Communications

WiMAX to be a fringe technology by 2015

Recently I was interviewed by the folks at TMC because I'm giving two presentations, “Mobile Broadband – New Applications and New Business Models” and “Our G-enealogy” at the upcoming 4G Wireless Evolution conference in Los Angeles September 1st-3rd.  The first talk's subject should be clear. The second talk, "Our G-enealogy," is a high level version of my 3G-4G wireless tutorial.

In any event, they asked a bunch of questions, including my thoughts on WiMAX and I answered.  For all the Q&A see the interview, here.

eComm in Amsterdam ― shameless self promotion

I've just wrapped up a focused effort that delayed blogging and many other things.  As a result, I finally submitted the detailed description for my plenary slot at eComm Fall 2009 which will be happening in Amsterdam October 28th-30th.  My abstract is not up on the website yet, but hopefully the next few weeks will bring details on my talk and many others.  For now, let me just say my title is
   Stealth Approaches to Legislating Open Spectrum
in which I propose what I hope is a novel approach to dramatically expanding the capabilities and commercial success of license-exempt consumer devices.

This will be the first time eComm has been held in Europe but, based on the first two eComm conferences (2008 and Spring 2009), this is the meeting for the future of communications.  It's not a trade show and it's not a mass event.  Instead, it's three days of rapid paced information ― high level, insightful and non-commercial.  Even more important, the people are very, very interesting.  It's not cheap, but it costs less if you sign up now (especially if you sign up before July 21st).  What's more, because I'm such an enthusiast, and I'm on the conference's advisory board, I've been given a discount code.  For an additional 20% off type in "BroughTurner" as the eComm discount code, i.e. where the registration form says "Click here to enter a promotional code."

I hope to see you in Amsterdam in October.

Opportunity Doesn't Always Knock. Sometimes It Calls.

The mammoth telecom industry ― fixed and cellular ― is in the process of being re-written. You can stand on the side and be written into history or join with the growing community that's writing the future. Opportunities have never been so great ― to influence how humanity connects, communicates and collaborates and to profit from radical restructuring.

Highlights from eComm 2009

This year's Emerging Communications conference, eComm 2009, was the best telecom conference I've been to in ages (ever?).  Now presentations and videos from the conference are becoming available on the web.  The presentations are on SlideShare; search by speaker name or for the tag "eComm."  Here's my presentation, Structural Bypass - A simple proven path to "Real Broadband."

Brough Turner's Presentation at eComm 2009

View more presentations from eCommConf.

Videos and transcripts are also coming, although not as rapidly as I'd like (a matter of resources - one person editting and releasing 2-4 videos per week).  Here's a transcript of the Spectrum 2.0 panel that I moderated.

Videos will show up on Fora.tv, for example, here is the really cool keynote address by Ge Wang entitled "New Expressive Social Mediums on the iPhone."

For more information and pointers, subscribe to the eComm blog.

More bandwidth ― less delay, less latency

I was a little sloppy yesterday and several people have questioned my comment about latency.  I was reacting to slide by Herman Wagter of Amsterdam's Citynet in his presentation at F2C 2009.  His slide said:

Latency is the cause, bandwidth is the effect.

From his discussion it was clear he meant "Latency is the cause, bandwidth is the cure."  At the time he was talking about real-time person-to-person communications and illustrating it with a housebound person in Amsterdam who wanted to play cards with friends in other places (not nearby).  Verbally he mentioned the issue of sending large files.  In short he was addressing the real reason for high capacity Internet access links.

Why people want more "bandwidth"

It's not because they need or want to send and receive 100 Mbps of data all the time or even a significant part of the time.  The issue is delay, specifically serialization delay.  If I have a 1 Mbps upstream Internet connection and I want to send an email with a 5 MB Powerpoint file attached, it will take more than 40 seconds (5 MB ~= 40 Mbits).  On a 100 Mbps link, the same email is delayed only a fraction of a second.

Serialization delay also effects media streams, although much less.  If I want to send 500 Kbps of continuous video over that 1 Mbps uplink, serialization delay will cause added latency.  IP is a packet protocol and the 500 Kbps video stream will be broken into a stream of packets, typically ~1500 bytes (12 Kbits) each. While the serialization delay is only 12 ms on the first link, there is serialization delay on every link.  If there is another 1 mbps link at the other end, that's another 12 ms of delay.  And here, 12 ms is significant.  For a natural interaction between two people, you'd like to keep the round trip delay below 200 ms.  Nothing goes faster than the speed of light so transoceanic links introduce many 10s of ms of delay, each way.  It is very easy to eat up a 200 ms budget, so saving 12 ms at each end is significant.

Burst rate versus continuous

For me and for most people, the issue that drives demand for high speed access links is delay, not the amount of information that is to be sent or received.  Indeed, I'd love a service offered only a few Mbps average over a month, if I could be guaranteed 1 Gbps on a burst rate basis whenever I wanted.

David Weinberger is blogging F2C rather completely

And David is a expert blogger!  i.e., really good coverage.
  http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/

The first Freedom to Connect conference entry is here. 

Latency is the cause; bandwidth is the solution

Actually, what Herman Wagter of Amsterdam's Citynet said at F2C 2009 was:  latency is the cause, bandwidth is the effect.  But his explanation matched my title above.

If you are attempting to interact with other people, whether by VoIP or just playing cards together (with video) you need less than 200 milliseconds of end-to-end delay.  If it's playing cards together, with video, and you need to exchange 500 Kbps in less than 200 ms, you need a 100 Mbps pipe!

It's latency that drives the need for high bandwidth.  Most people won't fill that pipe most of the time, but they need the pipe to guarentee that what they do send gets through rapidly.

Highlights from Day 1 of F2C

Shamelessly ranked by my areas of interest...

Tim Nulty of East Central Vermont Community Fiber.  Tim is a veteran network builder and a forceful speaker, so he's happy to tell it like is.  He's also got that Yankee mix of liberal politics with extreme fiscal conservatism.  He's building fiber networks, in rural Vermont, which pay for themselves.

Ken Biba of Novarum has been measuring actual wireless networks in buildings and in cities for years.  While the detail is in a report available for purchase, the summary is that WiFi-based Muni WiFi yields significantly better performance than 3G cellular.  Interestingly coverage and reliability is right up there in selected cities, as well.  The take-away - 802.11n really rocks. I.e., the next cycle of WiFi is going to be vastly better than what he's been measuring over the past 3 years.

Ellen Miller of Sunlight Foundation was low key by comparison with Tim or Ken, but her stories were compelling - multiple instances of Internet community feedback creating the kind of information that the "open government" initiatives aspire to.

Finally, Dewayne Hendricks is always interesting.  This year he seemed more optimistic than last, presumably the result of the recent election.  In any event, here's another speaker with deep experience in building networks.

Freedom to Connect 2009 and Municipal Fiber

I'm attending F2C 2009 in Silver Spring Maryland. If you are here, please say hello.

Things are just getting started with a panel on Municipal Networks, led by Joanne Hovis, President of Columbia Telecommunications Corporation (CTC).  Panelists are:

Tim Nulty, formerly of Burlington Telecom and now running East Central Vermont Community Fiber, has tons of experience building fiber networks in low density areas (Vermont).

Dirk van der Woude, from Amsterdam's CitiNet, to talk about the Amsterdam's municipal fiber to the home project..

Lev Gonick, CIO Case Western Reserve, who was a key player in creating a 4000 mile fiber network for Cleveland and northeast Ohio under a community organization called OneCommunity.

Bill Schrier, CTO for Seattle, which is starting a fiber project, but already has it's own electric power utility.  (Although Bill implies they have had to drag their utility brethren into this).

What's interesting is the discussion on the chat backchannel is not about muni vs. commercial, but wireless versus fiber.

Tim Nulty has a strong argument that wireless is excellent for mobility, but not economical for fixed access.  In rural Vermont, a WiMAX network would cost $35M if you could get access to the spectrum (which is being horded by others).  Fiber would cost $70M but has 50 times the capacity and several times the revenue potential versus the wireless approach.  Further, if you deploy wireless as an addon after you have the fiber network (and the customer support infrastructure), the incremental cost is dramitcally less (perhaps $10M) and you get enough incremental revenue to get a good return on investment.  IN other words, you make more money if you do fiber first.  Tim's key to success is to get as near complete deployment as possible - something that is possible in areas where the incumbents are going.  Second, he goes for community ventures as a way to qualify for muncipal bonds.

Skype wideband codec now open to all developers

At eComm 2009 this afternoon,Jonathan Christensen, Skype General Manager for Audio and Video announced that Skype will open their wideband audio algorithms for public use.  The blogsphere was pre-briefed under embargo, so multiple people have already written this up.  But it's a pleasure to see Jonathan presenting things live.

Skype was the first significant company to deploy wideband audio telephony.  As a result, with Skype it feels like you are in the same room as the person you are talking to.  The algorithm they are releasing is called Silk.  It reproduces 50 Hz to 12,500 Hz audio signals versus traditional telephony at 300 Hz to 3000 Hz.

Skype is making this codec available to third parties royalty free.  That's important as many (most) audio codecs are encumbered with all sorts of patent royalties.  The Silk codec is what's currently used in Skype v4 and it appears there will be a string of related announcements from partners, today and tomorrow.

In response to a question from the audience, Jonathan makes it clear that Skype's direction is to open up as much as they can, in order to seed the market and accelerate the spread of Skype.

Note:  this is binary distribution, not source code or a description of the algorithm.  On the other hand, Skype is hoping to get this algorithm on as many processors and chip sets as possible.  As a result, they are open to working with anyone that has a business case for a port.

More cloud-based telephony services

One thing (of many) that struck me during this morning's session at eComm 2009 was multiple companies going after cloud-based communications platform services.  Three which had their public launch announcements today were Grid.com, Tropo.com from Voxeo and Mobivox.  They're not the first to tackle this area and they each have a somewhat different focus, but there's a clear interest in producing Web 2.0 service platforms that developers can use to access communications services without hassle.

Grid.com is from a couple of developers who were frustrated that they could mash up an application quickly but then had to spend months getting SMS short codes and other communications services.

 

Tropo.com is an offshoot of Voxeo and makes the underlying Voxeo platform services available to Web 2.0 developers.

 

Similarly, Mobivox has launched a cloud services platform based on the platform they build for the Mobivox service.

There is certainly room for someone to get this right.  On the other hand, there must be a dozen companies going after portions of this space.  The first round were telephony calling platforms like CallFire, Angel.com and five9.com focused on allowing developers to access traditional calling, switching and IVR platforms - call centers and business process automation were early targets.  It will be interesting to watch the evolving focus of this new round of entrants.