The "Social web" - does anyone actually want it?

Is this another example of The Emperor's New Clothes?

I've lost count of the number of pitches I've heard recently along the lines of "a single client to manage all your social network connections", or "a feed of updates via homescreen widgets" and so on.

I've also often been bombarded with the hideous phrase "social web", which I'm starting to think is utterly cringe-worthy, and ties in with a lot of nonsense talked about "social graph" and the farcical notion that you might be able to link together all your various communications channels.

I am genuinely unsure why anyone would want to link their various social networks or contact lists / directories, or tie together their calling and messaging patterns.

Personally, I work incredibly hard to make sure that I keep Facebook and LinkedIn almost totally exclusive. I'm happy that my Skype friend list has minimal overlap with Yahoo contacts. (Sidenote: on average Skype users have<10 contacts, but they're very "intimate").

Like most people, I'm happy with multi-tasking and compartmentalising my communications channels. I don't meet or talk to people who find they have a problem with fragmented social networks or phonebooks. And I certainly don't want *anyone* to be able to derive collated intelligence from across all of my different ways of interacting with friends, clients, acquaintances and so on. Fragmentation is safer and more comfortable.

I suspect that the only people that only really want this are aggregators and/or operators slightly irked by being usurped by Facebook et al. Plus some of the "social media connectivity freaks", who are generally just those in the social media industry itself, or its immediate neighbours like PR and politics and entertainment.

I reckon there's a near-100% overlap with the type of people people who think Twitter is important, ie a very loud and very small group who like shouting at each other repeatedly via 100 different media. The same group that sit in conferences obsessed with back-channels and Macs with Tweet-deck or whatever else they're playing with this week.

But I've seen no evidence that normal people identify with the types of problem that the "social web" attempts to cure. It's possible I'm projecting my own prejudices here, but I don't think so.

Edit: One specific problem will be that of de-duplication of messages. I already have 50%+ of personal emails being Facebook notifications, as well as the little notification icons on Facebook.com itself. So if I also had them replicated to my phone's homescreen, I'd be getting them in triplicate. Wonderful. (And no, I wouldn't turn off the email notifications as I want them on my PC as well as phones - yes, phones *plural*)

Back to low-power GSM: licence exempt?

I'm at eComm in Amsterdam - and currently listening to a very interesting presentation from James Body (historically with Truphone but wearing a different hat today).

A few years ago, I wrote about the UK's low-power GSM auctions, and the subsequent slow-burn deployment of various GSM picocell-based services from companies like Teleware. It's never really lived up to its promise, though.

I hadn't realised this before, but apparently it is now legal to deploy low-power GSM in the guard band in the Netherlands, *licence-free*. I'm not sure exactly how this is implemented, as presumably there needs to be some sort of coordination to manage interference. Maybe you act as "your own MVNO"? One of the audience reported that the Dutch military was already using this option to build their own mini GSM networks on their bases and ships.

More interesting still - apparently this approach conceivably be rolled out Europe-wide. Worth watching....

Sharing multiple mobile broadband connections - possible already

About a week ago, I wrote about the exciting possibility for the new WiFi Direct technology to enable sharing of multiple mobile devices' connections via WiFi. I also noted that this would further help to reduce the historic link between "subscription" (ie SIM) and "identity", which I have long felt is one of those areas where MNOs have taken their role for granted unrealistically.

I wrote "I'll bet one of the most popular will be some form of bandwidth-sharing or load-balancing between multiple phones or other products. I can think of numerous "reasonable" use cases here, eg de facto user-driven "national roaming" to work around coverage blackspots. I'm sure there will be some cool connection-sharing iPhone or Android apps, as well as ones for PCs"

Well, I was wrong on one score - the first connection-sharing app is for Symbian S60, not Apple or Android. I saw a presentation by Joiku this morning about their new JoikuBoost Beta, which does precisely what I had been talking about, multiplexing together multiple data connections, on multiple devices, potentially via multiple operators, and creating one super-fast WiFi virtual hotspot. This can either be open or secured. The technology could also be used by a single device to effectively combine two or more separate HSPA connections (or even HSPA and LTE and/or WiMAX I guess, if devices with suitable OS's become available).

Given what I wrote yesterday about doubling up HSPA channels to compete with LTE... well, it looks like a radio network standard might not even be necessary. Now I think about it, this is even a good way to combine two separate frequency bands - have one phone on 2.1GHz and one on (say) 900MHz, and you've suddenly got the perfect indoor/outdoor solution without all that cumbersome messing about with handoff.

The ramifications of this type of technology are huge - I can see it eventually enabling users to create their own ad-hoc shared meshes, bridging operators, frequencies, radio technologies, tariffing plans and so on. There's no reason that it shouldn't incorporate dongles and MiFi-type devices with Linux or other OS's as well.

Not so much "dumb pipe" as "dumb aether". I think this could be truly disruptive in time.

I think there's probably 100 enhancements you could do in software to optimise, set up groups, manage power, share costs equitably between users and so forth. There's also some fairly horrible things this could do to operator business models - although it potentially also enables congestion problems to be mitigated by the cross-operator load balancing functions. In a way, it's software-defined radio at the application layer. Exciting/scary stuff....

HSPA in 2.6GHz?

I'm wondering.....

... if LTE looks like it might be delayed, for example because of poorer-than-expected performance, difficult optimisation, continued wrangling over voice/SMS implementation, or because operators don't want to be strong-armed into IMS...

... then does it start to make sense to put HSPA/HSPA+ into the 2.6GHz bands, especially given the flurry of upcoming auctions in 2010/2011?

After all, HSPA is a "known quantity" in terms of radio deployment and operation, it's not too difficult to add another band to existing handset platforms, and it's got voice built-in out of the box.

Let's imagine a situation in markets with existing consumer use of mobile broadband, say Europe or Australia or parts of Asia. Now imagine the end of 2012 - there's a lot of 2.6GHz spectrum that's now owned by MNOs. LTE still has teething problems for whatever reason... and in any case, there's several hundred million PCs, dongles, smartphones and other gizmos running on HSPA, albeit only on existing bands like 2.1GHz. I've got to believe that a 2.1/2.6GHz HSPA+ netbook on sale for Xmas 2012 is going to be cheaper and more reliable than a 2.1GHz HSPA + 2.6GHz LTE one - and with broadly similar performance and network efficiency.

On the same theme, do any readers familiar with the innards of UMTS specifications think it might be possible to tweak R9 or R10 HSPA to support flexible channel size, from 5MHz-only to something more like LTE's range of options.

New personal phone - might finally get around to getting an iPhone

A real life case study in handset decision critera & thought process: Me.

This is my genuine thought process about choosing a phone. Probably not typical, but nonethless a realworld example.

At the moment, I mainly use two handsets

- A SonyEricsson C902 for my personal use, billed to D Bubley esq, and only used for voice & SMS (plus originally for camera, although the images are worse than my old S-E K800i from a couple of years ago), on O2

- An unlocked Nokia E71 for work use, used solely for web, email and VoIP. Currently mostly using a 3UK prepaid SIM, although occasionally other SIMs if I'm travelling. It's billed to Disruptive Analysis.

I also occasionally use other devices I have around on loan or that I get through other channels, usually with the 3UK data SIM. I've also got a 3G dongle & a MiFi.

My personal S-E is on a contract coming up for renewal. Also, the software is very buggy, it keeps hanging during calls and occasionally losing inbound speech while a call is live. It's a pain.

Question: what do I replace it with? My normal preference is for my personal handset to be a featurephone, not a smartphone. I have no personal interest in downloading apps at all - I only use download mobile software for work reasons. If I wasn't in the industry, I'd just want a decent browser and email client, and maybe a mapping app.

... however. I'm quite tempted by the idea of a personal iPhone. I like the UI, even just for scrolling through the phonebook and camera album. And I might resuscitate my old & broken iPod music on my PC. And maybe... just maybe... I might try some free apps (I don't have an iTunes account, so I won't be buying anything).

Otherwise, the only appealing options are things like the new widescreen LG Chocolate, the Samsung Jet and maybe the Nokia 6700. The S-E Satio looks tempting and has a camera with a xenon flash, but unfortunately I've lost faith in S-E after the C902, and anyway it's a smartphone so not what I'm looking for. At some point I may play with a BlackBerry, but that's as a replacement for the work E71, not person.

For whatever reason, the HTC Hero and the various Moto devices have no appeal to me right now.

So to be honest, I'll probably get the iPhone - because I'm fairly sure that the "smartness" won't get in the way of me using it as a basic device. My main question is whether the 3Gs if worth an extra £100 over the basic model - essentially a question about whether the camera's any better, as I don't care at all about either video or speech control.

Anyone have any alternative suggestions for a non-smartphone with a good camera, ideally Xenon flash, which looks cool & has a decent browsing experience?

LTE needed immediately!.... er, or else what?

Interesting story in today's Fierce Wireless that apparently LTE is needed urgently in 2010 to avert a capacity crunch for mobile broadband.

Well, I guess that means we're on for a crunch, then. I'm not expecting to see any major deployments of LTE in Europe until 2012, with no real massmarket availability of devices and coverage until 2014-2015.

In practical terms, the lack of devices, lack of spectrum auctions and early-stage nature of the network technology (plus the perennial "what about voice?" question) means that:

- Expect to see even more emphasis on offload to Wifi and femtocells (I'm currently working with Telco 2.0 on a specific and detailed look at managed offload, more details to come soon)
- Some operators are going to start giving serious consideration to putting HSPA/HSPA+ in 2.6GHz instead of waiting for LTE and/or will be pushing harder on 900MHz refarming. Places like Germany even have spare 1800MHz around.
- Lots of opportunities for HSPA optimisation in terms of radio network planning and tweaking
- Various attempts to keep a lid on traffic volumes, with new tariff plans based around time-of-day and so forth.
- More sensible pricing for data tariffs that aren't based solely on marginal costs
- Possibly some more opportunities for WiMAX in those tempting unused bits of TDD spectrum
- Some interesting stuff around sideloading, in an effort to get people to use local content rather than the web... maybe "free 8GB of movies on a memory card with this phone"
- Various attempts to compress web images and other traffic from the Novarra's of this world. All great, but unless you have a robust solution on the client side as well as the server (and that means PCs) it's just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.

We'll also hear a lot of talk about application-level filtering ("you can't do video over 3G") instead of flatrate plans, but frankly a lot of that is just hot air. It's rather tricky to go to market with a proposition which states "it's just like ADSL. But you can't look at that funny clip that your friend has posted on Facebook".

The fact remains that most of the 3G traffic in Europe still comes from PCs and iPhones, neither of which the operators have any real control over in terms of application or, critically, user expectation of openness.

WiFi Direct - helping to break the link between SIM and personal identity

One of the claims that the mobile industry likes to perpetuate is that SIM cards (and subscriptions) are "personal" and therefore position cellular operators as ideal providers of identity management services.

I've long thought that there were lots of assumptions about the one phone = one SIM = one person view of the world that were extremely fragile. Most obviously, it's very common for one person to have multiple SIMs, but that's not a particularly critical issue in most cases. Having multiple "identities per person" is pretty valuable to most users, anyway.

More interesting is the opposite problem - multiple people per "identity". This has long been the case in fixed PSTN and broadband, where the basic subscription unit is a "household" not a person from the operator's view - perhaps with the "bill payer" identified as a named individual. The rest of the household members are generally anonymous, despite years of attempting to offer various family services to help distinguish the bill payer from their spouse or children or flatmates.

The same thing is happening in mobile. There have been fixed cellular routers for some time, albeit achieving limited popularity. But two new developments have the potential to create a massmarket disconnect between SIM and individual:

- MiFi-type devices, as sold by companies like Novatel and Huawei, which act as "mobile hotspots" for multiple users connecting via WiFi, without any form of personal identification. In theory there are mechanisms for tracking back individuals via WiFi MAC address, but in reality that's very complicated, especially for shared devices like PCs.

- the new WiFi Direct specifications from the WiFi Alliance, which essentially make peer-to-peer WiFi easier to use and more like Bluetooth-on-steroids. This will enable adhoc connections between devices, and I'll bet one of the most popular will be some form of bandwidth-sharing or load-balancing between multiple phones or other products. I can think of numerous "reasonable" use cases here, eg de facto user-driven "national roaming" to work around coverage blackspots. I'm sure there will be some cool connection-sharing iPhone or Android apps, as well as ones for PCs. Yes, there will be a ton of security issues, but I bet some could be solved via social-network reputation techniques (eg "share my connection only with my Facebook friends, and friends-of-friends")

If you have 10 random people in a room collectively & collaboratively sharing 5 bridged WiFi-to-cellular accesses, you can pretty much forget about an notion of individual identity being traceable through the SIM. Add in anonymous prepay and it's even trickier.

One scenarios where femtos could be faster than WiFi

A commonly-asked question around femtocells is the question of what advantage they confer to data devices, in the case where both the device and the broadband gateway also have WiFi access. Is there any advantage in keeping the data on the femto connection, given that many millions of people are now routinely using WiFi set-ups with security keys & SSIDs, without much hassle or confusion?

I've been thinking about this, as it also fits with some work I've been doing on offloading 3G cellular traffic, and the role of fixed operators (DSL/cable) in providing additional capabilities or grooming services, going from purely independent offload, to a more collaborative "managed offload" scenario where the fixed and mobile operators work together, even if they are not sister companies.

One scenario I can envisage is this: a homeowner has a relatively low-tier home broadband service, say a 4Mbit/s connection, although the local copper could support 10Mbit/s. Now, consider if the user purchased a mobile broadband service offering "up to 7.2Mbit/s", for which the operator also supplied a femtocell in the hope of offloading some of the traffic generated while the user is at home.

There is is an argument that attaching the 7Mbit/s femto to a 4MBit/s ADSL line is actually against consumer protection law - the customer is legitimately paying money for a mobile broadband service which, at least theoretically, should be able to get to 7Mbit/s. If he uses his laptop or smartphone at 3am next to the cell tower, he should be able to attain peak speeds. But with the femto, it ceases to be even theoretically possible, because the backhaul won't support it. Potentially, the connection would *slower* than if the user just unplugged the femto and went back to the macro coverage.

It's not really the operator's fault - the customer has chosen to have a low-spec ADSL service. But the experience is unsatisfactory nevertheless.

However, now consider that the mobile operator pays a small sum to the ADSL provider to "over-provision" capacity to a certain IP address range (ie the femto gateway). Perhaps $2 per month to permit bursts of headroom up to a total 8Mbit/s, as long as total volumes don't exceed 2GB.

Everyone is a winner in this scenario - the user gets blazing-fast connections via the femto, which actually perform better than his own WiFi. The mobile operator offloads more traffic & has a customer with more loyalty. And the fixed operator gets a bit of extra revenue which pretty much goes straight to the bottom line.

Amazon Kindle 2: Does this herald the arrival of "dumb roaming pipes"

Reading between the lines of the Amazon Kindle 2 announcement, it seems that Amazon may have worked out a method for solving one of mobile application and device developers' biggest problems: how to avoid hiring an army of lawyers and commercial personnel to put in place deals with 100+ mobile operators around the world, and also avoid aggregators that want to take yet another slice of revenue. It might also have enabled AT&T to invent a new business model - servicing end-users resident outside its own geographic footprint.

My understanding is that Kindle 2's (initially at least) will ship from Amazon's US website and operation - and will have AT&T-registered SIMs. This means that a UK customer will purchase the device and have it imported (including paying customs charges) and that it will work on one or more UK mobile networks automatically.

Details are still a bit opaque, but as far as I can see, Amazon seems to have persuaded AT&T to provide it with a fully-loaded cost for supporting non-US Kindle users. I would imagine that AT&T has sufficient clout to get some quite good international data wholesale rates in general, although whether it has negotiated a special arrangement for the Kindle seems less likely. Amazon has probably worked out some good compression mechanisms (one source I've read suggests foreign Kindles won't download images in newspapers, although that might be for copyright reasons).

I would also imagine that AT&T really won't want to disclose its wholesale rates that are behind this. But if somebody buys a book for $10, Amazon squeezes it down to a 1 MB of data, and the roaming cost to AT&T in the UK or Spain or wherever is $0.30, then clearly the numbers all work out nicely as long as they're kept in the background.

This approach will likely have upsides and downsides. Downsides will probably involve slightly cumbersome ordering and delivery from the US site to an overseas destination, plus issues around customer support, as well as possibly some interesting tax/VAT implications where books are bought "in the US" but delivered onto a technically-US registered device while it is "roaming" in the user's home country. I'll leave that one to the lawyers to deal with. A representative of a UK operator that I met at the ITU Forum yesterday seemed a bit annoyed with the whole thing - as if Amazon had behind their backs and come up with a non-optimal solution.

The upsides for Amazon are clear - far fewer headaches in dealing with multiple operators around the world: they've outsourced all their contractual headaches to AT&T. The prospect of working on 100 global MVNO deals must have had them tearing their hair out. Not only that, this means that but the nature of roaming should mean the Kindle gets better coverage, as it can potentially use any or all of the 3G networks in a given country, as long as AT&T has a roaming relationship. This means that AT&T can firstly shop around for the best wholesale rate and update its preferred partner list on an ongoing basis - and secondly, that coverage should be much better than one provided via an in-country MVNO deal.

Now, this approach only works because the Kindle is a low data-volume device. It would be much harder to justify the bundled roaming charges for video or even hi-res colour images, so I'm not expecting to see a YouTube tablet or similar following the same model. But I can think of a whole range of "mobile narrowband" devices that can benefit from "mobile broadband" networks - falling roaming costs per MB could mean a whole host of opportunities.

It's rather ironic that while all the operators have focused on Internet "over the top" players, it might actually be their international peers that become the real threat, using ever-cheaper "roaming pipes" without paying for local infrastructure or spectrum, and taking a much greater share of customer value.

The one fly in the ointment is perhaps regulatory - will national authorities really be happy with AT&T "exporting" SIMs to users in countries in which it doesn't have a licence to operate?

[Caveat - much of this is written based on limited real information and supposition, as there's a real lack of clarity. It's possible that the situation may be clarified or change over time. I'll try & update if that happens]

EDIT - one additional thought here. How does Net Neutrality and policy management apply to data roaming users, exactly? Presumably any restrictions on applications etc would need to be in the wholesale arrangement between the host and the visiting operators - I really don't know whether an operator can apply the same T's and C's to visitors as to domestic customers who have signed individual contracts. For example, I've never tried using VoIP on a device with an 3UK SIM while roaming on a network which blocks its own users...


EDIT 2 - Interesting that Amazon is already advertising the UK Kindle on prominent UK websites (I saw it on a political blog I follow). Going through to the Amazon site and clicking through to the UK T's and C's yielded this:

Important Product Information for Your Country

• Your international shipment is subject to customs duties, import taxes and other fees levied by the destination country. We will show you these fees upon checkout. Learn more
• Kindle ships with a U.S. power adapter and a micro-USB cable for charging your Kindle via a computer USB port. The U.S. power adapter supports voltages between 100V - 240V.
• You can transfer personal documents to your Kindle via USB for free at anytime. Service fees for transferring personal documents via Whispernet are currently $.99 per megabyte. Learn more
• Wireless download times can vary based on 3G or EDGE/GPRS coverage, signal strength and file size.
• Kindle books, newspapers, and magazine are currently priced and sold in United States dollars
• Blogs and the experimental web browser are currently not available for your country

The US power adapter is obviously going to be an annoyance for UK customers. But more interesting is the figure for the "personal documents transfer". If I was a normal US AT&T subscriber with a data card or smartphone, I'd certainly be annoyed if I had to pay retail roaming charges of more than $0.99 per MB when travelling to the UK in future....


EDIT 3 - just joining some dots here. Thanks to Eelco for the comment about the KPN/Garmin deal . The interesting thing there is that it references a company in the M2M space I've come across before, called Jasper Wireless, which hates to be referred to in the same sentence as the term "data MVNO", but which nevertheless has a platform which looks like a value-added MVNO aggregation service for data devices. By a curious coincidence, Jasper announced a deal with AT&T a few months ago with the even more coincidental phrase "The companies expect to connect the first emerging device under the agreement in the coming months".

If I'm right, then it's possibly Jasper that's done the heavy-lifting around negotiating data roaming rates for M2M products like the Kindle 2 - which I suspect may well be less-expensive than plans aimed normal smartphones or mobile broadband PCs. The downside may be that it only has one partner per territory, so the hopes of multi-operator roaming and better coverage might not prove realistic.

The basis for "sender pays" data is rather fluid....

I've talked before about the notion of 3rd-party payment for a user's mobile data access, for example a venue owner or conference organiser sponsoring "free mobile broadband" for certain customers or attendees.

mBlox in particular has discussed its notion of "Sender Pays" data for chunks of content. For people without flatrate data plans, having a clear method to ensure the customer isn't going to face a big bill for downloading per-MB has to be a good thing.

However, the general contention that "Sender Pays" is analogous to the postage system's model is unfortunately rather underminded by this proposition by the UK's Royal Mail to make the "receiver" of letters pay as well....

(Note: my view is that "sender pays" content represents a small proportion of the overall opportunity for third-party sponsored connectivity, as I see content as merely a small, uni-directional sub-category of all applications. Most apps are bi-directional, with the user themselves sending a good proportion of the overall traffic. This is especially the case for user-generated content services like Qik)

Nice to know that evolution to two-sided markets isn't solely the domain of the telecoms industry.

Upcoming event on all that's cool in comms - eComm Europe

I've name-dropped the two SF-based eComm events before - always among the most fascinating of events, ranging from Voice 2.0 startups to visionaries thinking about industry governance and spectrum policy, with a handful of cool apps & mobile services thrown in for good measure.

This time, it's on this side of the Atlantic, in Amsterdam from 28-30 October. I'll be there, speaking about voice-on-LTE and radio issues, and no doubt throwing my oar in on some other themes as well.

I'd definitely recommend it - it gives a great flavour of the direction that comms technology could / should / might go, as well as some meat on businesses surround it. It's not explicitly pro- or anti- large operators, but it definitely is anti-status quo. Generally, the carriers that are represented there are the ones that "get it" - the conservative old guard tends to stay away. Quite a good barometer, really.

The details are here

Net Neutrality in wireless

Another quick post.

I generally find it too hard to get worked-up about net neutrality, as in competitive markets everything tends to sort itself out. In the UK I have a choice of mobile broadband providers - some open to all content/apps, some more restrictive, with an array of price plans, coverage and customer service. I choose which I like.

The US tends to be more complex, because of the relative lack of true nationwide competition, and the barriers to consumers having (or trialling) multiple service providers, because of a lack of contract-free prepaid offers. It's much more difficult to exercise choice if you're locked into a 2-year monthly contract with onerous penalty exit clauses.

One solution may be for the FCC to impose a trial region (state?) for true open-access, let it run for 24 months and scrutinise the impact on user behaviour, network management, congestion and so forth. However, this would need to be imposed *after* network build-out, to give a true apples-for-apples comparison with differentiated-service territories. Even then, it would be necessary to monitor ongoing opex and operations to ensure a "fair fight".

The observation I'd make is that there appears to be clear consumer appetite for broadband pipes, even if they sometimes get congested. Another option could be that some form of naked and unmanaged pipe should be made available on a mandatory basis - perhaps as a % of total capacity in the air & backhaul, so customers could opt for best-efforts if they wanted, versus a fully-managed virtual partition of the rest of the network.

RCS Phase 2 - some progress

OCT 11 2010 NEW REPORT AND BLOG POST ON RCS HERE
I'm utterly buried with work & travel this week, so can't dig into this very deeply, but the GSMA has just announced its next iteration of RCS.

A key feature seems to be support for PC clients, which makes a huge amount of sense - and indeed, is just about the only area where there's historically been traction for these kind of enhanced operator services, through the efforts of software vendors like Movial.

That said, at first sight the press release seems to focus on multi-device sharing and interoperability, rather than integration into web-based services. My view is that RCS would probably get most rapid traction if it came as a slick Facebook plug-in, or interoperable with other social networking platforms.

The problem will likely be that most of the mobile operators will try to "own" the address book and hook it into subscription databases, rather than leverage a more open (or at least access-independent) contact list located online.

Should also be interesting to see what happens if I put MNO#1's RCS client onto a PC or other device connected via #2's mobile broadband......

I'll try & get a full briefing from GSMA or one of the partners when I can, although it's not likely to be until next week at the earliest.

Incidentally, the membership list for RCS supporters still seems to be missing a few important potential members, like Apple, Google, Microsoft, RIM, HTC, Facebook, Skype , Palm, Vodafone, H3G, Sprint, Cisco and so on.

Although after the treatment of Google Voice by the Apple AppStore guys & the ensuing FCC brouhaha, the RCS folk must be smirking about their chances of getting a client onto iPhones without direct support from Mr Jobs....

Quick musing on Cloud Computing

I just heard the phrase "Everything as a Service" during a presentation on Cloud, SaaS and other forms of managed service offering.

I have no problems with hosted software in general - I use enough myself for email, blogging and so forth. I also outsource an awful lot of other things - financials to my accountants and so on.

But I can't get around the feeling that there's a fundamental lack of awareness among people in the tech industry, that every individual and company has specific criteria for owning vs. renting anything.

There are some things for which people prefer opex (renting, 3rd-party services, leasing etc) and some for which they prefer capex (buying stuff outright). This applies to all aspects of expenditure, from hardware to software, from physical infrastructure to one's personal possessions.

Some people rent houses, some own them. Preferences vary by individual and by cultural background. Some companies prefer to own and control their IT and communications elements, others prefer the predictability of outsourcing or "cloud services".

I've yet to see any good analysis of exactly what determines the optimum mix of rent vs. buy, or how this changes over time. Clearly there are hard aspects to this, like cost of capital, or the tax treatment of depreciation or capital investments. There are practical concerns, like uptime or connectivity limitations. Yet there are also softer issues, like trust or fear of lock-in. For consumers, there's even an emotional element - how many people would choose to use a "jewellery service" to rent their wedding rings?

This isn't an area where I have very strong opinions - but I do think it's important to have a good set of filters and questions to sift through some of the rhetoric and hype.

Outdoor applications for mobile - underestimated?

I've been following the topic of indoor coverage for mobile for almost 10 years now. The general perceived wisdom is that most voice and data traffic on cellular devices involves communication from inside buildings (50%, 60%, 70% - pick your own number). This assumption has been the primary driver behind the growth of femtocells, and various solutions looking at WiFi offload.

I regularly see forecasts predicting that this proportion is going to grow, and certainly with the current usage patterns of 3G laptops and smartphones, that seems reasonable, at first sight.

But.... how solid is that assumption? I'm starting to wonder if the ground might be less certain than everyone thinks. Because fundamentally, the indoor/outdoor split comes down to use cases and applications. The problem is that most radio-network folk in the industry are often a long way from those thinking about next-generation applications, devices and services, and what impacts these might have on the network and traffic patterns.

I can see a few early signs of a new generation of "outdoor-centric" applications, that might reverse the trend. Most obvious is mapping/navigation in various guises. But there's also streaming audio/radio - it will be interesting to see how Spotify grows on mobile for example. Then there's the whole area of "augmented reality", cloud computing and quite a few other examples I can think of. Several of these might be more symmetric (or upstream-heavy) than current applications, too.

On balance, I suspect that any shifts will happen slowly, but it's quite possible that we'll suddenly all be surprised by a new app coming out of nowhere and getting rampant adoption, thanks to appstores and widgets and other mechanisms that make viral uptake simpler. I can think of a few hypothetical examples that might emerge, although I'm not going to mention them here. (Let me know if you're a VC, I might do one of them myself....).

It's not just applications either - factors around device and OS architecture will also make a difference. If iPhones supported background applications, cellular networks might be suffering even more pain than they are currently, for example.

If you're working in the radio part of the industry - on either the vendor or operator side - and you'd like to explore the risks of "outdoor applications" more thoroughly, please get in touch with me.

Content: just a special sort of application

About 10 years ago, it became fashionable to say that "voice is just another sort of data on an IP network". VoIP, it was suggested, just turned telephony into mere bits, just like any others.

I want to extend and explore that description of subset/superset: I assert that "content is just a special sort of application on an IP network". It's just big chunks of software.

In both cases, there is a strong empirical evidence of truth, but the one word which is out of place in each sentence is "just", at least in the short term. Nevertheless, both assertions provide a view of how things change over much longer (10+ year) periods.

First, a quick re-cap of voice and VoIP. Certainly, at a network transport level, it is entirely feasible to get good voice quality with VoIP - most international calls use packet connections in the backbone. Millions use Skype and other VoIP services on the public Internet, while corporate IP-PBXs are mainstream. So at one, level, voice certainly can be viewed as just another form of IP traffic.

However, the word "just" is still not fully appropriate yet. Voice telephony has some very specific qualities that still mean it needs to be treated differently, and retains a quite high "value per bit". Aside from the obvious issues around latency and the need for realtime connectivity, it has some other , which have kept it at 60%+ of telecoms revenues. Firstly, numbering introduces barriers to entry and a need for interoperability. Secondly, regulatory issues remain wide and critical. Lastly, it has some very specific user-interface and experience issues - call setup times, the need for useable diallers and phonebooks, the natural human focus on time metrics (minutes) rather than IP packet volume, and so forth. There's also a hundred years of legacy experience, which conveys a lot of weight, authority - and sometimes arrogance.

The result is that voice telephony is indeed "special" - but over time, its importance and specialness are starting to wane. Basic voice revenues are falling - even in mobile, in some cases. The "phone call" is starting to blend into more complex voice interactions, new "voice 2.0" models are emerging in which context adds as much value as the media stream, and so forth. Networks are still designed with voice as a "special case", rather than just another packet stream. Voice is becoming blended with other applications and services, but arguably it is still over-represented and over-regulated compared with its long-term social and economic value.

Now, content. Compared with voice, the term "content" has always been a bit woolly in terms of definition; I've heard people refer to spreadsheets or even voice conversations as "content". But for most people in the industry, it tends to refer to visual programming media, chunks of written material, music, some images and so forth. The Wikipedia definition is:

"information and experiences that may provide value for an end-user/audience in specific contexts. Content may be delivered via any medium such as the internet, television, and audio CDs, as well as live events such as conferences and stage performances. The word is used to identify and quantify various divergent formats and genres of information as manageable value-adding components of media"

Like telephony, content tends to bring with it some specifics that do make it "special" - regulation, legal and commercial rules (censorship, copyright, reproduction rights & so forth). Video and audio content often requires special treatment because of their-sensitivity and huge volumes of data. And of course, there are decades (video) or even hundreds of years (text) of user experience. There is also a huge sense of entitlement by the media industry, that makes its advocates believe in their own uniqueness.

Yet for all its power and "specialness", it is starting to be put in its place. According to PWC/Cisco the entire market for digital media is worth about $300bn, including digital broadcast [non-Internet] TV. The software industry is also worth in excess of $300bn - and is shifting to either "cloud" applications or over-the-network downloaded apps like the iPhone. The video game industry alone is worth $30bn or more. Even the software piracy industry costs $50bn a year.

There's clearly many different ways to slice the statistics, depending on definitions or what's included/excluded - Internet vs. non-Internet, inclusion of things like SMS or web advertising, is user-generated material "content" in its conventional sense, and so on.

But to my eye, there's a close parallel here. Content is getting subsumed into applications like social networks or music-based communities. Amazon's valuation is about much more than the "content" stored in its warehouses or servers - it's the platform itself which is the core of the business. Facebook's value is about it's user base and APIs, not third-party chunks of media. Even for Apple, the AppStore is much sexier than iTunes, capturing a far greater share of industry attention.

And just like VoIP, digital content is also feeling the pinch of arbitrage on pricing. I don't just mean piracy - look instead to the failing of the print newspaper industry, as value moves to other application-based sources. (Are blogs "content"? I don't think of this post as an application, but I'd wince if someone called it content, in the same way I wince if they call me a blogger). And in future, what might happen to the value of news or live sports/music, if I stream and back-up all I see and hear to a server in the cloud via "life-streaming" or a similar application? Do content rights apply to my optic nerve?

Just as I think that the telecom industry is facing a dead-end in the notion of communication as simply sessions (see my recent posts on IMS), I think the media industry is similarly constrained in thinking of content as "chunks" of video or audio material. I also think that designing next-generation networks that are content-centric is as wrong as creating them session-centric.

Let's be honest. Ultimately, if voice is just data, rthen content is just software. We're not there yet, but they're both inevitable in the long term. Lobbyists and incumbents in both cases will plead for special treatment - justifiably, sometimes. Both telephony and content come with huge expectations on the part of users and regulators, and need to be protected in various ways.

But let's not lose sight of the end-game either - or entrench decades-old prejudices or business models in the underlying technology architectures. The content tail should not be allowed to wag the future application-networking dog.

Various quick things

I'm hugely busy at the moment, but a couple of quick things:

Skype's reported acquisition is very interesting, and it will be interesting to see what evolved. I'd expect to see:
- either collaboration or competition with Google's Wave. I'm increasingly thinking that the 100-year notion of a phone call or session as the basic unit of telecoms "conversation" between people is nearing end-of-life (well, on 20 year view, anyway)
- perhaps a proprietary carrier-grade service for VoIP on LTE or HSPA+, avoiding the IMS / CSFB etc conundrum
- I've got to believe that $100bn of profitable SMS revenue worldwide is a very tempting target, especially given the success of local alternatives like MXit in South Africa
- maybe the MVNO / SIM approach being targetted by Truphone and others


I see that 3UK is launching Novatel's MiFi. EDIT: Apparently it's actually a Huawei device (see comments). I'd thought it was the Novatel, but in a custom plastic shell; I stand corrected.

The UK's leading political blogger Guido Fawkes agrees with me about the faddish nature of Twitter.

I'm also skeptical about Android - I've said before that it's massively over-hyped and according to Andy, it seems like AT&T agrees with me. He's also had another great post up recently about service vs. product.

Symbian's David Wood has a blog post evoking something I wrote about a year ago - femtocell-optimised handsets.

Lots of noise about netbooks supplied via mobile operators, perhaps subsidised - but I'm waiting to see the outcome, as I reckon the market opportunity has been overestimated. I'm hearing anecdotal evidence that customers recognise it's cheaper to get a separate retail netbook and data contract rather than a bundle.

Does telecoms NEED a unified control plane?

My IMS=Dead Parrot post the other week drew a significant amount of attention and argument, as I anticipated. It was followed by more comments in another post.

One of the consistent arguments that was advanced was that IMS is the only standardised mechanism for the control plane for telco-grade IP networks.

From my stance, a central part of my argument is that I don't see IMS as a suitable platform for future revenue-generating, customer-demanded services and applications, at a device level or through integration with Web/consumer electronics/enterprise/IT. I also think it is inflexible in terms of supported business models, for example around wholesale or SIM-free adhoc services.

In a nutshell therefore - is it better to have:

a) A cast-iron control layer for services that nobody wants, or...
b) A less-optimal control layer that permits more service innovation?

From a million-foot view, are we moving to a situation where the notion of a single, all-encompassing telecom control plane is a ridiculous notion, similar to the idea of a government controlling all its citizens through a single database and monitoring system?

(See what I just did there, political wonks reading this?)

Are the costs and inflexibilities and "injustices" (in technology, anything which is user-unfriendly) worth it, just to achieve pure elegance of the ultimate machine?

The more I think about this, the more the whole notion of a single IMS control plane for IP looks exactly like a totalitarian state, where everything is done "for your own good". Policy control is the equivalent of the nannying Health and Safety Executive, the HSS and SIM is the equivalent of the National ID Database and ID cards, DPI is the equivalent of pervasive CCTV cameras. And the whole thing is hugely expensive for taxpayers (end users) and doesn't actually work because there are always flaws in the system.

Personally, I much prefer to live in a libertarian society, where there are specific checks and balances at particular points. I'm happy with passport controls at borders, or fines for people jumping red lights. I don't mind tax evaders being pursued. I'm in favour of jury trials and punishing prison sentences. But I don't want to live inside The Matrix.

The Internet works well enough without a centralised control plane. Various point solutions like CDNs or peering points act as a form of decentralised, distributed and collaborative control, which works pretty well, most of the time. Other large-scale systems work well without central control as well - in fact, the whole basis of capitalist economies revolves around the concept.

Apologies for the high-level "philosophical" nature of this post. But after the last week or two of discussions, I am increasingly of the opinion that IMS has a flawed central assumption: that an all-encompassing "control plane" is necessary, feasible or even desirable.

Femto industry needs to get real about WiFi

I've had two conversations this week with senior, technically- and commercially-savvy representatives of the cellular industry, both from very well-known organisations at the core of the mobile world.

Both have expressed severe reservations about the femtocell model, at both technical and commercial levels. They mentioned various issues I've discussed before, including the need to support multiple operators within a single household, and the prevalence of WiFi in almost all devices creating meaningful volumes of cellular data traffic.

Yet I still see various protagonists in the femtocell industry suggesting that femtos could potentially replace WiFi as an access mechanism in homes or businesses. (I'm going to leave public hotspots for a moment, as their owners have typically made a multi-year mess of pricing and ease-of-use, which is another bugbear of mine).

In my view, the positioning of femtos as WiFi-replacements diminishes the credibility of the companies involved - not just in the eyes of those who actually understand WiFi, but also in the eyes of those skeptics in the hardcore macrocellular community who believe that "outside-in always wins".

Yes, there are marginal cases where the precise configuration of a connection manager client on a PC or iPhone might divert a few MB of traffic one way or the other. But the lack of awareness of how ethernet (yes, remember WiFi = WLAN = Wireless Ethernet) works and gets deployed and managed is sometimes scary. I've sat through hour-long panel debates on supposed opportunities for enterprise femtos without a single mention of terms like "firewall", "power over ethernet" or a recognition that companies like to manage *their* LAN without bits of it being managed by a third party that typically *outsources its own servers*.

The same arguments apply in the home. Ethernet and WiFi are now pervasive, and I see no reason that they're likely to disappear.

My view is that the femto industry needs to tackle this issue head on, and learn how to play *nicely* with WiFi, rather than pretend it's either irrelevant or a competitor. Otherwise it is going to find it hard to convince even the skeptics in the mobile industry, let alone the IT world.

Nokia using Windows, Microsoft using Java.....

I'm horribly busy so don't have time to write reams of analysis, but the juxtaposition of two announcements today really caught my eye:

1) Nokia announcing a Windows-based netbook (sorry, "booklet"). I wonder if they'll ship all of them with 3G modems embedded - how will that play with retailers like Carphone Warehouse that want to sell them on multiple operators' networks? Most of the MNOs don't (yet) sell data-only SIM-only packages, so will the stores have to stock multiple operator-specific "flavours" of the PC?

2) Microsoft announcing a Java app for featurephones, intended to hook into web/cloud services like Facebook and Twitter (and Windows Live mentioned quietly). Microsoft has long neglected the still-huge featurephone marketplace, so given that its smartphone business is only trickling along, this is perhaps an interesting way to get a foothold in emerging markets' mobility ahead of Google & Apple & BlackBerry.