Communications

LTE and spectrum stupidity

Mobile operators are counting on Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology to handle surging demand for mobile data access.  But LTE developers made some poor choices, cutting spectral efficiency and thus driving up operator costs.

LTE was envisioned as an all IP system, but the RF allocations follow the voice-centric approach of earlier generations.  While LTE standards allow for either Frequency Division Duplexing (FDD) or Time Division Duplexing (TDD), all initial LTE equipment uses FDD.  FDD requires two separate blocks of spectrum - one for each direction.  FDD makes perfect sense for bi-directional voice traffic. It makes no sense for data. With the exception of peer-to-peer file sharing (which most mobile operators block), data traffic is very asymmetric. Sending data via FDD means one block of spectrum is fully utilized and the other, equal sized block, is dramatically under utilized.  Result: the operator pays for almost twice the spectrum they actually use.

Verizon is deploying LTE in the 700 MHz C block which means they are using 746 MHz to 756 MHz (a 10 MHz channel) for their downlink (to the mobile device) and wasting most of 777 MHz to 787 MHz (another 10 MHz channel) for the uplink. If Verizon could deploy TDD (as used by WiMAX and as defined for LTE but not implemented), they could fully utilize both 10 MHz blocks for data tranfers, almost doubling their data capacity.

I don't know the actual capacity Verizon will realize on average with their first generation LTE infrastructure. But suppose Peter Rysavy is correct (as implied by Gigaom) that Verizon will initially average 15 Mbps per 10 MHz channel. That's 15/15 Mbps, symmetric, even though average traffic is likely to be 15/2 Mbps. No single user is likely to see 15 Mbps; rather that 15 Mbps is shared among all users in that sector. With TDD (the default for WiMAX and an unimplemented option for LTE), the Verizon spectrum could support two channels of perhaps 13/2 Mbps each in that same sector. Again, no single user will see 13 Mbps, but all the users in the cell will be sharing 30 Mbps of capacity that can be dynamically divided between up and down - mostly like averaging 26/4 Mbps but able to allocate 15/15 or 28/2 as the traffic mix changes.

It's ironic the LTE implementors got this wrong when you consider their decision to use only IP in the rest of the LTE design, thereby dropping support for traditional voice or SMS services.  That's right, initial LTE deployments won't support voice telephony or SMS messages, only data services, and yet LTE spectrum assignments were made as if voice comes first.

That's ironic.

A directional antenna for VHF TV — it's Large!

A potential limitation of TV "white spaces" arises from the relatively large wavelengths associated with these lower frequencies (lower than mobile or Wi-Fi).  At cellular frequencies, and even better at Wi-Fi frequencies, wavelengths are quite short (at 5.8 GHz, a half wavelength is 2.5 cm, i.e. 1 inch), so it becomes relatively easy to build highly directional antennas.  Not so with TV frequencies.

Here's a picture from a wonderful article by Neal McLain about highly directional VHF TV antennas in the CATV industry.

 Quoting Frank Baxter, formerly Vice President of Engineering for GE Cablevision: 

[This] antenna was erected in about 1965 [near] Merced, California, [for] a CATV system owned and operated by General Electric Cablevision until 1986. The screen was about 90 feet high and 360 feet long. The radius of the torus was about 100 feet. The screen was centered on San Francisco and several antennas were placed along the locus of feed positions to cover all the Bay Area signals. The support structure consisted of steel towers with the appropriate curvature and the screen was constructed using horizontal, stretched steel wire.

This is an extreme case, but it's worth remembering.  Today, semiconductor technology makes it possible to do MIMO and, in the very near future, adaptive beam forming, in silicon at consumer price points.  As a result, we're on the verge of major performance gains for wireless, at short wavelengths.  That's 2 GHz and 5 GHz, but much less so TV white spaces.

TV white spaces will be useful for applications that must penetrate trees or heavy masonry but, as I commented earlier, the real action over the next 2-5 years (and beyond) will be at frequencies, like 5 GHz, where highly directional antennas can be built in small spaces.

Native Skype on Nokia N900 - sounds very good

I just had a call from Alex Harrowell (of Telco 2.0).  Alex was on the floor of the Mobile World Congress so there was a lot of background noise and he was calling from a mobile device, specifically a Nokia N900.  What's more, he was using Wi-Fi, something that's been highly marginal at previous MWCs.  But this call sounded much better than the typical mobile phone call !  It was excellent.

The difference:  Alex was using the Skype client for the N900, so our call was Skype-to-Skype, Barcelona to Boston, and thus it used wideband audio, a.k.a. HD Voice.  Yes, there was background noise from the conference floor, but Alex's voice was completely clear and stood out from the background noise.  Also, the background was distinct enough that I felt like I was on the floor with Alex.

Mobile HD voice is significantly better than most traditional phone calls and much better than any other mobile call.

Mobile HD:  Operator-provided or via Skype?

As I've commented in the past, mobile operators in the EU (starting with Orange in the UK, Belgium and France) are promising to roll out mobile HD voice on their networks in 2010.  But so far, only Orange Moldova has actually launched (in September 2009).

With the announcement that Apple is no longer blocking VoIP applications on the iPhone over 3G, it's likely we'll see Skype and others show up an ever increasing range of mobile devices.

Mobile operator provided HD Voice might eventually reach a wider range of mobile devices than Skype over Wi-Fi or 3G, but mobile operators better get cracking.  Otherwise, they might just be left in the dust.

Overestimating mobile data growth

Cisco has recently updated their forecast of mobile data growth.  The good news is their forecast compound annual growth rate (CAGR) is down, from last year's forecast of 131% to their current forecast of 108% growth per year.

 
 

Unfortunately, when you look over the past 15 years of Internet traffic growth, the idea that any specific sector could exceed 100% growth for more than 1-2 years just isn't credible. 

In the early days of the Internet (prior to 1994) traffic did approximately double each year. And, as Andrew Odlyzko points out in his classic study, there was a period of perhaps 18 months in 1995-1996 when US traffic grew much more rapidly, however growth reverted to 100% per year in 1997.  And since then, Internet traffic growth has been slowing.

The most comprehensive data I am aware of is from Minnesota Internet Traffic Studies (MINTS) which shows the rate of Internet backbone traffic growth slowing so that in recent years (2008-2009) it has been in the range 40%-50%.  For a good discussion of long term trends see Internet Growth Trends & Moore's Law.

Mobile network traffic growth

It's interesting to look back on the growth of mobile networks so far.  Here are some numbers on cell sites, subscribers and voice minutes of use, extracted from CTIA data by Andrew Odlyzko.

                             1991              2006

subscribers            6.38 M          219.7 M

cell sites                6,685           197,576

MOUs                    5.2 B           858 B
 

Over 15 years, voice traffic grew 165x which is 41% CAGR.  

As an aside, it's interesting is to separate the growth in capacity due to more cell sites from the growth due to better wireless technology.  Over the 15 year period 1991-2006, we got a 30x growth in the number of cell sites, or 25% CAGR.  That suggests improvements in wireless technology (the transition from 1G AMPS to 2G and 3G systems) provided for only 5.58x of the increased traffic, or 12% CAGR.  This surprised me.  It can't be due to uncounted data traffic as data traffic was a small percentage of the mix in 2006. If true, it's rather embarrassing for the 2G and 3G equipment providers.  Any suggestions?

There's a different view in this study of available mobile data download speeds done by Novarum Inc.

This shows available download data rates doubling in a little less than 24 months, or ~45% CAGR. However, this is measuring available bandwidth, not actual traffic.  None-the-less, it's suggestive of capacity as these measurements were made on live networks during business hours.

A More Reasonable Projection

Given both Internet and wireless history, I suggest mobile Internet traffic growth over the next 5 years is more likely to be in the range 50% to 100% CAGR.  There may be a 12-18 month period when it grows more than 100% per year, but only for 12-18 months and only if some alternate technology enters the mix (for example, widespread use of Wi-Fi hotspots as I suggested a few weeks ago).

Wi-Fi offload, not Femtocells

Mobile operators face soaring data demand (~18x in less than 30 months according to slide 10 here). The natural evolution of 2G/3G/4G infrastructure delivers about 2X additional capacity every 24 months (see slide 11, ibid).  That's a major disconnect!

(At least) two solutions are on the table, Femtocells and Wi-Fi offload.  Both approaches solve the backhaul issue by using customer or 3rd party links (DSL, DOCSIS, T1/E1, WISP or otherwise).

Femtocells are tiny mobile cellsites using the mobile operators' licensed spectrum, supporting all handsets and all services.  Thus femtocells are a great way to extend coverage.  If you want mobile voice service in a place where macrocell coverage is poor, a femtocell could be ideal.  However, that's the only place where femtocell's have the advantage.

As a solution for mobile data capacity, Wi-Fi wins, for many reasons.

First, most mobile data is destined for the open Internet, not for someplace on the mobile operator's network.  Multiple actual measurements of live traffic in different countries show 96%-99% of all bytes passed over the mobile data channel are destined for the Internet.

The mobile operator's NGN mobile core network is a complex network designed to support differential services, fine-grained billing and so forth. This makes it significantly more expensive than a best efforts network like the Internet and yet, no operator has found a way to charge for this extra capability — people just want to get to the Internet.

Femtocells are part of this complexity, and cost.

Second, the primary sources of mobile data demand are laptops, notebooks and smart phones. Laptops and notebooks have Wi-Fi connectivity. Half of smart phones have Wi-Fi already and the percentage is rising rapidly.  So the major demand comes from devices that can connect to either femtocells or Wi-Fi hotspots. Thus the only potential disadvantage of Wi-Fi hotspots is gone or rapidly vanishing.

Third, Wi-Fi access points cost less than femtocells.  Besides being somewhat simpler, they are being produced in very high volumes, far higher than the mobile operators are likely to achieve with femtocells. Femtocells might have made sense when they were first conceived, but today Wi-Fi has changed the landscape which leads us to...

Fourth, Wi-Fi access points are showing up everywhere.  People are installing them in their homes but we also see Wi-Fi coverage in enterprises, in retail establishments and in public places. 

Individuals spend most of their online time in just two locations: home and the office. Enterprises will not install Femtocells as the IT department can't control them.  Consumers, retail and public locations have already done or are doing Wi-Fi.  They won't install femtocells unless there is some form of subsidy from the operator — another cost with no net benefit. 

Summary: 

 Femtocells will flop. They do provide a way to extend voice coverage into homes that macro cells don’t reach, but they are not efficient for data offload. Since Wi-Fi is efficient for data offload, and it costs less to buy and less to operate, Wi-Fi will trump Femtocells.

What should an operator do?

Mobile operators need to focus on providing bundles of connectivity, not on whether its 3G/4G or Wi-Fi. They should be encouraging Wi-Fi offload by bundling "free" public Wi-Fi access with their mobile data plans.

In the long term, it's likely most mobile data bytes will go over Wi-Fi.  The 3G/4G network is still necessary to provide a backup path when no Wi-Fi is available. Mobile operators who recognizes this can still come out on top, if they focus on facilitating connectivity for their customers regardless of the technology involved.

Broadband Wireless — the future is 5 GHz

and eventually, spectrum from 4 GHz to 10 GHz.  

Unfortunately, the mobile industry doesn't understand the implications of MIMO or beamforming, so they are asking for the wrong thing.  They are asking for more spectrum near their current bands (below 2.1 GHz) or lower, e.g. in former TV bands below 700 MHz.  This is all wrong.

Until recently you could say: lower frequencies "work better" meaning they go farther.  But this was a technology limitation, not something in the physics. From a physical point of view, 5 GHz photons pass through the atmosphere just as well as 700 MHz photons. Today, MIMO and beamforming are correcting some of these historic technology limitations and changing everything.

• MIMO not only delivers significant performance improvement, it makes 5 GHz spectrum as useful as lower frequency spectrum for all sorts of applications.
• Beamforming delivers the next performance increment (20x and up), and it's actually easier to implement at higher frequencies.

Addressing mobile data demand

There is no doubt data consumption is growing more rapidly than mobile operators' data capacity (see slides 10 and 11 of my presentation at 4GWE). Unfortunately, US cellular operators are pressing for more low frequency radio spectrum and they are being heard in Washington. In his keynote at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said an impending shortage of wireless spectrum in the U.S. will dampen future economic growth unless action is taken to fix the problem. 

However, the short term issue is investment dollars not spectrum and the long term solution is new technology at much higher frequencies (above 4 GHz) rather than more spectrum for existing technology near existing bands.

Why 5 GHz spectrum is more useful than TV frequencies

Everyone know TV signals go long distances but remember than TV broadcasters use from 100 Kilowatts to 5 Megawatts ERP.  That's a million to a hundred million times more signal than your mobile handset puts out.  No wonder it covers a lot of distance.

There's also an equation most wireless engineers use in one form or another to calculate free space path loss which says higher frequencies have more loss. But this equation encapsulates two factors:  the true path loss and the size of the antenna.  It assumes a 1/2 wavelength antenna. Higher frequencies have shorter wavelengths, so it assumes the antenna gets smaller as the frequency goes up. Smaller antenna, less signal. With comparable antenna apertures, path loss in the atmosphere is the same from below 50 MHz to nearly 10 GHz. Thus in open air, 5 GHz photons go just as far as 500 MHz (US channel 19) photons or indeed photons for Channel 2 or Channel 50.

Multi-path and MIMO

The reason people have had trouble with higher frequencies for the past 100+ years is "multi-path" propagation.  As a signal radiates from a source, some of it goes directly to the receiving antenna but some of it goes in other directions where it may be reflected or refracted by objects it encounters. When reflected signals also reach the receiving antenna, they are slightly delayed because they traveled a slightly longer distance.  In the days of over-the-air analog TV, we saw these delayed signals as "ghosts" or shadows around images on our TV screens.  For digital data transmission, multi-path contributes to the "noise" in the signal-to-noise ratio. The historic problem with higher frequencies is their shorter wavelengths made it easier for them to be reflected and refracted by man-made objects like buildings, window frames and even closely spaced double pane glass surfaces.

 

But with MIMO, all this changes. With MIMO's multiple antennas and multiple radio front ends, it's possible to separately decode and make use of the multi-path signals.  Now "multi-path" is not only removed as a source of "noise," it adds additional signal and helps carry more data.

Beamforming

A beamformer uses signal processing to control the phase and relative amplitude of the signal at each of a group of independent antenna elements.  Radiation from multiple antenna elements causes a pattern of constructive and destructive interference in the resulting wavefront.  This can produce a tight beam just like one from a highly directional antenna.  But with beamforming, the antenna beam can be steered in software on a packet-by-packet basis.

With eight antenna elements spaced 1/2 wavelength apart (total 3.5 wavelengths), you can create a beam like this:

 

Highly directional beams significantly extend the usable range of a wireless system. And since the beam is computed with digital signal processing software, it can be steered to different directions in microseconds. What's more, the benefits of beamforming apply both while transmitting and while receiving. Either way, the beamformer accentuates the signal in the desired direction while surpressing signals to/from other directions.

But what about wavelength?  To obtain this narrow beam, the outer antenna elements are 3.5 wavelengths apart.  At 5.8 GHz, that's less than 7.5" so the whole antenna array easily fits in a ceiling mounted access point just 8" x 3" by 2".  At 700 MHz, that degree of beamforming still requires 3.5 wavelengths, but wavelengths are longer so now we need 5 feet of separation — something that may fit on a cell tower, but is difficult for a microcell and impossible for a femtocell.  For beamforming, higher frequencies are an advantage.

More spectrum at higher frequencies

Finally, there's a lot more spectrum potentially available at higher frequencies and, today, in the 5GHz band, there is over 555 MHz of license-exempt spectrum already available for applications like Wi-Fi. That's more spectrum than Verizon Wireless, AT&T Wireless, Sprint PCS and T-Mobile USA have, combined!

Wi-Fi blazes the trail

The Wi-Fi market place is vastly more diverse than the 3G/4G mobile operator market place, which means many new technologies show up in Wi-Fi years before they are deployed in mobile networks.  That is certainly true of so-called 4G modulation (OFDM) which was deployed for Wi-Fi with 802.11a (1999) and 802.11g (2003), years ahead of WiMAX (2005) or LTE (2010).

The 802.11n specification includes MIMO and optional beamforming and silicon technology is appearing to support 4x4 MIMO with beamforming.  MIMO products (2x2) have been shipping since 2007 and 4x4 MIMO in consumer products expected in the next six months. Meanwhile, many players are scrambling to deliver 11n options, including beamforming. Early systems are already deployed.

Mobile operators, please pay attention

The technology benefits of MIMO and beamforming apply to the mobile phone industry, it will just take a few years for the deliberate pace of the industry to catch up.  Meanwhile, mobile phone operators should be tracking real world measurements of Wi-Fi performance to understand what spectrum they will really need five to eight years hence.

Google and China — a very different view

Usman Latif (Techuser) has a fascinating take on what’s going on with Google and China.  I can’t guess if he’s right or not, but we’ll know in due course.  If what he suggests is true, Google will exit China by selling it’s Chinese business to the Alibaba Group.

In 2005, Techuser uncovered the strange nature of Google’s 2004 patent settlement with Yahoo.  The terms of that deal have never been revealed, but what was revealed in various SEC filings leading up to Google's IPO appears to have been, at least, obscure and misleading.  Usman’s point now is that 2004 deal included some substantial, probably very substantial, undisclosed obligations, perhaps due at the end of an unknown grace period.  So Google may need a way to make a big payoff to Yahoo without letting anyone understand the details of their patent settlement.  Turning over their rapidly growing Chinese business to Alibaba (40% owned by Yahoo) might be their answer.

Yes, it reads like a “conspiracy theory,” but Usman is a smart guy and, in any event, we soon know if he’s right or off track.

Wi-Fi's likely impact on 3G/4G services and operators

This morning at the 4G Wireless Evolution conference in Miami, I gave a talk about how Wi-Fi is going to impact both 3G/4G operators and fixed line operators over the next 2-4 years.  The slides are on SlideShare, and here:

Wi-Fi Opportunities In A 4G World

View more documents from Brough Turner.

I think the reason I’m invited back is I manage to be controversial and since, today, I was given more than an hour all for myself, I attempted to make at least a few provocative points:

• We’re at a wireless tipping point that will dramatically drive up performance of all wireless systems, but Wi-Fi is way ahead of WiMAX or 3G/4G mobile, thus Wi-Fi is where the excitement will be over the next 2-5 years.

• Femtocells will flop.  They do provide a way to extend voice coverage into homes that macro cells don’t reach, but they are not efficient for data offload.  Since Wi-Fi is efficient for data offload, and it costs less to buy and less to operate, Wi-Fi is will trump Femtocells.

• Wi-Fi is consistently ahead of the 4G community in commercial deployments of “4G technologies.”  Specific 4G technologies that Wi-Fi has pioneered include OFDM modulation (802.11a, 802.11g, 802.11n), MIMO (802.11n) and beam forming (done via antenna element selection as early as 2002;  and done via antenna arrays with on-silicon signal processing under 802.11n, coming to market right now).

• MIMO makes 5 GHz spectrum as useful as 2.4 GHz spectrum or TV spectrum. 

• Beam forming via adaptive antenna arrays will dramatically drive up performance (for Wi-Fi beginning now and for WiMAX and LTE some years from now).  Beam forming increases range, reduces interference and allows spectrum reuse even in confined areas.

• But with beam forming 5 GHz spectrum becomes more valuable than 2.4 GHz or TV spectrum as shorter wavelengths (at higher frequencies) allow tighter beams.

• As Wi-Fi performance and range increase, it’s becoming useful for broadband wireless service delivery, thus driving down costs and helping fuel rapid growth in the Wireless ISP community.  (There are over 2000 WISPs in the US today.)

In my talk, I backed up these statements with data and arguments that may not be clear from the slides alone.  If there is any point you don’t agree with or don’t understand, fire away in the comments below and I’ll endeavor to answer within a day or two, or elaborate in a separate blog post.

Off to 4G Wireless Evolution in Miami

I'm off to Miami to attend (and speak) at the 4G Wireless Evolution conference.  Although I spent most of 2002-2008 providing technology and applications for mobile networks, my current interest is Wi-Fi, so I'm going to try and shake people up with a talk on Wi-Fi in a 4G world.  

Of course, I'll also peruse IT Expo that's co-located but, even through I spent two decades in computer telephony and have promoted Internet Telephony since 1996, it's now a distraction from all things wireless!

More explanation at some point.  Meanwhile, if you will be at 4GWE or IT Expo, please say hello.  I'll be there Wednesday morning until mid-day Friday.

Network Neutrality, Common Carriage and Layers - an international perspective

I'm attending an FCC workshop on 'The Open Internet" which means Network Neutrality. I am very much in favor of open access to the Internet. However, by settling for network neutrality rules, we won't solve the real problem, which is a lack of competing ISPs.  If we don't address this, we'll insure the US falls further and further behind other countries. Consider:

 

In the US, we claim to be supporting facilities-based competition. This means the rights-of-way are open to multiple competitors and you expect to see competing networks built from the ground up.  I call this open access at layer zero.  Unfortunately, this approach hasn't worked in the US. Most locations have only one or two access networks (the phone company-cable company duopoly).  

The reason is fairly easy to understand:

 

Building a new set of facilities represented a large fixed cost.  This investment must be paid back and typically only larger players have enough revenue to be able to make the interest payments. If you only capture 10% market share, you can't payback the investment.  As a result, facilities-based competition usually results in 2-3 competitors, at most.

Note that in Korea, facilities-based competition is part of a fairly complex history of government and private network evolution.  Hong Kong also has facilities-based competition, most notably by Hong Kong Broadband Networks Ltd.  But that's one fiber over-builder in a market that has open access to copper (i.e. layer 1 access) and many, many DSL providers. Facilities-based competition is a great idea, but by itself it doesn't work.

The ideal solution, at least for metropolitan population densities should be clear from this diagram:

The horizontal axis shows years of useful life. Notice that dark fiber is expensive to install but has a useful life of decades. But the equipment you use to light up the fiber will be functionally obsolete in 30 months just due to Moore's Law.

So what happened in Stockholm?  In 1994, Stockholm chartered a company, Stokab AB, to lay dark fiber and offer it to all comers.  Throughout the 90s, Stokab only offered dark fiber.  The result is many, many ISPs and corporate customers who lease fiber for diverse purposes.  A bigger result, is one of the lowest costs for some of the best Internet access of any city in the world.

What the US really needs

We need open access to bare copper and dark fiber from a utility that is regulated and is structurally separate from companies who provide telephony, TV or ISP services.

Rather than talk about network neutrality, we should be talking about structural separation, or at a minimum, functional separation with common carriage requirements. That would be a big change and is probably politically impossible, but that's the only way to get ISP competition and ISP competition is the only approach that will get us world class broadband.

FCC workshop on Open Internet at MIT this Wed January 13th

I haven't seen much publicity for this, but an FCC staff "workshop" on "Innovation, Investment and the Open Internet" will be held in the Bartos Theater at MIT"s Media Labs on Wedensday January 13, 2010.  "Open Internet" is usually political speak for Network Neutrality, although presumably some of speakers will differentiate between the advantages of open access versus the specifics of network neutrality, common carriage, structural separation and other approaches to achieving open access.

Details were provided in a press release which was picked up by a few people, but not many that I follow so, if you are in the Boston area, here's the scoop:

JANUARY 13 WORKSHOP ON INNOVATION, INVESTMENT, AND THE OPEN INTERNET

The Federal Communications Commission will hold a staff workshop on innovation and investment as part of the Commission’s Open Internet proceeding. This workshop will examine how the Internet’s openness affects the ability of network operators, Internet content and application providers, and other Internet technology developers to innovate and to drive investment, job creation, and economic growth throughout the Internet ecosystem. These issues will be explored from the diverse perspectives of innovators and entrepreneurs, investors, network operators and equipment vendors, and experts in Internet innovation and investment. 

WHAT: Innovation, Investment, and the Open Internet
WHEN: Wednesday, January 13, 4:30 p.m.
WHERE: MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater Cambridge, Massachusetts
ONLINE: www.openinternet.gov/workshops/ 

PANELISTS:
Ajay Agarwal, Bain Capital Ventures
Tim Berners-Lee, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
David Clark, MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Jeffrey Glueck, Skyfire
Shane Greenstein, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
Nabeel Hyatt, Conduit Labs
Susie Kim Riley, Camiant, Inc.
Paul Sagan, Akamai
Lynn St. Amour, Internet Society
Amy Tykeson, BendBroadband
Barbara van Schewick, Stanford Law School
Marcus Weldon, Alcatel-Lucent
Christopher S. Yoo, University of Pennsylvania Law School 
Sharon Gillett, Wireline Competition Bureau (Moderator)
Paul de Sa, Office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis (Moderator) 

The workshop will be open to the public; however, admittance will be limited to the seating available. Audio/video coverage of the workshop will be streamed live with open captioning over the Web at www.openinternet.gov/workshops/.

Wi-Fi in the TV White Spaces - 802.11af task group underway

The commercial success of unlicensed devices in TV whites spaces remains an open question, but Wi-Fi support could tip the balance, so it's good the IEEE standards association has officially chartered an 802.11 task group to:

... create an amendment whose implementation in solutions is likely to receive FCC approval for operation in the TV White Spaces under the 47 CFR Part 15 subpart H rules.

The group is 802.11 "TGaf." Their first meeting will be in Los Angeles the week of January 18th and their initial schedule calls for final votes on a new spec by the summer of 2011. My guess is they'll hit that 2011 date since many of the more difficult white space issues were figured out for 802.11y. In particular, 802.11y specifies "dependent station enablement (DSE)" where low cost devices (clients or access points) can operate under the supervision of a more intelligent (e.g. more expensive) device that actually consults FCC-mandated databases and provides sophisticated sensing.

TV White Spaces may yet be a commercial failure

At least as defined so far, TV white space rules are so restrictive that a market may never emerge. Indeed TV white spaces could follow the same path as Ultra Wide Band (UWB) - much hoopla, some significant investments, but no significant commercial success.  As specified so far, the only places where meaningful amounts of white space spectrum are available are rural areas where the population is small. This means sales volumes will be small and prices will be high - not exactly a formula for commercial success.

The good news is Wi-Fi operation will inherit much of the high volume silicon advantages created for other bands; only the actual RF amplifiers and antennas are specific to TV frequencies. If anything can succeed, Wi-Fi should be it.

Applications that could benefit from white spaces operation

Wi-Fi at TV frequencies could be useful for:

1. Rural broadband access for subscribers in densely forested areas.  If there is a line of sight, Wi-Fi at 5 GHz is more useful (and has more capacity and low cost) but when subscribers are hidden by trees, TV frequencies are scattered less.
   .
2. Wireless LANs inside heavy masonry buildings or those with plaster on metal wire lath.

In most other applications, 5 GHz is preferable to TV frequencies.  That may sound nuts to wireless engineers used to free space path loss calculations, but those calculations assume the antenna gets smaller as the frequency goes up.  With comparable antenna apertures, path loss in the atmosphere is roughly flat from 50 MHz to nearly 10 GHz.  Thus in open air, 5 GHz photons go just as far as 500 MHz (US channel 19) photons or indeed photons for Channel 2 or Channel 50. 

There's also a lot more spectrum available at 5 GHz.  What's more it's easier to form highly directional radio beams at 5 GHz than it is at TV frequencies.  Finally, at 5 GHz you need less open area around a line-of-sight transmission path, i.e. the Fresnel zone is smaller.

The primary place where 500 MHz does better than 5 GHz is going through heavy masonry.  The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has done detailed measurements of how radio waves are attenuated as they pass through various building materials.  Their report is here.  Masonry significantly obstructs radio signals but it's much worse at 5 GHz than it is at 500 MHz.

Dense forests also obstruct radio waves.  The situation is a lot more complex as the randomly distributed leaves, twigs, branches and tree trunks cause attenuation, scattering, diffraction and absorption. There's been quite a bit of study of radio in forests, both for radio communication and for satellite observation of natural resources.  A good summary is here.  In short, wet forests are more of a problem than dry forests and lower frequencies do better than higher frequencies.

Wi-Fi:  the best bet for commercial success with TV white space

Wi-Fi has several years lead over WiMAX or LTE in deployment of so-called 4G technology.  In addition, the Wi-Fi market is large so prices are low (versus WiMAX or LTE where handsets may eventually be low cost, but infrastructure is expensive).  If there there is commercial success in the TV white spaces, it's most likely to be with Wi-Fi, in the 2012-2014 time frame.

Broadband capacity - sizing buffers to handle traffic bursts

This is part 4 in a sequence of posts examining how broadband services actually work.  Part 1 looked at ISP concentration ratios.  Part 2 examined the effect of  averaging traffic from many subscribers.  Part 3 considered the impact of congestion on user experience. Here we'll take a finer grained look at traffic in the access network.

How do we achieve "zero" packet loss? Most websites are "hosted" and connect to the backbone by Fast Ethernet or Gigabit Ethernet links. Individual websites may be mismanaged, but there is no excuse for packet loss here.

Internet backbone links and backbone-to-backbone hand-offs are extremely high capacity multiplexing the traffic of thousands to millions of users.  Traffic statistics are predictable and operators compete on the basis of service levels, so packet loss is typically zero.

If there are performance problems, they're usually in the access network. Of course, one bottleneck is the service I've signed up for, for example a DSL link at 6 Mbps /1 Mbps. By definition my traffic is shaped to the service level I've signed up for.  This shaping typically happens at the first aggregation point (CMTS, DSLAM or WISP P2MP radio) or, on an IP or MAC address basis, at a bandwidth management device further upstream.  If they arise, problems are in the aggregation points and/or links between me and the backbone.

Since packet loss significantly degrades user experience, we'd like to understand how much over-provisioning a broadband service provider needs in order to absolutely minimize packet loss in the access network.  To understand this we need to look at smaller levels of aggregation (dozens and hundreds of users) and shorter intervals (sub-second rather than 5 minute averages, as few routers buffer more than a few tens or hundreds of milliseconds of traffic).

But first lets look at some five minute averages from a WISP with ~300 customers, each with either 1 Mbps or 3 Mbps service.

If one took these graphs at face value, it seems 20 Mbps of backhaul would be more than adequate, as the traffic peaks at 17 Mbps.  But 5 minute averages don't speak to what's really happening.

I don't have sub-second averages for the specific WISP above, but Fergal Toomey, Chief Scientist at Corvil Ltd., has some very detailed measurements on a similar Internet access network providing services to users at 512 Kbps, 1 Mbps and 2 Mbps. These are available in a whitepaper you can request from Corvil's website. Fergal's measurements were made at the Internet POP looking at traffic headed towards individual users.  Also, his measurements were made in 2004 when most hosted servers had 100 Mbps connections to the backbone and the majority of computers had TCP stacks configured for a maximum TCP receive window of 32KB.  In this graph, green shows 5 minutes averages, while light blue shows 500 ms averages. Dark blue shows 5 ms averages and they are striking!

What's Happening?

Web browsers typically use persistent TCP connections to minimize connection overhead and to avoid repeating TCP's slow start.  As a result, servers will frequently respond to a new request with a full window's worth of data.  In 2004 that was 32 KBs of data or ~23 packets of up to 1500 bytes each. Today it could be much more. Absorbing one such burst should be no problem, but to what extent are such bursts coincident?

Beyond web browsing, detailed traffic analysis uncovers a variety of odd behavior and some less savory behavior. For example, one burst was a blast of many 41-byte packets sent by a web application that apparently does a series of 1-byte writes to a TCP socket with the NO_DELAY flag set.  Several thousand packets arrive in quick succession causing packet loss.  Worse yet, follow-on losses occur as retransmissions cause a decaying series of echo bursts.

On a more malicious note, the data includes bursts caused by port scans.  These consist of many, many minimum size probe packets that attempt to scan all of a subscriber's ports in one enormous burst.  Luckily these lost packets are not retransmitted.

Beyond these, Fergal Toomey's analysis uncovered a variety of application anomalies that I found unexpected, but which crop up in the real world.

What headroom is really required?

Clearly we could just increase the size of the buffers in the router and smooth out any of these bursts, but that would also increase the delay while the burst lasts and thus introduce significant jitter.  A better question is how much headroom is required to guarantee zero packet loss and no more than 20 ms of incremental delay?

Conveniently, Fergal Toomey has run that calculation on the data set above and the result looks like this:

In this graph, the average traffic (the "mean" shown in light green) peaks just shy of 5 Mbps.  To guarantee zero packet loss and no more than 20 ms incremental delay 100 % of the time requires 19 Mbps of capacity or nearly 4x.  However, to guarantee zero packet loss and no more than 20 ms of delay 99% of the time, requires only 8 Mbps, i.e. a little less than 2x.

Interestingly, while ISP practices tend to be trade secrets, the rule of thumb that 2x headroom provides good service crops up repeatedly.

Conclusion

As a practical matter, real Internet traffic is fairly complex and includes a wide variety of anomalous behaviors. Rules of thumb based on averaging the traffic of a few hundred or even a few thousand subscribers are likely to be very expensive (in terms of excess capacity).  A better approach is to continuously monitor packet loss and delay variation (jitter), adding capacity as needed to keep those measures below desired levels.  

Zero packet loss and less than 20 ms incremental jitter, more than 99 percent of the time sounds plausible objective to me.  

Now if only my broadband service provider was willing to share any information about their service level objectives or performance.  Ooops, I must be dreaming.

Broadband capacity - the impact of congestion

This is part 3 in a sequence of posts examining how broadband services actually work.  Part 1 looked at ISP concentration ratios and part 2 examined the impact of averaging many subscribers. Future posts will consider how to size backhaul links and how to configure buffers.

Two major reasons people purchase broadband (or sign up for more capacity) are to improve interactivity and to get access to new applications, for example streaming movies.  New apps is clear, but it's worth looking congestion and how congestion affects interactivity.

Congestion has two impacts. First you get increased delays, as packets are buffered in queues waiting for free capacity on the next link. Usually this adds tens or hundreds of milliseconds to round trip times. Then, if the average traffic exceeds link capacity, you get packet loss. If you do have congestion, it's these packet losses that cause TCP traffic flows to back off, thus avoiding congestion collapse (and even less throughput).

Here is a graph of packet loss on a service that most of us would consider unacceptable.  These measurements were taken by Tom Dunigan on an early cable modem service (February 2001) that was substantially upgraded about a year later.

 

The next graph (also from Tom Donigan) shows how this congestion impacts interactivity.  The graph shows the echo delay for typing into a remote program using telnet in character-at-a-time mode.  One test (red line) was run in the early morning and one test (green line) was run during the evening when packet loss was peaking.  Each test measured the echo response time for 100 successive individual characters. Notice the typical echo delay goes up from ~130 ms in the morning to roughly 200-300 ms in the evening, but with occasional delays of more than one second.

Relatively few programs operate character-by-character, so the extra 100 ms or so might not matter.  On the other hand, a once second delay is noticeable!

A more common activity is viewing content on websites.  Here, the dominant time in any interaction is the time spent waiting for web content to download to your browser.  Since web content is downloaded using TCP (and more generally, TCP is the dominant protocol in use today), it's worth looking at the impact of packet loss on TCP throughput.  

The TCP protocol includes a congestion avoidance algorithm which is triggered by packet loss. When a packet is lost, the TCP sender slows down. As a result, the data rate for a single TCP flow looks like this (thanks to Guido Appenzeller):

Of course this assumes the TCP flow lasts long enough to saturate the bottleneck link and that this is the only flow in the network!  

What happens in real networks is complex, but RFC 3155 has an approximate formula for how a single flow is affected by packet loss in real network.  Even better, Bill Gibson at Niwot Networks has produced a nice graphic based on that formula for his paper on TCP limitations on file transfer performance.  It looks like this:

 

This is dramatic!  The different lines reflect different end-to-end round trip times (RTT) - times that will vary depending on the site you are connecting with.  Also, they represent the maximum throughput you could achieve with long duration TCP flows and no other bottlenecks.  What's notable is the logarithmic throughput scale on the left and the fact that, at 1% packet loss (0.01 on the bottom scale), potential throughput drops by a factor of 100!

Again, there are many caveats.  A real network has a mix of short- and long-lived flows. The local operating system may not be optimized to take full advantage of broadband speeds (although MS Windows actually got better at this with Vista). None-the-less, even 1% or 2% packet loss is correlated with poor user experience.

In short, to actually obtain the instantaneous throughput you thought you were purchasing, you don't want packet loss in upstream portions of the network.

I'll discuss what this actually implies for routers and backhaul links in a subsequent post.

Broadband capacity - the impact of averaging many subscribers

The fundamental idea of packet networks like the Internet is to transport variable rate data flows over a shared infrastructure.  Individual end points may generate little or no traffic for minutes or hours on end and then suddenly want to send or receive a large data set as quickly as possible.  Packet networks efficiently share common transport facilities among multiple users but how does this sharing actually work?  Yesterday I posted some actual, relatively current data from three small ISPs.  Today, let me show you how averaging traffic from many individual end points produces a completely stable core network flow.

Each of the graphs below shows successive five minutes measurements during a 24 hour period, but the first graph reflects a few hundred subscribers while the final graph represents the average of many, many millions of subscribers.

In the first graph, the blue line reflects outbound traffic from a few hundred subscribers.  While the average is just over 1 Mbps, the peak (at ~1615 hrs) is 6.9 Mbps for a peak-to-average of nearly 7-to-1.  The green bars represent inbound traffic with an average of 5.6 Mbps and a peak of nearly 16.8 Mbps for a peak-to-average of 3-to-1.  Some of this is time-of-day dependency but a lot of it, particularly the 6.91 Mbps spike at 1615 hrs, is the result of averaging only a few hundred subscribers.

 

Here's a traffic measurement at AMS-IX, the largest Internet Exchange in the world.  With an average of nearly 1 Gbps, the peak-to-average is a modest 1.43-to-1 and it's almost entirely due to time of day.  The largest change from one 5 minute measurement to the next appears to be about 140 Mbps so the short term peak-to-average is perhaps 1.1-to-1.

 

Finally, here a measurement of all the traffic flowing through AMS-IX – over 822 Gbps peak.  Here the time-of-day variation remains but there are virtually no statistical fluctuations.  The short term peak-to-average is almost 1-to-1.

 

To put this in economic terms, for an Internet backbone link that runs at many Gbps your daily traffic profile is completely stable and you can guarantee zero packet loss merely by providing 10%-20% extra capacity above your daily peak.  

But if you are running a small ISP, both the capacity you need per subscriber and the extra "headroom" for unanticipated peaks must be substantially larger.  To get a handle on what is required we also need to look at shorter intervals (shorter than five minutes).  But more on that in a subsequent post.

ISP Contention Ratios and average traffic per user – some data points

Recently there’s been a flurry of discussions about bandwidth shortages, not to mention bandwidth hogs, bandwidth caps, network neutrality and what constitutes fair practices by ISPs. But there is very little public data and no transparency! 

So let me offer a (very) few actual data points, one from a few years ago and three fairly current. These come from friends who are operators and from emails shared on trade association mail lists. Since some of it was not intended for publication, I have withheld specific names. 

Notice contention ratios vary widely and yet each of these operators has enough extra capacity that they claim to avoid link saturation and its impacts, like packet loss and excessive ping times. It’s true these are all small operators (280-1200 customers) so this data lacks the statistical smoothness one would expect when aggregating traffic from thousands or millions of subscribers. 

I also have some data on traffic averages by time and by number of subscribers that I’ll share in a subsequent blog post. 

Mar 2006 – Rural ISP (Dialup, DSL & Wireless)
130 Motorola Canopy subscribers (with 512 Kbps service)
150 DSL subscribers (110 with 512 Kbps service; 40 at 1 Mbps)
100 dialup lines serving 800 customers (average 40 Kbps)
Daily traffic was saturating 4.5 Mbps (3 T1s) for an hour per day but not with 6 Mbps.
Contention ratio: 164Mbps / 6 Mbps -> 27:1
Traffic per BB user: 6 Mbps / 280 subscribers -> 21 Kbps 

Sep 2009 – Rural ISP (DSL & Wireless)
1200 customers, DSL subs at 1.5, 3 or 6 Mbps; wireless subs at 384 Kbps, 768 Kbps, 1 Mbps or 3 Mbps. I don’t have the mix, so I'm guessing the contention ratio.
Daily traffic peaks at around 35-40 Mbps; up to 150 Mbps Internet transit available.
Contention ratio: 2400 Mbps(?) / 150 Mbps -> 16:1
Traffic per BB user: 40 Mbps / 1200 subscribers -> 33 Kbps 

Sep 2009 – Community-run WISP
340 customers, mostly on 3-4 Mbps service
Daily traffic peaks around 17 Mbps; 45 Mbps of Internet transit available.
Contention ratio: 1190 Mbps / 45 Mbps -> 26:1
Traffic per BB user: 17 Mbps / 340 members -> 50 Kbps 

Sep 2009 – Rural ISP
370 customers: 300 Customers on wireless (1-3 Mbps) and 70 customers with FTTH (10/100 & up, but most have 10 Mbps peak). Monthly fees based on a 10 or 20 GB cap with extra charges for heavier use.
Daily traffic peaks at 13-14 Mbps; 20 Mbps of Internet transit available.
Contention ratio: 1200 Mbps (?) / 20 Mbps -> 60:1
Traffic per BB user: 14 Mbps / 370 subscribers -> 37 Kbps

White spaces could be the broadcasters best hope

For years, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) fought the White Spaces Coalition and others interested in making US "TV white spaces" available for broadband, Wi-Fi or indeed, any new purpose. When the FCC voted 5-0 to permit license exempt use of TV White Spaces, the industry brought suit in Federal court. And they did this, despite rules in the FCC's decision that are so restrictive that, for now, white spaces devices are doomed to commercial failure. The NAB are savvy in the ways of Washington

But fighting the White Space Coalition is short sighted. The NAB faces a much bigger and more powerful enemy — mobile operators.

The White Spaces Coalition merely seeks permission to use spectrum where NAB members are not using it, i.e. on a non-interference basis as "secondary users" with purely secondary rights.  

The mobile industry wants it all.  They'd prefer that broadcast spectrum be taken back and auctioned off for mobile use. Discussions on recapturing broadcast spectrum ramped up after an October comment by FCC broadband czar Blair Levin. For example see the transcript of this December 1st panel discussion. Or consider last week's appointment of Duke Law Professor Stuart Benjamin as the FCC's first Distinguished Scholar in Residence. Benjamin is a vocal proponent of reclaiming the TV broadcast spectrum!

Broadcasters beware!  

Unlike the White Spaces Coalition, the mobile operators are political experts. They are part of a 100+ year telecom lobbying heritage. The Bell System was lobbying government agencies before the broadcast industry existed. Now Congress is considering spectrum policy. The FCC is considering spectrum policy.  

Broadcasters may eventually extort large sums of money out of the public, but over the next decade they will lose more and more of their spectrum.  I am no fan of the broadcast industry. Even after converting to more modern "digital" broadcasting, they are sitting on spectrum they don't need in order to deliver a limited number of channels of broadcast TV to the 14% of households who don't subscribe to cable. I'm one of those 14% and I don't even watch TV, so I have no interest in broadcasters' survival. But I can't help noticing there is one thing broadcasters could do that would block mobile operators from taking over broadcast spectrum.

White spaces can save broadcasters' spectrum rights

If license exempt white space devices are commercially successful, it will become increasingly difficult and then politically impossible for Congress or the FCC to recapture TV spectrum for exclusive use by the mobile industry. If Wi-Fi, WiMAX and other consumer devices appear using TV frequencies, it will become harder and harder to displace these consumer uses and recapture the exclusive use the mobile industry requires.  

So, if the broadcast industry really wants to hold onto their current spectrum rights, they should get as many non-interfering "secondary users" into their band as possible.  Otherwise, they will eventually lose their primary rights to the quest for more mobile broadband.

User owned fiber in Utah

Here's some wonderful news via Geoff Daily's excellent Broadband blog, Apprising.  Brigham City Utah is offering its citizens the chance to own their own fiber connection from their premises to the Utopia network where they can pick and choose among a growing number of services and service providers.

Some highlights from Geoff's post:

Today in Brigham City, for $3,000 you can buy your own fiber. And in fact more than 1,600 local residents have already bought in to this new opportunity.

The biggest problem with the economics of deploying fiber is that you have to carry a massive debt load and begin paying it off before much revenue starts coming in. Plus you have to invest a lot of money into neighborhoods without any real idea of how many people are going to sign up for service.

The user-owned model totally changes these dynamics. First off, by having users pay for their own pipes you disaggregate most of the debt. Just look at Brigham City. They're building a $5.5 million network and the city's putting up less than $700,000. So no massive debt load for the city (or a private provider for that matter) to carry.

Of course the other issue with is fiber builds is take rate - what percentage of the prospective customers actually sign up?  For Verizon FiOS it's 21%.

With user owned fiber the take rate is 100% !  and the churn is zero.

Best of all, the owner controls their destiny while multiple service providers compete for the business.

My notes from eComm in Amsterdam

The first EU version of eComm was not as large as the California event, but equally worth it.  Below the photo is a copy of my notes (i.e. my warmed over Twitter stream) followed by a copy of the schedule.  I don't know if this is of much value to you, but like many things in the blog, it's a convenient way for me to keep notes on things I'm interested in.  :)

There's a copy of my presentation on SlideShare.  My photos are here.

Monday, 26-Oct-09

8:29 AM Getting organized to leave for eComm Europe 2009 in Amsterdam, http://bit.ly/TL45Q. Plan to write my notes live on Tweeter!

Wednesday, 28-Oct-09

8:39 AM Amazing - a European event that actually started at 8:30am, and there are perhaps 100 people here already with more coming in...

8:42 AM Lee Dryburgh's giving global telecom vision, but no practical issues like conf tags and Wi-Fi codes. Assumes smart folks!

8:48 AM Martin Geddes - Goodbye minutes - Hello moments. Voice & SMS revenues have peaked, now declining - but there are new opty's.

8:50 AM Martin Geddes - Describes how biz to consumer messaging could work better (& gen revenues for operator).

9:04 AM Geddes - Better Vmail: Editting APIs; HD Audio; Pers Interactions; Smarter Container; Multimedia.

9:05 AM Geddes - Integrating comm to reduce friction, e.g. Ribbit adding voice to Google Wave.

9:07 AM Geddes - Telco platform needs to provide 3 steps: connect (many ways); interact & transact (e.g. collect on enterprise behalf)

9:10 AM Geddes - Who will profit fr platform? Telcos? Salesforce+Google+Facebook? or Someone new?

9:11 AM Geddes - New Platform needed to manage complexity - Martin's focus, so far, has been Biz Process improvement

9:13 AM Geddes: Comm Stages have been: Messages, Minutes, MBs, Media, but what we need next are "Moments"

9:16 AM Geddes - 1st Q from Audience is about customer privacy. Martin thinks operators are trusted and can manage to remain trusted.

9:17 AM Geddes responds to Q about transition: Will be messy.

9:19 AM Geddes responding to Q: Are Ops really trusted or just tolerated? A: Trusted, could blow it, but generally optimistic.

9:20 AM Geddes responding to Q about moments: Moments of experience more important than moments of efficiency

9:22 AM Geddes responding to Q from Martyn Davis about regulation. A: Google exists, it can be done.

9:23 AM Bob Frankston - Need to move beyond telecom & network neutrality -- To Ambient Connectivity - where you can assume you're connected.

9:25 AM Frankston: Endpoint ID; Routing ID; independent of IP addr, Operator, anyone else - networking independent of any network

9:27 AM Frankston - rediscover the Internet, i.e. rediscover End-to-End. Some tastes - Subscriptions decouple some apps from the path

9:28 AM Frankston points out China now has ambient electricity, i.e. universal sockets that accept any international plug.

9:30 AM Frankston: Opportunities - no dependence on subscriptions, no per-pipe billing - who will provide the bit commons? What is he asking for?

9:31 AM Frankston: Talks about running our own wires, but also seeks access to common infrastructure. Networks versus networking...

9:34 AM Frankston: Internet is an experiment in economics. It's about the apps - those are the end points. Opty to rethink everything now.

9:36 AM Frankston ""Broadband"" is the lamp post model (look for keys where light is)

9:37 AM Frankston: Shift funding to infrastructure; ran out of time...

9:39 AM Frankston: responding to Q about port 80 - people use it because it works, not because they are doing client-server.

9:41 AM James Enck works for special situations capital company - opens with comments on current financial stress - amusing slides!

9:45 AM Enck: Recovery will not be to what was, but something new. US deficit far more than Obama is saying. Some EU countries there today

9:47 AM Enck is giving an amazing depressing view of our future! EU-centric, but applies world wide. I hope he has something to suggest.

9:52 AM Enck says telecom industry not as important as other global issues. But finally, he admits he's being flippant. Promising views?

9:54 AM Enck's telecom industry wish list: Awareness, Engagement, Investment, Reorientation - i.e. with future global needs.

9:55 AM Enck responding to Q about protecting Moore's law from government regulation - didn't get a simple answer...

9:57 AM Enck responding to Q: will telcos die or change? A: Not very optimistic.

10:03 AM Morten Hjerde: Phone Paradigm Shift - extended introduction to what paradigms are, using computer analogies.

10:09 AM Hjerde: Shows augmented reality browser (on your mobile device).

10:10 AM Hjerde: Communications as a medium, i.e. a stream of information, is something that translates to mobiles.

10:12 AM Hjerde: Most people still view mobile device as just phone. Paradigm shift will be to phone as medium & a life repository.

10:13 AM Hjerde: Smartphone users have made the transition - pick up phone to do other things (other than voice call). But devices are diff.

10:17 AM Julien Salanave from IDATE - Telecoms in EU in 2015. Has optimistic view of EU: EU good on fixed Broadband and now mobile BB.

10:19 AM Salanave: France using VoIP (i.e. FT); Dutch operators outsourcing their networks; Openreach, etc. - examples of EU innovation.

10:24 AM Salanave: 6 uncertainties: 1-silos, fragmented comms. 2-UltraBB availability. 3-New verticals? 4-Content optimization 5-open devices

10:25 AM Salanave: 6-open connectivity or bundles?

10:27 AM Salanave: Four possibilities... 1- Silent death. Most likely with public bailouts in some countries.

10:27 AM Salanave: #2 Market Shakeout - e.g. operators structurally separated with mix and match model for app providers

10:28 AM Salanave: #3 - Clash of the Giants - Telcos vs. Internet giants, but giants on top

10:29 AM Salanave: #4 Generative Bazaar - probably requires public infrastructure or net coops, i.e. connectivity, nothing more.

10:30 AM Salanave: DIY connectivity? Thinks we need a professional organizer but advocates Net coop.

10:31 AM Salanave: Has an argument there will be more revenue from generative bazaar... Not clear what that argument is. ??

12:09 PM - the pause in my coverage was the result of having to give my PC to the A/V crew before I spoke. I'm back in audience now.

12:21 PM Pictures are going up here: http://bit.ly/3LiFAn

12:30 PM Moray Rumney, Agilent - LTE started with a clean sheet. Constraints: spectrum, bps/Hz, # of cells

12:31 PM Rumney: Most wireless capacity gains have been due to more cell sites.

12:32 PM Rumney: Peak rates going up much more rapidly than average for optimum cell capacity - will be 90x with LTE. Ads for peak are bad!

12:34 PM Rumney: 3G/4G problem 19 frequency bands

12:35 PM Rumney: LTE Rel-8 won't actually work much better than HSPA+ in commercial deployments.

12:36 PM Rumney: Worried about single frequency intercell interference and OFDM. Also, MIMO for Wi-Fi but maybe not in cellular...

12:39 PM Rumney: Mobile broadband dilema - won't get the capacity people expect with current LTE path. Linear increase for exponential problem

12:41 PM Rumney: LTE must watch out for Wi-Fi ! Great follow up for my talk !

2:15 PM Norman Lewis describing and promoting vlume.com - promoting user control of mobile services by web aggregation of people.

3:13 PM Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino: CEO of tinker.it - arduino.cc makezine.com1

3:17 PM Deschamps-Sonsino: the Internet of Things - I am my devices - making those smarter - non-verbal communication via contextual info

3:18 PM Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino: CEO of tinker.it - arduino.cc makezine.com1

3:20 PM Deschamps-Sonsino: arduino.cc over 100K sold - cheap easy way to prototype w/RFID, Bluetooth, Xbee, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, GPS

3:22 PM Deschamps-Sonsino: Examples: device tweets when unborn baby kicks; RFID detects when cat is in the house; Kill-a-watt home power mon

3:24 PM Deschamps-Sonsino: New product possibilities: Guardian Twat race; Rewind; Centograph

4:06 PM Claire Boonstra co-founder of Layar is describing their augmented reality mobile application

4:10 PM Boonstra: Layar uses GPS/cell-ID, camera and data including 3rd party data via open API. 3rd parties develop layers!

4:37 PM Mark Rolston of frog design: more augmented reality plus user interactivity via the device watching what the user is doing.

4:40 PM Rolston: Discussion of Microsoft Natal project

4:43 PM Rolston: showing phone keyboard projected onto your hand and a person dialing, i.e. the MIT example I've already seen.

4:45 PM Rolston: The problem with computing is it requires computers. Frog design working to make it seamless. New affordances.

4:57 PM Peter Kaptein& Valerie ?, RoomWare - software to use mobile as remote control - demo just finished this weekend... setup probs...

5:00 PM Kaptein: Connecting people places and things - more than remote control, it knows where you are & what's possible - e.g. order lunch!

5:02 PM Peter Kaptein: The following are in same space, but different (complementary?): pachube, layar & roomware

5:07 PM Peter Kaptein: demo not working... good attempt to fill and/or recover, but demo still broken - finally 4 precious minutes gone...

5:08 PM Peter Kaptein: voice call; IVR response, then DTMF keys become remote control direction keys: 1 upper left, 2 up, 6 right 8 down, etc.

5:10 PM Peter Kaptein: Repeat demo with an Android, Now get data menu on scrren - using it to control the slides. More clear than IVR.

5:11 PM Peter Kaptein: Now we're seeing a good demo! I wonder how much the IVR approach will be used. Data approach so much better.

5:12 PM Peter Kaptein: They use Voxeo for the IVR part and gave Voxeo a pitch (as a supporter of the conference!).

5:18 PM Gerd Leonhard, MediaFuturist.com - Futurist - develops scenarios for clients for next 2-3 years and next 5 years.

5:25 PM Leonhard: Recent events - Social media passes email. video streaming (youtube) passes P2P. Ref to STL's 2-sided markets.

5:30 PM Leonhard: I've heard his points before, e.g. Music by itself has no value, the value is around it. Bundle + + +. Freemium models.

5:32 PM - to many back channels. Can deal with Google Wave right now (and it's not widely public yet). Certainly can't cope with IRC.

Thursday, 29-Oct-09

9:07 AM Jaap van Till, HAN University, NL gives outline of cooperative actions starting with a reference to Ostrom's Noble prize."

9:09 AM James Body, Telenet Research (formerly Truphone) is now working on what can be done to fill in gaps in GSM coverage."

9:33 AM Bob Sweeney, VoiceSage - focus on communications enabled business processes... Value metric is customer contacts missed."

9:38 AM My presentation from yesterday is up on SlideShare if your are interested http://bit.ly/2JWo3Z

9:39 AM @kerryritz http://bit.ly/2JWo3Z

9:43 AM Sean Park, Nauiokas Park, formerly a banker (<2006) now advisor on financial markets and platforms"

9:46 AM Park: Extends Carlota Perez to 6th paradigm which he projects will be ""Cloud Computing"" - Everything as a service.

10:03 AM Park: His website is http://nauiokaspark.com/#/home

10:06 AM Park: Advocating open APIs in banking as opposed to bank's current practice of black box closed systems.

10:19 AM Michael Jackson, Mangrove Capital, is giving a good (but very general) presentation on disruption.

10:23 AM Jackson claims biggest disruptive driver is telcos be pushed to their rightful place - as providers of tubes for the Internet.

10:33 AM James Burke, VURB, studies computing in cities - many things under rubric of Intelligent City. Augmented reality, co-working, ...

10:34 AM Burke: 100kgarages.com supports homebrew manufacturing (via outsourcing?)

10:36 AM Burke: Tons of interesting examples: Barcamps and other ""camps""; sensors networks & twitter; find your friends; recylcing; ...

11:20 AM RJ Auburn, CTO of Voxeo is talking about text, not voice! Kids don't talk on the phone, they text or IM. So the future is text.

11:39 AM David ""Lefty"" Schlesinger, LiMo Foundation asks audience # under 35? ~25% hands up. Wow. Lefty started w/computers 35 yrs ago.

11:54 AM Schlesinger: iPhone exposes problems with our assumptions, but is not indicative of what's coming next (can't even guess!)

11:57 AM Moshe Yudkowsky, Disaggregate - ""practical is a relative term"" as a lead in for a discussion of the status of speech technology

12:08 PM Yudkowsky: Good survey of speech technology. I liked his comments on data mining recorded speech.

12:14 PM Jay Phillips, creator of Adhearsion, now part of Voxeo - speaking on open source software - 1st post-scarcity economy

12:20 PM Phillips: Goal is to get ""crazy efficient"" at producing a class of applications. His lead-in to open source development tools.

12:25 PM Phillips: Java is back and here to stay, i.e. SIPMethod, Mobicents, Sailfin

12:28 PM Phillips: UniMRCP - general purpose media server!

12:35 PM Jan Linden, Global IP Solutions is on stage now, but having presentation problems...

12:39 PM Linden: Still no sound, but good video examples. Clear benefit of H.264 SVC. Description of what H.264 & SVC are.

12:50 PM Dean Bubley of Disruptive Analysis comes on stage to talk about LTE's problems providing either voice or SMS.

1:01 PM Bubley: LTE Voice - Circuit-switched fallback is so bad it looks like it was designed to force mobile operators to adopt IMS.

2:26 PM A panel discussion is getting underway: Investing in the Telecom Value Chain for a Post-Meltdown World - Moderator Introduction

2:36 PM Telecom Value Chain: James Enck (mCAPITAL), Sean Park (Nauiokas Park), Hjalmar Winbladh (Rebtel), Michael Jackson (Mangrove Capital)

2:54 PM Sean does an interesting bit on weather derivatives and frictionless brokering of weather insurance using a new Internet-based sys.

2:56 PM Jackson has good point that he doesn't buy stuff on-line in Denmark because in many cases there is no way to pay, e.g. US videos.

2:57 PM Winbladh makes the point that stores sell prepaid cards, but you can't buy Skype credits without a credit card - a big gap.

2:58 PM Panel bitching about how Telco's have a micropayment platform but have never figured out how to make them available to 3rd parties.

3:10 PM Martin Geddes talking about 2-sided markets - Covering similar material as last spring: http://blip.tv/file/1839328/1

3:16 PM Martin Geddes now on the transition from IT Svcs to Cloud Svcs. Money will be in aggregating services (definitely not infrastructure)

4:09 PM Sten Tamkivi, GM Skype Estonia - Why Skype's success? Intimate (i.e. HD/video) & free plus International LD (i.e. pays for Skype)

4:12 PM Tamkivi: 33% of Skype calls now include video; ILD volume +13% retail price -7% wholesale -4% fo rnet +4%, increasingly going mobile

4:15 PM Tamkivi: 500M minutes US-Mexico = leading calling corridor, 37% in top 30 corridors and then very, very long tail.

4:18 PM Tamkivi: US 46% video; China 24% video // US 5% IM; China 24% IM // Dev Mkt to Emerging Mkt is highest usage // Dev-Dev is 2nd

4:23 PM Tamkivi: Long talk of Dev countries wanting video while emerging mkts want IM, SMS, cheap voice - seems obvious - why dwell so long?

4:26 PM Tamkivi: 100K hours of Skype-Skype per hour; 33K hours of video calls; 12K hours of calls to landlines and mobiles (PSTN).

4:27 PM Tamkivi: Q about SIP - A: won't fix want's not broken, thus addressing interop but not worrying about stuff that works. Well stated.

4:28 PM Tamkivi: When original design was done (in 2001-2002) we couldn't have made a system that ""just worked"" using SIP - won't chg now.

4:31 PM Tamkivi: Answering Q about adding money xfer capability - experimented w/Paypal. Problems with per-countries regulation.

4:34 PM Tamkivi: Q: Will you add social networking? A: Skype is a social network already - may expose more & integrate (as did w/MySpace).

4:36 PM Tamkivi: Q about retaining P2P svc when groups become isolated. A: a bit ambiguous - always reviewing on case-by-case basis.

4:38 PM Tim Panton, PhoneFromHere.com talking about deploying SILK codec. They embed voice into websites. SILK 1st true VoIP codec vs PSTN c.

4:41 PM Panton: 1st use at gamers site. Need rich (HD) comms - using max quality level w/16 KHz sampling at half the uLaw rate

4:44 PM Panton: 2nd case is language lessions - less CPU than gamers & variable BW - quality important. So 8 KHz samples & variable rate.

4:45 PM Panton: 2nd case benefits from having network stats to feedback to codec. Getting that feedback through Asterisk was a lot of work.

4:46 PM Panton: Summary - SILK has been most flexible and better than any alternatives they've tried

4:48 PM Panton: Rspd'g to Q - They avoid transcoding at all. Always loading Java client with the right codec & parameters.

4:48 PM Panton: Haven't done a comparison of SILK with ILBC

4:49 PM Now Tim Panton starting again with a new presentation - new topic - Google Wave

4:56 PM Panton: giving examples of phone calls included in a Google Wave. Wave shows each snip with timestamp in the wave.

4:57 PM Panton: each segment listed in the Wave is in a separate audio file with a time stamp.

5:05 PM Dean Elwood, VoIP User, talking about Voice UI (voxygen.co.uk) - why it's important (customer sat.)

5:09 PM Rudolf van der Berg, Logica, on the future of Interconnect - won't get free voice anytime soon because stuck with EU regulation.

5:13 PM van der Berg: Exposing the problems with ""Calling Party Pays"" - nice to see suppt for stuff I've written about: http://bit.ly/37VhLN

5:16 PM van der Berg: Advocating Bill and Keep - refers to Internet peering and his article http://bit.ly/ILszq

5:20 PM Daniel Appelquist, Vodafone, on Social Web - he's in an R&D group - won't talk about 360 offer or widgets.

5:23 PM Appelquist: Net history - closed to open // Social networks are sep gardens today - will have to chg. Working on Soc Net platform

5:27 PM Appelquist: 71% of people are active in multiple social networks

5:29 PM Appelquist: Screen full of logos - we need this diversity, but... Shows 3 scenarios: Consolidation, fragmentation, Social Web

5:30 PM Appelquist: Advocates social web where users move btwn social apps and exchange data (under their control) - decentralized.

5:32 PM Appelquist: req. protocols - get slide deck for long lists of who is pushing what standards - special mention for OSLO Allicance

5:36 PM Stuart Henshall, Phweet: On twitter: #Callme, #SkypeMe, text me - @mgs are like ring, but may be delayed for days.

5:39 PM Henshall: Twitter provides ID and reputation, but needs nxt gen - TwitterTalk - Important for calls outside out budy list.

5:40 PM Henshall: Who has access to me? Proliferation of channels. Phweet Alpha dumped URL into stream - launches bridged call in browser.

5:41 PM Henshall: Problems - delayed receipt of tweets

5:43 PM Henshall: Location-based Phweet - signaling outside carrier; don't share #s; profile is Caller-ID - solution not limited to Twitter

5:48 PM Tjeerd Hoek, frog design, promises 10 observations on communication trends

5:52 PM eComm Hoek: 1) Being a great tool is pretty cool (& long lived - e.g. FAX & Morse code).

5:54 PM Hoek: 2) nailing the basics is hard - prototype and test, repeatedly.

5:56 PM Hoek: 3) Hardware is a commodity, or is it? Tech-tools as objects of desire. Examples of gorgeous devices.

5:58 PM Hoek: The phone is the next platform, or is it? - Dedicated devices with optimized HW & SW with one focus.

6:02 PM Hoek: How can we free the data people care about? share btwn user devices. Sharing and social beyond personal devices...

6:05 PM Hoek: Server-side processing and visualizations - showing models built from many individual's photos; then gapminder visualizations.

6:07 PM Hoek: Make it very easy to pay and people may pay!

6:09 PM Hoek: Be a Platform - open it up - change the world. Tjeerd Hoek is running over (& last talk of the day).

6:12 PM day is done. Tomorrow morning will have keynotes by both Sascha Meinrath and the Google Wave team.

Friday, 30-Oct-09

8:51 AM Cullen Jennings, Cisco, is up first today as Sascha Meinrath seems to be stuck in traffic.

8:54 AM Jennings is giving a survey of what's happened in telephony - nice talk, amusing anecdotes about support, but no new insights, yet.

8:56 AM Jennings: Oddly, codecs have gotten more expensive - need more variants, need wideband, need video - device cost goes up.

8:57 AM Jennings mentions distributed hash tables (as used by Skype) - looks like he loves the subject. So do I !

8:58 AM Jennings: Mentions P2PSIP groups attempt to standardize the use of Dist. Hash Tbles. (DHT). DHTs the opposite of Cloud Computing!

9:00 AM Jennings: Phone numbers - artificially scarce resource! Identifiers are valuable. Phone Nums will outlast the PSTN.

9:01 AM Jennings: Public ENUM co-op'd by carriers, turned into Infrastructure ENUM (where carriers control). Will people steal their # back?"

9:03 AM Jennings: Lack of royalty free codecs in holding back media in HTML. iLBC for narrowband, SILK or CELT for wideband, Theora video."

9:04 AM Jennings: H.264 SVC is great but we can't even figure out what the royalties will be, except they will be expensive. Go Theora!

9:06 AM Jennings: IETF may be able to make progress with royalty free codecs, se their Codec BOF codec@ietf.org"

9:11 AM Jennings: ENUM issue is who gets to make changes. Users or carriers.

9:13 AM Sascha Meinrath, New America Foundation, speaking with no slides - Works where technology & policy intersect. Educating Congress."

9:18 AM Meinrath: Amusing story about how we are too protected in the west (vs. visiting dev world). Righteous injuries! You can be an idiot.

9:20 AM Meinrath: Story includes local optimization (while climbing a cliff) that gets you into a position where you can't go up or down.

9:20 AM Meinrath: Pt of his story - We are at a critical juncture in telecom that will set our trajectory for decades to come.

9:23 AM Meinrath: No one is paying attention to most of the critical telcom policy battles.

9:24 AM Meinrath: Now he's gotten to spectrum policy & how our current policies are based on the latest technology of the 1930s!

9:24 AM Meinrath: Telco's spending $100M on lobbying in the US. There are only a few dozen people to lobby.

9:25 AM Meinrath: Spectrum is artificially scarce, but it is most valuable asset on many telcom companies books. Telco's want no change!

9:27 AM Meinrath: Amusing tie back to story of being frozen on a cliff wall in Turkey. 1st thought is to take no action, i.e. no risk.

9:29 AM Meinrath: Making spectrum access opportunistic (TV white spaces) is being countered by large companies - FCC frozen in inaction.

9:32 AM Meinrath: Loose coalition of public interest groups in Wash DC are fighting the good fight - and Sascha is clearly enjoying it!

9:34 AM Meinrath: Jaap raises question of commodities - Sascha: yes, new biz models scare existing players.

9:36 AM Meinrath: Same problem appears in many other policy fronts, but opportunistic spectrum access is critical for decades of progress.

9:39 AM Meinrath: Q - can you prove this is in public interest. A: poor answer in my view - based on net neutrality discussions.

9:48 AM Tom Katis, RebelVox, on what telephony would be if we designed it from scratch. Notes that even Skype is still basic telephony.

9:50 AM Katis: TV analogy - getting away from live TV (pre-recording) helped production quality. DVRs improve user convenience.

9:51 AM Katis: Voicemail should have fixed it, but didn't - requires live call to leave message and called party needs live call to listen.

9:53 AM Katis: Live is waiting on hold; Live is social anxiety; Live is often impractical (asleep, on plane, etc.). Msg'g is a relief.

9:54 AM Katis: But Msg'g not a replacement for live. Need the combination. DVRs are really buffers - buffering is what's needed.

9:57 AM Katis is setting up to give a demo - rather like this: http://bit.ly/h0u2b

10:01 AM Katis: not surprisingly, the demo on stage is not nearly as compelling as the demo in the video here: http://bit.ly/h0u2b

10:04 AM Google Wave team setting up - Lars Rasmussen & Stephanie Hannon have flown in from Sidney Australia to give talk & demo.

10:08 AM Google Wave team - apparently 6M people (including 60% of those in this room) have viewed the demo video: http://bit.ly/z6Hsm

10:12 AM Google Wave team has amusing flashes of negative reviews and a hilarious video takeoff someone did.

10:16 AM Google Wave: Now they are doing their 80 minute demo in 6 minutes. IM and email integrated with letter-by-letter type thru.

10:17 AM Google Wave: showing two people simultaneously editing the same document. Adding images (thumbnails appear in real time)

10:19 AM Google Wave: 3rd party extensions - a game has been stored within wave and Wave handles the coordination - competition in a coop tool

10:21 AM Google Wave: showing SW that syncs a map exploration using Wave API. Then show a very advanced spell checker (enormous lang. model).

10:24 AM Google Wave team now does everything in Wave: 35K accts in pre-alpha; Sept 30th - now at several 100K active users.

10:26 AM Google Wave invites going to groups that might collaborate. English only for now. 40% US, but also French, German, Spanish, ...

10:28 AM Google Wave has problem of ""Lonely Waver"" but can make a Wave public and find friends elsewhere among those who have Wave.

10:28 AM Google Wave is becoming a social networking tool. Users helping users within public waves, making friends, etc.

10:30 AM Google Wave - most Waves are private. Largest wave is 100KB (a limitation). Search for "Google Wave Extensions"

10:31 AM Google Wave example of sharing an SAP tool to build biz processes using a Wave - result goes into SAP compiler to produce result.

10:32 AM Google Wave in use by Salesforce.com who have a tool for their customers - example mobile phone company spt demo

10:37 AM Google Wave - 1st most requested is more Wave accts. 2nd is email integration where emails arrive in Wave - but on backburner.

10:37 AM Google Wave email integration would result in Wave being flooded with email. Wave can't match mature email tool.

10:38 AM Google Wave will add permissions - 3 levels: do anything; add & edit your own adds only; read only

10:40 AM Google Wave problem - hard to learn. Yes. Will users perceive enough benefit to go thru the learning curve. Initial retention good.

10:41 AM Google Wave federation ports to open today - Google and non-Google servers hosting Waves that can interop

10:42 AM Google Wave - Google voice integration is freq requested. Not sure when if can be scheduled.

10:43 AM Google Wave A to Q: Expect ecommerce - collaborative pizza ordering - coupons.

10:44 AM Google Wave Ans to Q: Wave designed for 30"" screens today, not for mobile screens, but working on a mobile version."

10:46 AM Google Wave Mobile will soon be able to add a msg to a Wave - but not experience the full intf.

10:46 AM Google Wave search for tags - needs work - not yet as simple as Google search

10:47 AM Google Wave - what about spt for other OSs? A: Wave content is very webby - need a full Web browser. Working on svr-svr protocol.

10:47 AM Google Wave - no work on std protocol for client-server yet. Maybe in 1-2 years.

10:49 AM Google Wave - any idea of offering frameworks (philosophies) like ""Getting things done""? A: focused on basics, protocols & APIs

10:50 AM Google Wave - users are developing Wave etiquette (frequently for a specific Wave) - Thinking of how to formalize this in the UI.

10:51 AM Google Wave - Q: what about user with poor links? Off-line mode? A: super-important - algorithms work equally well on flaky or offln

10:52 AM Google Wave - on poor link, stuff still arrives, just in chucks and after delay. Working on full off-line mode but will take time.

10:53 AM Google Wave Q about connecting streaming video. 6rounds has already done a video conf extension. Expect other 3rd party solutions.

10:54 AM Google Wave team pitching developers to add extensions.

10:56 AM going into a break, but expect more Google Wave after the break.to talk about Wave federation.

11:27 AM David Wang on Google Wave federation - Wave is a technology. Google Wave is a product. Federation allows diff Wave sys to intr-op.

11:28 AM David Wang - working on specs for federation, see http://waveprotocol.org/

11:30 AM Wang: Google particularly interested that other Wave-like products interoperate - pick product based on features, price, ...

11:30 AM Wang: Wave server parallel to SMTP servers.

11:31 AM Wang: Wave data model - Wave is collection of Wavelets which are group of participants, unit of concurrency; unit of federation.

11:33 AM Wang: One server owns a Wave - multiple svrs share updates. Adding a participant means adding someone who gets updates.

11:34 AM Wang: Federation works by exchanging XMPP - within a Wave server anything can be done privately.

11:35 AM Wang: Data stays on your server. Outside people only added with your permission, and only for specific waves.

11:37 AM Wang: draft protocol specs available; 40K lines of codes available as open source (Apache license, i.e. very open); also proto C-S.

11:39 AM Wang: opening federation port on WaveSandbox.com - very experimental for now. FedOne client/server very simple, to be updated.

11:39 AM Wang: Wave team seeking community participation.

11:41 AM Wang: interesting demo of GUI interface to text-based XMPP interface.

11:43 AM Wang - will open source the lion's share of Google's client and server.

11:49 AM Robert Horvitz, Open Spectrum Foundation/Alliance - of television and teraHertz - spectrum demand exploding - what mks economic sense

11:51 AM Horvitz - two legal traditions - nothing allows w/o permission or everything allowed that is not explicitly forbidden.

11:53 AM Horvitz: de-monopolize spectrum - to locales, user grps, professions, individual users & devices. ISM bands show it can work.

11:56 AM Horvitz: ""Looming spectrum crisis"" (US mobile guys want 800 MHz now) but existing economics won't spt this (telcm revenue growth 6%).

11:58 AM Horvitz - won't see 14x chg in user spending or cost of infrastructure - what is the middle ground?

12:01 PM Horvitz - interesting video of the largest screen in the world (in Las Vegas - works by projection on a canopy)

12:03 PM Horvitz: Is spectrum crisis looming - No, Cooper's law - http://bit.ly/51usH

12:05 PM Cooper's Law law: every 30 months the amount of information that can be transmitted over a given amount of radio spectrum doubles.

12:07 PM Martin Taylor, MetaSwitch, is working on voice enabling Google Wave - robot called ""Talky Talky"" conferencing also w/ transcription

12:08 PM Taylor: projects developed world in 2015 will have fixed & mobile BB with Net Neutrality, most phones smart and SIP widespread.

12:10 PM Taylor expects VoIP revolution - relationship with operator is where the biggest stakes are in play.

12:12 PM Taylor: - Right to own PSTN numbers is barrier for over-the-top providers. Expect non-mobile SIP # on mobiles - huge for EU mkt

12:14 PM Taylor interconnect complex and expensive (and with emergency svc obligation) - considerable costs

12:15 PM Taylor: visual voicemail is just an intf to a network application (V/M). A source of differentiation, but what about Google voice?

12:16 PM Taylor: QoS - is best efforts IP good enough for voice. Wideband is a major way IP is better than TDM.

12:17 PM Taylor: ease of use - pipe provider may have advantage handling setup - of course Skype did it well...

12:19 PM Taylor: Pipe owner will price voice to retain voice busines. Odds still stacked in favor of pipe owners - but be careful!

12:22 PM Stefan Agamanolis, Distance Lab (US co, he's in Scotland) Slowing Down Comms: Designs Inspired by Quality, Intimacy, & Humanity

12:23 PM Agamanolis: mobiles are like fast food - ideas for slow communications... 1) Distraction free (Phone booth used to do that).

12:27 PM Agamanolis: video of two people on phones, each in isolation tank - no smell, no touch. Sensory deprivation. Bizarre experiments.

12:29 PM Agamanolis: video of how to make phone more intimate - in bedroom, wearing a ring whose location is drawn in light on each side's bed

12:31 PM Agamanolis: Personalized interfaces - flower pot that blooms when partner far away logs into computer.

12:31 PM Agamanolis: made tilt sensing braclet which allows other party to know if you are active.

12:32 PM Agamanolis: video conferencing intf where all parties are put together in one scene with loudest talker at front - shared space.

12:34 PM Agamanolis: video of music sharing where you can listen to what nearby strangers are listening to on their headphones...

12:36 PM Agamanolis: video of sports at a distance - but ran out of time.

12:39 PM Aaron Kaplan, FunkFeuer, trends in community wireless - multiple cases in EU - open

12:40 PM Kaplan: Internet is scale free, i.e. very centralized. It's easier to connect to centralized nodes. But meshes are diff!

12:42 PM Kaplan: Nice picture of Funkfeuer network link status as of this morning. 240 nodes longest link ~40 Km; from slow to 80 Mbps.

12:44 PM Kaplan: Lots of geeks in the network, independent, meshed - we own our nodes, each has public IP addr. Users = small ISPs w/peering.

12:46 PM Kaplan: community co-location center close to Vienna IXP - leverage excess bandwidth from companies using the co-lo ctr.

12:48 PM Kaplan: similar network in Athens - 5000 nodes! Have their own internal DNS and local content and name extensions.

12:48 PM Kaplan: also Berlin, Barcelona. 70 euros for a node"

2:02 PM William Webb, Ofcom, on the use of ""junk"" spectrum - quoting the recent Microsoft funded study on Wi-Fi & open spectrum"

2:04 PM Webb: Oops, last quote was of a study by Perspective done for Ofcom.

2:05 PM Webb: projects more Wi-Fi chips than cellular chips by 2014. Indeed, mobile operators are embracing Wi-Fi off load.

2:07 PM Webb worries about congestion on Wi-Fi. UK has analog TV repeaters in 2.4 GHz band which interfere with Wi-Fi.

2:09 PM Webb: possible solutions more rules at 2.4 GHz; move to 5 GHz (but he worries about range); femtocells; cognitive radios.

2:10 PM Webb: Femtocells have strong industry support but uncertain commercial model (espc compared to Wi-Fi which works w/multi-operators).

2:11 PM Webb reporting on UK measurements btwn 10 MHz and 5 GHz - bunch of stuff down low, very little aboe 2 GHz.

2:13 PM Webb: Note that 2.4 GHz band when measured from cars is less than 1% utilization - they are usually indoors.

Note taking pause as I had to moderate my Spectrum 2.0 panel discussion with: William Webb, Phillipa Marks, Dean Bubley, Robert Horvitz and Aaron Kaplan.

4:38 PM Stefan Hopmann, Swisscom - a dinosaur that listens to its customers? Demo's click-to-call similar to other click-to-call apps...

4:43 PM Hopmann: Qs - why not standardize on some open source layer above the API so dev don't have to learn Swiss-specific APIs?

4:46 PM Colin Pons, KPN, Telephony = 80% revenue 100% profit; but VoIP is just telephony warmed over. Both will die as revenue source.

4:47 PM Pons: showing biz model canvas as invented by Alex Ostenwalder.

5:05 PM Serge Jespers, Adobe, talking about the Open Screen Project - seeking consistent runtimes on mobile to facilitate Adobe RT updates.

5:22 PM Greg Skibiski, Sense Networks, talking about DB analysis they do on carrier CDRs - Get billions of records per day.

5:26 PM Skibiski: DB for personalizing results you get - comparison with Amazon recommendation engine. - Telcos & CDRs !

5:40 PM Johanna Kollmann, Vodafone, on user interface design - starts with anthropology - oral behavior - chg'd w/writing (Walter Ong).

5:42 PM Kollmann: reading/writing in solitude until the web - IM instantaneous - blends characteristics of oral and written

6:03 PM Lee Sankey, Voxygen Limited, on NextGen Caller ID - Web browsing history linked to click-to-call Caller ID.

6:08 PM awards - most insightful speaker award - Sean Park

6:09 PM awards - most realistic speaker - Moray Rumney

6:09 PM awards - most inspirational speaker - Stefan Agamanolis

6:11 PM Communications Innovation Community Award - Andy Abramson - grabs Microphone to thank Lee for the conference.

6:13 PM Communications Innovation Community Award - Whoops they gave it to me...

6:14 PM Communications Innovation Community Award - Paul Sweeney

6:15 PM Communications Technology Award - Google Wave - Rasmussen & Hannon

6:16 PM Communications Application Award - Layar

6:17 PM Company to Watch Award - Sense Networks

6:33 PM 1800 hrs in Amsterdam; eComm has ended but there are still 25 people in the room. Time for me to power down. Bye.

==========================================================

Wednesday October 28, 2009

 

8:30:00 AM

Introduction

Hello and Welcome (Day 1)

Lee S Dryburgh, eComm Media, Inc.

8:30:00 - 8:45:00 AM, Transformatorhuis

8:45:00 AM

Keynote

Goodbye Minutes, Hello Moments

Martin Geddes, BT

8:45:00 - 9:15:00 AM, Transformatorhuis

9:15:00 AM

Session

Opportunities in Post-Telecom Connectivity

Bob Frankston, Frankston Innovating

9:15:00 - 9:30:00 AM, Transformatorhuis

9:30:00 AM

Session

Post Financial Trauma - How is the Telecom Value Chain Now Positioned?

James Enck, mCAPITAL

9:30:00 - 9:45:00 AM, Transformatorhuis

9:45:00 AM

Session

The Phone Paradigm Shift: People's Understanding and the Future

Morten Hjerde, Vodafone

9:45:00 - 10:00:00 AM, Transformatorhuis

10:00:00 AM

Session

European Telecoms 2015: Silent Death or Generative Bazaar?

Julien Salanave, IDATE

10:00:00 - 10:15:00 AM, Transformatorhuis

10:15:00 AM

Break

Morning Break

11:00:00 AM

Session

Almost all Marketing & Product Management of Telco Services is Wrong

Rudolf van der Berg, Logica

11:00:00 - 11:10:00 AM, Transformatorhuis

11:10:00 AM

Session

Technology and Biological Evolution: What This Means for Media and Communications Technologies

Tomas Rawlings, University of the West of England

11:10:00 - 11:25:00 AM, Transformatorhuis

11:25:00 AM

Session

Open Access Makes Economic Sense

Benoit Felten, Yankee Group

11:25:00 - 11:40:00 AM, Transformatorhuis

11:40:00 AM

Session

Stealth Approaches to Legislating Open Spectrum

Brough Turner, Ashtonbrooke

11:40:00 - 11:55:00 AM, Transformatorhuis

11:55:00 AM

Demo

bettie. Bridging the digital divide.

Ben Arent, Bettie

11:55:00 - 12:05:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

12:05:00 PM

Lightning Talk

Bringing Interaction and Engagement to Digital Display Advertising

Tomaz Stolfa, Marand Lab

12:05:00 - 12:10:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

12:10:00 PM

Session

LTE - Long Term Employment or Less Than Expected?

Moray Rumney, Agilent

12:10:00 - 12:30:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

12:30:00 PM

Break

Social Networking Lunch

2:00:00 PM

Session

Power to The People - Time to Seize Power

Norman Lewis, Open-Knowledge UK

2:00:00 - 2:15:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

2:15:00 PM

Panel

Are the Current Ecosystems of Wireline and Wireless Still Relevant? - Moderator Introduction

Andy Abramson, Comunicano

2:15:00 - 2:20:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

2:20:00 PM

Panel

Are the Current Wireline and Wireless Ecosystems Relevant? - Martin Geddes Introduction

Martin Geddes, BT

2:20:00 - 2:22:30 PM, Transformatorhuis

2:22:30 PM

Panel

Are the Current Wireline and Wireless Ecosystems Relevant? - Dean Bubley Introduction

Dean Bubley, Disruptive Analysis

2:22:30 - 2:25:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

2:25:00 PM

Panel

Are the Current Wireline and Wireless Ecosystems Relevant? - Moray Rumney Introduction

Moray Rumney, Agilent

2:25:00 - 2:27:30 PM, Transformatorhuis

2:27:30 PM

Panel

Are the Current Wireline and Wireless Ecosystems Relevant? - Brough Turner Introduction

Brough Turner, Ashtonbrooke

2:27:30 - 2:30:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

2:30:00 PM

Panel

Are the Current Ecosystems of Wireline and Wireless Still Relevant?

Andy Abramson, Comunicano

2:30:00 - 3:00:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

3:00:00 PM

Session

How the "Internet of Things" will Change the Way we Connect

Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, Tinker.it

3:00:00 - 3:15:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

3:15:00 PM

Break

Afternoon Break

4:00:00 PM

Session

How the Mobile Phone is Changing your Reality Forever

Claire Boonstra, Layar

4:00:00 - 4:20:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

4:20:00 PM

Keynote

Beyond the Handset: Evolving from Mobile Devices to the Ubiquitous Digital Life

Mark Rolston, frog design

4:20:00 - 4:50:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

4:50:00 PM

Demo

Using the Telephone as a Remote Control for any Physical Object - Part 1

Peter Kaptein, RoomWare

4:50:00 - 4:57:30 PM, Transformatorhuis

4:57:30 PM

Demo

Using the Telephone as a Remote Control for any Physical Object - Part 2

Valerie Ivangorodsky, Vivango

4:57:30 - 5:05:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

5:05:00 PM

Session

Telemedia Futures

Gerd Leonhard, MediaFuturist.com

5:05:00 - 5:30:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

5:30:00 PM

Session

Sell What Can't Be Copied

Chris Castiglione, University of Amsterdam

5:30:00 - 5:40:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

5:40:00 PM

Session

Enslaving Humans using Communications Technology for Fun and Profit

Thomas McCarthy-Howe, Jaduka

5:40:00 - 5:55:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

Thursday, October 29, 2009

8:30:00 AM

Introduction

Hello and Welcome (Day 2)

Norman Lewis, Open-Knowledge UK

8:30:00 - 8:45:00 AM, Transformatorhuis

8:45:00 AM

Keynote

21st Century Economics: Lessons for Telcos

Jaap van Till, HAN University, NL

8:45:00 - 9:05:00 AM, Transformatorhuis

9:05:00 AM

Session

Filling the Not-Spots - Provision of Service in No Service Areas

James Body, Truphone

9:05:00 - 9:15:00 AM, Transformatorhuis

9:15:00 AM

Session

Edge As Value - Value As Edge

Graham Brierton, Voicesage

9:15:00 - 9:30:00 AM, Transformatorhuis

9:30:00 AM

Keynote

Platforms, Markets & Bytes - the Economic Landscape of the 6th Paradigm

Sean Park, Nauiokas Park

9:30:00 - 9:50:00 AM, Transformatorhuis

9:50:00 AM

Keynote

Finding Disruption

Michael Jackson, Mangrove Capital

9:50:00 - 10:10:00 AM, Transformatorhuis

10:10:00 AM

Session

Peers in the City

James Burke, VURB

10:10:00 - 10:20:00 AM, Transformatorhuis

10:20:00 AM

Break

Morning Break

11:00:00 AM

Session

The Rise of Real-Time Text and the Demise of Voice

RJ Auburn, Voxeo

11:00:00 - 11:15:00 AM, Transformatorhuis

11:15:00 AM

Session

Where's the Desktop?

David "Lefty" Schlesinger, LiMo Foundation/ACCESS

11:15:00 - 11:30:00 AM, Transformatorhuis

11:30:00 AM

Session

The Practical Edge of Speech Technology

Moshe Yudkowsky, Disaggregate

11:30:00 - 11:45:00 AM, Transformatorhuis

11:45:00 AM

Session

Entrepreneurial Advantages with New Open-Source Technologies

Jay Phillips, Adhearsion

11:45:00 - 12:00:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

12:00:00 PM

Session

Why H.264 SVC is Transforming Video Conferencing

Jan Linden, Global IP Solutions

12:00:00 - 12:15:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

12:15:00 PM

Keynote

Is LTE being Held Hostage by Ordinary Voice Telephony?

Dean Bubley, Disruptive Analysis

12:15:00 - 12:35:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

12:35:00 PM

Break

Social Networking Lunch

2:00:00 PM

Panel

Investing in the Telecom Value Chain for a Post-Meltdown World - Moderator Introduction

James Enck, mCAPITAL

2:00:00 - 2:05:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

2:05:00 PM

Panel

Investing in the Telecom Value Chain for a Post-Meltdown World - Hjalmar Winbladh Introduction

Hjalmar Winbladh, Rebtel

2:05:00 - 2:07:30 PM, Transformatorhuis

2:07:30 PM

Panel

Investing in the Telecom Value Chain for a Post-Meltdown World - Michael Jackson Introduction

Michael Jackson, Mangrove Capital

2:07:30 - 2:10:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

2:10:00 PM

Panel

Investing in the Telecom Value Chain for a Post-Meltdown World - Investing in the Telecom Value Chain for a Post-Meltdown World - Sean Park Introduction

Sean Park, Nauiokas Park

2:10:00 - 2:12:30 PM, Transformatorhuis

2:15:00 PM

Panel

Investing in the Telecom Value Chain for a Post-Meltdown World

James Enck, mCAPITAL

2:15:00 - 2:45:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

2:45:00 PM

Session

Structural Bypass - A Simple, Proven Path to "Real Broadband"

Brough Turner, Ashtonbrooke

2:45:00 - 3:00:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

3:00:00 PM

Session

Multi Sided Markets and Cloud Computing

Martin Geddes, BT

3:00:00 - 3:15:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

3:15:00 PM

Break

Afternoon Break

4:00:00 PM

Keynote

Peace, Love & PSTN

Sten Tamkivi, Skype

4:00:00 - 4:30:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

4:30:00 PM

Session

Deploying the SILK codec, How and Why

Tim Panton, PhoneFromHere.com

4:30:00 - 4:45:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

4:45:00 PM

Demo

Googlewave - Skype - Asterisk Audio Mashup

Tim Panton, PhoneFromHere.com

4:45:00 - 4:50:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

4:50:00 PM

Lightning Talk

Defining the Voice User Experience

Dean Elwood, VoIP User

4:50:00 - 4:55:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

4:55:00 PM

Session

The Future of Interconnection

Rudolf van der Berg, Logica

4:55:00 - 5:05:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

5:05:00 PM

Session

Rise of the Social Web

Daniel Appelquist, Vodafone

5:05:00 - 5:20:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

5:20:00 PM

Session

The Emerging Telecology of Social Networks and the Status Update

Stuart Henshall, Phweet

5:20:00 - 5:30:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

5:30:00 PM

Session

Emerging Communication: Crossing all Over

Tjeerd Hoek, frog design

5:30:00 - 5:50:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

Friday, October 30, 2009

 

8:30:00 AM

Introduction

Hello and Welcome (Day 3)

Brough Turner, Ashtonbrooke

8:30:00 - 8:45:00 AM, Transformatorhuis

9:15:00 AM

Session

The Next Wave of Communications Applications

Cullen Jennings, Cisco

9:15:00 - 9:30:00 AM, Transformatorhuis

8:45:00 AM

Keynote

The Battle for Communications Justice: An Open Spectrum Manifesto

Sascha Meinrath, New America Foundation

8:45:00 - 9:15:00 AM, Transformatorhuis

9:30:00 AM

Session

What Would Telephony be Like if we Designed it Today? (with demo)

Tom Katis, RebelVox

9:30:00 - 9:45:00 AM, Transformatorhuis

9:45:00 AM

Keynote

Why Should You Care About Google Wave?

Stephanie Hannon, Google

9:45:00 - 10:00:00 AM, Transformatorhuis

10:00:00 AM

Keynote

Why Should You Care About Google Wave?

Lars Rasmussen, Google

10:00:00 - 10:15:00 AM, Transformatorhuis

10:15:00 AM

Break

Morning Break

11:00:00 AM

Session

Wave Federation: Building An Open Network

David Wang, Google

11:00:00 - 11:20:00 AM, Transformatorhuis

11:20:00 AM

Session

Opening of the Terahertz Region

Robert Horvitz, Open Spectrum Foundation/Alliance

11:20:00 - 11:35:00 AM, Transformatorhuis

11:35:00 AM

Session

Ubiquitous Voice over Broadband - is There a Future Role for the Smart Pipe?

Martin Taylor, MetaSwitch

11:35:00 - 11:50:00 AM, Transformatorhuis

11:50:00 AM

Session

Slowing Down Communication: Designs Inspired by Quality, Intimacy, and Humanity

Stefan Agamanolis, Distance Lab

11:50:00 - 12:05:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

12:05:00 PM

Session

Current Trends in Community Wireless Networks and Beyond

Aaron Kaplan, FunkFeuer

12:05:00 - 12:15:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

12:35:00 PM

Break

Social Networking Lunch

2:00:00 PM

Keynote

Unlicensed Spectrum: Future Regulation

Prof. William Webb, Ofcom

2:00:00 - 2:20:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

2:20:00 PM

Panel

Spectrum 2.0 - What's Really Happening? - Moderator Introduction

Brough Turner, Ashtonbrooke

2:20:00 - 2:25:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

2:25:00 PM

Panel

Spectrum 2.0 - What's Really Happening? - Dean Bubley Introduction

Dean Bubley, Disruptive Analysis

2:25:00 - 2:27:30 PM, Transformatorhuis

2:27:30 PM

Panel

Spectrum 2.0 - What's Really Happening? - Robert Horvitz Introduction

Robert Horvitz, Open Spectrum Foundation/Alliance

2:27:30 - 2:30:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

2:30:00 PM

Panel

Spectrum 2.0 - What's Really Happening? - Prof. William Webb Introduction

Prof. William Webb, Ofcom

2:30:00 - 2:32:30 PM, Transformatorhuis

2:32:30 PM

Panel

Spectrum 2.0 - What's Really Happening? - Phillipa Marks Introduction

Phillipa Marks, Plum Consulting

2:32:30 - 2:35:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

2:35:00 PM

Panel

Spectrum 2.0 - What's Really Happening? - Aaron Kaplan Introduction

Aaron Kaplan, FunkFeuer

2:35:00 - 2:37:30 PM, Transformatorhuis

2:37:30 PM

Panel

Spectrum 2.0 - What's Really Happening?

Brough Turner, Ashtonbrooke

2:37:30 - 3:05:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

3:05:00 PM

Session

When Will HD Voice Become a Reality?

Martyn Davies, Dialogic

3:05:00 - 3:20:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

3:20:00 PM

Break

Afternoon Break

4:00:00 PM

Keynote

The Myth of Spectrum Scarcity

Michael Calabrese, New America Foundation

4:00:00 - 4:20:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

4:20:00 PM

Session

How to get More Value out of Customer Interactions by Blending Online with Voice

Stefan Hopmann, Swisscom

4:20:00 - 4:35:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

4:35:00 PM

Session

Telephony is Dying, are Telco's?

Colin Pons, KPN

4:35:00 - 4:50:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

4:50:00 PM

Session

Open Screen Project: Next Generation Contextual Applications

Andrew Shorten, Adobe

4:50:00 - 5:05:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

5:05:00 PM

Session

Lifestyle Segmentation from Carrier Location and Call Data - Part 1

Greg Skibiski, Sense Networks

5:05:00 - 5:15:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

5:15:00 PM

Session

Lifestyle Segmentation from Carrier Location and Call Data - Part 2

Tony Jebara, Sense Networks & Columbia University

5:15:00 - 5:25:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

5:25:00 PM

Session

Back to the Roots? Emerging Communication Paradigms in the Context of Secondary Orality

Johanna Kollmann, Vodafone

5:25:00 - 5:40:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

5:40:00 PM

Session

Transforming CallerID into CallerContext

Lee Sankey, Voxygen Limited

5:40:00 - 5:50:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

5:50:00 PM

Session

Awards

Lee S Dryburgh, eComm Media, Inc.

5:50:00 - 6:15:00 PM, Transformatorhuis

 

Wireless tipping point! My presentation at EU eComm today

My presentation this morning was entitled "A Wireless Tipping Point, Open Spectrum Implications."

A Wireless Tipping Point, Open Spectrum Implications

View more documents from Brough Turner.

The abstract:

Are we using radio spectrum efficiently? No.

Is this likely to change? Not soon.

"Smart" radios have the potential to support much more efficient and productive use of spectrum, but spectrum regulation is a political issue with well established stakeholders. What's more, our limited experiments with commons-based spectrum management have had widely differing results: WiFi, enormous success; UltraWideBand, disappointment. WiFi's success happened in "junk" spectral bands where established players weren't interested. That will be difficult to repeat, but Brough will describe some very simple physical principals of radio propagation which, when combined with the next five years of Moore's law progress in semiconductors, suggest a path forward that's very different from TV white spaces. Indeed, the most important result of regulatory decisions on UltraWideBand and TV white spaces is they validate the concept of secondary access.