presenting at an IEEE meeting this Thursday

This Thursday evening (May 14th), I'll be discussing Open Spectrum at the May meeting of the Boston chapter of the IEEE Communications Society.  My working title:  Open Spectrum ― Physics, Engineering, Commerce and Politics.  This is a technical audience, so we'll touch the physics of electromagnetic propagation and examine radio engineering solutions as they stood in the 1920s, as they are today and where they're likely to take us in the coming decade.  But we'll also look at the politics of spectrum regulation and the commercial implications of recent developments.

Just to get your attention:

• We'll explain why the TV White Spaces (TVWS) won't be considered  "beach front spectrum" in the future, and
• Why the lasting impact of the FCC's recent TVWS decision may be what it does for "secondary access"

If you're in the greater Boston area and at all interested in spectrum policy or the commercial evolution of WiFi and other unlicensed technologies, please stop by. 

The meeting begins at 7 p.m. and the presentation soon after at the Verizon Labs, 117 West Street, Waltham. The meeting is preceded by an optional dinner at Bertucci's, Winter St, Waltham, at 5:30 p.m.  The meeting is open to all, but please let Paul Zorfass know if you plan to attend the dinner at Bertucci’s. Paul can be contacted at paul.zorfass@embeddedtrade.com.  More directions and details here.

Spectrum Transparency: Can the US catch up with France?

Richard Whitt has a good article, Taking stock of the nations airwaves, on the Google Public Policy Blog.  He focuses on the Radio Spectrum Inventory Act, a bill introduced in the US Senate by Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Olivia Snowe (R-ME).

It's hard to argue spectrum policy if you can't actually determine who has what rights in which parts of the radio spectrum.  This bill is a start.

For a first cut at what we should aspire to, look at this site by the Autorité de Régulation des Communications électroniques et des Postes - the French equivalent of the US FCC.  Try typing in a frequency or a frequency range; then hit "Rechercher."

I haven't figured out how to determine who owns individual licenses to spectrum in France and, of course, that is critical.  The proposed US law, S.649, explicitly calls for such information to be gathered and made available to the public on a website.  Let's hope this passes.

Pouzin Society - organizational meeting, today

The most interesting data networking ideas I've come across in the past N years are in the recent book by John Day, Patterns in Network Architecture: A Return to Fundamentals.  John Day's fundamental insight is that data networking is a distributed version of inter-process communications (IPC).  Those of us who come at this from the computer and computer operating system side of the world are quite familiar with IPC within one computer running one operating system.

The Pouzin Society (named after datagram inventor Louis Pouzin) is a group interested in investigating the implications of John Day's architecture and how it might be used in developing viable solutions to the current Internet architecture crisis.

Here's a top level picture (from a talk by John Day).  If you don't buy the book, there is an interesting summary in a presentation here.

Viewing data networking as a distributed IPC function (DIF) does a number of things.

• It clears up names versus addresses in a fashion that makes sense to me.  The application asks for connection to another named application while node addressing remains internal to the DIF.  Indeed, the point of attachment address for one DIF is a "name" presented to a lower level DIF.
• It makes management explicit.  To even establish an IPC, we must ask the DIF for the other party by name and then get their permission to exchange information (i.e. to establish the IPC session).
• It simplifies layers.  There is only one kind of layer, the DIF, that is used recursively.  Successive levels in the recursion differ in scope, and likely in policies, but architecturally they are the same.

I'm still getting up to speed, but this appears to be a fundamental theoretical breakthrough.  There are a mix of academics and practical networkers in the room for the Pouzin Society kickoff, so hopefully some practical implications for the evolution of the Internet will emerge in time.